Camp Woodwil on Upper Saranac Lake, where Lewis Spence spent four memorable summers with Grandfather—”an authentically fake Kentucky Colonel.”

Memories sweet and painful

By Neal Burdick

Sooner or later, we all come home—if not literally, then spiritually, emotionally or psychologically to a place that had a role in shaping us. One day, without realizing it, we are there. And we confront the forces that made us what we have become. We complete a circle.

The Adirondacks are an arc of that circle in two outstanding memoirs, at once a player and a stage for settling up with the ghosts of elders. Lewis Spence’s A Mountain View, published posthumously in 2002, recounts the author’s four summers with his eccentric, bigoted grandfather at the family compound on Upper Saranac Lake. Adam Hochschild’s classic, Half the Way Home, first published in 1986, probes the author’s relationship, much of it at Eagle Nest on Eagle Lake, with his distinguished, distant, disapproving father.

A MOUNTAIN VIEW

Lewis Spence (1920-1998) was a reporter for the Schenectady Union Star and later a correspondent for Time magazine. He spent the summers of 1930-1933, when he was 11 through 14, as the only family companion of his widower grandfather at his grandfather’s 50-acre Camp Woodwil on the north end of Upper Saranac Lake. “It was variously my good fortune, delight, loneliness, and sorrow” to pass the summers of “those sad but golden years” in the company of a man 63 years his senior, he writes.

“Grandfather” was John Dunlap, whom Spence encapsulates as “an honest to God, authentically fake Kentucky colonel.” Dunlap was indeed from Kentucky, but he had to reinvent his ancestors as Civil War heroes in order to help his own pedigree along. He made money in publishing, sold out and used some of the proceeds to erect the multi-structured Woodwil in the rustic Great Camp tradition, in large part because he believed that that was what men of his station were expected to do. Naming it for Woodrow Wilson, a distant acquaintance and, much more importantly, a southern gentleman, he completed it in 1929, just in time for the crash to nearly wipe him out. He spent the rest of his life alternately trying to shore up Woodwil, symbol of an era and style he refused to surrender, and sell it to people of his social status, who didn’t have any money left either.

After the author, Dunlap is the lead character in this poignant and humorous telling of an adolescent boy’s summers in the mountains. Here’s an early glimpse of the old man and his impressive physical limitations:

I often think of Grandfather as a prototype of the twentieth century’s prosthetic man, someone who would think nothing of checking into the hospital for new hips, knees, or kidneys. Though Grandfather was a bit too early for such handy replacement parts, to my child’s eyes there seemed to be few organs in his body that modern medicine hadn’t tinkered with. If he didn’t have his cane, he walked with the lurching, staggering gait of Ahab in a typhoon. Shed of his toupee, his pate was as smooth and polished as an inverted chamber pot. He wore false teeth, was blind without his glasses, and was hard of hearing. Finally, because of a hernia, around his groin he wore a truss that he was continually adjusting.

Yet Grandfather was in no way a hypochondriac and carried off these afflictions, and their compensatory devices, with a panache that made me envious, hoping that one day I too might be blessed with them.

Formal to a fault, he wore on his sleeve all the prejudices one might expect. Grandfather expected the Jews to stay at the southern end of the lake, and put his hideaway as near the northern end as he could. Believing it was his God-given duty as a WASP to own land, he kept his money pit teetering along, the Depression be damned. He professed support for conservation, yet contended that game laws were meant for “lilypickers and Mussolinis.”

To be fair, in staking out these positions Dunlap was in step with his contemporaries; the nearby Saranac Inn, whose owner was a friend from whom he bought the Woodwil acreage, had a clear and shameless anti-Jewish policy, as did many Adirondack hotels of that era. Part of the effect of all that was, thankfully, to persuade the next generations—Spence and his peers—in the opposite direction.

Other characters came with the Woodwil package. Principal among these was the handyman Oscar, a profane, filthy, perpetually farting Swede who was the perfect foil to the old man’s phony propriety. It was with the barely competent Oscar that Lewis had some of his best times. We meet Oscar’s stoic wife, Julia, a superb cook whose kitchen skills were the reason the Colonel put up with Oscar, and whose running battles with the coal stove, and with Dunlap, are hilarious.

Another role is filled by Woodwil itself. In its “contrived rusticity,” Spence sees, from the vantage point of years, that it was in many ways unreal. It provided isolation from the economic realities of the times even as it succumbed slowly to them. Spence writes of the wood bugs that got into the main house, “so that summer evenings over cribbage or dominoes were punctuated by the grinding crunch of the insects munching away under the bark” that sheathed the structures. It was not just a building they were devouring; it was a way of life.

But Woodwil was also where Spence learned to paddle, hike, build a campfire, and appreciate the flora and fauna of the woods. He took that knowledge with him, passing it on to his own children and grandchildren, who today have more modest places on what’s left of the estate.

It’s the relationship between Lewis and his grandfather, though, that binds the narrative together. Despite their differences of age, temperament and attitudes (Spence calls theirs an “eccentric pairing”), the two got on well. They had, Spence explains, a love of the Adirondacks in common. Perhaps because the young boy honored the old man in this way, Dunlap let Lewis be himself, find his own amusements, hang out with the “help.” “It was the indulgence and freedom at Woodwil that made me love it so,” Spence writes. Thanks to this, Spence can see past his grandfather’s faults, look closely at their times together and laugh affectionately at both of them. Balancing the inevitable pathos of growing up, growing old, dying, and dealing with a doomed white elephant in the Adirondack woods, there is much humor in these delightful recollections.

	A Mountain View: A Memoir of childhood on Upper Saranac Lake By Lewis Spence Syracuse University Press, 2002 Hardcover, 159 pages
	Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son By Adam Hochschild Syracuse University Press, 1996 Softcover, 236 pages

HALFWAY HOME
There is no such humor in Half the Way Home. In its 236 pages, not one anecdote directly involving the author elicits laughter. Whereas Lewis Spence describes a loving if fundamentally Victorian relationship between a boy and his grandfather, Half the Way Home is a search for understanding of a father-son relationship where love was not voiced until the last possible moment, where fear, guilt and impenetrable barriers ruled the years. One cannot imagine a young Adam and his father, Harold, laughing over a game of cribbage, wood bugs or no. Half the Way Home is a tremendously powerful book, deeper and darker than A Mountain View.

Adam Hochschild, Ramparts magazine writer and editor, Mother Jones magazine co-founder and NPR commentator, was the only child of Harold Hochschild, a reluctant corporate magnate, world traveler, confidant to presidents and governors, and patriarch of the Adirondack family Great Camp, Eagle Nest, near Blue Mountain Lake. He was forever Father, not Dad or anything else approaching familiarity, to Adam. Our first glimpse of him comes in Adam’s recollection of their boxing matches at Eagle Nest: Father would set the appointment and Adam would agree, even though he didn’t want to do it; they would don gloves, go through a set routine of gentle punches and, at Father’s dictate, call a halt. At that point, Father would present his cheek for a peck, “not in celebration of something fun we had done together, but rather to be thanked, for something he had done for me.” Those gloves are symbolic of many things that came between father and son.

Harold Hochschild married late and became a parent at an age when most people are sending their children off to college and looking ahead to retirement. His life had been absorbed by the family business, which the family called “The Company” but the New York Stock Exchange called at various times The American Metal Company, American Metal Climax and AMAX—a mining conglomerate that had “interests” from Colorado to Africa.

Allowed by Father to see first-hand the grasp of The Company’s tentacles, Adam came to realize that copper plus sweating, underpaid black African workers equaled Eagle Nest, where he could revel in banquets, boats and books in endless supply. It was a troubling juxtaposition, and his rejecting of Father’s plan that he go into The Company, following education at The Right Schools, was but one more source of friction between them.

Another was Judaism, which Father repudiated in his compulsion to have anti-Semites like John Dunlap accept him. But try as he might, the mere sound of his name meant that Harold Hochschild, tolerant and open-minded, would never have been allowed on the northern end of Upper Saranac Lake.

As in Lewis Spence’s memoir, other people weave in and out of the conflicted story line. Adam’s mother was the attentive peacemaker, with whom he had a relationship that was the polar opposite of that with his father—and yet we never learn what he called her. Among a fluid and sometimes bizarre cast of “extras” the most memorable is the dashing, philandering Russian aviator Boris Sergievsky, who literally swooped in to marry Adam’s Aunt Gertrude; the antithesis of Father, he was to Adam what Oscar was to Lewis Spence, although considerably more refined. Local people, the folks the Hochschilds employed, come and go; although pleased that they are invited to holiday celebrations at Eagle Nest, Adam is perplexed that they get better treatment from Father than he does. And there is Rex, Adam’s golden Lab and, tellingly, favorite companion, who Father won’t even let into the house for five years, but ends up favoring with warm affection—whereas in a certain sense he never did let his only child into the house.

An Aching Sadness
All of which could be read as the whining of a spoiled son of privilege. But this is something else entirely. There is an aching sadness throughout, a wish that understandings could have been achieved, heartfelt words exchanged, an overlay of regret that things weren’t better between a sensitive, confused boy and a man whose tough veneer masked a core of insecurity.

This action plays out over 40 years and in many locales—foreign capitals, cruise ships, hotels where the prospect of dinner alone with Father brings on waves of nausea—and Eagle Nest, a former country club on the Eckford Chain of lakes that Adam’s grandfather and some associates had rescued from bankruptcy and subdivision. The family spent only summers and some holidays there while Adam was growing up, but, he writes, “it was then that I lived.” If Father was in residence, Adam would escape to the cool of the icehouse, explore the woods with Rex, or talk to the staff, whom he admired because they could do things with their hands. Often the joy of these otherwise carefree explorations was clouded by his dread of a scheduled afternoon appointment in Father’s office, no doubt to be politely but firmly reprimanded for some mysterious social gaffe he had committed.

Most often of all, my crime would be that of taking too much space, of talking too much: at the table, in a carload of family and guests en route to Eagle Nest, anywhere he and I were together with other people.

It was so easy to slip into this pattern, particularly if I had been spending time with my mother. To her I was a precocious, entertaining child; she was endlessly delighted by my thoughts and questions and fantasies. When I was with her, there was no such thing as talking too much. I could chatter for hours and she loved it. But when Father and a group of his friends were there, I was surrounded by an invisible trip wire. I could never figure out in advance just where it lay, until suddenly I knew, with a sinking-stomach despair, that I had inadvertently stumbled against it. I would be talking and giggling, happily taking center stage, when I would see the moment at which Father found me guilty: a slight pursuing of the lips, a raising of one eyebrow, a few cryptic words which I knew he would expand on later, “Adam! I think that’s enough for now.”

At this point some valve opened inside me, and I felt a pervasive dread traveling through my whole body, as if I had taken a powerful, swift-acting drug. Sometimes I tried desperately to win back his approval by being very affectionate, but it never worked.

Among Adam’s favorite hideaways at Eagle Nest was his bedroom, where he could escape to read, play or daydream. From here, between bedtime and sleep during long summer dusks, he could hear the music of the piano echoing across the lake, or the sounds of some of the younger guests sneaking a secret skinny-dip. This was his universe, and he felt himself within it yet not part of it, unable to attain it as the sounds fuzzed and he drifted into sleep.

As Adam grew into adulthood and Father into decline, their attitudes toward each other softened. Father gradually accepted his son’s career choice and even took pride in his accomplishments as a crusading, anti-Establishment journalist. More relaxed and mellowed, Harold displayed great affection and playfulness with his grandchildren. Adam, in turn, speaks with pride of Father’s writing an acclaimed book on Adirondack history, founding the Adirondack Museum, and playing a key role in the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency—although of the latter he implies that the victory for Father was as much in getting his way, in having his iron will prevail over the speaker of the state Assembly, as in protecting the Adirondacks from uncontrolled development.

Finally, Harold is on his deathbed in a New York City hospital. The last hours pass, the last minutes. At the last breath, Adam summons the will to tell Father what he has not been able to for a lifetime. Perhaps now he is ready to begin the other half of the way home.

Much that is inconsequential sets these books apart. Hochschild writes more about a person, Spence more about a place. Spence’s Adirondack idyll is at the headwaters of the Saranac, Hochschild’s at the head of the Raquette; each is fractured for a different reason. Hochschild’s significant elder is the real goods, Spence’s a pretender. And so on. But the similarities are greater, and not merely the superficial ones (summers at a Great Camp, formal address). Each writer, master storyteller that he is, tackles honestly the questions we all must ask: Who, and what, made us who we are? Where is home, really? And how do we get there?

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