October 2017 Archives - Adirondack Life Magazine

Remains of the Days

A hand-scrawled sign for “Shapiro’s Junk Shoppe,” curated by “Marcel Le Junkologist.” A certificate from the 1954 All-American Soap Box Derby with a card of congratulations, addressed simply to “Glenn White, Town.” A space heater from the New Brunswick Hotel. The sash of a long-gone “Miss Tupper High,” its lettering carefully cut from red electrical tape.

You can find those treasures and more at the Tupper Lake Heritage Museum, a storage depot for the town’s collective memory. This place is the brainchild of the late Art Richer, who prodded the community into creating a common space for all the unsung snippets of their everyday lives.

Two Sides of Mount Marcy

When you grow up under the care of a parent who is so completely a mess, your chief struggle is to be not a mess when you yourself become a parent. Often that struggle is humdrum and nearly invisible in the way it is embedded in daily life. The lunch box that isn’t gross, the school pickup that’s never late. But on the exposed rock dome atop the Adirondacks’ highest peak with an early winter wind raging and my nine-year-old son wet and cold and half a day’s difficult hike remaining, all my pretensions of being the not-a-mess dad fell away. It would be possible to die up here, I thought when I considered the hike still remaining to Lake Tear of the Clouds and then an extended ass-slide all the way back down to Johns Brook Lodge. Either that or we’ll be rescued by some other, much more responsible fathers.

From Jamaica to Peru

At the end of June, Seth Forrence looked over the orchard from his farmhouse window. An early summer rain had abruptly turned to hail, crashing down on the trees outside. Seth’s lived here, in Peru, for 41 years and had never seen hail like this.

The storm passed as quickly as it arrived. Seth and his farm manager Mervan Green—“Granny”—stepped into a row of Honeycrisp trees. Seth twisted a golf ball–size green apple from a limb and turned it over in his fingers. After inspecting its skin for hail damage, his heart sank. As fruit grows to full size, so too will its scars. In the apple industry appearance is everything, and the slightest imperfection can diminish market value.

Seth called his father, Mason, Forrence Orchard’s president since his father, Roger, passed on the reins. “Dad,” he sighed into his cell phone, “it looks bad.”

Peter Paine

A few months before the November election, Peter Paine Jr. was fuming. He sat in the living room of his farmhouse in Willsboro—one of several homes he owns in the North Country and New York City—unlacing his work boots. He’s a tall, lanky guy. He’d been out tending chickens and looking after his beloved bird dogs, Wendy, an English pointer, and Chase, a Brittany spaniel. “They’re among the best bird dogs I’ve ever had,” he said.

Wired in the Wild

One of the reasons I love the Adirondacks is the invitation to escape technology. This place reminds me of essential truths: It is good to be personally prepared, to know where I am going. I am responsible for the steps I take to navigate through my own life, even when GPS-guided directions are wrong or inaccessible. It is good to focus completely on where I am in each moment. I am responsible for the impact I leave on the people and places I touch physically. Cyberspace is no substitute for the world of flesh and mountains.

Last Monday in July

It’s after 9 p.m. and twilight has turned to darkness, making it hard to discern much other than the lights from homes on the far shore and the erratic, looping flight patterns of insects in the foreground.

Around 9:24, a boat—appearing only as a row of three lights—enters from the left, moving slowly. It is followed shortly after by a much faster boat with a single light, which soon catches up with the slow boat. The lights mingle briefly in a confusing jumble before the slower boat, now with two lights, drifts out of the frame. The other boat bobs in the water. The insects continue their oblivious aerobatics.

October 2017

Remains of the Days

Two Sides of Mount Marcy

From Jamaica to Peru

Peter Paine

Wired in the Wild

Last Monday in July

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