The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969
Last spring, after months of deep freeze, the East Branch of the Ausable River still choked with ice, a neighbor caught a bobcat on his backyard trail cam. In the grainy footage, the creature saunters forward again and again on a seven-second loop, like those clips you see on the news that track the last movements of a missing person—or a criminal.
The whitewashed walls in Ben Gocker’s Tupper Lake studio are hung with large wooden boards, each almost entirely covered in small sticks and scrap wood pieces. The sticks, painted with bright pastels and bold matte primaries, have been assembled into intricate and dreamy word-search-game mosaics. There are subtly formed rivers and movements of color dancing behind jumbled letters, somehow calming despite the immediate chaos of the puzzle itself. The words “Flamingo” and “Dianthus” pop from a work in progress. The piece borrows the terms from a puzzle titled “Think Pink” that Gocker found in a children’s book.
Outside, falling snow blankets the residential street of modest homes tucked just behind the village center. This is the first time in Gocker’s life he has had a studio of his own. It is allowing him the space and flexibility to experiment with scale, to make bigger and more complex work.
I don’t remember when I first learned how to hold a fishing rod. By the time I had learned to walk, my father already had me standing on the dock, pulling up panfish with him. There are generations of fishermen in our lineage, so it was only natural that my two older brothers and I followed suit. My sister, the eldest child, and my mother don’t enjoy fishing the way the rest of us do. Yet, it is our family tradition to experience it all together and fill the days at our Ticonderoga camp with laughter, smiles and fish stories told around the campfire on clear, starlit nights.
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