Let’s go back to the good old days. Let’s go back to the days when all was well, when life was pure, when music filled the air.
Chances are good that every one of us is drawn to an image of a golden age. The golden age of rock and roll, for instance, could be (depending on your age and taste) the 1950s of “Rock Around the Clock” or it could be the British invasion of the 1960s. It couldn’t possibly be the 1970s, though if you are an aficionado of punk, the golden age of punk was indeed the late 1970s. I lived in Manhattan at that time, and I saw The Clash and any number of lesser punk bands. But when I think of punk’s glory days, I see Wendy O. Williams, the originator of the spiky Mohawk as the rebel’s coif of choice. In her live shows with The Plasmatics, she blew up cars and ripped guitars apart with a chainsaw. Now that was punk.
Other, more decorous domains have also had their golden age: flyfishing, landscape painting, furniture making, sculpture. Today can’t help but pale in comparison. Sometimes, as with rock and roll, there is argument over when the golden age occurred, but there’s no argument that today isn’t it. Life was better, more perfect back then. Squint hard enough and you can recall less antagonistic public discourse, a culture built not on egotism but on community, neighborhoods where kids could safely play without adults supervising every move. I’m guilty of all of those romanticizations.
When building our vision of the future, we use the cornerstone of the past. And the past that we long for can be something that passed away long before our time.
One of those idealistic visions is that of the New World as a promised land, filled not with milk and honey but with stupendous mountains, primordial forests, and rushing rivers cascading to the sea. Oh, to breathe in just one twilight in spring at that time, to listen as the late afternoon stillness gives way to dusk’s cacophony of frogs, toads, and thrushes, and to watch a darkening sky fill up with sparkling heavenly bodies. No intrusion of planes or traffic, no glow of streetlights, no sullied air: what a remarkable place it must have been.
Much of our environmental movement has been built on a longing to return to that world. And that longing is powerful. People with that vision have in the last fifty years brought about cleaner air and water and the restoration of habitat for many species that had been on the brink. These are magnificent triumphs, accomplished by the hard work of visionaries, many of whom were driven by a thirst to return to Eden, an Eden in which Adam and Eve had not yet transgressed.
I can understand that thirst, because I spent all of my childhood summers in the Adirondacks, where wild places are just a hike away. My love of the natural world began on those hikes, and climbing Bald Mountain was one much-anticipated annual event. It’s been my experience that any place there are mountains, one is likely to be named Bald Mountain. The one that means so much to me was between Old Forge and Eagle Bay.
What we rather grandiosely called “climbing a mountain” was in reality nothing more than a long uphill hike. Sure, there was some scrambling up rocks to be done, but we’re not talking about technical climbing here: no precarious fingertip holds, no belay lines. Still, what opened up before us as we climbed out of the woods and onto the bare rock top that gave it its name was no less awe-inspiring to us than was the view from Mt. Whitney to John Muir. It was sublime.
The granite top had a fire tower perched on it, and even though I had a horrible fear of heights, my brother Tom encouraged me to make my way up the five flights of open-air stairs and on into the cab at the top with views in all directions. A ranger manned the tower, and he had a cool map that helped us see which mountains and lakes we were looking at. To the south, we could see three lakes of the Fulton Chain (Second, Third, and Fourth), then out beyond were the Moose River Plains and Little Moose Lake; to the east but tucked out of sight,was our camp on Sixth Lake. This was big country, country that people disappeared in, country that caused the jaws of city folks to drop in stunned silence.
Other day hikes led to back-country lakes: Cascade, Bubb and Sis, and my favorite, Bug Lake. Bug Lake was no more buggy than any other, and we loved it because along its shore we discovered two rowboats that had been stowed in the underbrush. Neither boat had oars – evidently, the owners carried their oars in with them – but that didn’t stop us from launching them. We could always find long branches to pole with while pretending to be Huck Finn on the Mississippi, though I don’t believe Huck would have returned the boat. Those were the good old days, but they were more than that. This was the awakening in me of an environmental consciousness, though I didn’t know it as such. All I knew was that these wild places were treasures. They were quiet and remote and pure. Except for the fire tower and the trails, there were no other signs of man’s presence, and it felt like going back to the Garden. Today, I realize that these lands are not wilderness, that more than a century ago the forest had been logged heavily, and that the present-day trails likely came about as logging roads.
As I grew old enough to have a job in the summer, I worked at cottage colonies that served the tourists, the main economic engine of this lightly populated dot on the map. The owners, Mary Evans and then Ed Stiefvater, were self-reliant Adirondackers, and from them I learned how to improvise solutions from the materials at hand; we would reuse the hinges from the broken door stowed in the shed and a selection of screws saved for decades in a coffee can on the oil-soaked work bench, and make that screen door good as new. I was a handyman and proud of the skills I picked up – replacing electrical switches, cutting glass to fit a broken window, persuading a flooded Evinrude to start, replacing a washer on a dripping faucet. All summer long, I’d fix this and refurbish that, though those tasks were simply the punctuation marks on a run-on sentence of raking the beach, mowing the lawn, and painting cabins. You could never catch up – there was always a cabin with blistered paint.
Ed Stiefvater taught me to tie a rope of oakum around my neck to ward off the black flies. From him, I also learned to drive a truck with a 3-speed on the column, and when I drove the week’s accumulation of trash to the dump, I milked the opportunity for all it was worth, rolling slowly through town at the helm of the green 1951 Chevy.
The last year I worked in the Adirondacks, it was not a student’s summer job. It came after five years of living in Manhattan, where I’d been driving a moving truck and lugging sofa beds up to 5th-floor walkups, and, yes, listening to punk bands. All this was in service to my dream of becoming a writer. But I was in bad need of a break from the city, and I found it in the employ of Ralph Murdock.
I’d graduated in a way from being a handyman, and now the work was harder. Instead of fixing things and painting things, we were building things: roads and foundations and septic systems. Ralph was masterful with the equipment. When installing septic systems, I would be down in the hole with my shovel, and Ralph would be on his backhoe lowering the concrete septic tank that dangled on a chain above my head. My job was to guide it into place as he lowered it and make sure it ended up level. I was never afraid. As someone else on the crew once said, Ralph was so good, he could comb your hair with his backhoe bucket.
The year I worked for him, he spent his off-hours converting a school bus into a truck to pull his 5th-wheel RV. He cut off the back of the bus, shortened the driveshaft, and mounted a receiver plate to the frame. When it was done, the cab was like a living room and could fit the whole family for a rolling party.
These inventive people were direct descendants – maybe even literally, but at least figuratively – of the mountain men and the pioneers who settled this wild land. Their resourcefulness and their skill were an art form. Just as climbing the fire tower on Bald Mountain brought me back to a natural Eden, working for Ralph brought me back to the sturdy souls who’d made their way into this wild land. It’s not only historical re-enactors dressed in buckskin and toting flintlock muskets who consider this era of settlement a golden age. So my image of the good old days includes wolves, huge trees, and five-pound brook trout, but it is also populated by mountain men and pioneer families who somehow coaxed a living out of the wilderness. I wish I could live in the world of a Winslow Homer painting with his trappers, hunters, loggers, and surveyors. The ethereal landscapes of the painters of the Hudson River School call attention to what has been lost, but Homer’s image of a guide rowing a blue boat speaks just as clearly to my core.
Believe me, I don’t fail to see the irony of lamenting the loss of the garden while admiring the people who inadvertently set its destruction in motion. I recognize that the wolves, the trees, and the trout – indeed, the whole forested system – suffered dramatically as these men did the bidding of those who sent them.
Philosophers and policymakers both ponder the question: Does nature have intrinsic value or is it in the service of humankind? To me, that poses an artificial choice, because it supposes that we are outside of nature, that nature is an abstraction that exists on its own. Not so. We are part of nature. We cannot survive without making use of the plants, animals, and minerals that we turn into everyday products.
We cannot put a fence around nature and leave it alone. But we can develop a humble reverence for the gift we’ve been given and make a solemn vow to take better care of it. Let the golden age of stewardship begin.