I. THERE ARE NO LIGHTS ON THE OPPOSITE SHORE
Brandreth Park—also occasionally known as Brandreth, B-town, the lake, and camp—has never been an easy place for me to describe. When speaking to strangers, people to whom I feel no special obligation, I say that it’s a large family property I’ve been visiting my whole life, a bit like you would a beach house. Then I try to route the conversation toward the stranger’s job or their hobbies or the weather.
If the stranger won’t be distracted—if they say something like, “How large do you mean by large?”—I explain that Brandreth is currently either 11,000 or 27,000 acres, depending on how you measure it, and is the oldest family-owned park in New York State. This confession then forces me to explain two things. First, that the property was purchased 172 years ago by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Brandreth, a bootstrapping avatar of American myth who emigrated from Liverpool in 1836 and made a fortune mass-producing plaster bandages and herbal cure-alls. Second, that the property is currently, thanks to a rather un-American combination of tolerance and cooperation, shared by some 350 of Ben’s descendants.
“Three hundred and fifty of you share a single beach house?” they invariably say.
At which point I sigh and settle in for a longer but-never-quite-satisfying explanation, which usually involves saying that Brandreth is a small community of second homes, currently about 40 in number, nesting on the northeastern shore of Brandreth Lake. Some of these homes—we call them camps—are 4,000-square-foot log cabins with fireplaces and solar power and water that runs in the winter. Others are 500-square-foot timber-frame bungalows whose winter visitors drill holes in the lake’s ice to access drinking water. Most camps fall in between. From the air, the camp area, as we call it, looks a bit like a dirt-road village surrounded by miles of ponds and bogs and uninhabited mixed forest. Except there are no stores. And each of these camps is owned by someone to whom I’m related. It’s a quiet, changeless place. There are no motorboats. There is no landline electricity. My relatives go there to hike, swim, row, sail, fish, hunt, get lost, identify songbirds, forage for mushrooms, read books, sit by fires, snowshoe,
