Susan drove me in a Zipcar from Chelsea to Orange, New Jersey this morning to pick up our van for our camping adventure to Indian Lake, located in the Adirondack Park Preserve. We do not recommend the Subaru Outback, our sole Zipcar rental choice. It’s got a crazy, semiautomatic shift option and before we realized it existed, we wondered why the car was revving and sounding as if its gears were processing a 10-pound bag of unshelled walnuts. Also, it’d been poorly cleaned after its previous occupants. In the glovebox, we found a nest of receipts, a half-smoked Newport and a CD-R of the Linkin Park album Minutes to Midnight which Susan later regretted forgetting to take with her.
After a pause at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru for coffee and the cruel truth that the chain refers to the cake donuts I favor as “old-fashioneds,” we reached Epic Auto Rental, which is located next door to a grocery store named Super Supermarket, which in what’s surely a record concentration of superlatives in New Jersey, is located next door to Super Discount Liquors. Epic is chiefly a repair shop and looks it, which worried us. But it opened at 8:00 a.m. sharp as advertised. Unfortunately, our van wasn’t ready to be rented as it was being driven in from a satellite location so we were over an hour late driving into Manhattan to return the Zipcar and pick up the camping crew from outside Vincent’s apartment on Second Avenue. To smooth things over, Epic upgraded us for free from a minivan to a 12-passenger Ford Econoline van, I believe it was, which was a good thing, as we had more stuff than we’d planned to cram in there.
The drive upstate was mostly uneventful. Our longest detour was to the Wal-Mart in Saratoga Springs, where we purchased provisions and ate a late lunch at the in-store Blimpie. I snuck next door to The Spirits of Saratoga Wine & Liquor to pick up my friends Jack Daniel’s and Jose Cuervo, plus a bottle of Captain Morgan Parrot Bay coconut rum, the Official Sport Beverage of Susan and Toisha, our trip’s organizers.
When we arrived in Sabael, a hamlet on the northwest side of Indian Lake, we unloaded our supplies from the van to the marina launch, then from the launch across the dock to our two canoes and 14-foot aluminum Smoker Craft utility boat. The guy behind the counter at the marina office, who’s lived since birth at Indian Lake, recommended not drinking the lake water, either pointedly or by accident, as a previous camping group had allegedly contracted Giardiasis, or “beaver fever,” a disease that caused equal amounts paranoia and running jokes among our crew.
The first approach to the island as the sun set was marvelous. Oriented roughly north-south, it’s long and narrow, a quarter of a mile long and 175 feet across at its widest. (You can see it on a map here; you’ll need to zoom-in manually.) Although skirted with small cliffs and boulders, a pair of tiny patches of beach serve as excellent landings for the boats. At the north and the south tip is a cleared campsite with a fire pit and grill, and an outhouse. In between the camps lies a dense forest of underbrush, pines and white birch. And it’s all ours for $36 a night.
By the time everyone and everything we needed was on the island, night had fallen, but we squeezed in a dinner of brats cooked over the northern site’s campfire. Although our island is known officially and sadly as “sites 7 and 8,” I’m confident a motion to rechristen it Giardiasis Island will meet with approval.