As we descend the wide, curving stairs to make our entrance into the Cotillion Ballroom, we look up and observe six — no, eight! — crystal chandeliers hovering above us, massive structures roughly the shape of upside-down umbrellas, each one magically suspended under the 30-foot ceiling. This is a grand interior space reminiscent of those we have seen [...]

The bleak and vaguely militaristic atmosphere of the terminal is now behind us; we have endured the stifling tedium of the runway and the paralyzing terror of the lift-off, during which we considered the high likelihood of our imminent death and regretted our many missteps. We thought with great tenderness of Dante and Zephyr and [...]

I sat down in Terminal C next to an older woman, who in a long black dress and ostrich-feather hat appeared oddly elegant among all the business suits.
“I hope it’s not too crowded,” I remarked in a somewhat stilted attempt to engage this mysterious woman in conversation, as if we were both waiting to be [...]

Since we last saw the hills around Saratoga a few days ago, they have become drab and mundane, the color of an unwatered suburban lawn, while further south the Catskills have grown equally tired and pedestrian. Did we really talk with any enthusiasm about wanting to visit either of these spots? Even the Hudson River [...]

Whenever the gay recluse leaves home, we find our dreams inhabited by those we have left behind. Several times in the passing nights we feel the slight pressure of paws walking across the terrain of the bed, pausing now and again to balance on our legs, as if to ask us if anything we have [...]

Our first impressions of Lake Placid are oddly and unexpectedly reaffirmed by our continuing explorations, which reveal the existence of a completely inaccessible series of estates — here they are called “camps” — that ring the shoreline of the lake. Still filled with a naive optimism after descending from the nearby mountain, we had succumbed [...]

Yes, we exalt at the view offered by the summit of Whiteface Mountain! Here from New York State’s fifth-highest peak we see nothing but a carpet of trees — both deciduous and coniferous — rolling over an ancient, haunted landscape interrupted by exquisite lakes and bands of cirrus clouds that hover ambivalently over the horizon. [...]

Today on the way up Whiteface Mountain, we stopped to take in the view and were surprised when a hawk suddenly appeared above the treeline. It flew toward us and landed on a nearby boulder; in its beak it carried a single sheet of paper, which we were equally surprised to learn — after the [...]

This from a July, 1906 newspaper article — “Chicago Woman Physician Alone All Night on Mt. Whiteface” — on display at the summit of Whiteface Mountain:
“Dr. J. D. Merrill, a prominent woman physician of Chicago, is reported to have ‘got lost’ and stayed all night alone on the top of Mount Whiteface one night last [...]

“If you turn around now, and face the mountain, notice how dwarfed the trees just above the parking lot are; small, contorted by the wind, branches broken from the load of ice in the winter, spring growth killed off by late spring frosts, soil so thin and impoverished as to defy definition, the whole scene [...]

There is a tawdry quality to the buildings lining the main street into town that even we find it difficult to romanticize, as it does not recall an excess of abandoned grandeur (in this regard we have been literally ruined by Washington Heights) but a desperate, opportunistic desire to skim off the hordes (us among [...]

The Eastern White Pines cover the rolling hills like a sphagnum moss, dotted with patches of silver (the Quaking Aspens, shimmering like schools of fish) and the burned red of the Sugar Maples. A little higher up these give way to spruces — tall, drooping and dignified — hemlocks, birches — whose gnarled white trunks [...]