MY LAKEFRONT PROPERTY: AN ENVIRONMENTALIST’S TALE
By Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.
For well over 200 years, my family has lived — for part of the year, at least — in a small village in upstate New York, Cooperstown, which was founded in 1789 by my three times great grandfather, William Cooper, and was written about by his son, my two-times-great-grandfather, James Fenimore Cooper. He grew up on the shore of Otsego Lake, which he renamed “Glimmerglass” in his “Leatherstocking Tales.” As a child, the feelings he developed about nature – that it was something beautiful and worth preserving, as opposed to something dangerous, to be overcome by hard work (the prevailing idea at the time) – were woven into his novels; hence “The Leatherstocking Tales” — and Otsego Lake — are a major source of American ideas of nature, conservation, and the environment.
Two centuries later, Cooperstown and Otsego Lake are still amazingly well conserved, despite repeated threats from developers and State-sponsored schemes to run major power lines near the Lake, build an enormous State—run boat launch on its shores, and (most recently) encourage arrays of 400-foot wind turbines within view of it. As a founder of a local environmental group, Otsego 2000, I have unabashedly invoked “The Leatherstocking Tales” for the Lake’s protection; no one should trash the Glimmerglass, Otsego 2000 maintains; it is the Walden Pond of New York State.
The fact is, I have always loved living near the Lake – though there has always been one big problem: Our family had not owned any property on the Lake for over 150 years, ever since the Chalet Farm, about two miles up the east side of the Lake, where James Fenimore Cooper wrote “The Deerslayer,” was sold after he died in 1851. And we have been complaining about this deprivation all these years.
I grew up inland, on Red Creek Farm in the next valley, but the Lake was never far away. We had picnics on its shore — at Three-Mile Point, at Five Mile Point, and occasionally even at Kingfisher Tower, a medieval-style castle on its own little cape. I used to canoe on the Lake with my father, in pursuit of muskrats and painted turtles in Blackbird Bay. As a teenager, I had a Comet sailboat, the Mal de Mer, a rotting hulk which always came in last in any race it was in, but was otherwise a nice way to bob around the Lake. In later years, I had a Boston Whaler.
Then, about a year and a half ago, in June of 2003, when I was approaching 70 and my knees were not what they used to be — getting in and out of the Boston Whaler was downright dangerous — I was having dinner at The Blue Mingo, a restaurant on the Lake across from Kingfisher Tower, with my daughter Lizzie. It was a cloudless evening, the Lake calm and light blue, except for where it reflected the green hillsides across the way. A number of ungainly-looking pontoon boats with awnings overhead were chugging in and out of the harbor. Now I and my family had always been slightly contemptuous of pontoon boats and the people who owned them, thinking of ourselves as being rougher and tougher than they. (Indeed, forty years ago my sister Susan formed a club for her young children called “The Rough and Tough Club;” they would go out early in the morning in their motor boat, “The Lima Bean,” when the mist was still on the Lake, and fish off of other people’s docks before they woke up; they re-named the Club “The Early Morning Sneaky Peaky Fishing Club,” and re-named their boat “The Sneak-Easy.” To such extremities was our family driven by the lack of our own lakefront property.)
Anyway, there I was, sitting at the Blue Mingo, looking out at the Lake and sipping chardonnay, when I found myself saying to my daughter, “You know, Lizzie, the older I get the better those pontoon boats look.” Indeed, with their vinyl couches and round tables screwed into the deck, and their blue awnings, they looked like floating cocktail lounges; also, they were flush with the dock so you could get on and off them without bending your knees.
Another sip of Chardonnay, watching the gulls skim about.
Then I said, “You know what I think I will do? I think I will get one. And do you know what I think I will name it? I will call it ‘My Lakefront Property.’”
And Lizzie said, “Oh don’t do that, Daddy; if you want some lakefront property, why don’t you buy some?
I said, “There isn’t any.”
She said, “Oh, yes, there is!” While bicycle riding around the Lake, she had discovered a For Sale sign on a small stretch of lakefront property just north of Fairy Springs. It was the scrubbiest of scrubland; it descended quite precipitously to the Lake. It was too small to build on; it was less than the three-acre lot size in Middlefield, the township on the east side of the Lake. But, to make a long story short, I bought it. It would be a nice 70th birthday present.
I hadn’t quite realized when I bought it how strict the land-use laws and local ordinances governing lakefront property in Middlefield were. For example, I was prohibited from building any kind of a structure within 100 feet of the Lake or within 50 feet of the road. Given the fact that the property was, on the average, 150 feet wide, this did not leave a lot of room for maneuvering. I was somewhat browned off.
But then, when I understood the purpose of these ordinances, my environmental instincts came to the fore. The purpose, of course, is to preserve the lakefront from overbuilding, which has destroyed so many lakes in upstate New York and elsewhere. And, of course, what is wonderful about our Lake is its relatively unspoiled character, particularly on the east side, where the steep forested hillsides plunge to the shore; Cooper’s Indians could paddle from one end of the lake to the other, unseen, beneath the branches extending over the water.
So I found myself embracing the local ordinances wholeheartedly, delighting in finding a way to work within them. Indeed, one of the reasons I had bought the property was to conserve it. I did not want a house on the Lake; I have a perfectly good one on Red Creek Farm. As an inlander, I always thought of the Lake as a special place one journeyed to and returned from; you didn’t have to live on it. It was better if you didn’t; lakeside houses tend to be damp, mouldy even. What I wanted, basically, was my own tiny park on the Lake, and a dock.
Still, I had to find a way to get down to the Lake, and to the temporary wooden dock I had already put in. The only way to get to it was to rappel down the steep hillside with a rope tied to a hemlock, and this was not good for the knees. In theory, a stair case was ruled out; a staircase is technically a structure.
Fortunately, as it turned out, there already was a structure on the property – a derelict pump house that had once been part of the water supply for an old children’s camp, once just to the north of my property (and now the site of five or six lakeside houses, the only houses on the eastern shore between Lakeland Shores at the edge of the Village half a mile south of me, and Pegg’s Point, six miles further up, just south of Hyde Bay.) In exchange for demolishing this eyesore, the Middlefield Planning Board allowed me to build a staircase and a terrace with a low wall.
The next question was how to construct a staircase and terrace that was within the spirit of the law, and of my own goal of conservation. One thing I wanted to avoid was a wooden staircase cutting straight down to the Lake, creating a man—made scar visible far out on the water. I also wanted to avoid any kind of a wooden deck projecting out from the steep hillside. For me, the answer was to get hold of Michael Whaling, an old friend of mine who was an artist, a stone mason, a carpenter, and an environmentalist. (I overlooked the fact that once Michael, a sort of one—man Greenpeace Movement, during an environmental spat, had referred in the local paper to Otsego 2000 as “the Chardonnay and Brie Set.”) Before we were through, we would need all of Michael’s various skills.
Michael quickly teamed up with a friend of his, Bill Lachmann, a contractor with grading equipment. Another mutual friend, Drum Hadley, a poet for whom Michael and Bill had done a spectacular bit of landscaping, referred to Bill as “a poet with a bulldozer.” In other words, he could read the terrain and determine how to fit a path or a terrace into it with the least intrusiveness.
For me, the two artists (as I think of them) laid out a sweeping path with two curves, cutting unobtrusively down the hillside before traversing downslope to the Lake. Michael found just the right large flat stones for the steps, and smaller stones for retaining walls holding the earth back on either side; the staircase was contained inside a crease cutting diagonally down to the dock. It was hidden from the Lake. Both men saw to it that no dirt or vegetation would slide into the lake, before or after construction. Above, on the pathway before it turned down to the Lake, Michael built a stone terrace with low retaining walls. The stones in the walls make interesting shapes, creating their own irregular abstract patterns; carefully selected stones, slightly concave on the upper face, are on top, just right for sitting. The whole thing is virtually invisible from the Lake. For one thing, the natural stone blends perfectly with the ledgey hillside. For another, most of the trees remain (the local ordinance limits to one-third the number of trees ten inches at breast height that can be cut down within 100 feet of the Lake), and this completes the concealment. The few trees removed for the path and terrace were not discarded: the locusts made sturdy fence posts, and the alders and linden branches made railings. A Cooper Indian, slithering in his canoe under the overhanging canopy, would not know the stonework and its woodwork were there, so naturally does it blend in.
For myself, I am delighted. I feel as though I have my cake and am eating it, too — that is, I have my own swimming hole on the Lake without damaging the lakefront. I feel I have been a good environmentalist, conserving a piece of the Lake. I feel that in my own small way I have joined that unsung band of families with land around the Lake that has for a century or more preserved our lakefront. I feel as though I own a work of art — not only the landscaping and stonework, but I feel that I have bought into another, larger work of art: Otsego Lake itself. I feel I have bought a piece of American cultural history — a small bit of the source of our ideas about nature and the environment. Of course it has all those associations with the Cooper Indians. In Samuel F. B. Morse’s painting looking up the Lake, “Apple Hill,” the artist puts a curl of smoke rising to the sky from just about where I am; it is the smoke curling from the site of Natty Bumppo’s cabin. It makes me all the more determined to help protect the Lake. I now have a personal stake in it.
You should know I also bought myself — as another 70th birthday present — a pontoon boat. I did it before the staircase was put in, so that I could reach my new dock without killing myself. But I could no longer name it “My Lakefront Property” because I now had some. So I have named it “The Life Aquatic,” after a movie I was in. But that is another story.
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