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WHEN I WAS FOUR, MY MOTHER, NATHALIE, AND MANNIE, WHO WOULD soon become my stepfather, and I took a drive in the country. Mannie had told me about a great place up the Hudson called Bear Mountain, and even though I wasn't sure about the bear part, he made it sound so enticing that, with typical four-year-old exuberance, I just couldn't wait to get there. It was a long drive in his 1957 dark green Lark convertible, and the top was probably down, and our hair was flying in the breeze. We had made a late start, and the afternoon was drawing to a close, but we still hadn't gotten there yet. I was getting quite impatient and cranky, unable to wait much longer to see the bears at Bear Mountain. Also, although nobody could have known this, the next morning I was to come down with a fulminating case of the chicken pox, so the virus was probably already affecting me, making me even more irritable and hard to deal with. Bear Mountain was still a long way off, many more miles of driving with a petulant four-year-old than my mother and Mannie were prepared for. So all of a sudden, my dad swung the car off the road onto a little parking area and told me with great excitement and glee that we had just arrived at the most wonderful and amazing place in the whole world, called Flat Mountain, a place thousands of people drive for hours and hours to get to but often can't find at all, and weren't we so amazingly lucky to find it right here right now! Of course, he said, Flat Mountain is way better than Bear Mountain because it is so difficult to find and so unusual and so special. Most people miss it completely and never get here at all.