Elizabeth Allison, sixty-year-old nature enthusiast, confronted New York’s governor in his office yesterday and defied him to remove her and a matronly blue heron from his chambers. Miss Allison, a longtime supporter of conservation measures, was once (1921) the subject of a statewide rescue operation when she and her younger brother, Timothy, were lost in the northern Adirondack Mountains during the dead of winter.

But this is apart from my story. What I want to tell you is about Timothy and me, about the mountains, and especially about that winter of 1921 when, as the New York Times says, we were lost in the dead of winter.

I saw that frozen country again beneath the wings of my jet airliner this morning. It took only a few minutes to fly over it and leave it behind.

But in 1921 it took Timmy and me nearly three months to cover the same distance on what I now call our “interrupted journey.”

As I said, Tim was my stepbrother. My real mother died when I was three, and a few years later, my father married Pauline Hood, a widow, with one son, Timothy, who was a year younger than me.

Father had met her down in Speculator on a trip to buy winter supplies, and they came to live with us on Indian Lake. Now that there was a boy in the house, I could devote myself to my dolls and needlework and piano lessons. I didn’t, of course. Most people are quick to learn two things about me. The first is that I remember every word I hear. The most casual remark is burned into my memory for all time. This mysterious gift should have been enough to carry me to untold glories were it not for my other outstanding trait which can only be described as pure bone laziness. I never run when I can walk, walk when I can stand, stand when I can sit, or sit when I can lie down.

But the harm had already been done. Those years my father had alone with me wrought permanent harm. While I may have complained a lot, there was never a fishing trip or an overnight campout that did not finally draw me, like a fluttering moth to its compelling flame. By the age of eight, when seven-year-old Tim came to live with us, I had already become what I am today: a hopeless lover of the great outdoors.

It soon grew into a competition between my stepbrother and me. He could run faster, but I knew the shortcuts. He was stronger, but I knew how to use a lever. He could swim faster, but I swam farther.

We fought, and Tim always won. He was stronger. I could have won, but that would have meant using a trick or a hold or a fall that might have broken bones, and I decided no fight was worth it.