Not really part of the Appalachian Chain, but a southern extension of the Laurentian Plateau, the Adirondacks are about a billion years old, about twice the age of the Green Mountains. They have the distinction, along with only three other highlands in the United States, of never having been underwater since their formation. Under ice, yes; you can see that from their rounded domes. Our ferry slipped across a blue, almost deserted Lake Champlain. I gazed at the deep notch between two old friends, Giant and Hopkins, and reflected that the boys were up there in camp as I watched, enjoying the first week of hunting season.

Those early weeks of deer season used to be a real problem for Mother and me. Both her birthday and our Halloween wedding anniversary fall at the same time, and years ago the tug-of-war in my soul was all too evident. But time has passed. Though it’s still a treasured ritual, I’m not as eager to get to camp as I was; and as the anniversaries have added up, they’ve become more important. So as the end of October rolls around each year, we plan to get away, if we can.

The Euro and Loonie are both quite high against the dollar; so no France or Canada. The idea of a rustic cabin is not appealing to Mother; she simply does there what she does at home, but with less convenient equipment. And, she says, I can watch you read right here at home. Why sit beside a wood stove in poor light to do the same thing? So the Adirondacks it was.

Both of us spent years there, she as a child in Old Forge, I as a laborer and guide in the eastern high peaks, and the two of us together as a young married couple in the early ‘60s. We remember them with nostalgia, have many friends there, and as soon as we can make good our provenance, will be permitted to buy a cemetery lot from which we can gaze forever up at the magnificent Great Range, in company with a lot of old friends and mentors who are there already.

It was an easy five hours, including the ferry ride, to Old Forge. On the way, Mother kept mentioning a mountain she wanted to climb. Convinced that she couldn’t be serious – she hasn’t climbed for 35 years – I agreed without a murmur. But it turned out she wasn’t kidding. She’d climbed Bald Mountain, a few miles from Old Forge, at the age of four with a camera crew, who took her photograph on a ledge overlooking Fourth Lake and put it onto a postcard. She’s still got that card somewhere around home, and she wanted to take another in the same place, over six decades later. I indulged her fantasy. She couldn’t last all the way up.

Turned out she could and did. We found the ledge; I took the requisite picture, and a pair of friendly young ladies from Syracuse took one of us both. We hiked back down to the trailhead, and I waited for a mention of some ache, pain, or complaint. There was none. Delighted, we drove on to Old Forge, where white-tailed deer roam the village streets like cattle in a Wyoming cow town and come to the gliding doors of the motels for handouts. We dined out and spent the evening at an old-fashioned movie theater whose owner, many years ago, let a little girl, whose mother was working late at the local newspaper, sit in the theater as long as she liked, free. The current owner is nice, too. Mother took him three 8-mm projectors (he collects old cameras) and got in free again.

If you look at the Adirondacks on a map, you can see they’re in the jaws of a giant demographic nutcracker. That they’ve been preserved so well – the Adirondack Park, at over six million acres, is the largest by far in the United States – is little short of a miracle. Just before the turn of the 20th century, spurred by the danger of forest fires caused by rapacious logging, the loss of water supplies for drinking and canals, and the destruction of wilderness described by one romantic as having “balsamic influences, health-giving emanations and aromized atmospheres,” a state constitutional convention in 1894 passed an amendment known as the Forever Wild Clause. Just what it means has been debated hotly for over a century, but wild it remains. To me it means I’m hunting, as I can nowhere else in the East, among trees over 100 years old.

In recent months another coup for conservationists was announced. For $110 million, the Nature Conservancy has agreed to purchase 161,000 acres in the Forest Preserve from the Finch, Pruyn Paper Company. It’s not a purely sweet deal – the Conservancy is obliged, for example, to supply pulp to the Finch mill in Glens Falls for 20 years, and will have to sell some of the land to private owners, who can’t develop it, but can exclude the public. Still, it may turn out to be the most important transaction in many decades, as well as a precursor and example for others.

None of this was on our minds as we tooled gently northeast through Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake, and Lake Placid toward the place we first lived after we were married that long-ago Halloween. The roads were almost empty, ours was the only car in both motels where we stayed, and our meals were leisurely affairs in quiet restaurants. The mountain peaks that I attacked so eagerly as a young man rolled away blue into the distance, one after another. I call this phase of life living in the present perfect tense; which is to say we’ve had some wonderful times here and a wonderful life together.