I decided a month ago or so that I needed to hide out in the woods for a few days. Not to escape the law, do yoga, or anything like that. I just felt, like my fellow poseur Thoreau, that I’d gone too long without laying eyes on a woodland trail. But sifting through dozens of Adirondack rental websites just left me faintly depressed. It’s an unfortunate truth that people who own vacation properties tend to be very aware of their value (either that, or they considerably overestimate them). It’s a rare thing to find an owner who thinks, “You know, I could charge market rate for my amazing mountaintop bungalo, but you know what? I’ll just ask $12 a night. No, I like the sound of $10 better. It’s a nice, tidy, round sort of number. Let’s go with that.” Maybe there are people like that, but they don’t live in the state of New York.
But it’s more than just the prices. The presentation at most hotels, and even budget B&B’s and cottage rentals feel too self-conscious. The websites promise and purr about serenity. From the potpourri to the towels, you are guaranteed to love it. And while you are there, you obligingly gush about how great the place is, and usually that gushing is in direct proportion to how much you're forking over.
Then I discovered this cool cabin. The website made no extravagant promises. It didn’t call to me by my given name or sing out in velvety tones. In fact, with its manic fonts, it reminded me of the side of a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle. So of course we had to take it.
It’s up in the Adirondacks Mountains, five hours north, where the time between towns starts to stretch. There aren't many cars passing, and the mountains perform that slow dance with the highway, rising directly ahead and then stepping aside just in time to let you pass. With the windows down, we exclaimed several times about how good the air smelled. I do this without fail whenever I set foot outside New York. I even started to do it in Newark recently before I caught myself! We ate pistachios and and listened to a reggae mix that Steve gave us for our Jamaica trip last year. The music clashed with the geography, but I kind of liked that. Hey, Adirondacks. Meet Bob Marley.
When we were nearing our destination, I dug out the detailed directions that had been provided for “checking in” to our cabin. We were to turn off the quiet highway onto the owner’s property—a swath of land about as big as Central Park and home to two mountains, a handful of rental cabins, including the one where he resides with his dog and the one that would be ours for a few days. We were then to pull up to a small, rusty trailer by the roadside where we would locate a telephone, which we would use to call the owner and receive further instructions. Finally, we were to drop off our bags at our cabin and then head over to the owner’s place to check-in. It was fun—like wilderness espionage.
When we were too slow to perform that last step (heading over to the owner's cabin), he came to us. He was somehow just what I had expected—a man who had transcended the pettiness of mirrors and sworn off the society of shampoo. With one sleeve rolled up and other down and bellowing for his sociable golden retriever to get back in the car, he squinted into a small stack of 3X5 card and proceeded to grumble the instructions for lighting the gas lights, locating the outhouse (no!), and otherwise laying to rest our city slicker ways for a few days. Then he eyed us doubtfully and demanded whether we had any questions. We didn't.
Later that day, Justin was looking over the bookshelves in our cabin (there were several) and noticed a narrow yellow spine bearing the owner’s name. It was a book of his own poetry, dedicated to his two daughters, who were depicted in a photo on the first page as two grinning teenagers. I steeled myself for the poems, but they turned out to be good— melancholy and prosy. They revealed that the owner had spent his early years in Manhattan. There was also a blunt publisher’s note on the flap explaining that the book was priced at just $5 because readers shouldn’t be expected to pay $12 for a book by someone they aren’t sure about. Deeply impressed by this logic (and pretty sure it was written by the author himself), I resolved to leave a five dollar bill on the kitchen table the next day and take the book when we left.
But for some reason, which I can’t seem to pinpoint, I didn’t end up doing this. Maybe I was embarrassed to claim I had been reading the man’s poems, even though he was so obviously inviting us to do just that. Or maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t stand up if I brought them back into my world and put the book side by side with my other books. Or maybe—I swear this will be the last maybe—I was disappointed to learn that the owner is an ex-New Yorker. I had expected his poems to be folksy knock-offs of “Mending Wall” and “Apple Picking.” Instead, they suggested that he was someone who had led different lives, who had ended up in the woods not simply by birth or romantic accident, but by choice.
Later when the owner told us that the land on which our cabins stood was the size of Central Park, I was pulled again into that inevitable comparison of Home and Away. I imagined the mountainous Adirondacks property going head-to-head with that orderly park in the middle of Manhattan. I don't have to tell you who'd win.
