Sacandaga Stew

For the five of us kids crammed into the back of the wood-paneled Suburban station wagon, the first sign that we were approaching our destination came through our eager noses, lifted to take in the redolent scent of pine. The crisp fragrance wafted over us like the richest of perfumes, filling all of our senses as we watched the tree-lined mountain road unroll past the car windows. Sure, there were pine trees in other places along our journey from Hopewell Junction, NY to the Great Sacandaga Lake, just past the small town of Northville in the Adirondack Mountains. But the pines never smelled so invigorating as they did pulling into the campground where we would spend the summer.

Towing a pop-up trailer crammed with faded green army surplus pup tents, sleeping bags, bathing suits, and fishing poles, Daddy stopped to check in at the tiny camp store while we waited impatiently in the car. Then he drove up the curving dirt road to our campsite in the pines. Bliss! Piling out of the car to run around like wild animals after being cooped up for the four-hour drive, we explored our home in the woods while Mom and Daddy started setting up the campsite.

Summer vacations at Sacandaga Campground were a time of freedom for us kids when we were growing up. There were no rules, except "Don't drown in the lake," or "Don't get eaten by a bear." And the only concerns for my parents were, "I wonder if the kids have been eaten by a bear," and "Do we have enough beer or should we walk down the hill to the store?" We didn't know that most parents didn't drink as much as ours did. We couldn't know that the endless cans of Budweiser were a symptom of something deeply wrong with their marriage.

In this time of blissful freedom and childish ignorance, we didn't know what "dysfunctional" meant, or that this was how the psychologists would describe their marriage. We didn't know they both suffered from depression, or that Mom would have a "nervous breakdown" in years to come, or that they would go through a painful divorce after being unhappily married for twenty years. All we knew was that we had returned to our natural environment: the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. And that there were two months of life in the serene green woods ahead of us.

We spent our days swimming in the lake, reached by descending an extraordinarily steep flight of rickety wooden steps across the road from the camp store to the narrow sand beach below. We wandered in the woods making up games, building complex fantasy worlds out of our imaginations, and acting out great dramas of exploration and survival. Sometimes we went out on the boat with Mom and Daddy, as they waterskied up and down the lake with other couples, and we jumped off the back of the boat to swim in the deep water. It sometimes seemed that we kids were a strange species of fish, born to be in the water.

But of course, growing children need to eat, to keep up their energy for adventuring and exploring and swimming. Meals were a hit-or-miss affair, although Mom tried to maintain some small bit of structure. Breakfasts consisted of Fun Pak individual-serving breakfast cereal boxes eaten dry when there was no more milk left in the cooler under the picnic table. Daddy would use his pocket knife to slice an H across the box, folding the flaps back to either side. I think my sister still has Daddy's old knife. I should ask her about that...

Somewhere around the middle of the day, Mom would lay eyes on one of us and send him or her off to round up the other kids, who gradually coalesced into what resembled a flock of ducklings dressed in muddy bathing suits and straggling up the dirt road to the campsite for lunch. Lunches were nothing special, usually bologna sandwiches with yellow mustard on Wonder bread. It was hard to feed five ravenous kids in a hurry, so easy—and cheap—was always best. And we were too hungry after a hard morning of building dams in a runoff stream, watching chipmunks in the woods, or playing on the swings, to care what we ate.

The one meal which none of us would ever forget, all these many years later, is Sacandaga Stew. Born out of a particularly heavy-drinking day (not a waterskiing or boating day, thank goodness!) when Mom and Daddy had polished off several six-packs of Budweiser cans, Sacandaga Stew was a "What are we going to feed the kids tonight?" kind of meal.

They were too drunk to drive (or walk!) to the store one evening when twilight was setting in and the cooler was empty. So Mom turned to the dry goods, an odd assortment of nonperishable groceries which were stored in battered cardboard boxes lined up in the back of the station wagon. With little effort at all, she filled the old spaghetti pot with water from the spigot on the side of the campsite next to the trailer, then propped it over the campfire. When it was boiling, she dumped in a pound of dry elbow macaroni, the kind that sold for about fifty cents a box. When it was finally cooked—amidst whines of "I'm starving!" and "When can we eat?"—she drained the pasta, dumped in a jar of Ragu classic spaghetti sauce, and chopped a can of Vienna Sausages into rounds and stirred them into the mix.

This was about the cheapest meal one could ever make. I would guess that it cost maybe $2 in ingredients (minus the beer to keep the cook in a good mood), and served our entire family of seven, with leftovers for the dog waiting eagerly beneath the picnic table to devour anything that dropped on the ground. And the effort expended was minimal.

When we asked, "What is this?!?" of our inebriated Mom, she very calmly replied, "Sacandaga Stew." Out of nothing but beer-fueled laziness and a few odds and ends of groceries, a legend was born.

This family legend grew with every time Sacandaga Stew reappeared throughout the many years of camping trips yet to come, always accompanied by hysterical paroxysms of laughter. As dysfunctional as our family was, we did laugh an awful lot. It was a You gotta laugh or you're gonna cry kind of thing. So we laughed and laughed and laughed, until we cried.

But as much as we gloried in eating Mom's infamous Sacandaga Stew—to the point that the basic ingredients always found their way into the boxes of groceries packed for the trip north—it never tasted the same if we made it at home. There's just something ineffable about a big bowl of Sacandaga Stew eaten around a roaring campfire in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, while your family is still intact, and all the diners are innocent of the anguish the future will bring.

Sacandaga Stew is a recipe that will live in the memories of my brother and sisters forever, but I don't think that any of us ever made it in any place other than Sacandaga Campground.

It just wouldn't be the same. It couldn't be.

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Author's Note: Sacandaga Reservoir (renamed the Great Sacandaga Lake) was formed when the Sacandaga River was dammed and an Adirondack Mountain valley was flooded, to relieve the pressure of seasonal flooding downriver in Albany, Troy, and other cities. Hundreds of homes and small businesses were seized by the government under "eminent domain," though many people tried to fight the seizures. More than a dozen small villages and hamlets lie at the bottom of the lake, and there was a legend that on quiet nights you could hear the church bells ringing from beneath the water. Another legend (or more likely, a fact) held that giant sturgeon lay at the bottom of the dam, gorging themselves on whatever flowed through the dam gates, and growing big enough to devour a child. Just the kind of scary stories we all thrived on! You can read more about the creation of the Great Sacandaga Lake in the following article: