The fireplace in the living room at Memorial Cottage. On the varnished mantlepiece are some little burns from cigarettes laid there by Robert Louis Stevenson. (Photo provided)

“More fair than roses, lo,

the flowers of the fire …”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson probably never knew how lucky he was when his wife found him an apartment in this ancient mountain chain that came with a hearth. At the time, the brick fireplace at Baker’s was a rarity in this section of the state.

Baker’s fireplace was at first an idea in the head of a hotel tycoon from Washington, D.C., a sport by the name of Mr. Riggs. Upon learning that his favorite guide, Andy Baker, was moving his business to a house under construction (1866), Riggs had a vision. He saw himself seated before an open fire in the comfort of a living room as an extra feature of all his future Adirondack sojourns. Riggs contacted his guide with an offer to pay half the price of fulfilling his vision. Andy agreed and a section of the new east wall was removed to allow for the fireplace destined to be a museum centerpiece.

Sitting before an open fire, we all know, has a certain effect stamped into our DNA hundreds of thousands of years ago. Stevenson liked that effect and achieved it readily in the Old World, where hearths were a-plenty. A portrait by John Singer Sargent even shows RLS seated in the glow of his home fire in the house he called ‘Skerryvore’ in Bournemouth, England. A second Sargent portrait has him pacing in front of it.

Less than two years after the paint dried on the canvas, the ailing author again found his plans interrupted by the urgent need to rush him to an alien environment as a life-preserving precaution.

“We at last escaped to Saranac Lake, where we are now and which I believe we mean to like and pass the winter at … a hill and forest country very unsettled and primitive and cold, and beautiful … I believe it will do well for me” (RLS to Henry James, Oct. 6 1887).

It sure did. A week before, he had been spending his days stretched out on a couch in Newport, too ill to get up. A week after reaching Saranac Lake and he’s hiking through Baker’s private fields and woodlots to a pristine Moody Pond, where only a sparse network of paths betrayed the presence of man.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a natural born nature lover. Exploring the lower flanks of Mount Baker to the Saranac River bank, he felt for the first time in years, the spell of the forest primeval, beckoning the wanderer “to come down off this featherbed of civilization and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints” (RLS, “Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes,” 1879).

This was big medicine for the new exile in town. It was by no random choice that Stevenson used the mountains west of Lake Champlain to advance the plot of his new novel even to its conclusion.

“Before us was the high range of mountains towards which we had been all day deviously drawing near. From the first light of dawn, their silver peaks had been the goal of our advance across a tumbled lowland forest …” (RLS, “The Master of Ballantrae”).

A popular notion about Stevenson is that he did his best writing when bedridden. There, with his pen, he lived a life of action and adventure vicariously through the characters of his novels and short stories. In better conditions, he left the pad and pen on the bed to pursue real-life activities with real people, and at this he often pushed the envelope.

The theatre was one of his interests, and his failure to make it as a playwright was one of his disappointments, but the author of “Kidnapped” never lost his flair for role-playing. He had nurtured that talent in his youth by acting in home theatre plays at the house of one of his professors at Edinburgh University.

Saranac presented Stevenson with new possibilities for role-playing. The extreme ride from Loon Lake to Baker’s had driven home the sense of isolation and need for self-reliance typical of a frontier town because this was a frontier town. Coincidental with the resurgence of vitality that had him on his feet again, this Peter Pan personality was on a roll in a new role.

His mother: “Our House is called the ‘Hunter’s Home,’ and Louis will not allow anything to be done that interferes with that illusion. We have in the living room a plain deal table covered with stains; I wanted to put a nice cloth on it, but he would hear none of it. ‘For what,’ he cries, ‘have hunters to do with table-covers?'”

His wife: “I went to Montreal–and came back laden with buffalo skins, snow shoes and fur caps. Louis wants to have his photograph taken with his, hoping to pass for a mighty hunter or a sly trapper. He is now more like the hardy mountaineers, taking long walks on hilltops in all seasons and weather.”

“I have to trouble you [Will Low] and your wife to come and slumber. Not now however: I won’t have you until I have a buffalo robe and leggings, lest you should want to paint me as a plain man, which I am not, but a rank Saranacker and wild man of the woods. Yours, RLS.”

There is a familiar ring to all this, cast in bronze on Stevenson’s tomb in faraway Samoa, beneath the Southern Cross, in the last two lines of his poem “Requiem”:

“Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.”

These words might suggest to passersby who don’t recognize his name that here rests a man who lived a full life and decided to brag about it for eternity by putting his favorite activities in his epitaph. The pathos inherent in that phrase is only evident upon understanding that this is an invalid speaking who was denied the bodily health to pursue such pastimes. FDR with his polio could have related to it, as well as all handicapped people.

So it seems that Stevenson did lead a separate existence in his head. His physician in Saranac Lake, Dr. E.L. Trudeau, said that his patient “lived in an ideal world painted and peopled by his own visual imagination” (Trudeau, “An Autobiography”).

In Saranac Lake, Stevenson’s imagination was leveled at his landlord, Andrew Jackson Baker. Baker embodied all the right stuff in his role as an American frontiersman, independent in thought and action. That included the stamina and know-how to survive in the wilderness and to walk a mile or more home with a deer slung over his back to feed the family. This is the woodsman, the professional Adirondack guide, the ‘hunter’ whom Robert Louis Stevenson emulated while he was a resident of Saranac Lake.