NONFICTION - April 10, 1994

AN ADIRONDACK PASSAGE: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp by Christine Jerome. (HarperCollins: $20; 224 pp.) I like the idea that a few harried working people will pick up this book, obtain the notion that one can simply take off on a wacky canoe trip in imitation of an obscure writer/camper extraordinaire from the late 1800s, take the four weeks of vacation due and skip town. Like Jerome and her husband, they can be in their late 40s. They don’t have to be rich or in great shape. They don’t have to be rabid nature-lovers, irresponsible hippies, equipment-crazed yuppies, nerdy historian-types or environmental “agendarians.” They might just go. In 1883, George Washington Sears (pen name Nessmuk), age 61, writer for Forest and Stream magazine, paddled and portaged his cedar-hulled, nine-foot, 10-pound, 8-ounce canoe 266 miles the length of the Adirondacks, from the southwest to the north-central part of the region. In 1988, age 47, managing editor for New England Monthly magazine (a job she loses almost parenthetically during the trip) makes the same journey in a 10-pound canoe of similar design. “If you get sick of this as a canoe,” the maker of the Sairy Gamp told Sears, “you can use it for a soap dish.” There are no blinding revelations in the course of Jerome’s journey, just some small triumphs over weather and physical discomfort, a sense of connection with Sears but mostly with the boat. As Sears put it during a night of camping in 10-degrees-below-zero weather: And there may be a reason why I shun the blatant street,/To seek a distant mountain glen where three bright waters meet./But why I shun the doors of men, their rooms alight and warm,/To camp in forest depths alone, or face a winter storm,/Or why the heart that gnaws itself will find relief in rhyme,/I cannot tell: I but abide the footing up of Time.