Car trips to faraway places were a rare treat when I was a youngster. This was in the day when most families were lucky to have one car, never mind three. And while it’s true that the price of gasoline was then measured in gallons per dollar rather than the other way round, household incomes were a whole lot less than they are today. So the family car was mostly reserved for my father’s daily commute. Road trips were luxuries. Still, my Grandad lived in the Adirondacks, and we made the drive from the New York‑Vermont border to the magical realm beyond the fabled Blue Line as often as we could. (What’s the “Blue Line,” you ask? A line drawn in blue ink marked the boundary of the Adirondack Forest Preserve on early maps, and today this Blue Line is synonymous with the Adirondack Park.)

As you might expect, on each of our infrequent family outings I climbed into the car in a state of barely controlled excitement. I was unmoved by the charms of the rural landscape between my home and the Blue Line. The overgrazed pastures and hardscrabble farms of dairy country seemed to slip by with agonizing slowness, until, at along last, I could see distant shadows rising from the horizon. These, I knew, marked the start of the Adirondack foothills. At first slowly, then with increasing rapidity, individual peaks emerged from among the shadows, as cultivated fields gave way to wetlands and deciduous trees ceded space to stands of conifers. Soon the highway wound around ragged outcrops and skirted sheer cliffs, while my heart danced a happy triphammer beat.

Our progress often seemed frustratingly sedate. The Adirondack Northway ended at Lake George in those days, and traffic slowed to a crawl at every crossroads hamlet. Impatient as I was to get to Grandad’s camp, however, there was an upside to our stately passage. Each small town boasted a craft‑and‑curio shop, and we kids could sometimes persuade my father to stop at one. We didn’t buy much — cash was always in short supply, and the gas for the trip consumed most of my family’s discretionary income — but the shops were fascinating places to explore, nonetheless. Miniature bark canoes hung suspended from the ceilings like fish on a stringer, and wonderfully fragrant pillow‑shaped balsam sachets were piled high on the shelves. Most of the sachets bore some sort of embroidered legend, with “For you I pine/For you I balsam” being a favorite. Impossibly corny? Of course. But we kids thought that this overwrought pun was the height of wit. The writer E. B. White must have thought so, too, because an identical balsam sachet, bearing the selfsame legend, makes an appearance in Stuart Little, his enduringly popular children’s book, as does a miniature bark canoe.

I loved the smell of those sachets, and it wasn’t long before I learned to identify the aromatic scent of balsam with the deep Adirondack woods. Not that balsam firs are limited to the Adirondacks. In fact, their range more or less coincides with the geographic boundaries of Canoe Country, extending from Alberta to Newfoundland and from Minnesota to Maine. That said, balsam has more than its pleasant smell going for it. In the words of professor E. H. Ketchledge, it’s “The Most Beautiful of all [North] American Conifers”… Read more…

 

 
Send a Comment