TYPE: REFLECTION | DATE: CHILDHOOD / MAY 2026 | LOCATION: FROM THE OLD CAMP TO THE PLACE

I grew up in Glens Falls, but summer opened somewhere else.

My parents had a camp just inside the Adirondack Park, remote enough that you could not drive to it. Everything had to be boated across the lake. There was no phone. No electricity except for a generator used mostly to make toast. The refrigerator, stove, oven, and hot water ran on propane.

At night we used kerosene lanterns — Aladdin and Rayo mostly. Coleman lanterns worked, but they were too loud.

The old camp landscape — lake, mountain, and logged-over Adirondack ground. This was the childhood world where the robin first became memorable.

The camp had belonged first to my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather’s line was Hulsebosch. Fred LaBoeuf was farther back on my grandmother’s side. After my grandfather died, the shares passed through the family, and eventually my parents bought the camp with two other families.

In summer there were often a dozen kids there, sometimes more. We swam, fished, hiked, climbed the mountain, explored, and water-skied twice a day when the weather allowed it. Water skiing became an event. People from other camps would come over, and a whole loose tribe would make a loop around the lake.

It was an ordinary childhood paradise, which is to say I did not understand it while I was inside it.

Inside the old camp. Coleman lanterns on the table; the quieter Aladdin and Rayo lamps belonged to bedrooms and living-room corners.

The forest looked like forest. The lake looked like lake. The mountain looked permanent. The logged-over Adirondack ground, the glacial till, the second-growth woods, the old roads and paths — all of it seemed complete because I had no older version to compare it against.

But one day my mother noticed something.

“Is that a bird?”

It was a robin.

I remember the moment because of the surprise in it. Not alarm. Not drama. Just recognition breaking through absence. A robin should not have been remarkable. A robin should have been background. A robin should have been part of the ordinary noise of summer.

But it was remarkable.

It felt as if there were no birds. I cannot prove that. Memory is not a census. But the silence was strong enough that a robin became an event.

Only later did I understand the larger history around that silence.

Black flies, mosquitoes, nuisance insects — the human answer had been chemical. Planes sprayed. Trucks sprayed. Neighborhoods were fogged. In Glens Falls, I remember pumper trucks moving through the streets in early spring, laying down clouds that children ran through as if the poison were part of play.

That is the part that is hard to carry now.

Not because we were careless children. We were children.

Because the adults did not yet understand the scale of what had been released.

A little spray by humanity does not remain little. It enters soil, water, insect, worm, fish, egg, bird. It climbs the ladder. It thins the shell. It silences the branch. It turns a robin into an event.

Years later I came across Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the title landed because I already knew the condition before I knew the book. I had heard that spring. Or more accurately, I had not heard it.

The barn edge at The Place, looking toward the maple stand. This is where the present record begins.

That may be why birds matter so much to me now.

The eagle over water. The phoebe in the barn rafters. The junco working low near the ground. The ordinary robin stepping through the grass as if nothing historical is happening.

But something historical is always happening.

A bird seen now is not just color and song. It is recovery. It is evidence. It is a living counter-entry against the old confidence that the world could be sprayed into obedience without cost.

The robin was the first correction I remember.

Not the first bird.

The first witness.

Robin song recorded from the corner of the barn, looking up into the trees. The machine may or may not have caught the bird clearly. The witness did.