The Minx and I are not particularly athletic. Left to our own devices, we might wander back to the bookstore via the farmers' market. But our better halves on this trip were our adolescent sons, whose appetites needed more than waffles. In summer, the river accommodates canoeing, an activity that seemed both dignified and diverting. The Minx, who loves nothing more than a party, suggested making a day of it: We'd invite another friend along and her teens, and we'd all go have a lovely lunch afterward. What could be nicer!

The folks at nearby Clarke Outdoors were happy to set us up. We met there a couple of days later, early in the morning—a party of eight anchored by three moms. Not really knowing what to expect, we had all prepared for our own idea of what the day would bring. Some of the children wore swimsuits under warmer clothing; the Minx looked sporting in white jeans and flats.

The Clarke people carted our group, plus three canoes, a fair distance up the Housatonic and helped us slide in. The banks of the river were thick with bushes and trees and wildflowers, with the odd grassy lawn thrown in here and there. The water was placid, the children were all terrifically competent at paddling, and their behavior—except for a willingness to explore the techniques and strategy of water battle—was above reproach. The trip turned out to be longer than we'd expected: After an hour and a half, we passed the landmark that signaled we had gone only a third of the way. We persevered, at times spreading out, with each family canoe making its own reconnoiter, and at other moments paddling abreast, sometimes making brief attempts at racing. The pace was easy, our arms got tired, and just when the issue of hunger threatened to make everyone cranky, we came to the point where buoys were strung across the water, indicating that it was time to pull over and pull our canoes up and out of the water.

Despite being the very definition of an international sophisticate, the Minx turns out to be at heart a very earthy girl, perhaps owing to her swamp Yankee roots. The tree house is on Mount Riga, part of an old camp purchased by three families around the time of World War I. Before then, in the nineteenth century, the mountain was the location of "America's most important iron furnace," and its inhabitants were the Raggies, poor immigrant families who worked as colliers and forge hands. People had started producing iron in the South Taconic hills as early as the 1730s, and even before the famous Riga Furnace was built in 1806, this was an important mine and forge, providing the arsenals of the Revolution and the iron aboard the U.S.S. Constitution. Back then, the mountain was known as Bald Peak. At the Connecticut Museum of Mining and Mineral Science, in Kent, where the floor is made of bricks from around the country and the dioramas have puffs of cotton wool to represent the smoke from the furnaces, a pretty silver-haired docent named Gail explained, "A hundred years ago, there were no trees here. Everything, everything was bare for miles—burned for charcoal for the mines." Once the wood was gone, the iron industry left too, moving to Pennsylvania, where coal was cheap and plentiful.