On the second-to-last day of 2013, when the glow of Christmas had passed and there was nothing to do but settle in for months of unbroken winter, a stranger arrived in Saranac Lake, a 5,400-person mountain town 70 miles shy of the Canadian border. Set amid the patchwork of forest preserves and villages that make up the largest publicly protected area in the Lower 48, Saranac Lake is the self-appointed "Capital of the Adirondacks," a onetime best small town of New York, and the place where I'm from.
The stranger was a 31-year-old infantry captain in the Royal Australian Regiment who'd been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Afghanistan two years before. He arrived at 6 p.m. on the one bus that comes through town each day: an Adirondack Trailways coach that chugs slowly uphill from Albany, stopping in what seems like every podunk town along the way.
[For more of this story, written by Kathryn Joyce, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...disappearing-soldier]
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