Lewis Camp
Story goes that my grandfather won Lewis camp in a poker game nearly seventy years ago. There will never be any other place in the Adirondacks quite like it for me. Lewis lies just off the northway, the exit today that many people hop off to catch the Essex Ferry to Vermont. Well, if you head the other way and cross Rt. 9, the road continues up Wells Hill to Lewis Camp.
As a kid, we often took day trips there after the 4th of July ... when the bugs went gone! It was only an hour's drive on old Rt. 9, but seemed like an eternity. Around the last bend we passed the Johnson's log home, the closest year-round residents, and gave the traditional two toots on the horn. Two other places lay between Johnson's and us -- the ol' witch's house, a cabin nearly taken over by nature, where the elderly owner's body was found sometime after her demise. That's not what made it scary. My grandfather once showed us the marks on the walls of the adjoining horseshed. Sometime after her death, her horse too passed on, tied to wall here no one could answer his whine. In the pitch dark of an Adirondack night, we kids swore we could hear him crashing through the woods, or banging on his stall.
Next came an abandoned hunters camp, and finally the last turn where two brooks came together was Lewis Camp. The first thing I always did was suck in a huge breath of the wet, piney woods air. My grandmother always had the place toasty with a fire going in the cast-iron woodstove in the kitchen. But I couldn't stay indoors and set out as soon as possible to make my rounds to see my favorite fishing pool, favorite rocks in the brook, favorite birches and footpaths in the forest.
Each summer, my grandparents would take us to camp for a week. We'd start in Plattsburgh at the Army Navy Store where they bought us a new pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, socks and sneakers. Then on to Fountain-Lucas, a local grocer, for steaks, potato chips and comic books. Most days at camp we had a half-day project: stacking wood, washing windows, painting trim etc., but then we were free to hike, fish, read, swim in the brook, swing in the hammock, collect wildflowers or blueberries and play cards. Breakfast each morning was on a little side porch called the nook. Often it was fresh pan-fried trout we early birds dragged up from the brook, still hanging on the line. If it was worthy, my grandmother traced it's outline on a paper plate with your name and date on it and this plate would remain tacked to the wall until a bigger fish came along. All week we practiced for the annual "boat" races on Sunday. They weren't actually boats, but blocks of wood half the size of a brick that my grandfather tossed into a pool from the bridge at the junction of the two brooks. The four of us kids would be standing knee-deep in the pool, walking sticks in hand. The youngest started first and one by one we'd follow our wood blocks rushing downstream, jumping from rock to rock, over logs, down to the finish line. You could only touch the block if it got stuck, and then catapult it from it's position with the walking stick. The adults roared with laughter from the bridge above.
My grandmother taught us the art of fishing. My grandfather took us on walks. One of our favorites was up the road to Nicki's barn. Back then the loggers still used a horse to haul trees out of the woods. Nicki was as gentle as a lamb and loved sugar cubes. I never remember meeting the loggers, just Nicki, his head hanging out the half-door of his stall, smiling at us, waiting for his sugar. Another great walk was what we called walking the line. The first half was down an old road along Robert's brook. There we kept a tin cup in an old abandoned woodpecker's hole and stopped for cold drinks from the brook. One year we drove to Frontiertown and bought a small Indian doll as a souvenir and stuck her in the woodpecker's hole. The following year when we walked the line, she was gone. Eventually the old road gave out and we followed single file behind my grandfather, bushwacking. Somewhere along the way we came upon a clearing and followed the telephone poles out to the designated roadway where my grandmother was waiting for us around 3:00 in the afternoon.
Each summer, we took a day-long trip to someplace special: Land-of-Make-Believe, Frontiertown, Santa's Workshop, once to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. Sometimes we'd walked to the village of Lewis - which as I recall, had a classic general store with penny candy and postcards and across the street, a french bakery where you could buy "petit-fours". That and a grange and a church was about it. My grandfather died in his sleep at Lewis in 1959, my grandmother in 1965. The family held on to Lewis for a while but it was sold in the late seventies. No one lives an hour away anymore, no one had time to chop the wood, paint the trim re-build the footbridge across the brook, clean the chimney, put on a new roof or drain the pipes. No one had time for boat races, fishing in the brook, reading in the hammock, picking blueberries or walking the line.