A WEEK IN THE ADIRONDACKS

In the summer of 2004, we stayed a week at Northbrook Lodge on Osgood Pond in the Adirondacks. The lodge, one of the smaller “great camps” in the area, built in the 1920s, was a bit run down, but set in pleasant enough white-piny grounds.

Osgood Pond was a quiet little jewel, with few private houses along its shores. Another “great camp,” White Pine Camp, was on the opposite side of the pond from Northbrook, discreetly tucked among the trees. That place was Calvin Coolidge’s Summer White House from July 7 to September 18, 1926. For his use, there was a bowling alley in a building at water’s edge.

Two rivers entered into the pond, and an old canal connected Osgood to another pond; those three added to our kayaking possibilities.

One misty morning, before dawn, we set out across the pond to see check out White Pine Camp, and to shoot the arched stone bridge and tiny Japanese tea house on a little spit of land sticking out from the shore. Another Northbrook guest, Mick, came along in his kayak, and he and I got of our boats to snoop in Coolidge’s bowling alley just past the bridge and teahouse. Inside the building, nervous we would get caught by the staff, I was whispering. Amused, Mick said, “Why are you whispering? We’re not in church.”

A week was not a lot of time to explore the area, though we did check out Paul Smith’s college in the Adirondack Park, on Lower St. Regis Lake.

Another day we visited the modest frame house in Lake Saranac where, in 1887, Robert Louis Stevenson, in ill-health and on advice from his physician, spent the bitterly cold winter with his mother.

Evenings we gathered in the lodge with the other Northbrookers, all lively and interesting, and—to our pleasant surprise—all liberal in their politics. Most were regulars, returning year after year. And mornings, we paddled around the pond, sliding through the Adirondacks mists.