It’s 3 a.m. and my four-month-old baby is wide awake.
I run through the checklist: his tummy is full, his diaper clean, and I assume nothing disastrous is brewing since he’s laying there, eyes gleaming and blowing raspberries. So I begin another story about his mama’s lifelong love affair with a place called Lake George.
Rebecca with her parents.
And it works, this experiment I began in deep winter, in the early days of Noah’s middle of the night wakings, when I was still at a loss for how to handle this strange being alone.
I tell him about a little girl named Rebecca who, in August 1976, became a camper at the grand old age of two months.
How she’d ended up there because her father, who’d grown up during the Depression and was older than Rebecca’s other friends’ dads, discovered Lake George while on furlough from the army during WWII. And how he was so enchanted by these islands — where $25 bought you a fortnight on a campsite complete with equipment and rowboat rental — that he made it an annual tradition for the rest of his life, bringing his family on annual, two-week late August stays in the Lake George Narrows.
I talk about Rebecca’s favorite island, Mohican. Specifically, campsite #4; the finest on the lake. How it was the breeding ground for her wild imagination as an only child. Where in the twilight, she and her mother would look at the distant twinkling lights of The Sagamore (or, when she was a very little girl and it was still abandoned, wax tales about “The Fairy Castle”). Where bug juice, charred marshmallows and banana boats baked deep within sunset-colored coals constituted a perfectly acceptable dinner. And where her mother developed a knack for turning a scary outhouse into a welcoming place with a few sprigs of lavender and a heckload of bleach.
I paint a picture of the island during that magical golden hour, just after the late-afternoon water ski run and just before the August early sunset, when it was still warm enough to dive down to the long-forgotten metal boat hooks screwed into the metamorphic rock.
I tell him about Glen Island. Where Rebecca perfected her toddle on the steps of the general store. Where she was allowed a post-dinner treat of frozen Charleston Chews or ice cream sandwiches or Swedish fish. Where she’d excitedly accompanied her increasingly bearded father so that he could check in weekly with the ad agency he owned on one of the spider-webbed pay phones. Where they’d have requisite chatter at the ranger station about the terrible last winter, and where she and her mother would busy themselves leafing through photo albums of boat accidents (favorite caption: “On the rocks! Tee hee!”)
Little Rebecca visits Lake George.
My baby listens to Rebecca’s madcap adventures along the lake’s 32.2 miles. How she learned to ski at seven on wooden skis held parallel by rope tied into holes drilled by her father. How at age 12, she ignored warnings about the deceptively strong winds and had to be towed back to the island in her runaway canoe, her mother using all her willpower to suppress the ultimate I told you so. And how, just after her 16th birthday, she proudly navigated the motorboat through dark waters to the right dock in an inky, moonless night.
I tell him about some of the boys who came along before his daddy. About my first kiss, at age 14 while floating in a black inner tube, courtesy of Jesse Lewis, whose Brooklyn family also camped on Mohican each summer. And how a small handful of suitors had been vetted based on how well they could pitch a tent.
I tell him about all my other milestones I experienced on the lake with my parents. It’s where we mapped out college and career strategies had epic arguments and sang timeless songs.
There’s one story I don’t tell him — not yet — even though the details are as fresh to me now as all the others. On Labor Day 2006, my family stuffed our Subaru Outback with camping equipment at Smith and Son’s Marina in Bolton Landing. We’d had the languid kind of stay that makes an adult feel as though she’d been on summer vacation and was heading back to school.
I took a moment to escape the woebegone scene of our boat, dangling from a lift and dripping with so much lake water that it, too, seemed to be crying at the end of summer, and ducked into the covered part of the marina to say a silent goodbye. Just me and the squeaks and yawns of the antique wooden boats pushing up against the pilings.
After, we made our way back to NYC where my parents dropped me off. I gave my mom one last round of hugs, kisses and I love yous. And they headed onto our hometown of Philadelphia. I settled onto the sofa, standing on that bittersweet bridge between dream escape and office reality — dressed in my camping clothes, a daddy long-legs crawling out of my fleece pocket, the sweet, dried scent of the lake still on my skin.
The phone rang. A large piece of debris in the lane, a sudden swerve, and my mother was now lying dead on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, near Exit 8A. I scrambled to head South toward her, still wearing my hiking boots caked with Adirondack dirt.
I also don’t tell him the sad kicker. How a few years later, my father went on a cruise to the Bahamas, and how late one night, his heart gave out in his cabin.
I’m not over the pain of knowing my son will never meet his maternal grandparents — really, could I ever be? — but I’ve introduced them as characters in an endless string of Lake George adventures. He listens as I hone the ritual of keeping my parents’ memory fresh and their energy into my daily life.
I talk and talk, forgetting about the painfully late hour as I share all the adventures I hope to have with him there. And how I hope to pass along my love of this place in hopes that Lake George can come to mean to him what it has been to me: an attainable Nirvana.
My son’s eyes slowly — finally — flutter shut. Though I know I shouldn’t rock him to sleep, I remember these late night meetings, just the two of us in the darkness, his sweet breath slowing against my neck, are too few not to relish. So I give in, closing my own.
Suddenly, in my reverie, I’m no longer in a nursing chair in my overstuffed apartment. I’m on the baking hot rock at Mohican Four with my parents, my husband and my baby, ready to go for a swim together in the golden hour.
A version of this essay originally appeared in Adirondack Life Magazine.
