Silver Bay was salve for the soul. It showed up in hues of ombre, startling us with the marked tones of silver along the shore, otherworldly in its beauty. I particularly liked the sound of it on the tongue for there is something mellifluous about it. It was a splendid day that – when beneath a mellow afternoon sun we walked past sprawling Victorian mansions, old gymnasiums and boathouses and small stone churches peeping out through the vast spread of greens rolling down into a few tennis and basketball courts. It was imperative that we messed around the basketball court, lobbing the ball around and shooting it through the hoops, Adi dribbling the ball away from me so often that I made pouting faces and harumphs and then finally left him to it. It was a delightful little hamlet on Lake George just as the other one called Bolton Landing which had enough pumpkins to feed an entire town, pretty cottages, old shops selling antique and Adirondack chairs, cider donuts and where I came close to confiscating the most perfect Garfield I have ever seen on a little girl with pigtails. Yet I had to think twice because the store I detected her and Garfield in was so stuffed to the gills that when I did a little jig to the music playing on what sounded like an old, old radio, the wooden floors shook alarmingly and porcelain cups and mugs rattled to make Adi glare at me in alarm.
I cannot bypass Lake George in the Adirondacks, said to be the birthplace of the original concept of the American vacation when a preacher from Boston in the 19th century touted the idea of returning to nature as an escape from the trammels of city living. So the wealthy built their summer homes here — a collection of beautiful log cabins in the woods, a scene completed by the accoutrement of boats and fishing gear — along the glistening lake with the burnished hills across it. There is the reconstructed fort there where the Huron tribes massacred British soldiers in the mid-1700s – so it is inevitably host to ghosts and what not.
The drive around this part of the Adirondacks was filled with such sceneries of peace that even though we reached home that day after a fantastic pile-up on the road which took hours to clear up, we had the indescribable beauty of the day to see us through.
ARUNDHATI BASU 
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