August, 2009

Bernards, New Jersey, has voted to buy a conservation easement that includes public access for $5 million.

Even when I lived in the Adirondacks, 30 years ago, Follensby Pond was iconic -- a remote lake with both wilderness and poetry at its heart. Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz and others of the Boston intellectual elite camped there in 1858, and their host, William James Stillman, underwent some truly mystical experiences, if his book, The Autobiography of a Journalist, is to be believed.