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| Vintage Cooperstown postcards (ebay) showing Otsego Lake (Cooper's Glimmerglass) and Kingfisher Tower, commissioned by Edward Clark when times were hard and the local stonemasons were out of work. |
Last week I had a semi-literary adventure. Michael and I went looking for the bit of landscape now called Natty Bumppo's cave. Cooperstown is stranded somewhere between the real and the mythic or fictional, with its castles and lake monster and semi-fictional Cooper places (not to mention the faux nineteenth-century village made out of real-but-transported buildings that is the Farmer's Museum, or the tourists dressed up like pro ball players), and that uncertainty was much of what made me write Glimmerglass. We spied what we thought might be the cave and climbed up, me in treadless shoes. By the nigh-vertical top, sliding and crawling on leaf litter and loose sticks, I was quite sure that I would be a very minor footnote in Cooper history, doomed to go pinwheeling down the slope. The cave was quite tiny, fit for only a pygmy family, but imagination can do a lot with the materials given.
On the way back, after teetering along the ridge for some time, we spotted a more prominent path that we might have taken. And now that I've seen some photographs, I realized that all that death-defying enterprise of scrabbling about and hanging on to little roots and skating on leaves was for something that was definitely not Natty Bumppo's cave.
