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Fall 2026
RL/Culture

Cabin of Wonders

When you’re given a key to a secret place deep in the woods.
By Jay Fielden
I didn’t grow up in New England, where, in certain tomato-tomahto circles, lakes aren’t called lakes but ponds. Early on, a kiddo fresh out of college, I was an assistant to an editor of the typewriter era—The New Yorker baseball scribe Roger Angell, who was also an editor in the fiction department. His mother, Katharine Angell—the magazine’s very first fiction editor and one of its early shapers—married E.B. White, who became Roger’s stepfather. White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, but he nevertheless stuck to calling lakes lakes, as his famous essay about one in Maine titled Once More to the Lake illustrates. Maine is where White went to live in 1937. He loved the outdoors and the idea of having a farm—obvious to anyone who’s read any of his books that bloomed from that decision, Charlotte’s Web being the most ubiquitous. Roger eventually had a house in the same town “Down East,” and would spend Augusts there. One sweltering midsummer day, I heard the familiar sound of Roger calling at the door of my small office: the jingling of loose change in his pocket. He palmed out a key that belonged to a little cabin on a pond he owned, which he’d invited me to use while he was away at his place in Maine. He warned me that even though it was located just an hour and a half north, it felt deep in the woods, and that the digs were primitive. The windows were nothing more than wire screens with plywood shutters propped open like awnings, he told me, and the bathroom was an outhouse. I wondered how this could be. Roger had gone to Harvard; he belonged to the Century! I wasn’t just learning about words and names that signified a kind of secret handshake. I was being ushered into that storied New England tradition of submitting oneself to the raw rhythms of nature, an ideal etched into the American imagination by Thoreau’s cabin at Walden and Emerson’s “Philosopher’s Camp,” the Adirondack retreat he took in 1858 with a contingent of fellow thinkers, sleeping under lean-tos and living off the land.
Photo: White Literary LLC.
Photo: New York Times Co./Archive Photos via Getty Images.
DOWN EAST
E. B. and Katharine White, with their dog, Minnie, in the early 1950s. White, in Maine, in 1977.
Roger’s little rustic cabin was further connected to the belief that roughing it, in close-to-nature simplicity, was an essential habit of experience for cultured Manhattanites, even if being able to do it was something of a luxury. The cabin in the woods where I was going, it turned out, was part of a private community that had been founded in 1927 by a New York newspaperman named Harold Kline who built it as a country retreat on the banks of a 34-acre body of water. He named it Lost Lake—prizing, as any good writer would, alliteration over conformity, even if, in size, it truly was a pond. Lost Lake found a following with other writers, artists, cartoonists, and Sarah Palfrey, the number four tennis player in the world in 1934, who apparently shellacked all the men at the annual tennis tournament.

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ADVENTURE PREP

This Fall, prep style breaks free of the campus and the city and heads for the North Woods, land of rugged individualism. Here’s your five-point field guide to looking great in a new frontier. READ NOW

RALPH LAUREN PLAYLIST

Yonder Tunes

Sounds that play nicely with silence.

By Randall Poster

Up here in coastal Maine, the water temperatures keep you honest. I am feeling an affinity to E.B. White as never before. On the shore, a hike, and finally shaking off trepidation, a jump into a Coos Canyon pool! Electric shock that would revive Frankenstein, and as your heart pounds away like a tympany, there is this creeping sense of joy and justice that the natives call “peace on earth.” Here is a playlist for these trips to the North Woods: dinners at sundown; that first cup of coffee in the morning; a 90-minute boogie-woogie space out; a ride to town.
LISTEN NOW
Randall Poster is a Grammy-winning music supervisor who has worked on films ranging from Rushmore to Skyfall 007 and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Those weekends were never long enough. We got sunburned, bug bitten, rained in, waterlogged.
I spent several Augusts making the Friday run up to Lost Lake. The journey began in the heat and chaos of Grand Central, shank to flank on the 3:43 to Patterson with other weekend escapees overloaded with R&R ambitions—golf clubs, coolers, fishing rods. Rolling along, the urban grid of hard lines and right angles, sidewalks and steel, gradually dropped back, and the tree-lined Main Streets of towns along the Harlem Line appeared, that midway patchwork between city and country life. We—my future wife and I and sometimes other friends—would keep following the looping swoop of power lines and other tawdry features of civilization’s relentless need to sprawl, until the umbilical cord that sustains indoor life got swallowed up by the ensuing green. From Patterson, where we got off, we’d then hire a 15-minute cab that dropped us off at a closed, unnoticeable gate, which seemed hardly able to hold back the fractal creep of silent spread and abundance behind it. We were, like Lewis and Clark, on the threshold of a wild, twilit world. Those weekends were never long enough. We got sunburned, bug bitten, rained in, waterlogged. It was a let’s-make-pancakes-and-bacon kind of atmosphere; a let’s-stay-up-late-over-too-many-beers-and-then-have-to-go-it-alone-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-the-outhouse- without-a-flashlight-because-someone-misplaced-it atmosphere; a lazy, quiet, slow-motion existence where you tracked time by the arc of the sun as it ticked across the dome of heaven, coming in one side of the cabin and then the other. It was a small paradise. Friends. Nature. The essential truths. We read a lot. It was impossible not to. Books were everywhere. In one of the roughly framed-out small bedrooms was a wall of paperbacks by writers old and new who, as an accretion over the years, constituted New Yorker literary taste—several summer’s worth of education, at least. The cabin breathed in the moist outside air and its curious critters, dampening the pages, spackling some with faint traces of mildew, weakening the spines. How long had they been there? What other lucky guests of Roger’s had plucked them off the shelf and spent an afternoon in their pages? At heart, that’s the kind of place Lost Lake was. The interior of your mind dropped its guard, and your thoughts meandered, like dreams.
Jay Fielden, a former editor of Esquire, is the head of editorial at Ralph Lauren.
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