I was fortunate enough to spend grade school summer vacations at my grandparent's turn-of-the-century cottage on the shore of a north country lake. On warm, sunny days the old place really hummed; younger cousins splashed and shrieked in the shallows, older ones buzzed around in the boats, aunts chased toddlers, and un cles fidgeted till 4:00 P.M. and happy hour.

As I got older, I'd walk the shore path north to where it disappeared into the quiet and cool of the evergreen woods, narrowed to a pine-needled rut of an Indian trail and wound up a steep hill, carrying a pilgrim a century and more back in time.

At the top of the hill—half-hidden in a hemlock grove—was a collection of little-used hunting cabins that dated from the lake's earliest resort days. Out front, the hill dropped off sharply and a narrow stairway zigzagged down to a lakeside gazebo that held a clutter of chairs, settees, and tables.

All of it—cabins, stairs, railings, gazebo, and furniture—was fashioned from whole and split logs, rough-hewn planks, and saplings-some bare, some with bark, some straight, others featuring crooks and twists, burls, snags, and gnarls.

To a 10-year-old, it all seemed to have grown from the woods the way a mushroom pushes up from the forest floor, gleaming white under a cap of pine needles and loam—distinct, yet still a part of it. The gazebo's roof was thick with lichen and moss and the rough plank floor was littered with squirrel-hollowed nutshells and clamshells left by raccoons. In the center, a gnarled and knot-holed log reached to the roof peak. Around the perimeter were more whole-log supports, each with two opposing branches growing out from the trunk at just the right angles to support the eaves poles.

Which Is the Real Adirondack Chair?

To most of us, an Adirondack chair is a big, angular, laid-back lawn chair made of flatboards that you see around waterside resorts and in unpainted-furniture outlets. They are easy to make, and plans are featured frequently by woodworking magazines. The design is more properly a product of western Vermont than upstate NewYork and better suited to Lake Champlain-side lawns than the Great Cottages in the Adirondack uplands. To make some, get the book Building Adirondack Furniture; see Sources at the end of this article. Another variety often called "Adirondack" is more properly "pole furniture" as it is made of round fence poles with ends of the horizontal members peeled down to tenons that fit into round mortise holes in the verticals much like a westernstyle rail fence. Making it (most commonly from secondgrowth Canadian white cedar) requires really big debarking skinners, tenoners, and mortising machines and is more properly a modern industrial product than handmade rustic.

The furniture looked as though the woods had designed it. Chair frames were saplings with branches braided to make backrests. A settee was fashioned out of a section of huge wild grapevine that arched in the middle to frame the back. Each end bent down and out abruptly, jutting forward to form the arms. A little side table veneered in birch bark had a cross rung made from a tree branch growing through a paper wasps' nest. Y-bends, twists, gnarls, and knots in the materials hadn't been cut out or planed smooth but were left in—celebrated, even!