A Place in the Dark

Last night, I had an incredible drive up to Lake Placid. This is really not a drive to be done in the dark, in the winter, in the extreme cold, alone. The winds were howling, and even on the Northway there were occasional patches of black ice (areas where either water has melted onto the pavement, or where blowing crystals of ice have settled into patches of hell designed to throw your previously in-control vehicle careering through the rails and down an embankment). Once off the Northway, travelling up 73 into Keene and then the Cascades, it was high-speed treachery.

It’s hard to explain how dark the Adirondacks are. Dark, and darker than that. Along the streams and rivers, where the roads wind, the mountains are steep and lined with evergreens and birch stalks, and there’s only a narrow slice of sky. Even if the moon and stars are visible, they only take up a little piece of the view. The rest is the little wedge illuminated by your salt-encrusted headlights, and absolute blackness on the other three sides. The roads were covered with salt and edged by recent snow, so lanes and other markings were indistinct. There were lines of black ice, and drifted snow across the lanes. There was hardly any other traffic, so there were no lights to follow into the abyss. There was one idiot rushing behind me with those million-watt blue headlights, plus halogen fogs, throwing light all over the place in ways that kept confusing me, making me think there was oncoming traffic when there wasn’t. There are very few straight sections, and hardly anywhere to pass — the few turn-outs and parking areas came up too quick and were mostly snowed in. Eventually I was able to pull over in Keene Valley, sliding across the parking lot of the Noon Mark Diner while Bright Lights sailed on past. I was happy with that. After a quick stop at the Stewart’s in Keene to wash my headlights (again), I trudged up the Cascades, where the winds coming down the valley at one moment moved me an entire lane to the left. Un-fun.

That sense of utter darkness, nothing ahead but headlights, a little patch of mountain road, and blowing snow, was one I hadn’t had in many many years. I don’t remember the last time I drove in the Adirondacks on a winter night; I’m usually there in the summer. But that sense of being enveloped by dark and howling cold, all the time inside a nice warm car, took me back to when I was 12, a February ride to a Boy Scout outing in Lake Placid. My father driving his big Plymouth Fury III. Paul and Sudi and their fathers along with us, driving snow all the way up the then-newish and novel Northway, more snow all the way up 73. A stop at the Elm Tree Inn (still there at the fork in Keene, though minus the elm tree growing through the porch, and probably minus what was already then a very very worn taxidermied bear inside the bar). Back then it wasn’t considered unusual to bring kids to the bar — at least not in my family. The men went up to the bar to have a beer and a shot, and we boys got to have soda and quarters for the pinball machine (dime a game, three for a quarter). Then, back in the car for the rest of the drive. (It was the early ’70s – I’m sure the conventional wisdom was still that people drove better if they were “more relaxed”.) It was warm in the car, and the only thing we could see out the windshield was falling snow. We couldn’t see anything out the side windows at all. Sudi’s father was from India, and while he had lived in the states long enough to have seen snow, this experience was something new to him. Paul’s father then told us a story of how as a boy he had been somehow plowed into a snowbank while walking home from school in his hometown in Hungary, and had been stuck there overnight until his family found him in the morning. To this day that is my entire perception of Hungary – being frozen into a snowbank, and how different that would be than being snug in a car with a nuclear heater, bombing through a snowstorm in the darkest place on earth. And then we arrived in the magical little winter village of Lake Placid, a place then and now just alive in the winter in a way few other places are.

Sudi’s father was transferred a year or so later, and we lost track of him. Paul died. His father died. My father died. And yet last night it was just as if it were 31 years ago, straining to see the road through the snowflakes, amazed at how much blackness there could be all around.

(Much sunnier pictures, from the much less spooky trip back down, will be at my fotolog , with a few new ones added every day. It was breathtakingly beautiful today, all that crystal ice settled on the limbs of the trees.