LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 50 But it's not just the Persian rug of colors that im- presses. It's the silence, the purity of the scene with almost no sign of human interference in nature's handiwork. It's the calming isolation, the serenity. The distance. Stay a few hours, as I have in my role as a summit steward with Azure Mountain Friends, and you will become aware that not only have the colors subtly changed even as you watched, but that you, too, have changed. Your sense of time has altered – it marches on without concern for its pace. Your sense of place shifts – here in one of the nation's most popu- lous states, you may see no other humans. You open yourself to the fact that you are alone amid millions of trees of varying hue – dark green conifers, red and or- ange sugar maples, tawny beeches – and you become aware that they all live peacefully together, in harmo- ny with each other. And you ask yourself, why can't we humans do that? Why can we not live side-by-side in harmony? Your mind drifts; a hawk soars overhead, a loon calls plaintively from one of the ponds spread out below, a chipmunk scurries under the summit ferns. Deer browse unseen the forest carpet stretching miles upon miles in every direction. And you imagine yourself as one of those hawks, one of those loons, one of those deer, deep in the encir- cling woods. The sun moves steadily west, steadily down. The panorama tells you that most of the Adirondacks — dare you think the "real" Adirondacks — are not mountainous at all, but gently rolling, undulating like a breeze-swept sea, quilted by forests up to 10,000 years old. You realize that most of the Adirondacks are not populated by dramatic, almost mile-high peaks, but by water – water, in the ancient glaciated bowls of lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, bogs, marshes…. And you think about how vital is this circulatory system to the health of the Earth and its weather, and so also to us. You become part of that vitality, part of that scene, of that cosmic integration. You sense that if you return here in a year, or 10 or 1,000, it will look much the same, superficially, as it did a year or 10 or 1,000 ago, but that beneath that veneer of permanence there is a rhythm, a tempo, in the constant cycling of nature, where change is daily, monthly, yearly and beyond, and it all circles back. It is the same and different simulta- neously. And then something snaps you out of your reverie – an eagle's call, perhaps, or the cooling late-day air or a cold sprinkle of rain – and you realize it is time to start down, down to the world of cars and asphalt and pow- er lines and clamor and big-box stores, but that just as the colors are always changing – as all of nature is changing – so too are you always changing, in ways you must step back to see. And you are thankful for it. t Top to Bottom: A view of the firetower cabin taken by Joe Berner. Fall colors looking southeast from Azure by Tom Ortmeyer. Sandra Hildreth's watercolor of St. Regis as seen from A zure, with Mt. Marcy and Algonquin in the back- ground.

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