Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

What they call the Adirondack Park, you understand, is no small roadside park, no cutesy little campground with public toilets and showers — I mean, we’re talking six million acres of woods, mountains, and lakes, we’re talking a region the size of the state of Vermont, the biggest damn park in the country — and most of the people who live there year round are scattered in little villages in the valleys, living on food stamps and collecting unemployment, huddling close to their fires and waiting out the winter, until they can go back outdoors and repair the damage the winter caused.

It’s a hard place, hard to live in, hard to romanticize. But, surprisingly, not hard to love — because that’s what I have to call the feeling it evokes, this strange combination of fear and awe I’m talking about, even in someone like me.

That wasn’t what I expected, though. When I first drove up there, the day after the school bus went over, I was astonished by what I saw. Upstate New York, to me, had always been Albany, with maybe a little Rip Van Winkle, Love Canal, and Woodstock tossed in; but this was wilderness, practically. Like Alaska. Suddenly, I’m thinking Last of the Mohicans. “Forest primeval,” I’m thinking. America before the arrival of the white man.

I’m driving along the Northway above Lake George between these high sheer cliffs with huge sheets of ice on them, and I look off to the side into the woods, and the woods come banging right back at me, a dense tangle of trees and undergrowth that completely resists penetration, and I start hoping my car doesn’t break down. This is not Bambi territory. It’s goddamn dark in there, with bears and bobcats and moose. Ten thousand coyotes, I read in the Times. Sasquatches, probably.

Of course, it was dead of winter then, that first time, and there was five or six feet of snow over everything, and daytime temps that got stuck below zero for weeks in a row, which only made the woods and the mountains more ominous. Trees, rocks, snow, and ice — and, until I turned off the Northway and started down those narrow winding roads into the villages, no houses, no sign of people. It was scary, but it was also very beautiful. No way around it.

Then I began to see the first signs of people — and I mean poor people here. Not like in the city, of course, not like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where you feel that the poor are imprisoned, confined by invisible wire fences, lifelong prisoners of the rich, who live and work in the high-rises outside. No wonder they call them ghettos. They ought to call them reservations.

Up here, though, the poor are kept out, and it’s the rich who stay inside the fence and only in the summer months. It’s like Ultima Thüle or someplace beyond the pale, and most of the people who live here year round are castoffs, tossed out into the back forty and made to forage in the woods for their sustenance and shelter, grubbing nuts and berries, while the rest of us snooze warmly inside the palisade, feet up on the old hassock, brandy by our side, Wall Street Journal unfolded on our lap, good dog Tighe curled up by the fire.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only slightly, because that is how you feel when you cruise down these roads in your toasty Mercedes and peer out at the patched-together houses with flapping plastic over the windows and sagging porches and woodpiles and rusting pickup trucks and junker cars parked in front, boarded-up roadside diners and dilapidated motels that got bypassed by the turnpike that Rockefeller built for the downstate Republican tourists and the ten-wheeler truckers lugging goods between New York City and Montreal. It’s amazing how poor people who live in distant beautiful places always think that a six-lane highway or an international airport will bring tourists who will solve all their problems, when inevitably the only ones who get rich from it live elsewhere. The locals end up hating the tourists, outsiders, foreigners — rich folks who employ the locals now as part-time servants, yardmen, waitresses, gamekeepers, fix-it men. Money that comes from out of town always returns to its source. With interest. Ask an African.

Sam Dent. Weird name for a town. So naturally the first thing I ask when I register at a sad little motel in town is “Who the hell was Sam Dent?”

This rather attractive tall doe-eyed woman in a reindeer sweater and baggy jeans was checking me in, Risa Walker, who I did not know at the time was one of those parents who had lost a child in the so-called accident. I might not have been so flippant otherwise. She said, “He once owned most of the land in this town and ran a hotel or something.” She had that flat expressionless voice that I should have recognized as the voice of a parent who has lost a child. “Long time ago,” she added. Like it was the good old days. (Good for Sam, I’ll bet, who probably died peacefully in his sleep in his Fifth Avenue mansion.)

She gave me the key to my room, number 3, and asked would I be staying longer than one night.

“Hard to say.” I passed her my credit card, and she took the imprint. I was hoping that tomorrow I’d find a better place in town or nearby, maybe a Holiday Inn or a Marriott. This motel was definitely on the downhill slide and had been for years — no restaurant or bar, a small dark room with scarred furniture and sagging bedsprings, a shower that looked as if it spat rusty lukewarm water for thirty seconds before turning cold.

It turned out there was no other place in town to stay, and as I needed to be close to the scene of the crime, so to speak, I ended up staying at the Walkers’ motel throughout those winter and spring months and into the summer, every time I was in Sam Dent, even when things got a little ticklish between me and Risa and her husband, Wendell. It never got that ticklish, but when the divorce started coming on, I was giving her advice and not him. Throughout, I kept the room on reserve, not that there was ever any danger of its being taken, and paid for the entire period, whether I used it or not. It was the least I could do.

The most I could do for the Walkers was represent them in a negligence suit that compensated them financially for the loss of their son, Sean. And that’s only part of it, the smaller part. I could also strip and hang the hide of the sonofabitch responsible for the loss of their son — which just might save the life of some other boy riding to school in some other small American town.

That was my intention anyhow. My mission, you might say.

Every year, though, I swear I’m not going to take any more cases involving children. No more dead kids. No more stunned grieving parents who really only want to be left alone to mourn in the darkness of their homes, for God’s sake, to sit on their kids’ beds with the blinds drawn against the curious world outside and weep in silence as they contemplate their permanent pain. I’m under no delusions — I know that in the end a million-dollar settlement makes no real difference to them, that it probably only serves to sharpen their pain by constricting it with legal language and rewarding it with money, that it complicates the guilt they feel and forces them to question the authenticity of their own suffering. I know all that; I’ve seen it a hundred times.

It hardly seems worth it, right? Thanks but no thanks, right? And I swear, if that were the whole story, if the settlement were not a fine as well, if it were not a punishment that, though it can never fit the crime, might at least make the crime seem prohibitively expensive to the criminal, then, believe me, I would not pursue these cases. They humiliate me. They make me burn inside with shame. Win or lose, I always come out feeling diminished, like a cinder.

So I’m no Lone Ranger riding into town in my white Mercedes-Benz to save the local sheepherders from the cattle barons in black hats; I’m clear on that. And I don’t burn myself out with these awful cases because it somehow makes me a better person. No, I admit it, I’m on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it’s obvious. And I don’t need a shrink to tell me what motivates me. A shrink would probably tell me it’s because I myself have lost a child and now identify with chumps like Risa and Wendell Walker and that poor sap Billy Ansel, and Wanda and Hartley Otto. The victims. Listen, identify with the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.