Stories, Essays, Rants, Appreciations, Long Walks With Mookie The Dog, History Lessons, Occasional Social Justice Warfare and Bad Advice For Parents from the Left Bank of Duffy's Creek.
I was not there for the corn snake. When I heard about it, the first person I thought of was Samuel L. Jackson. Motherf#%&ing snakes crawling around in this motherf#%&ing country house. Great.
The corn snake was, as reported by reputable sources related to me by blood, well in excess of 3 feet long. He was not crawling up the wall from behind the oil tank in the basement machine room in order freak anyone out. This was purely incidental on the snake’s part, as I assume it is with any snake. Snakes don’t intend to freak people out, and I would think they’re annoyed and distracted when it happens. I guess they have to look at it as the cost of doing snake business sometimes. Goddamned people.
Corn snakes are not venomous, but rattlesnakes are, and there are many, many rattlesnakes in Columbia County. Trisha and Jack did not know the corn snake was not a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake in the machine room of the basement would have been enough for any of us to say, “OK. Tried living Upstate. Didn’t like it. Let’s make a profit on this deal and get the hell out of here.”
But it wasn’t a rattlesnake. It was a corn snake, which are similarly fat, spotted and creepy. And the corn snake was there in the basement machine room to eat the mice.
And the mice were there because up until this year, they lived there.
The House on Trisha’s Mountain was more or less vacant for two years before we bought it, although it was being minimally maintained. So there was plenty of quiet time with no people around for the mice to workshop ways of getting in, but since there was no food or water once they did, they were most likely taking up residence to escape from the coyotes and other predators who couldn’t follow behind them, or else just to get warm, since the boiler was running for no one to keep the pipes from freezing, as it is right now.
Somewhere in the midst of this year of Pandemic, social unrest and civil war, in a small rural town in Upstate New York, a man and a woman removed more mouse shit from habitable space than they had ever before or will ever again. Cleaning the garage alone should have killed us via hantavirus, but here we are, still standing.
The very first time I stood outside of the garage on the Mountain, on a hot and murky September afternoon in 2019, when it was a vacant house full of mice and snakes, there was also a shed full of wasps to my right, and one of those wasps rightly saw me as a potential enemy and stung me on my right arm, which screamed silently in pain for the rest of the afternoon as we assessed the potential investment in a house full of mice and snakes surrounded by angry wasps. But neither the wasp that stung me nor the squirrel I accidently ran over on the way up the hill that afternoon was enough to make me think there was any sort of bad mojo embedded in this whole buying a second house plan. Though I still feel bad about the squirrel and I always will.
One key difference between my wife Trisha and I is that I’ll always try the stupid idea first and work my way up to the practical one. After I tried to drive the wasps away with noxious gas in a can from the Herrington’s Hardware store, Trisha called Meerkat. After vacuuming out two years of mouse shit from the kitchen drawers, I bought some of those plug-in things that are supposed to emit a deafening noise torturous to mice and drive them away, or something like that, and stuck them in various electrical outlets around the house.
Trisha called Meerkat. This was shortly after a hot day in July when Jack and I came back from a peaceful, positive morning bike ride on the Rail Trail from Millerton to Coleman Station and I cooked four slices of leftover pizza and a mouse in the oven.
The first thing I can tell you is that a mouse cooked in an oven at 400 degrees on a hot July afternoon, even for a just few minutes, is just about the most horrific thing I’ve ever smelled. And I consider myself lucky in that regard.
The second thing I can tell you is that Meerkat is a company well on their way to building a rodent and insect control empire in Upstate New York, in part you can be sure through contracts with people who have come from Long Island and other more barren places to find a countryside teeming with critters they have never had to deal with in any sort of large numbers before. Lyle Cat had effectively (and proudly) taken care of the comparatively few mice that have made their way into the House on Duffy’s Creek, but it was way too problematic to temporarily export a cat, and the problem was bigger than Lyle, as big as he thinks he is.
Of course, The Country Way would be to get rid of those critters oneself: Trap all the mice, and the motherf#$&ing snake if necessary. Blast those wasps out of the yard and seize their nest while they slept. Painstakingly seal up all the crevices between out there and in here which would be big enough to accommodate a stone-cold outlaw mouse with nothing to lose.
Around the same time I cooked the mouse, I discovered an angry nest of yellow jackets living under the front porch, directly beneath the front door. I discovered them because they all swarmed up and attacked me the moment I arrived on the Mountain. Another trip to the Herrington’s Hardware store procured some more noxious gas in a can designed to take them out, and that was my stupid plan. But the electrician who was working at the house advised me on one of his trips out to the truck that the Country Way, as it were, would be to just get in there and take the nest out. He grabbed a plastic bag, wrapped it around his hand, and proceeded to crawl under the porch and grab the yellow jacket nest with one hand, wrapping it into the bag in one motion. After that we hit it with the noxious gas. Problem solved.
He told me, “they sense fear.”
The Suburban-Pretending-To-Be-Country-Way is to write checks. The Meercat Guys who had rid us of angry wasps in the springtime were more than happy to return to Trisha’s Mountain to rid us of mice and the snakes who love them. This was not their first circus. In regard to the very large corn snake (who was probably the descendant of a long-ago escaped pet, as they are not native to the area), as well as some smaller garter snakes that Trisha and Jack had also met in the basement, one Meerkat Guy suggested that the snakes would find their way out once there were no more mice, which would be after they did their Meerkat thing, baiting and trapping the mice inside the house and sealing up the entry points for adventurous and/or desperate mice outside the house. He also suggested that we might find a few dead mice here and about upon our arrival after this process was completed, and that was certainly the case.
When asked how the snake would find its way out if they were sealing up the house, he suggested the disengaged dryer vent where no dryer was at the time. I’m hoping the corn snake overheard him.
The other Meerkat Guy pointed out to Trisha that the unfinished attic space under the roof was full of snake shit, which he noticed was part of the general potpourri of the house when it was closed up for a while. Having no idea what snake shit actually smells like, I could only accept this information at face value, and I have no reason to go into the attic. The Meerkat Guys cleaned the attic, and the house smells just fine to me. I burn a lot of Yankee Candles when I’m there.
Apropos of nothing, every deer is Bambi to Trisha Duffy. And if there are more than one, it’s not “Look! Bambi and her family!”, it’s simply the plural: “Bambies!” Which really makes no sense. This has been going on for twenty-one years, but I’m not tired of it.
The House on the Mountain is bordered on one side by a cornfield (more about that in a future chapter) and in the back by Taconic State Park woodland. There’s a large crabapple tree at the top of the hill in the backyard, which is convenient if you’re a deer on your way from the cornfield to the woods and you decide to stop for lunch. It’s a swell place to be a deer, Trisha’s Mountain is, although it’s tough being everybody’s favorite large prey.
We’d like to have a garden on the Mountain someday. The deer of course, would like everything about that idea, as would the bunnies and the chipmunks and the groundhogs. So without a significant investment in infrastructure; fencing, raised beds, fake owls, air horns and the like, there’s a lot of stuff we just couldn’t grow. Food, for instance. And it would certainly be the end of the road for the bread and butter pickles I’ve been making from creek-grown cucumbers and passing around to people for the last few years. Anyone who’s tried one could tell you that would be a tragedy.
The bunnies and the groundhogs live in the brush bordering both sides of the property, along with the chipmunks and the little brown squirrels who seem smarter than the grey ones who run in front of moving vehicles. They have all given Mookie Dog new purpose. Long ago on Long Island, he decided that squirrels were not worth his time or attention, but he knows the scent of every outdoor cat within 3 square miles of Duffy’s Creek and they should all consider themselves under surveillance. We haven’t run across one outdoor cat on Trisha’s Mountain to date, but we’ve got bunnies in every bush, and Mookie knows it. He knows them as small but highly entertaining pretend prey, slightly bigger than Lyle the Cat but with similar markings. He’s chased a couple of bunnies back into the bushes and he knows damn well when a groundhog or a chipmunk is watching him from under the back porch. He enjoys picking up their tracks, which had done wonders for his self-esteem. I’m glad I was able to give him that experience.
But there are some tough fellows in the neighborhood, and you never know when you might run across one. If you happen to be large or small prey, it might prove a fatal encounter. If you’re an old man and an old dog from Long Island, you just have to keep your guard up and try not to make eye contact and you should be all right.
Fortunately, I have not come across a bobcat, a coyote or a black bear while hanging out with Mookie. The only bobcat I’ve come across at all ran across Route 22 directly in front of my car at night in the middle of a nasty summer thunderstorm. I considered it a close call, but I’m sure the bobcat knew he had it all along. If Mookie were to come face to face with a coyote or a black bear, he’d likely growl and be a jerk about it, because he grew up on Long Island and he thinks he’s hot shit, and this would likely make a tense situation worse. He would even make a fool out of himself trying to stand up to any passing deer, and the local wild turkeys probably smell vaguely like dog food. So if we’re chilling up at the top of the hill in the backyard, with several hundred square miles of New York and Massachusetts wilderness directly behind us, I have his leash where I can grab it and I listen for rustling, ready at any moment to save my stubborn friend from himself.
Because Trisha and I have, in fact, seen both a coyote and a black bear on the Mountain, and both relatively up close. Oddly, they were both traveling the same path, though I would think they’d stay out of each other’s way generally speaking. The path starts at our mailbox on the opposite side of the road from the driveway and travels straight downhill between our neighbor’s heavily wooded property and the southern edge of tree farm, ending at the Orphan Farm Road parking lot for the Harlem Valley Rail Trail.
I took an unauthorized walk down there one day, without Mookie, then Trisha told me about the coyote she saw coming out from the path and heading up the road and I took no more walks down there. A month or two later, I happened to look out the front door just at the right moment to see a black bear circling the mailbox. I managed to get a loch ness type picture and video of him. I thought about running outside to follow him once he started back down the path, picture-taking rectangle in hand, but then I remembered that he could kill me.
I have to listen for wild animals while this knucklehead rolls upside down.
As a matter of fact, when were in the process of buying a house where the wild things are, I conjured up a scenario wherein if I were ever diagnosed with a terminal illness, and was told that I would suffer and die in a short time, I would simply eat four or five “infused” chocolate bars from Theory Wellness in Great Barrington, cover myself in peanut butter and go to sleep in my hammock up where the yard meets the woods. Trisha noted that this would definitely make the local news, and that I could go out as “Copake Falls Man.” When I decided for whatever reason to share this little joke at the conference table where we all met for the house closing, our lawyer suggested honey would work better than peanut butter, which is the difference between a teaching degree and a law degree, never mind a Long Islander and a Copakean.
My Loch Ness Bear Photo.
For now I am alive and well and staying away from doctors. And when the moon rises over Trisha’s mountain, the coyotes howl and my friends the barred owls hoot, I feel like the luckiest bipedal son of bitch in the world to be in their presence.
As I finish up this chapter, the House on Trisha’s Mountain is quiet, but the boiler is running for nobody to keep the pipes from freezing. I can only hope that the mice and the snakes who love them are no longer able to gain access. I can’t help but imagine coyotes and black bears sitting around on the La-Z–Boy furniture watching Spectrum News, burning Yankee Candles, maybe inviting the bobcats in for Scrabble around the kitchen table. But this is only because I watched a lot of cartoons as a child.
Black Bears and Coyotes are excellent spirit animals. Owls, too. The bear totem is quiet strength, a grounding force of peaceful confidence and courage in the face of adversity. I also learned that the bear “medicine” is healing through quiet solitude and rest, which was pretty cool since the day after I met my bear I headed out on a trip to the Adirondacks with Mookie after 25 years of being yelled at under fluorescent lighting. I don’t know about him, but I needed that bear medicine real bad, never mind the chocolate bars from Theory Wellness.
Our totem pole, a housewarming gift from a friend. It sort of relates and I thought you might want to see it.
The Coyote Spirit (according to spiritanimal.info) is one who imparts his wisdom indirectly through “jokes or trickery. The spirit of the coyote may remind you to not take things too seriously and bring more balance between wisdom and playfulness.” Part of its magic is to reveal the truth behind illusion and chaos.” Lord knows there was plenty of that to sort through this year.
The Owl Spirit announces change. The death of one thing and the start of another, and the wisdom to accept it and live with it. I’ll look to him for comfort when the time comes that I have to drag myself kicking and screaming from my little creek in Valley Stream.
For now, I’m blessed to live even part of the time in a place where all this animal magic abounds. Even snakes, of course, whose likeness is rarely printed on country décor lampshades and curtains, have their own magic and their own wisdom. “The snake as a spirit animal can be to provide guidance about life changes and transitions, whether they are happening at the physical, emotional or spiritual level. “
I don’t know how exactly they transmit their magic, the spirit animals, but the folks up at the Six Nations Indian Museum in Onchiota, New York convinced me as a small child that this stuff was as real as anything the Catholics taught at Sunday Mass, and I’ve never had reason to doubt any of it.
Still, whenever I get up to the Mountain, the first thing I do when I go down to the basement is grab the broom at the bottom of the stairs. Spirits notwithstanding, I am so tired of these motherf#$&ing snakes in this motherf#%&ing country house.
Here’s where it starts: At the very end of 2019, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the week when nobody does much of anything, my wife Trisha and I did something complicated, extravagant and totally unnecessary. We bought a house.
Everyone with whom we shared this news was ecstatically happy for us. Nobody called us stupid. Not to our faces.
I suppose if somebody had a problem with us buying this particular house, the problem would be that we already own a house, and the majority of people on Earth don’t own a house, and many don’t have a home, and now we have two. From that perspective, of course it’s clear that we didn’t have any damn business buying another house.
But we bought it anyway. We had our reasons. We think some of them are almost valid, but I’ll leave that to you. If you’re a capitalist, maybe you’ll say we’re smart people and we know what we’re doing and it’s not a problem at all so go ahead and enjoy it. If you’re a Marxist, you’ll likely call us out for the selfish pigs that we are. Fortunately for us, there are way more capitalists than there are Marxists, at least in our circle.
Trisha and I bought my parents’ house eighteen years ago in Valley Stream, Long Island, New York. It’s a little 1,300 square-foot cape cod-style house on a 60 x 100 plot of land. It’s cute. You’d like it. We grow a lot of flowers. The backyard overlooks a pretty little winding creek, the official name of which is actually “Valley Stream”, but people who don’t know me usually either call it Hook Creek or Mill Brook.
People who do know me call it Duffy’s Creek. Some, anyway. Because I asked them to. My parents bought the house in 1955, and I grew up there, the “baby” in a family of five kids. I never went very far, never changed my mailing address. I got married, came back, entered into a real estate transaction, had a son of my own, and began growing old right on that creek. The tide comes in and out from Jamaica Bay, and by the grace of God, I go right on living. It’s a nice story so far, isn’t it?
But here’s the thing: Three weeks after Trisha and I met on the boardwalk by the ocean in Long Beach, Long Island in 1999, we spent a perfect early-November weekend staying in a cabin in Taconic State Park at Copake Falls, in Columbia County, New York, a place we had both discovered independently, she from going to the annual Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in nearby Hillsdale, me from years when I would periodically get in my car and drive long distances because I didn’t have anybody to go to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with. We lit a campfire on a crackling cold and clear Friday night full of stars, and on Saturday morning we hiked to Bash Bish Falls under Indian summer skies full of crazy blue jays hopping through orange and yellow trees yelling, “Stay! Stay! Live Here!” We fell in love with each other and we fell in love with the place. And for the ensuing twenty years, we returned there every summer and a couple of falls, probably logging about six months of elapsed time. Our son Jack has never known a year that didn’t include at least one week in Copake Falls.
“It’s like our second home,” we’d say.
But that wasn’t true. It just sounded nice.
So our home away from home stayed up there on the map and up there in our minds year after year as we continued to grind it out on Long Island. The sound of the blue jays and the turns in the country roads stood behind us, tapping on our shoulders to remind us what we were missing; the ancient mountains, the cleaner air, the bigger trees, the wide open roads, the farm stores and the church barbecues, the people who wave when they drive by, the absence of malls and chain stores (except for the Stewart Shop up in Hillsdale, which is perfect and cannot be criticized). I wasted hours and hours of my precious time here on Earth scrolling though Zillow listings.
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Copake Falls was an alternative reality. And as Valley Stream continued to get louder and louder year after year, summer after summer Copake Falls stayed mellow.
Valley Stream is a lot of things. Many of them are good. But “mellow” is not one of those things. A quick check for “antonyms of mellow” on Merriam Webster reveals “discordant, dissonant, grating, harsh, inharmonious, jarring, strident, unmelodious and unmusical.” I guess it would be harsh, maybe even unmelodious, to describe my hometown in these terms. But still, it sure as hell is not mellow, except in our backyard, and then only when our surrounding neighbors aren’t shooting fireworks or holding dance competitions. And if you want to see jarring and strident, live near a mall on Long Island during those seasons when people get in their cars every half hour to go buy more stuff. If grating and harsh is more what you’re after, listen to a Long Islander who has been inconvenienced.
Robert Frost came up with the line, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” It was such a good line that he requested it as the epitaph on his gravestone. As you might guess, Jean-Paul Sartre doesn’t have an epitaph on his gravestone (cool issues and all), but he sure could have gone with one of his best lines: “Hell is other people.”
People are what make a place more than anything. Or break it. There are rural parts of America and suburban parts of Long Island where I’m not too arrogant to say I wouldn’t be caught dead. People who are proud of where they live, wherever they might be, like to come up with slogans to promote their hometowns as places that other people might like to see, possibly even live in, because people spend money, and that’s what keeps places alive. Valley Stream once sold itself as “The Gateway to Suburbia”. Kind of a Dante’s Inferno thing really, but I suppose it was meant as a compliment at the time. The Town of Copake sells itself to this day as “The Land of Rural Charm.” That’s a good one, huh? I hope whoever thought of that at a meeting got the praise and recognition that they earned. But I could show you lots of uncharming rural places around town if I had to. And tell you about some less than charming rural people.
So In fairness to my fellow Long Islanders (and – whether they like it or not – my now-fellow Copakeans), let’s start with the premise that the vast majority of people everywhere, in every place with a name, are really all right. I truly do believe this. But sadly, as you know, while most people are wonderful, some people just suck. So it follows that if there are more people, more people will just suck. That being established, here are what I believe are the four basic groups of problem humans:
1. The Slightly to Extremely Dangerous: Those who have had hard lives or some sort of trauma and have decided than instead of nobility or faith, they will instead make it a point to project their hurt and anger on convenient targets they find around them. While this group of people have to be treated like walking landmines, as a child of God, one can’t judge them if one is not one of them and hopes not to be. I just try to stay out of their way and not to make things any worse for them.
2. The Insufferably Annoying: Those who have been sadly brainwashed by too much TV into thinking they are the star of their own little reality show, and thereby have developed a need to create drama and tension where none should exist in order to compensate for an otherwise tedious existence. Long Island is saturated with people like this, possibly because of its wealth. If your main problems are not the procurement of food, clothing and shelter, you really have no problems, so if you want some, you have to invent them. Ideally, it would help every one of them to be slapped silly, but violence is never an option.
3. The Head-Scratchingly Frustrating: Those who, for a variety of reasons, from deeply neurological to not getting hugged enough as babies, just can’t grasp the simple rules of getting along. They’re not particularly dangerous or overly dramatic. They just flat out boggle the mind. Ask anyone who’s ever worked in retail. But, as my father would have said, you can’t make their problem your problem. You can suffer fools gladly or ungladly. You’re still going to suffer fools.
Now, If you give people in these three categories the benefit of the doubt, and assume that in their essence they really just can’t help themselves, and they probably have many good qualities as well, that leaves us to grapple with the problems perpetuated and the damage done by Group #4, The Unrepentant Assholes: Those who live to purposefully and gleefully gain negative attention from the rest of us by being as unpleasant, uncooperative and self-centered as they can possibly be.
My personal sampling of the several hundred-thousand people I’ve interacted with in 57 years suggests that groups 1, 2 and 3 represent between 7% and 10% of the overall population. Maybe as much as 15% in higher-end neighborhoods. The Unrepentant Assholes in Group 4 are actually a very, very small percentage of the human population. I asked Trisha, and she said 2%. I was thinking three, but I’ll go with her answer.
There are 284.7 square miles of land in Nassau County, New York, and approximately 1,359,700 people call it home, making for a population density of 4,787 people per square mile, with all the people noise and chaos they generate. Bear in mind that there are large swatches of Nassau County where billionaires have reserved lots of land for themselves and their horses and their golf courses, leaving the rest of us to fight over what’s left. The population density of South Valley Stream is 7,583 people per square mile.
Traveling from Nassau County to Columbia County, you’ll pass Co-Op City in the Bronx, which has a population density of 47,000 per square mile. So really, I should just shut up. I’m very much aware of this. But we’re born where we’re born, for reasons that are seemingly random and certainly not fair, and we know what we know. I would like to build a little house with a garden for every family in Co-Op City on all the land currently being used for golf courses. I have no beef with horse farms.
Meanwhile, In Columbia County, there are 635 square miles of land, which is home to 59,461 people, which is 93 people per square mile. This includes Hudson, the county seat, which is two square miles and has 6,144 people, 1238 of whom sell antiques. Extrapolate that funky little metropolis, and now we’re down to 84 people per square mile, and 2% of 84 is 1.68.
This all means that in every square mile of land in Nassau County, you will find 94 Unrepentant Assholes (150 in South Valley Stream, most of them driving). Whereas in Columbia County you might find two. Plus you can factor in the variable that being known as having manners and not being a big fat pain in the ass is much more important in Columbia County, because you don’t want everyone else to agree that you’re that one person in their square mile, whereas in Nassau County, every asshole is competing for attention against 93 other assholes within one square mile, and it’s hard to keep track of them all.
There is no cure for any of this. Not in this life, man. More people create more stress. As the Pandemic of 2020 set in, I started seeing clickbait on my rectangle about how people would start moving from the city up into the Hudson Valley “in droves”. Since it’s an issue that affects my life, I was interested to know how many a drove is and how many droves you could multiply that by, but I try not to fall for clickbait. And the proliferation of people in Groups 1, 2 and 3 will only get worse as cell phones get better. And more Group 4’s means more chances of something unpleasant happening to you or around you every time you leave the house.
So the choice for us seems to have become one of either standing in the Gateway to Suburbia as the Barbarians continue to storm through, or goin’ to the country and buildin’ us a home in The Land of Rural Charm, hoping that agricultural zoning regulations will keep the droves at bay for a while.
And that’s why at the end of the twenty-first year of complaining about the miseries that follow the overpopulation of Long Island, and of idealizing the alternative existence of Columbia County, Trisha and I bought a second home two and a half hours away from our first one, a mellow-yellow ranch house on 1.9 acres of land bordering the very state park where we had once walked around all gooey in love under the autumn sun with the blue jays and everything so many years before. Since I had named the creek in back of our house in Valley Stream after myself, because who could stop me, and since the funds that made this real estate transaction possible were bequeathed through my wife’s family, I insisted that we call our new second home, perched on a ridge 840 feet above sea level, “Trisha’s Mountain”.
We had a dream. We had the money. We jumped off the cliff. And then the whole country broke. And then I quit my job.
Not really, but sort of. I actually retired from 25 years as a middle school English teacher. It’s an important job, and somebody has to do it, but it is no longer me. However, the pension I earned is a lot less than if I had stuck around and made more money for a couple of more years, thereby assuring that eventually, if I wanted to live in the style to which I’ve become accustomed, house in the country and all that, I’d have to suck it up and find a part-time job. So, I gave myself four months to decompress, while the Covid-19 Pandemic and the complete collapse of American Society that will likely precede or follow the Presidential Election of 2020 play themselves out.
In the meantime, in between traveling up and down State Route 22, I thought I’d write a book. But I didn’t know what to write about. I had some ideas, but I don’t like it when people are angry at me, so I had to keep thinking of other ones.
The whole “we left the crowd in the city and moved to the country but we didn’t know the cows next door would smell so bad and why are there bees and snakes” thing has been done to death. That’s not what I’m after here. There isn’t a whole lot of Upstate / Downstate culture shock for me to write about because I pretended that I had a house in the country for twenty years before I actually had one. And nobody up there has to explain to us how not to be “citiots.” We get along just fine with everyone. Not much material there. Of course, In order to be considered a local in Copake, your family has to have lived there for two-hundred years, so we know we’ll always be outsiders. We try to counter that by being polite.
So ultimately I decided to write a book of stories and word pictures, twenty of which are set in Columbia County, the other twenty in Nassau County.
My only claim to originality is that I write from the perspective of one whose heart truly lives in two places at the same time, and who knows his time in the one place, the place that created him, is likely winding down.
A Little Side Note: Right now, if you’re reading this book in its competed form, and not in installments on duffyscreek.com, you’ve established that 20 plus 20 equals 40 and not 41. Very astute. Chapter 1, the longest one in the book, is mostly about New York Route 22, the road in between (and how I found it). As we’re making this several years long transition, the road from here to there and back has become sort of my third home.
Valley Stream and Copake Falls, while they are almost united by a common language, and while you can drive from one to the other in two and a half hours, and while by virtue of boundaries drawn up 400 years ago are both in New York State, could not be less alike. But this book is not about comparing and contrasting them. It’s about things that define these places for me. They are both home now. When I’m in one place, I feel the other one trying to pull me back. Neither of them seems to understand that I can’t be in two places at once.
I have become a human wishbone.
I grew up in Valley Stream (and by extension, Long Island) in days when it wasn’t quite as strident and jarring. As another one of my heroes, Mose Allison, said of Tippo, Mississippi, “I am of that place, and the stamp is upon me.” But the little hamlet of Copake Falls has been yanking at the sleeve of my soul for most of my adult life, and now our plan is to go there for good someday.
But not today.
I guess you could say we have a plan. But we don’t, really. Our right-now-16-year-old son has two more years of high school and likes it upstate just as much as we do. So he would be more or less on board if we actually had a plan. Trisha is very successful at her mommy-takes-the-train-to-the-city job, so she’s not in a hurry to leave (as we’d be broke, and she’s in charge of the money) but I know Long Island’s obnoxiousness gets to her even more than it gets to me. And as I write this in the summer of 2020, you can’t even go sit on the beach unless you want to risk getting horribly sick (or getting somebody else horribly sick), and Long Island is pretty much pointless without the beach and the ocean. It seems predetermined which way the wishbone will eventually snap, and I guess if there is a plan, that’s the plan.
Abraham Lincoln said that the best thing about the future is that it happens one day at a time. I’ve outlived him by a year, so I’m happy to be here at all.
And as people suffer all over the world, my main purpose in life in August of 2020 is waiting for people to call me to schedule delivery of some comfy furniture.
I never thought it would come to this.
Of course, If we decided to put our house in Valley Stream on the market tomorrow morning, it would take the better part of two years to shovel out of it anyway. So for the foreseeable future, part of me is watching the tide come and go on the creek and part of me is watching the light dance across the mountains. I am a stupidly lucky son of a gun and I have not a thing in this world to complain about, but if you’re nice enough to read on anyway, I’ll try not to be boring.
When a friend at work would complain to me, he’d often say, indignantly, “this is not what I signed up for!” Well, this is exactly what I signed up for that mellow December day last year in the lawyer’s office in Millerton.
I am a human wishbone. I am Gumby, damn it. With one arm and one leg stretched north, the other arm and leg stretched south.
Which would put my center somewhere around the Red Rooster.
There’s a place. It’s about 325 miles from Duffy’s Creek. There’s a great big lake there, with another great big lake beside it. Near where that great big lake empties into a dam and disappears, you’ll find a beach. There’s not much sand left, but the grass is soft and the wildflowers are friendly. Next to the beach, the land extends to a point surrounded by tall pines and spruces, aspens that sparkle in the breeze and birches that stand around looking awesome. You walk across a carpet of pine needles on this point and you look out at wizened old mountains. One of those mountains has a rock formation in the center of it, almost in the shape of a smile. Once upon a time, if you looked very closely, you would see two birch tree logs, both at least 10 or 15 feet tall, strung together to look like a crucifix standing to the far right of the rock formation.
The mountain probably has another name, but to a couple of hundred people who passed through this place beginning in the late 50’s to early 60’s, it’s White Cross Mountain. The first time I stood on this beach and looked out across this lake at this mountain was in 1966, at the age of three, wearing a little red plaid swimsuit. And I have still have the scar on my finger to prove it. How I got to this place to begin with, why there was a crucifix in that mountain, why I and many, many other people keep coming back – and why my son might come back without me someday – are all very good questions. I would enjoy answering them, and if you stick with it, along the way there’s a history lesson, a fateful burrito, a kind-hearted motel owner, a guy who has lived off the grid for twenty years, some other really nice people – even Santa Claus shows up – not to mention the best damn soft serve ice cream under God’s Blue Sky.
White Cross Mountain
The Dude and Mookie on Family Beach, Lake Kushaqua, August 23, 2013
White Cross Mountain from the spot where we kept the motor boat.
In July of 1966, Francis and Joan Duffy, both 37 years old and married for 14 years, arrived at Camp Lavigerie, Onchiota, NY, owned and operated by the White Fathers of Africa, which is not a supremacy group. They had driven 325 miles with five kids, aged 3 to 13, packed into a 1964 Red Volkswagen Bus. They had never been to this place before. They had only heard about it through some friends who had some friends. And because the best things in life often come out of random events, Joan Duffy’s college roommate was from Keene Valley, NY, about 40 miles away from Onchiota. Joan had already indoctrinated Francis to Adirondack Magic. They were both from Astoria, and my mother had told the story several hundred times of how she saw the night sky full of stars for the first time when she got off the Trailways Bus in Keene Valley at the age of 18. Naturally, she dragged my father, her high school sweetheart, up to see it for himself as soon as she could. So 19 years later, they came to Camp Lavigerie, with the five kids and the Volkswagen Bus, intending to stay a week. They stayed two. The next year, they came back for two more. Eventually, they extended their annual July stay at Camp Lavigerie to three weeks. So in the end, their youngest son –me- spent about 18 weeks worth of July’s from 1966 to 1974 in this paradise in the Adirondack Mountains, about 15 miles northwest of Saranac Lake, NY.
Me in Lake Kushaqua, a long time ago
In 1974, Camp Lavigerie shut down. The land was sold to New York State. The Adirondack Park Agency added it to the Forever Wild Lands and they tore the whole thing down, save for three buildings. Francis and Joan’s oldest four kids were off doing their own things in the summer, but they couldn’t leave their youngest son – me – alone in Valley Stream, and they couldn’t stay away from the Adirondacks, so from 1975-1978, from age 12-15, I got stuck in a cabin in nearby Rainbow Lake with them for two weeks in July or August, thus adding eight more weeks to my time spent in the Adirondacks. But my brothers and sisters and all the hundreds of people that called that big Mountain White Cross Mountain were not there for the most part, except for one or two day visits. Being a snotty teenager, and bored out of my head with my parents, who were just trying to relax for God’s sake, I explored. A lot. By bike, by boat, by thumb and by foot, from Onchiota to Saranac Lake and everything in between. The place wrapped its arms around me. And it has never let go.
My parents in front of the Rainbow Lake cabin, which was wonderful once they stopped having to take me, Actually, we had some good times. Look, they’re smiling.
The Cabin at Rainbow Lake, where my dad wonders where I’d been with the boat so long.
And once I was old enough, I started coming up by myself, first by a combination of Trailways Bus and Illegal Hitchhiking, then later by car, bringing friends up to see it all for themselves, then still later to meet people from Camp Lavigerie for reunions. And then again to introduce those people to my wife and my son, and to introduce my wife and my son to the place where I spent a big fat chunk of summer youth, a place that I’ve visited in at some point during more than half of my 53 summers. I don’t know what the hell I was doing during the summers I didn’t make it up there, but as their probably ain’t more than 20 able-bodied ones left to go for me (and that’s optimistic) I don’t intend to miss many more from here.
Mom and Dad chillin’ in back of Uganda Cottage
The walk down to Family Beach on Lake Kushaqua that I first took in 1966. The beach chairs have been removed.
My parents loved being on or near the water. For example, they bought a house on a creek in 1955, the same house I’m sitting in. It probably was not long after unpacking the five kids and the Volkswagen Bus that they went down to see the beach at Camp Lavigerie, on the shores of Lake Kushaqua. The name is an Algonquin word for “beautiful resting place.” It must have seemed like just that until their freaking three year-old son got his finger caught in a wooden folding beach chair. The Algonquin spirits probably woke up from my screaming. I don’t know how far away my parents or my siblings were at that moment. All I do know is that I was rescued by a woman named Mrs. Herman from Buffalo, who became my mother’s first friend at Camp Lavigerie, and who probably remained on her Christmas Card list for the next 45 years. And I still have the scar on my finger. I don’t have a tattoo, and I’m the only guy at The Valley Stream Pool without one, but I have this mark from the first time I ever set foot on the shores of Lake Kushaqua, the day my mom and Mrs. Herman became friends.
You can see how easily a three-year-old could get his finger wedged…
…so I did
And the friends just kept coming, for my parents and for all of us. The place was riddled with big Irish Catholic families, each with enough kids to start their own softball team: The Lynches, Meenan’s and Donohue’s and Hickey’s, all from Long Island. The Shaw’s from Rochester, The Rudden’s from Ontario , the Heney’s from Quebec, the Desmond’s from Schenectady and the Zimmer’s from Buffalo. There were bonfires and big spaghetti dinners and softball games and talent shows and guys with speedboats and water skis; trips to the movies in Saranac Lake on Saturday Nights, or to the stores on Broadway and the Berkley Hotel in Saranac for lunch on rainy days, and let’s not forget church on Sunday morning. The place itself had originally been built in 1901 as a tuberculosis sanitarium. There was a colossal tudor-style building originally used as a hospital (“sanitarium”, actually), a beautiful little white chapel and a train station next to it, and ten or twelve “cure cottages” scattered about on the road and on the lakefront. In 1959, years after they figured out tuberculosis, the entire thing was bought by a French-Canadian medical missionary organization called the White Fathers of Africa to use as a seminary for priests in training . The White Fathers added a recreation hall and ten or twelve small cabins, which were all named after African nations. We either stayed in Algeria or Uganda. (And you’re thinking, my, this story got weird quickly. Seriously, it’s OK).
Stony Wold Sanitarium/ The White Fathers Seminary
The Front of the Sanitarium/Seminary
The Rec Hall. When I was four, I had a plan to climb those mountains to see what was on the other side. Never got to that.
A postcard of the Stony Wold / White Fathers Chapel, circa early 1900’s
The Chapel, July 2015
The Stony Wold Train Station, which became the Camp Lavigerie Store.
In addition to the seminary, the White Fathers first established a boys camp, then expanded it to become a “family camp.” You don’t hear about many family camps anymore. Probably because nobody has big families anymore. The folks that went to Camp Lavigerie had gone forth and multiplied, damn sure. And this piece of earth and water in the Adrondack Mountains went from a place where people at the turn of the 20th Century went to cough until they got better or died to the happiest little small town on Earth for two months every summer from 1962 to 1974.
Studying the ways of hippies by watching Pete Hickey in the Rec Hall. My guess would be 1973.
And it was pretty much the same thing every year, and nobody would have it any other way. You went to the Camp Store to get the list of who was staying where and you started looking up old friends. And you’d find them at the Rec Hall, where there were ping pong tables and big comfy chairs and people who needed one more for a card game and a teen room I was never allowed into because the damn place closed when I was 11. Or they’d be on the beach, swimming out to the raft or getting ready to take the boat out. (There were actually people going by on water skis and waving. I kid you not). The beach would also be the site of the end of the week bonfires on Friday nights, which were great if you weren’t leaving the next day. Then of course you’d see everyone at mass at the Chapel on Sunday Mornings, but you’d know you didn’t need to see heaven when you died ’cause you were already in it. There would be daily trips in the boat with the Johnson outboard motor to get groceries at Bing Tormey’s store in Onchiota, where the sign said “67 of the Friendliest People in The Adirondacks, Plus A Couple of Soreheads”, because Bing was as funny and smart as anyone who has ever lived in Manhattan. And you might even see Santa Claus on your boat trip back to the Camp; specifically, a retired vaudeville comedian named Ireland MacFadyn who lived in a trailer on Kushaqua and would throw on a santa suit and come out to greet kids who came by, just ’cause he enjoyed it. Imagine that. (And take a look at the picture below that I have thanks to Pat Haltigan).
And in the middle there were big spaghetti dinners and talent shows in the “Green Room” of the Seminary (where we all saw Neil Armstrong step on the moon on July 20, 1969). And Mr. Rudden would sing “The Damper Song” at the top of his lungs and people would be be rolling in the aisles (google it) and Pete Hickey would channel Arlo Guthrie and get everyone to sing “I don’t want a pickle/Just wanna ride my motorcycle…and I don’t wanna die. Just wanna ride my motorcy…cle.” And Pete and all the other teenagers were like Gods and Goddesses to me. They spent the week barefoot and seemingly unbothered with by their parents for the most part, Their wild early 70’s hairstyles and fashions making the place look like Godspell for Christ’s sake. I knew they were having much more fun than us younger kids, who still bring up this unfairness when we get together even though we’re in our 50’s now. We never got the chance to let loose at Camp Lavigerie like our older brothers and sisters did, though we loved it on our own terms. (And let loose they did. My father is 85 years old now and doesn’t remember much. But if you mention Camp Lavigerie, he often says, “I’m surprised nobody ever got killed up there.”)
Ireland MacFadyn aka Santa Claus with Pat Haltigan,probably around 1963
Mr Rudden. I went around annoying people one day with a camera and he was only one that posed for me.
You have never met anyone like Bing Tormey, unless you met Bing Tormey. I bought my first Dr. Pepper from this man. And he was always gracious every time you rolled into his town. And it was most definitely his town. :>)
During the last two or three summers, there weren’t enough “brothers” living at the White Fathers Seminary to keep the place running properly, so the Brother-in-Charge, Jim Heinz, had the smart idea of employing all the teenage guys who had grown up at the camp. My brother got the enviable job of driving around in a very old Red Chevy Pickup with Brother Vernon, picking up the garbage and doing maintenance. Tim Donohue ran the Camp Store. John Forzly was the lifeguard. Tony Shubert hung out in the boathouse with a pile of comic books. I spent a lot of time annoying them.
Then, In 1979, I got to be a teenager at Camp Lavigerie for a week. I was 16 and came up to Road’s End, one of the three remaining buildings left after the Camp was demolished, to attend a reunion with my brother. The reunion was put together by all the former teenagers, who were now in their twenties and knew how to have serious fun. My brother had to leave during the week and convinced my parents to let me stay, and they agreed because they knew who I’d be staying with. Perhaps if they knew I’d spend the entire week drunk on Genesee Beer they might have reconsidered. No matter, that wonderful week was the last I’d see of Camp Lavigerie for the next 9 years. I came up to the Rainbow Lake Cabin a couple of times with some friends and a couple of times just by myself. As a matter of fact, I hitchhiked up the Adirondack Northway from Glens Falls when I was 17, just to say I did. When I got to Saranac Lake and was just walking around my childhood hometown by myself, it was the most free I have ever felt, and would ever feel. I can still catch that feeling just by standing on the river bridge on Church Street. I was alone, 300 miles from Long Island (and all the people who had formed opinions of me there), and yet I felt completely at home and not the least bit afraid, ’cause this was home, too.
Me and Mookie in Saranac Lake, July 2015
In 1995, a group of people began putting together formal Camp Lavigerie reunions over Labor Day weekend. The people who had the week-long party at Road’s End were starting families and wanted to show them what it was like, minus the Genessee and debauchery, so they all got together at a hotel in Lake Placid. I didn’t go to the first one. I was so far removed from it that I didn’t think it would mean much to me. Then my parents came home gushing about all the people they saw and all the things they did, and I made sure I was at the next one in 1998 and had the time of my life catching up with everybody, and getting to hang out on equal terms with all the Gods and Goddesses of my childhood, who had turned out to be as cool as they always were except older. And then I went to one after that in 2001, and this time, I brought my wife of three weeks to see what all the fuss was about.
Trisha was feeling a little out of place. After driving through a wicked rainstorm up Route 73 and scaring the crap out of her, we arrived at The Ramada Inn in Lake Placid, which was all very nice and good but which is basically The Hamptons with Mountains. It has nothing to do with Saranac or Onchiota. She was about to find that out. We took a drive through Saranac Lake (which also made her nervous, which I found very funny) and made our way out to the old Rec Hall site, which was now (and still is) owned by a former camper, Pat Haltigan, who started out in Levittown, and who somehow found out that the White Fathers had never actually owned the land around the Rec Hall, and when they sold the rest to the State, he jumped in and bought it. Pat has lived off the grid on the Kushaqua Mud Road for over twenty years. He comes back to the story in a little bit. I’m digressing.
So there we are, all standing around on Pat’s property, catching up with each other, and Trisha is smiling and playing along. At this point Pete Hickey, and his beard and his hair and his tie-dye and his tinted hippie glasses, comes down the road covered in bloody scratches all over his arms and legs and announces that he has blazed a trail to the top of White Cross Mountain (he was one of the ones who erected the birch tree cross way back when) and would we all like to come for a hike. And I was in heaven, and my newlywed wife was wondering what fresh hell she had gotten herself into. But we climbed, Rudden’s and Shaw’s and Donohue’s and Meenan’s and lots of others, and we reached the big rock and looked down over Lake Kushaqua, and Trisha started to get it. And later that weekend we had a big softball game and a bonfire and a talent show where Mr. Rudden sang “The Damper Song” and Pete sang “The Pickle Song.” and she started to get it more. The group that organized the reunion had found a nice priest from Saranac who agreed to say a mass in front of the chapel on Sunday morning. In his homily, he pointed out how the Camp Lavigerie story was now moving on to a new generation, and pointed out how one young couple – Jimmy Meenan and his wife – had come with their newborn baby, and how another young couple, John and Trisha Duffy, had just gotten married and would probably be back at the next reunion with a baby of their own.
We came back to the 2004 reunion with a baby of our own. We caught up with everyone again, and had a big softball game (it was me and The Shaw’s against everyone else. I believe it was a blowout) and a talent show and a bonfire that we had to miss because Daddy was starting a new job the day after Labor Day.We stayed in Saranac Lake like normal people and Trisha fell in love with it on our walks around town, pushing our baby stroller just as cute as could be. By that time somebody had set up a Website where we could all try to keep in touch, but really, it wasn’t until facebook came along (you love to hate it) that it became possible to really keep everyone together. Still. life got in the way of the Labor Day Reunions and the last big one was in 2007.
Hanging out with the Great Burt Shaw at the 2004 Reunion, with a little five-month old Dude on my lap and a very small Emily Rudden and my niece Maggie Duffy gushing over him. Burt found out I wasn’t going to the bonfire that night and said, “well it that case I’m gonna sit down and talk to you right now.” And that’s just what we did. We haven’t seen each other since.
After that, I went 8 years between trips to The Adirondacks. We were happy enough with our little home away from home three hours away in Copake Falls and I just kind of let it get away from me. Then on August 23, 2012, my mother died at the age 82. And I knew that on August 23, 2013 I’d be standing on the shore of Lake Kushaqua, come hell or high water. (And in that intervening year we had some of both). Trisha understood completely. We stayed at Amanda’s Village Motel in Saranac. The Dude was nine years old and thought it was really cool to stay in a motel with Mom and Dad and Mookie, who loved the big comfy beds most of all. Our next door neighbor at the motel became a friend, Bruce Freifeld. He had just toured around The Great Lakes on a motorcycle and let The Dude sit on his bike and try out his weather-proof gear, including the jacket that heats up when you plug it into the battery, which of course blew The Dude’s mind. We saw a couple of our old friends, particularly Martha Rudden and her wonderful kids, Emily and James. We walked around Saranac and went for ice cream at Donnelly’s, which was a five mile drive from Camp Lavigerie but was one of the highlights of the week back in the days, when it was Crystal Springs Dairy. Every night they twist a different flavor with vanilla and it’s the best soft serve ice cream on the planet. Anyone reading this who has experienced this ice cream can attest. I can’t describe in words how good it is.
You stand around on Family Beach, Lake Kushaqua long enough, you run into someone you knew almost 50 years ago. This is Peggy Lynch Mulchahy, who lives about five miles away from here. I’d be more likely to see her on Kushaqua than at the King Kullen on Sunrise Highway.
We even went on a night walk through Tucker Farm’s Great Adirondack Corn Maze in Gabriels, which for The Dude, who is currently asleep upstairs with all the lights on, was a huge jump. On the second trip down to the lake, I saw two women and a dog. I said, “Lavigerie?” and one of the women said “John Duffy?” and I said, “Peggy Lynch?” and wound up having a conversation about the old days with someone who actually lives about five miles from here. The whole trip was magical. Even the weather was perfect, which is not always the case in this particular part of the world.
Driving back from Kushaqua to Saranac Lake that afternoon, my ipod shuffle picked out “Fire And Rain” just as I was passing the turnoff for the Rainbow Lake Cabin. I thought about my mother and tears welled up in my eyes. I thought about all the things we both had to deal with in our lives that were so far away from the peace and happiness of Camp Lavigerie, and for no damn good reason. How much we both had to deal with people and situations that just plain sucked: “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.” But on the other hand: “Sunny days that I thought would never end.” I knew I would have to keep coming back to this place to keep my center intact, honor the memory of the person that gave this place to me, and pass it on to my son.
So we came back again, this past July. The Shaws were renting the same place they’d rented since Lavigerie closed, Martha was coming to town with her kids, so we decided to move the Copake Falls Week up and come back to Saranac and Onchiota in July. So we ended up driving 150 miles, staying away from home for a week, driving 150 miles back home, staying for four days, then driving 325 miles to stay in a motel for four and a half days. While Trisha and I could envision what it would take to endure that, and why it was worth it, we didn’t realize that it would be a little too much of a strain on our 11 year-old Dude. Meanwhile, Trisha is, currently and unfortunately, suffering from an injury related to spinal stenosis, and it really hurts her to walk. She had gotten a cortisone shot before Copake Falls that she promptly undid by feeling great and trying to load the car. So for the entire week that she lives for all year long, she wasn’t able to walk any distance in the place where we spend half our time taking walks, and it was breaking my heart. However, you have never met anyone with a bigger heart than my wife, and a sweeter spirit. She insisted that we make the trip to Saranac Lake. She didn’t want to miss it. Under these circumstances, we knew it was going to be quite as “lightning-in-a-bottle” magic as the last trip, but we went anyway. Because it’s there.
The Waterhole on Broadway in Saranac Lake.
We made the trip in six hours flat. It usually takes at least seven. I was so excited that I told a friendly guy walking down River Street in front of the motel, as Mookie read the new pee mail, that I had just driven from Long Island in six hours. He gave Mookie a big hello (and vice versa), congratulated me and invited me over to The Waterhole for a drink. I of course couldn’t join him, being a family man and all that, but to be invited to The Waterhole is a great honor. Later Mookie and I saw the guy and his buddies on the front porch of the Waterhole, which is the Front Porch of Saranac Lake, and we all said hi like old friends. That’s how it goes there.
We went over to see the Shaw’s at their cabins on Flower Lake. Burt and Brian, my childhood heroes, were not there, which was a bit of a buzzkill, and started me thinking about how old we’re all getting. But we got to catch up with Glenn, who is a boy about my age – 50- and meet his three year-old son William and his fiancee Katie, plus my childhood buddy Christal, and Curtis (who Mookie particularly bonded with), and Mrs. Shaw, who is now 90 years old, and Keith, who gave The Dude a quiz on proper electrician and HVAC guy procedure, which was great entertainment around the campfire. Things were starting out well. Even Mookie got to go for a quick swim on their beach.
We stayed up too late and The Dude was starting to drag the next day. We had to drag him out of the motel for our first drive out to Lake Kushaqua. He wasn’t whiny, but he wasn’t having as much fun as we thought he should be. I couldn’t get him to come into the lake with Mookie and me, and Trisha had to sit down wherever possible. Plus I should point out that it’s a steep walk down to the lake. You can drive your car down the road, but it’s barely passable. Walking back up the hill was about all Trisha’s back could take and she was really wrecked by the time we got back to the motel. That’s when Edie decided to get involved.
Amanda’s Village Motel.
Edie and Joe are the proprietors of Amanda’s Village Motel, across River Street from Flower Lake. Amanda’s was brand spanking new in the 1940’s, but Edie and Joe have managed to suspend it in time. They run a clean, simple motel where you can bring your dog and walk to everything in Saranac, except if you can’t walk. Edie saw how much Trisha was suffering, and unlike myself, decided to do something helpful. She insisted that Trisha go see her chiropractor the next day. I was not particularly in favor of the idea. I’m pretty sure a chiropractor made my back worse than it already was when I destroyed it working in the Grocery Department of Foodtown when I was 18, so of course I base my whole opinion of chiropractors on that one incident. But desperate times call for desperate measures, so we agreed that Trisha would go see Dr. Cliff Wagner (who everyone just called “Doc”) at 3:30 the next day.
Meanwhile, The Dude was getting to be a little out of sorts. I tried to change his outlook by taking him over to the local Ace Hardware and Radio Shack so he could pick up the new outlet receptacle and wire he needed for his summer projects, because he’s spoiled rotten. Put it this way: I don’t mind doing this stuff at all as long as a little gratitude is shown. Instead, when we got back to the motel he started whining about the wi-fi being spotty, and that it was too hot, and generally being nasty and unpleasant, and he didn’t want to go for a walk into town with Mookie and me (which to me is inconceivable if the town is Saranac Lake) Pile that on with Trisha being in excruciating pain and it all adds up to me getting snarky back and taking the computer away.
Glenn is the happiest guy in Harrietstown. The Shaws go for ice cream at Donnelly’s every night during their Saranac Week. Each night is a different flavor twisted with vanilla. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.
And I immediately flashed back to those years when it was just me in the Rainbow Lake cabin with my parents, and how much of a jerk I thought my father was being, and how it was me being the jerk. We had ice cream with the Shaw’s at Donnelly’s after Little Italy Pizza in Riverside Park and we apologized to each other and tried to reboot. Oh, and by the way, if you’re in Saranac Lake the third week of July and you’re looking for the Shaw’s, just go stand in front of Donnelly’s Ice Cream Stand on Route 86 around 8pm, and they’ll be there in no time flat.
The Dude got his computer back the next day. After I got in a spectacular morning kayak paddle with Christal, we loaded up some lunch and a big yellow dog and headed back to Kushaqua. This time I drove down to the beach to save Trisha the walk (and drove back up -and anyone who knows that road knows that Subaru should be sponsoring this page just because I wrote that). I took a dive in and Mookie tried to rescue me. The Dude was doing a monologue, a lecture, an Asperger’s thing, where he takes the listener captive (in this case and most often, Trisha) and talks through every singe detail of how he is going to – in this case -hardwire a doorbell in the house this summer. And it’s pissing me off that he might as well be standing in a Wal-Mart Parking lot for all he’s really taking in Lake Kushaqua, the spot he described as “like a tropical island” the first time he saw it two years before. But I made the adjustment. I looked outside myself and into him. I decided consciously not be an asshole. I asked him to tell ME how he was going to install the doorbell, and I started walking across the beach, Mookie behind me as always. As he monologued on and on, he followed me right into the lake, and we walked through the shallow water and watched the Aspen leaves sparkle in the breeze as he talked and talked. Finally, he acknowledged that the water was pretty nice.
I tricked The Dude into going into Lake Kushaqua with me by letting him take me through the entire process of how he’s going to hard-wire us a front door bell.
And someday this tree will be 80 feet tall, and The Dude and I will stand under it together.
I had a plan. Besides getting Trisha to the chiropractor by 3:30. I wanted to take a drive down Kushaqua Mud Road, walk on a path that I knew of back down to the lake and see a spot that was called “Children’s Beach” way back when, even though it was more a grassy spot than a beach and there were never any children on it. The spot was special because it was the place where my Mother used to go to hide from us all at Camp Lavigerie. She had said many times that it was her favorite spot on Earth. She could sit there and look at out White Cross Mountain across the lake, maybe read a book, maybe sneak in a couple of Marlboros. I hadn’t visited the spot the last time we came up because the road was closed. This time I never got down there because we saw Pat Haltigan outside his place and we got to talking, and I’m glad we did.
Children’s Beach
As I mentioned before, Pat bought the land where the Camp Lavigerie Rec Hall was located. He started out as a kid from Levittown at Camp Lavigerie but, like quite a few others, he came up to the North Country permanently as soon as he could. (I told Edie That I might have done the same at one time in my life if I had not been born chicken-shit). Pat was a long-distance trucker, so when he started out, he used to keep his rig right on the property. He had tapped into the well water, has a giant propane generator and a wood stove and therefore is able to live off the grid. (When I told the Dude that Pat generated all his own power, he just stared at the trailer for a very long time). He is also the now, unfortunately, the single father of a seven-year-old boy and has been forced to go on disability because of some injuries. He bonded with Trisha right away because they a lot of had aches and pains in common. And if you still don’t believe in climate change, I’ll tell you that Pat – the most independent person you could ever meet – has gotten a place in Saranac to stay with his son in the wintertime, after hunting season, because the last two winters were horrific all through upstate. (The Rochester Shaw’s said the same thing – The worst they ever saw).
We stood around talking to Pat, who showed The Dude some of his cooler toys (an old CB radio among others) and broke out some old pictures (some of which accompany this article) and the time got away and it was time to head back to Saranac and take Trisha to the Country Chiropractor. The Dude took the River Walk through Saranac with me and was generally pleasant. We had heroes from the Lakeview Deli for dinner, ice cream with The Shaw’s again (it was “fruit surprise” night) and all was generally right with the world.
Crystal Shawm Myself and Martha Rudden. We all came to Camp Lavigerie when we were very, very small, and now they’re very nice people and I’m an old crank who doesn’t want to get his picture taken in DJ’s Rustic Restaurant because it’s ruining his Saranac Street Cred. But they like me anyway and we keep in touch.
The next morning Trisha was still in pain. We made another appointment to go see “Doc” at 11:30. I had breakfast with Christal and Martha and her kids at DJ’s Rustic Restaurant. (The Dude was “not hungry”) and planned to just spend the day walking around Saranac with The Dude and Mookie. The Dude was understandably upset about his mom’s condition and was again a little out of sorts. When we picked up Trisha, we decided to walk over to the Farmer’s Market in Riverside Park, and the walk damn near made her break down in tears. There’d be no more family walks for this vacation, or anymore rides to Kushaqua. We’d visit a couple of my favorite stores on Broadway and then have dinner at The Downhill Grill, plus of course ice cream at Donnelly’s, even though The Shaw’s had packed up to go home.
When The Dude and I have our battles, we always acknowledge after the fact that we were both to blame, and that is true. The situation usually escalates in direct proportion to how I react. The rest of that afternoon he whined about the wi-fi and the weather (it was getting right steamy) and burying his head under the covers on his motel bed. By the time we got to dinner, he insisted on ordering a burrito instead of getting something safer off the kids menu. The burrito came, looking nothing like a Taco Bell burrito, and he had a head-in-the-hands, rocking-back-and-forth full scale meltdown, bitching and moaning about how badly we treated him. And we had to eat our dinner real fast and get out. And he said some nasty stuff he didn’t have to say, just like a Duffy. And I lost my shit on him. I made him stay in the car while we got our last Donnelly’s ice cream and gave him the silent treatment until Trisha got him to sleep. And of course I felt bad about it later. I went for a drive that night, got one of may many, many coffees to go from the Stewart Shop, looked around Saranac and felt like the most selfish punk in the world for driving my injured wife and my ultra-sensitive son all this way just so I could reconnect with my past. When I told Trisha that, she told me I was being ridiculous. I love that woman.
The next morning, as we left to go home, The Dude was quiet, but apologetic. As we drove out through Saranac one last time, I told him that this place has a lot to do with the person that I am, and that I studied the ways of North Country people when I was “growing up” here in the summers. I told him that people who lived here, and the people who knew it well, were people who rolled with the punches, who didn’t let little things get to them, who treated friends and strangers alike with kindness and respect no matter what their circumstances; who kept their sense of humor and their connection to nature intact as much as possible and who knew what was important and what was not. I told him that I didn’t know when we’d be coming back, because he didn’t seem to really appreciate it. And that was just a plain old mean thing to say, but I said it anyway.
As we made our way down 73 to The Northway, The Dude told me he was sorry again. And I apologized for overreacting. And then he said something that will stay with me forever. This is what he said: “I’d like to come back here again and learn how to be a Saranac Lake Guy.”
And so we will. And we’ll find a nice cabin on a lake so we don’t have to live in a motel, and Mookie can go swimming whenever he feels like it, and Trisha will be able to walk, and we’ll leave the damn computer and all the electronic junk at home and keep working on teaching our son to love the North Country for the beautiful, magical place that it is.
And at some point, I’ll take a ride by myself and go down to Children’s Beach and sit and stare at White Cross Mountain and remember for awhile. I’m sure Mom wouldn’t mind the company.
A Creek Runs Through It 