The loons had called Charles Daniels to the water ever since he made his first trip to the Adirondacks in 1900. That was the summer after his father had walked out on his mother and him without providing a penny of support, completely cutting them out of his life. Charley was barely 15, skinny and small, and the anxiety that had crippled him through childhood was only getting worse. Charley’s mother, Alice, made the bold decision to vacate Manhattan to spend a summer in the great outdoors, hoping it would help rid the boy of what doctors called “nervousness.”
The concept that an excursion into the wilderness could actually be pleasurable had begun only three decades earlier, after a young Yale-educated preacher, William H. H. Murray, published his bestselling Adirondack guidebook in 1869. Murray contended that hiking, canoeing and fishing offered the ultimate
