I’ve lived in Fredonia since 1977, but before that I called the Adirondacks home. My first trip from Brooklyn to Trout Brook was like my father’s: from Grand Central to the railroad station in North Creek where Teddy Roosevelt took the oath of office after McKinley was shot. We rode the Delaware and Hudson all night, then someone would meet us with a car and drive us nine miles over to Olmsteadville. That’s where my mother grew up, on the farm settled by her ancestors from Ireland, the Wilsons. The Berggrens were from Sweden and got only as far as Brooklyn before they settled and raised a family. I went to the mountains every summer until I was 12, then we moved up for good. As my boyhood turned to manhood, I knew the joy of growing up on my mother’s homestead, living year-round on that 300-acre farm in the middle of wilderness. And no matter where I went, whether off to college or overseas in the army, home was there on Trout Brook Road. Ridges running north and south laid out an east-west figure that made a powerful impression on the imagination, what folks called the Sleeping Giant. A mass of momentum, this silent body at rest was as gentle as the morning fog floating along its side and as strong as the thunder that ricocheted from its body for eternity. If I was willing to listen, there was a lot to learn. But first I had to learn how to listen. The Sleeping Giant was my teacher and guardian. Recently I traveled an old dirt road that crosses Trout Brook. I took a walk in the rain to the top of Gochie Hill and tried to imagine my dad, that son of Swedish immigrants, smelling this wilderness for the first time, or hearing Trout Brook as he crossed the bridge, or seeing my mother. My dad loved the outdoors, and as a young man in Brooklyn sometimes he’d go camping with friends from church over on Staten Island. It was after his sister Florence returned from a vacation in the Adirondacks, boarding at the Wilson farm on Trout Brook Road, that she told her brother Walter that he had to go—and he did. The next chance he had, he headed north. But Ellen Wilson was ill that summer and couldn’t take boarders, so she asked Violet Gochie to put him up at her place on the other side of the river. Violet was a Vanderwalker who married Freddy Gochie. They had a farm cleared on the top of a hill. My dad called it Egg Mountain. He said they had so many chickens on their farm that Violet served up eggs three meals a day. Well, that was the summer when 27-year-old Walter walked over to the Wilson farm and met Ellen and Harry Wilson’s 17-year-old daughter, Dorothy. As I finished my walk in the rain, I thought I heard the rumble of thunder. I listened hard for the echo to hear which way the storm was moving, and I remembered something my mother had told me. In 1919, when she was 10, she was on her way home from the dentist in North Creek when a thunderstorm hit. Back in those days, between logging and farming there was so much clear-cut that as-the-crow-flies, you could see right over to Olmsteadville. That’s when my mother saw lightning split and fork in two over Trout Brook, striking Gochie’s barn on the top of one hill and her house on the top of another. At the Wilson’s house Grandma got a little jolt while doing the dishes, and it knocked Grandpa right off the sofa, that was all. He checked that everything was all right, then went back to his pipe. But over on the other side of Trout Brook, the Gochie’s barn burned to the ground, and except for a few chickens, all the animals ran away. Some were found over in Charlie Hollow. Some roamed wild for years. Why did lightning split and fork in two over Trout Brook, striking Gochie’s on top of one hill and Wilson’s on top of the other? I don’t know. It just did. And why, seven years later, did an Olmsteadville farmgirl meet a flatlander Swede from Brooklyn? I don’t know. They just did. But that’s why I’m here today.

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