Now, twenty-five years later, I was crazed with love for the woman named Chase—she whose given name is Penelope—who was in thrall to her Connecticut family’s multigenerational, transcendental, forest-and-mountain Adirondack fantasy. Her male ancestors were mostly clerics and academics, and for generations the family spent long summers and fall and spring breaks and winter holidays in the Adirondacks. It was the place where she had enjoyed something like a happy childhood, a respite from the rest of her childhood. It was the only place on earth where, as an adult, she felt at peace with the world. Her reasons for settling there make a different story from mine, which I leave for her to tell someday.
I followed Chase to the Adirondacks, then, she who had a good, perfectly understandable, familial reason for living there. Start with that. And for nearly three decades I have lived with her in a house perched on the shoulder of a mountain, a house that she bought at the age of thirty-seven as a summer retreat for herself alone, when she was a professor in Tuscaloosa, less than a year before I arrived on the scene. I might have just hung around as a summer vacationer, a middle-aged, love-besotted houseguest, and departed sadly in the fall to teach my classes at Princeton, and she might well have followed me, instead of me following her—as indeed she did many years later, when I wanted to continue my lifelong drift south and end it in Miami, for which I bless her. But I instead stayed on with Chase in Keene. And in addition to living with her down in Miami now, I live up there with her, too.
And where is “up there”? It’s a six-million-acre sprawl of mountain and muskeg, marsh, river, and pond, a land of cool, abbreviated Mongolian summers and long Siberian winters, bordered on the east by the Champlain Valley, on the north by the Saint Lawrence watershed, on the south by the valley of the Hudson, and on the west by the gently rolling hills and valleys of New York State. It’s a “howling wilderness,” as the first white settlers called it, and from the beginning has been viewed as a kind of Ultima Thule.
It’s a true borderland, a place between places, which in a sense is what has preserved it more or less intact into the early twenty-first century. Which may account for its continuing attraction for so many writers and artists and philosophers and clerics and professors, people whose lives depend for their meaning on standing slightly outside the world. People without year-round jobs. People, I suppose, like me.
From the wood engravings that portray Samuel de Champlain’s tentative first encounter with the North American wilderness to the svelte, four-color, fantasy-ad inserts of Ralph Lauren; from the writings of James Fenimore Cooper to E. L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake; from the transcendentalists’ Philosophers’ Camp to the U.S. Army’s northern outpost at Fort Drum: the word Adirondack has over the centuries evoked a variety of conflicted images and meanings. Translated into eighteenth-century English, the word means “bark eater” and refers not so much to the natives’ diet of choice as to one of the more unpleasant consequences of being condemned by hostile and more socially organized neighbors in more favored regions beyond to reside in a land that everyone, Algonquin, Iroquois, European, Quebecois, and Yankee, regarded as uninhabitable. That is, you will grow so hungry there that, like the starving deer in winter, you’ll eat the bark off the trees.
Following the Revolutionary War, the financially strapped American Congress surveyed the land, financed a narrow corduroy road through the forests, and offered wide swaths of the Adirondacks to New England and New York soldiers as a veteran’s benefit. Despite the undeniable natural beauty of the place—haunting mountain passes and waterfalls, splendid primeval forests, glittering chains of lakes, and north-flowing rivers and streams—there were very few takers. Too cold, too dark, too much snow and ice for too much of the year, too many black flies and mosquitoes in spring and summer, too little arable soil and too short a growing season to farm it.
Landless veterans preferred to pay a pretty price for softer Vermont acreage or simply trekked west and south to homestead in Pennsylvania and Ohio and beyond. The Adirondacks they left to hunters, fur trappers, hermits, and, in time, to bluff and hearty millionaires on seasonal safari helped by local servants and guides, roughing it in Victorian comfort and splendor in their huge, elaborately furnished and decorated great camps. Behind them came those artists and philosophers and writers I mentioned, along with clerics and academics like Chase’s ancestors, looking for a scenic hideaway located in the mostly unsettled far corner of the soul-stealing, newly industrialized, fallen world of urban New England and New York.
I’m not sure if this is background to my story or foreground. But it’s my nature to see myself and everyone else as contextualized by the warp and woof of history and place, by geology and climate and economics, by culture and class and race, before I see myself or others as individual human beings. It’s a way, I suppose, to delay facing what baffles and distresses me.
But I knew nothing of this and held no beliefs or opinions regarding the place when, late that night in June 1987, having left one good woman for another, my third wife for the woman who would become my fourth and final wife, I drove my ten-year-old diesel Mercedes sedan north for six hours and arrived sometime after midnight in the village of Keene, nestled in the valley of the Ausable River at the center of the forested wilderness known as the Adirondack Park. It was blackout dark, and a heavy late-spring rain pounded the car roof and hood. I knew nothing of the history or ecological fragility of where I had arrived; it could have been anyplace at the dead end of an unpaved lane a six-hour drive from the Manhattan apartment I had abandoned that night; it could have been someplace in West Virginia, Maine, or Pennsylvania. As has happened so often in my life, I didn’t know where I had gone. Only that I had gone away, that I had left someone, someplace, something behind.
It was long after midnight, and the house in Keene was dark when I arrived. The diesel engine clattered to a stop. The rain pounded down on the car. I asked myself, What have I done to myself? What have I done to the good, loving woman I have lived with for nearly five years and now have left behind, and to the equally good, loving woman I have followed into this unknown wilderness? For the last six months the woman I left behind had ridden the F train every day to her Manhattan office, returning to our apartment alone every night, while I casually, more or less innocently, befriended Chase in faraway Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while I was the visiting writer-in-residence at the university and Chase was a professor in the English department. Not until nearly the end of my one-term residency did we realize that, despite all our best and honorable intentions, we had fallen in love—suddenly, unexpectedly, as if one night in May on a dance floor at a literary party in Chattanooga we had simultaneously, spontaneously gone insane.
This was not, of course, the first time I had gone crazy with love for a woman. It happened with the teenaged girl I married when I was nineteen in St. Petersburg, Florida, and again, a few years later, in Richmond, Virginia, with the woman who became my second wife, and yet again in New York City with the woman who became my third wife. And it was not the first time for Chase, either. When it happens to you, when you go crazy with love, there is no advance warning, no point ahead of time when you can merely move to higher ground and evade what’s coming. Suddenly you are obsessed, totally fixated on another human being, and it’s as if you’ve been hit by a tsunami, and you find yourself flailing wildly, upside down and tumbling heels over head, carried off by an overwhelming wave whose irresistible force has been generated at the bottom of the sea hundreds of leagues away and thousands of feet below by vast, unpredicted tectonic shifts.
The living room light came on, and then the glow of a porch light cut a pale wedge through the rain and the darkness, and she walked onto the porch wearing a tattered pink cotton bathrobe and stood in the light and waited for me there. Her left index finger was wrapped in a thick bloody bandage, which she held in the air like a beacon.
The house, now that I could see its outline, was not a farmhouse or a summer cottage and certainly was not a great camp. It
was a long, low structure that seemed to have been built in stages over generations for a large, steadily growing family, as if every few years a new wing and roofline had been added onto it. It seemed much too large for one person or even two or three. A towering pair of pine trees stood like sentries near the porch stairs. I got out of my car and beneath the pouring rain jogged across the dirt driveway and climbed the half-dozen steps to the porch, and we embraced. She kept her bandaged finger in the air above our heads. Probably she quietly said, Welcome, for that is what she almost always says when someone arrives at our house for the first time. Welcome.
Welcome to the Adirondacks. Earlier that evening she had sliced so deeply into her finger that she’d rushed it for stitches to the emergency room of the hospital in Elizabethtown fifteen miles away. She’d cut into it while standing on a wobbly stepladder in the kitchen stripping the wire of a broken overhead light fixture with a pair of fingernail scissors.
This all happened nearly thirty years ago. It was the summer before our courtship tour of the Caribbean. She still wears a thin white scar like a piece of string across her left index finger between the second and third knuckles. Whenever it catches my eye, everything about that night returns to me—the wild, uncontrolled plunge into betrayal and abandonment and the emergence of a new connubial adhesion and the total reconfiguration of my life; and the rain, the porch light, the pink bathrobe, the bandaged finger in the air; and the all-too-familiar burden of shame. And sprawled out there, invisible in darkness, as if it were an ocean and there were no end to it, the wilderness.
As must be apparent by now, Chase is a gambler. She was definitely gambling on me, a thrice-married man with four daughters, scratching out a living as a novelist and part-time teacher, and who, having just left his third wife, was essentially homeless. But she was also a card player whose reputation had preceded her when she first arrived at graduate school in Iowa and later when she went to Alabama and held weekly card games at her house with only the most dedicated players among the faculty sitting in. I had never known a woman who was a serious, deliberate gambler, and it attracted me. She owned a beautiful set of poker chips. She also owned a set of drums and had played in a rock band in her twenties and still worked out on her drum set alone in the garage. That attracted me, too.
Thus, all along, on Sint Maarten and Antigua and now on Aruba, wherever we found them, Chase and I had been hitting the casinos, seated shoulder to shoulder with the package tourists at the blackjack, craps, and roulette tables, and in spite of the glitzy bustle and smoke, the cynical exploitation of greed, fantasy, and addiction that casinos foster in an island culture, we enjoyed it. It helped that we were both winning at the blackjack tables. Back then Caribbean casinos were nothing like those in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. They were generally small, a little tatty, and on the amateurish side, like the depressing Oneonta and Mohawk Indian reservation casinos in upstate New York. Some of them were more like church bingo parlors than the Sands or the Mandalay Bay, and rather pleasant for that. Especially on Aruba, at the Alhambra Casino on Eagle Beach north of Oranjestad, the capital, where Chase tried the roulette table for the first time and cleaned up and I continued to do just fine, thank you, at blackjack. We dressed fancy and cashed a bunch of traveler’s checks and let ourselves be good-time Charlies, and we stayed lucky for several nights running.
Until recently, Aruba had been a prosperous offshore oil refining and transshipping point. In the late 1970s, the whole island had been an Exxon and Shell company town. When, in the early 1980s, the oil companies cut back production in the region, it devastated the economy, and Arubans responded by rapidly, single-mindedly, developing large-scale tourism. By 1988 almost all the hotels, and there were many of them, were large, new, full-service resorts. The town of Oranjestad was a free-port shopping mall with newly constructed, cutesy neo-Dutch buildings stuffed with tax-free liquor, lace, china, and jewelry. Aruba was once again prosperous. The environment suffered less now from oil pollution than from overbuilding—it’s a small island, arid, low, without much fresh water, and with little capacity for handling waste. Aruba appeared to be turning itself into a beached cruise ship, and one felt that one was a late-arriving guest at the end of the final party there.
The saddest irony in the Caribbean is that without large-scale tourism the islanders starve; but with it, the islanders destroy the very thing they promote and package—beaches, coral reefs, wildlife, mountainous rain forests, desert landscapes, natural wonders that have filled visitors with something like religious awe for thousands of years, since the first humans paddled north along the chain from the Orinoco basin. The whole archipelago, from the Netherlands Antilles just off the shoulder of South America north to the U.S. Virgins, is a highly complex and fragile ecosystem. The vitality and warmth of the people and the beauty of the land and sea and sky are what draw and heal us. Yet our very presence in the numbers that almost every island needs for economic survival contaminates the source. The people become dead-faced dealers and their land and sea and sky a shabby, second-rate, smoke-filled casino.
Aruba’s closest neighbor, Bonaire, may well one day walk the same big-time tourist path to environmental and cultural degradation, but it will be years before the necessary infrastructure and trained personnel are available. Meanwhile, it remained perhaps the best island in the Lesser Antilles for serious scuba diving. But not much else.
Like Aruba, Bonaire is parched and flat, with long coral beaches and low hills in the hinterland covered with cacti. Because Bonaire was the only island in the region where it was forbidden to fish with spearguns or remove coral from the fabulous reefs that surround it, the shoreline waters were essentially an unspoiled underwater garden. There were endangered species of birds and lizards that thrived here and nowhere else, and more than 13,500 acres had been set aside in the Washington Slagbaai National Park. As a result, until recently, the usual visitors to Bonaire were ornithologists, marine biologists, and serious scuba divers. But in the late 1980s that was changing rapidly, and in spite of numerous government and private studies urging restraint, there was a whole lot of beachfront building going on.
The third in this trio of Dutch islands, Curaçao was the most cosmopolitan and populous. It has a long history as a transshipping point—first, slaves (nearly half the slaves destined for the Caribbean passed through Curaçao, where they were “rested” and then distributed to the other islands); then goods from the Dutch colonies in the Pacific brought through the Panama Canal; then Venezuelan oil; and now free-port luxuries. Owing to its location and the aridity of its soil, Curaçao has always been more of a trading outpost than a producer and exporter of goods—a quiet, calculating middleman among the islands.
When we were in Curaçao, there was an ambitious, ongoing attempt to develop tourism, especially along the southwest coast below Willemstad, and there were some wonderfully diverting attractions up and running, such as the Curaçao National Underwater Park and the Seaquarium. But the beaches were short and often man-made, and most of the hotels seemed better suited to the needs of business conventioneers than families on vacation or couples gone a-courting.
For us, after Aruba’s beach-resort glitz and Bonaire’s rustic simplicity, the city of Willemstad on Curaçao was a welcome change. It was a real international city, a deepwater port, one of the largest in the world, with good restaurants, mainly French and Indonesian, attractive seventeenth- and eighteenth-century town houses and public buildings, bustling narrow streets that wound around the port and crossed from one side to the other on lovely bridges. All day long, people of all races, from all continents, pushed along the crowded sidewalks with an urgency you rarely saw in the Caribbean—there were deals to be made here, goods to buy and sell, numbers to move from one column to the next.
But then night fell, and the city of Willemstad turned into a quiet, languorous Caribbean port where folks strolled slowly past their neighbors’ doors under moon-silvered palms or sat and gossiped over rum in dimly l
it taverns or, later, before bed, opened the shutters of their rooms to the cool evening breeze and gazed across the sea at the dark coast of Venezuela’s Paraguaná Peninsula and the continent beyond and contemplated the tangled, bloody history and destiny of the tropics. I imagined Arawak families, fishermen and farmers, emerging from the South American continent’s muddy rivers and deltas and crossing the silvery sea in their long canoes in a northerly direction, moving island by island up the chain, building villages in the bays and worshiping their gods in secret hillside caves. I watched the fierce Carib warriors come along behind them, conquering and pillaging and eventually being absorbed by the culture of their victims. Soon, from the east, came the Spanish in their galleons, searching for gold, enslaving the people they mistakenly called Indians, for they were lost and thought they had landed in India, and in their blind lust for gold they soon exterminated the entire native population. Behind them came the privateers and corsairs of other European nations, some of them landing and setting up as traders and planters, but most of them sailing farther west to steal stolen Spanish gold and topple Spanish power on the continent. Gradually, the Europeans agreed to divide the islands among themselves, and they enslaved and imported Africans, and began to plant spices, tobacco, coffee, and then sugar, one of the most labor-intensive industries known to man, requiring more and still more slaves to work the fields and turn the green cane into white powder and rum, until the entire region was caught in the eye of a cruel economic storm that swirled from Africa to the Caribbean to North America back to Europe.
In time, the North Americans and Europeans ceased to need the Caribbean for sugar, and the storm broke up; the African slaves, replaced by impoverished workers from India, were no longer transported here, and the long decline into desuetude and abject poverty began; until modern times, when the islands became small, more or less independent nation-states themselves, and once again a new economic storm began to swirl, and the region filled with North Americans and Europeans again, not conquerors this time, but visitors whose needs could be met only to a point before they threatened these azure seas and emerald-green isles, destroying their environment and dissipating their culture.