Benedict Arnold had been growing hunkier all afternoon.

Incarnated, at the moment, by Cameron Green, the director of interpretation at historic Fort Ticonderoga, Arnold had spent much of this May Friday on horseback. Sixty rain-numbed Revolutionary War reenactors had sloshed in his wake, marching up forest trails and past a Texaco station, in period-correct leather buckle shoes (not engineered to withstand repeated impact with modern Vermont’s asphalt highways) and period-correct wool coats (now ponderously wet, stinking of sheep). “Give ’em hell, boys!” a local resident had hollered from his farmhouse.

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Saturday morning would mark the 250th anniversary of the fort’s seizure in 1775 by the Green Mountain Boys—a rumbustious militia of proto-Vermonters who spent years violently defending their bite-size territory—but so far the rain was at best blighting and at worst obliterating every enriching activity the Fort Ticonderoga staff had dreamed up. A plan for the reenactors to sleep under starlight when we’d arrived on Thursday had been downgraded to a plan to shiver in a barn all night. A plan to shoot muskets had been canceled. A plan to teach elementary-age children how to cook a meal over an open fire in a town green had devolved into a horde of famished, filthy adults flooding into a schoolroom; propping their dripping muskets against shelves of picture books; and scavenging pencil-shaped cookies leftover from Teacher Appreciation Week. Everything was going less smoothly than it had in 1775. If the partially defrosted reenactors under Cam Green’s supervision—individuals who had come from as far away as North Carolina; who had had to submit color photos of themselves in 1770s-era clothing and proof of insurance to be granted the privilege of portraying 18th-century guerrillas—​camped out again tonight, there was likely to be a mass hypothermia event.

And so the majority of the group—approximately 40 men in 18th-century clothes, one 16-year-old boy in 18th-century clothes, and one reporter who had been explicitly forbidden from attempting to wear 18th-century clothes (because, a senior member of Fort Ticonderoga’s staff had insisted, she did not possess the fortitude to dress in leather breeches and buckle shoes for the first time while hiking 18 miles while conducting interviews, and he was right, he was right; thank God she had dressed in tactical hiking togs woven of such state-of-the-art ultralight moisture-wicking plastic that she herself could be said to be reenacting the life of a Poland Spring bottle)—had crammed into a one-bathroom family lake house for the night.

Its living room rapidly reached the swelter and volume of a blacksmith’s forge operating as a front for an unlicensed tavern. Upon entry, about half of the company sloughed off their soaking breeches to stand around in voluminous shirts, pantsless, like giant toddlers; within minutes the place reeked of sodden natural fibers, sweaty armpits, and, intermittently, a tropical kiss of summer, owing to a decision by some of the men to repurpose some scrounged-up kids’ sunblock as cologne. “Okay, so this is not—this is not coke,” a man told me as he sprinkled a pinch of the brown powder he had just snorted off a sword onto the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger. (It wasn’t coke! It was snuff—“battle crank,” they called it—dispensed from a porcelain canister with HONOUR TO THE KING hand-painted in spidery letters on its lid.)

Yet as the tide of fiascoes rose around him, Benedict Arnold (still, in 1775, a charismatic Patriot; it would take five years of grievances to whet him into the traitor of 1780) was becoming—I will say this as clinically and dispassionately as possible—ravishing.

Cam had appeared in the barn that morning looking neat as a nutcracker. His regimental coat was festooned with epaulets (fringed) and silver buttons (dazzling). His Tresemmé waves were bound tidily back. His calves were encased in trim black riding boots with cognac cuffs.

Scott Rossi for The Atlantic Benedict Arnold on the shore of Lake Champlain

But as the day sploshed on, Cam came to resemble more and more a windswept pirate on the cover of a romance novel. By dusk, the men in the lake house—men with wives and girlfriends wisely absent—were cracking jokes about his comely dishevelment. One observed that Cam, a 34-year-old father in buff breeches and a billowing white shirt, had metamorphosed into the group’s “zaddy.” Cam’s hair escaped its binding. He shed his scarlet coat. His swaggering boots remained powerfully on.

His swaggering boots would not come off, actually. Cam couldn’t get—huff—he couldn’t—gasp—he couldn’t get the—goddamn—boots off.

Now Cam was levitating horizontally. Men dressed as sailors and farmers and fopdoodles were yanking his arms and left leg toward opposite ends of the lake house, as if attempting to pull apart a stupidly huge party cracker. Cam had to be wrenched free because the alternative—having one’s feet totally and permanently encased in period-correct leather riding boots—would be a suffocating fate, and also because he ran a real risk of developing trench foot if he slept in the boots.

“How you doing over there, Cam?”

In reply, a voice, muffle-crushed beneath three men who were using their body weight to pin Cam to the floor while other men pulled on his right boot, or on the shoulders of the men in front of them who were pulling on his right boot, or on the shoulders of the men in front of them who were pulling on the shoulders of the men in front of them, etc.—in a chain that extended out the door to the stairs—a voice so tiny, it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well: “I’m good!”

Baby powder was sifted into Cam’s boot. PAM cooking spray was chhhh’ed around the cuff’s rim. Half a bottle of olive oil was glugged down into it. Cam lay on the floor with his eyes shut in concentration as a man wearing a floral neckerchief tied around his forehead, Rambo-style, attempted to rip Cam’s foot off his body.

“I’ve seen this happen before,” said a lanky apprentice leather-breeches maker from Colonial Williamsburg. “The long heel measurement wasn’t taken correctly!” Fresh hands kept appearing—at one point I counted 20 people in the bedroom—eager for a chance to pull the sword from the stone. Cam’s leg, by the way, was now fantastically slippery, because it was drenched in olive oil. A man in a red knit cap yanked as hard as he could. “That’s just—my ankle—breaking!” Cam yelped.

No one suggested slicing the boots open with kitchen shears.