We got off to a bad start that summer, the summer of my fourteenth year. Even now, remembering what happened is like watching a continuous film strip that turns back upon itself and is always the same, always curiously comforting in its familiarity, except for its last catastrophic scene, which changed everything. In 1962 it was a ten-hour drive to the lake from our home in Yonkers, just north of New York City. We had only been on the road a couple of hours when my mother''s Buick began to overheat. She let the engine cool off and then started up again and drove for a while before the same thing happened again. Not one to give in easily, least of all to a machine, she toughed it out as long as she could, until we could all see that we weren''t going to make it all the way to northern Vermont like that. By the middle of the afternoon she was so snappish that even Maddy, my grandmother, fell silent and the two dogs crouched on the floor of the back seat with their snouts in their paws. Finally she stopped at a repair shop somewhere on Route 22.
When the mechanic came out from under the hood, he said it was the thermostat and that he''d have to get a new one from somewhere too far away to put it in that day. When my mother protested, he said that she could go ahead and burn out the engine if she wanted, he didn''t care, or we could stay the night in the motel across the road. Not that I blamed my mother. She hadn''t counted on driving all the way herself. As I watched her pacing the concrete apron in front of the garage and lighting Winstons one after the other, sucking hard on them, ignoring the No Smoking signs posted all around, I felt only sympathy. She didn''t know how to be helpless and couldn''t bear it at all. If I blamed anyone, it was my father, who always drove us to Vermont. He was supposed to join us at the lake in a week.
The company he worked for, which had hired him just a few months before and where he planned heating systems for housing developments and plants, had asked him to stay on an extra week. I still couldn''t forgive him, even though I knew that he hadn''t been free to refuse. I stared furiously over the panorama of hills as green and neat as ones in a kid''s storybook, thinking about how we couldn''t go riding the next day and worrying that if the car wasn''t fixed we''d miss the day after that too, and that maybe we''d never even get to the lake at all, and our whole vacation would be ruined. That night in the motel I lay with my eyes closed listening to my grandmother''s mad voice going on about how she had to get down to Fort Hamilton to roll bandages for the troops. "Which troops?" my mother asked, already knowing the answer, and Maddy said, "Teddy Roosevelt''s." My mother answered back with barely suppressed irritation, "That was the Spanish-American War." Then Maddy asked if there was any news in the paper about Mrs. Astor, and then she said that she wanted to go see Nell Hogan as soon as we got back from New Orleans, and my mother said we were going to Vermont not New Orleans and that Nell Hogan was dead and Mrs.
Astor was too, and please try to get to sleep now, because we all needed sleep, lots of sleep. I was not a very observant boy, but I couldn''t help seeing that my grandmother was odd. Some days she wore a hairpiece that didn''t match her hair, or wore it on the side of her head and insisted that it was a style. She appeared in peculiar combinations of clothing or reported conversations that she said she''d had with one of the dogs. She put strange things on our dinner plates. Sometimes I found her cooking dirt on the stove and saying that she was making stew. Over the past year her memory had become steadily more unpredictable. People and places, entire eras fused and splintered and recombined in ways that increasingly unnerved me.
Next morning, to everyone''s relief, the Buick was repaired and ready to go. My mother rolled the top down and the dogs climbed onto Maddy''s lap, and as the car gathered speed their pink tongues flapped like pennants in the wind. The air smelled sweet, and I knew that we''d be crossing the state line into Vermont any time and that now the weeks would unfurl after all into endless days when there would be time enough for everything. We went from farmland to forest and then followed the Green Mountains north until we reached the towns we knew, Hardwick and Glover and Barton, where we always shopped for groceries and bought the New York Times, and where I already felt within the lake''s grasp. The lake lay a few miles east of Barton. It was a dark, ungentle landscape, and it made me uneasy when I was small, before I got to know it and made it my own. The lake--large for the region, nearly seven miles long from end to end--was so deep that on any but the brightest days the deep glacial trough that cradled it swallowed the sunlight entirely, leaving the black surface with a chilly, vestigial glint. The naked cliffs that towered over the lake''s southern end and the scree of shattered rock beneath them suggested cataclysm and rupture, a memoir in granite of the primeval violence from which it sprang.
Most of the summer cottages, however--usually shingled affairs painted in muted greens and browns and grays--lay in sunnier settings at the northern end of the lake and had cute names like Nod-Away, Wayward Winds, and Brookadoon. And, of course, the Lyndon. In later years, I vividly "remembered" having spent many seasons in the Lyndon. But this isn''t true. In years past we had rented a succession of cottages; my mother had discovered the Lyndon only the year before and been enchanted by its rambling verandas and old yellow planked walls and the huge wood-fired stove that she liked to think of as a dragon that dwelled in the kitchen. I didn''t understand then that she craved its space, space into which she could flee from Maddy''s nattering drone, space into which she could retreat with her alps of notes from her trips to Alaska and Mississippi and Florida and for the Northern Plains book that was supposed to get written that year. My mother had had an extraordinary life for a woman of her generation. For most of the last decade she had led the Association on American Indian Affairs, then the only important national organization concerned with the rights of Native Americans.
As its executive director, she introduced community activism to Indian country at a time when reservations were governed like colonial satrapies by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and when Washington had committed itself as a matter of policy to the systematic dismantling of the tribes. She charmed even those who opposed her with her vibrant and earthy Irish humor and with an erudition that sometimes daunted even good friends. If she feared anything, it was only boredom and ineffectuality. A stylish dresser, an epitome of Manhattan chic, she nonetheless never seemed more at home than on a busted sofa in some prairie cabin, her arm flung back, and laughing with a Winston dangling jauntily from her lips, surrounded by her Indian friends. Lakotas who adopted her into their family gave her the name Tokeya Icaga Win, or Eldest Child; Omahas called her We-hae-tunga, or Big Sister, and Miccosukees, Knee Hat Kee, or White Day. She never changed her name when she married and was known to everyone she worked with as Miss LaVerne Madigan. She worked ten and twelve hours a day most days, sometimes six or even seven days a week. When I went to bed, I would often see her scribbling on pad after pad of yellow foolscap, chain-smoking and drinking strong coffee.
Sometimes she would still be writing when I woke in the morning, and then she would drink more coffee and then get into the Buick and drive to her office in Manhattan. It was Alaska that was absorbing most of her energy that year. The past November she had brought Inupiat leaders from across the Alaskan Arctic face-to-face with each other for the first time in history, in the town of Barrow, to make them aware that they would soon have to deal with an onrush of legislation intended to forestall future native claims on the new state''s land and mineral wealth. She had gone to Alaska again in the spring, and then a third time in June, taking me with her, as she would often do, for two or three weeks at a time, lifting me out of the predictable cycle of suburban life and transforming me, as I imagined, from being just a son, her only child, into a colleague and partner, her best friend. On this trip she took me to Tanana on the Yukon River, where at her instigation Indians from the lower part of the state were coming together, also for the first time, as the Inupiat had the previous November. Since there were no roads, we flew into Tanana in a small plane over a green tumult of forest so vast and forbidding that as we descended into it I felt as if we were about to sink away in a fathomless green sea. My mother refused any special accommodations for us, and for two days we slept with strangers in someone''s home, on floors that were covered with mattresses, sleeping bags, and piles of clothing that did for pillows, and dined on peanut-butter sandwiches and coffee. The meeting took place in a shingled hall on the edge of the forest.
Although much that was said went over my head, I was old enough by now to see how masterful my mother was in the play of debate. She was always at the center of things, yet unobtrusive, never calling attention to herself, always ready to let others take credit for what she had done. And she was afraid of nothing. At fourteen, I was shy and tentative by nature, and her fearlessness amazed me. Mostly, she listened as native people spoke, answering their questions about what she thought Washington meant to do and what kind of help she could give them if they challen.