This month is my father’s birthday.  We lost him to cancer sixteen years ago; he would have been 96.

I’ve been thinking about my father lately as my interest in Adirondack history has grown in its personal impact.  The palpable feel of the history in the park, the physical sense of it, is the result of a sensibility I owe my parents, especially my father.   His life and values tied me directly to a different time, to a different world that is always echoed in the wilderness, in places that connect all of us to a sense of the primitive and to bygone lives.

Ray Nelson lived part of his youth as a frontier man, literally, in the north woods of Wisconsin.  There he lumbered, built cabins and farmed on a homestead that had been carved out of the wilds.  There was no electricity on this farm, only kerosene.  Power was human and animal muscle, no engines.  Dad was proud into his late years that he still knew how to bridle a horse.  I was born many years after this era but it is moving to me how much I feel such a continuum to it and on through my own life, most of it channeled through the abiding permanence of the Adirondacks. » Continue Reading.