People know when they connect easily. So, on meeting him I knew I had some manner of soul friend in Michael Wilson. I must have met him at Great Camp Sagamore, the great camp in Raquette Lake, where he and his Beverly Bridger served as associate and executive directors respectively from 1989 to 2013.
Michael died this winter, and I will remember him with much affection and admiration. I remember his laugh, and his eyes lit up when we met. I remember Michael investigating the social, cultural, and class dimensions of Adirondack wilderness, conservation, architecture, and other histories all around Sagamore.
He helped lead the Philosophers Camp at Sagamore in 1992, and many other memorable gatherings of thinkers and doers there. He and Bev welcomed our own conferences at Sagamore, where we took his memorable tour of each room, and met their ghosts.
In the early 1990s, Michael would tell his friends in Oregon about this amazing thing he had discovered about New York’s Forest Preserve, our constitution’s Article XIV, “forever wild.”
One of them called me to ask if what Michael was telling them was really true, and how could they replicate Article XIV in the northwest. I wasn’t much help, but Ed Zahniser’s admonition came quickly to mind: recruit, recruit, recruit.
Michael taught me to value the abandoned 19th century industrial ruins buried in leaf duff beyond Sagamore or Lows Lakes as lessons in human courage, arrogance and hubris – hubris which the Adirondacks and our planet could no longer afford.
I remember Michael questioning my environmentalism. He advised against clearing out the forest ruins that might soil the pretty woods of our “forever wild” forest preserve. Where would we gain lessons of the past to apply to the present, he asked, if you cleaned them out?
Leave the ruins to rust in the woods, he advised, so we are forced to read their stories, learn their lessons, and shake our heads in wonderment at what our species strove for when Adirondack and world resources seemed limitless.
But when it came to rivers and running them, I saw Michael the purist, the canny navigator of rapids, “wild horses”; Michael, the lover of fine wooden craft; Michael the slayer of river exploiters.
We’ve got slots in several boats, he told Ken Rimany and I on the phone one spring day in the mid-1990s. We worked for the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks. No cost for you, Michael said. Will you come? Wild horses could not keep us away. Early May.
What excitement we felt as the McKenzie drift fishing boats Michael brought from Oregon were loaded up at Sagamore Great Camp, and we were on the road, on our way to Chaisson Road, Newcomb, to put into the wild Upper Hudson River.
My Adirondack notebook tells the story of our trip down the river:
“The wild Upper Hudson. We’ve just run the river from the eddies of Newcomb to the Cedar River confluence. Incredible McKenzie drift boats ride the waves like cottonwood seeds aloft, only a few echoes of hitting a few rocky bones below the water.
“As I sit facing upstream, framed for my viewing pleasure is the great Santanoni massif. The oars are held by Gary Marchuk of Lake Placid. Joining me in Gary’s boat is photographer and environmental leader, Gary Randorf.
“The drift boat is 16 feet with great rocker; bow and stern out of the water allows the boat to easily pivot under expert guidance. Michael Wilson’s boat leads us through the rips. We eddy over to the shore to rest, keep lists of birds and plants. Past spring balsam, cathedral pines, to sun drenched hardwood slopes, we glide downriver.
“An osprey is flushed, then black ducks. Lunch stop is on a sandy spit off the river, full of driftwood. We speak of the Finch, Pruyn steel bridge just downstream, Michael is full of outrage how it was allowed to be built on such a river as this. He talked of a new Adirondack course of study he wanted to launch.
“Then back to the boats, past narrow rock defiles, slipping through the rips so elegantly led by Michael. He faces the danger, corrects, slots the rapid, aligns the boat… huzzah, we’re through! And repeat.
“On the rapids, we smell the Hudson River. That night, camped at Cedar River, I wonder, did we really pass through all that? Rain comes in. We sleep fitfully in the wet hollows of our tents, listening to the river. Tomorrow, the river will run high, all the way down to North River.”
Days later, I received a copy of a lengthy letter from Michael, addressed to Paul Schaefer, the effective leader of the 1950s and 1960s fight against the big dams then planned for the South Branch of the Moose and the Upper Hudson Rivers.
What can we do about the Finch, Pruyn steel bridge across the Hudson River stillwater, he asked Paul? The bridge’s large piers have their own damming effect, Michael contended.
Wasn’t the bridge permitted as a temporary bridge for timber removal, to be removed after timbering, he asked? Where are the legal hooks, he asks, to add to his own philosophic argument?
Is New York’s Wild, Scenic, and Recreational Rivers Act powerless in this instance? Where are the legions of Paul Schaefer’s allies that defeated Gooley Dam in 1969? We need them now. Paul probably wrote back, but I don’t know that. I still have Michael’s letter to Paul because he wrote so well and, in the cause of this or any wild river, so passionately.
Photos, from above: Michael Wilson scouts a rapid in a drftboat on the Upper Hudson River; Michael Wilson, right, with David Gibson at a Hudson River camp; and Michael Wilson’s driftboat on the Upper Hudson.
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