In Pursuit of Simple Things
In the Gilded Age, the aristocracy of America came to the Adirondack Mountains to flee the heat of summer. They wanted the woods, the water and the air, and they found it in the soft, green folds of the Empire State.
They would come by train, with steamer trunks and servants, and stay from Independence Day to Labor Day. If they were not coming here, they were going to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia or Mount Desert Island, Maine.
Summers were sacred. The patricians were called rusticators and they were city folk in search of simplicity and authenticity.
Of course, they summered in grand hotels and seaside villas and lived lavishly. But the impulse, even then, was to find somewhere less feverish and more natural in their lives.
That was no more so than in the “great camps” of the Adirondacks. Calvin Coolidge came here, to White Pine Camp, in the summer of 1926 and called it “The Summer White House.” A native of Vermont, he walked the woods in a tie, suit and hat.
Today the place is much the way it was. Like the rusticators, 21st century sojourners crave simplicity and authenticity.
Here that means hugging the shore in a canoe, seeking a kind of littoral truth amid the wailing loons and shimmering pines. It means a log cabin with a fieldstone fireplace, a twig bed with a woolen blanket and crisp cotton (not polyester) sheets. It means no television or telephone. It means a great hall with board games, well-thumbed books and conversation.
In other words, it was what we all want in the woods, here or anywhere else.
Yet in our search for solitude and silence we worry that this element of life will disappear as surely as the snows of Kilimanjaro. As much as a local magazine celebrates the wonders of the region, it warns of the fate of buildings and watercourses, reporting on pitched battles between preservationists and developers.
We are richer than we were a century ago but it’s not enough for us. We are digging up farmland in southern Ontario, among the best in the world, to build monster homes with three garages and six bathrooms. We push our cities out rather than up while civic officials — including those in Ottawa claiming to be guardians of heritage — approve bigger houses on smaller lots, destroying the character of neighborhoods.
Vanity Fair writes of the plutocrats of New York who are taking down homes in Southampton, the genteel community on Long Island. One Neanderthal razed seaside sand dunes because they ruined his view, who didn’t think it would cause an uproar. The dunes were 3,000 years old.
We have become latter-day Jacobins. We destroy things. In our obsession with comfort and wealth, small has become bad. We destroy not just forest and farmland but a sense of proportion and prudence in our lives.
A generation ago, a middle-class teenager may have had three sweaters. Now she has to have a closet full. Her brother may have played outside with friends. Now he sits alone, glassy-eyed, before a computer.
Our ethic is to consume and discard. Darn a pair of socks or patch a sleeve? Repair a television or dishwasher? Why bother? Replace it.
In the Age of Excess, we are urged to shop, the recession notwithstanding. But if you step away for awhile, it’s refreshing to learn how you can live with less.
Spend a year abroad, taking along a modest wardrobe, and you see how little you actually need. Spend a summer at a cabin, and see how swell it is to rely on a pair of shorts, a shirt, a sweater and socks. Spend some time on a canoe trip, and learn anew the meaning of contrast we lost long ago in urban life: hard and soft ground, hot and cold food, dry and wet clothes.
This isn’t an appeal to don a hairshirt, take to the woods and become the anti-social Henry David Thoreau. But we can learn the benefits of doing with less, of living lightly, of pondering why we are killing ourselves.
This isn’t just about the environment, whose champions appeal to our conscience every day. It is about the spirit. It is understanding the pleasure of reading and the joys of nature. It is seeing the need, more broadly, to preserve values such as restraint, resourcefulness, courtesy, modesty, frugality and equanimity.
We have survived as a species because we have always adapted. Now it’s time to adapt again — to build smaller houses, drive smaller cars, buy fewer things, lead simpler lives. To resist the siren call of more and to relearn the lessons of our grandparents.
It is to live by the rules and rhythms of the woods, as they once did here, in the Adirondacks.
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