Memories (and Footage) of Long-Lost Mountain Lakes

Remembering the Adirondack Mountains,

In my previous post I confessed that, as a longtime immigrant in Israel deeply committed to living here, I’ve recently allowed myself to acknowledge realities of loss that emigration almost inevitably brings about. In my case, the “old country” is not so much America as a landscape I grew up in—a rural part of the township of Clifton Park, near Schenectady, New York—and people associated with that general vicinity.

I can extend that purview, though, to an expanse of land lying to the north of there—the Adirondack Mountains, a national park comprising five thousand square miles of stunningly beautiful mountains, woods, and lakes. Whereas—as I also mentioned—Clifton Park is now a lot more built up, the Adirondacks, as a national park, remain the same in a way that seems to defy time. But while, in the thirty-eight years since emigrating, I’ve visited the area around Schenectady maybe a dozen times, I’ve made it up to the Adirondacks again only twice—the last time more than a decade ago—so that they’ve become for me a kind of lost paradise.  

My family spent much less time in the Adirondacks than in Clifton Park, but you could call it quality time. Summer vacations of a week or two, sometimes in a suite of cottages beside Lake George, sometimes in a rented-out two-story house beside a much smaller entity called Paradox Lake. It was beautiful up there with the pure air, the pine smell, the blue lake water. Days of swimming, of jumping from a raft or just rocking on it, of long leisurely rowboat rides; evenings of Scrabble games that brought the family—my parents, my two sisters, and me—together for unusually intense camaraderie. Unusual because most of us were people much given to separate pastimes, not easily brought together like that.

From the moment I made aliyah (moved to Israel) thirty-eight years back, all those places were very distant in space; but they get more and more distant in time, too, until Clifton Park, and even more so the Adirondacks, start to seem dreamlike, “lost”—whatever you want to call it. But since then there have been changes in the world, including phenomena like YouTube. Sitting in my bedroom-workroom in Be’er Sheva where I’ve been assiduously writing, translating, and editing for the last thirteen of those thirty-eight years—and sometimes even sleeping—I can be taken right back to those lost realms, and with fitting background music. 

A guy named Lou Hall makes great videos of Adirondack lakes while cruising over them in his small plane. Here’s one of Lower Saranac Lake. Well to the north in the Adirondacks, it’s not far from Lake Placid of Olympic fame. We never stayed at a place in that area, but we visited friends there who did. For this video Lou Hall picked a deeply meditative piano piece whose poignancy, laced with sadness, expresses better than anything I could write the feeling of looking decades back into an idyllic past.

And here’s another one he did of Paradox Lake itself, further south in the Adirondacks, where we’d stay for a week or two weeks at a time going back to my childhood. It’s hard to imagine a lovelier little mountain lake. For this one Lou Hall picked a more relaxed, gently reflective guitar piece that’s just as fitting in its way. Rowing with Dad along the shores, out to the little islands—it brings it all back. There might be a few more houses nestled in the trees than there were then, but essentially it’s exactly as it looked.  

Israel has its charms too—not least Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), the jewel of its north; but they’re places I first saw as an adult. They have great historical power but not the personal associations of places known in childhood. As a freelancer who likes to keep things moving, my visits back to the old country have been short, and there have been people to see and places to go besides the Adirondacks. But now schedules are easing up, and one of these days Tamar and I will really have to spend some time at one of those lakes and bring my life full circle.