The first time that I met Terry Winch, it occurred to me that he must have been vat-grown or cloned to match some idealized image of an Adirondack researcher, literally from the ground up. He wears old and creased, but clean, work boots to work every day. Dark green wool pants washed smooth and soft, with suspenders arching over a medicine ball belly that stretches the front of his worn chamois shirts. I’ve never seen him without two pairs of glasses on librarian leashes: one his regular bifocals for walking around and reading, the other a pair of extreme magnifiers for fine-detail work/examination. His eyes are bright green and alert, and never stop measuring and moving and cataloging and comparing. His hair’s an unusual salt and pepper mix, and combed straight back with something that smells like woods and bug dope to me, but must be some kind of hair tonic (Terry once told me that it’s the pine tar that makes me think of the woods, and also why he uses the stuff in his hair). He reached out to shake my hand in a slightly too-firm grip, that felt more calloused than a sixty year old office worker’s hands should be, and clapped me on my bad shoulder (although since he didn’t know about my getting shot last year, he couldn’t be blamed for this).
“Tyler! Good to see you. I hope you’re going to give our new systems and people a good stress test. We’ve been improving the cataloging system and archives organization and the staff and interns know our collections better than at any time in our history. I told them you were doing some research for a book, and could have access to anything we’ve got. I implied that you were a billionaire, and that if you were impressed with our system, you might fund a position in the back of the building (an archivist or curator, as opposed to a displays-geek or guide or educator), permanently. They’ll be looking to make a good impression on both of us, and I’ll be looking for you to run them, and the systems we’ve set up, ragged. Find the holes or weaknesses in the systems, write them up for me to deliver to the board, and you can have whatever you want.”
What I wanted was Cynthia Windmere, the woman who used to help me with my research projects at the Saranac Lake Free Public Library (SLFPL); she had died, been murdered, last year though, so I couldn’t have her. Dorothy and I had ended up leaving her body where it was dumped in Lower Saranac Lake, deciding that the potential difficulties and dangers of retrieving and moving her would outweigh all possible benefits (she wouldn’t be less dead, after all, and I didn’t/don’t believe that we’re anything but rotting meat after our heart and brain stop working); we had walked out to an abandoned cemetery near Olmstedville, and held a two-person service for her this spring, once the snow had gone. I had tried to adjust my old patterns of using the SLFPL without her, and it just didn’t work; I still used their collections and access to networks and databases and the inter-library loan system, but had adjusted my expectations and work-habits in the library to accommodate her absence in the world.
“Okay, Terry, how does this work? How do I know what’s there?” I asked, pointing to/through/beyond the wall of the entry hall, in which we still stood.
“Let me give you the short version of the VIP tour, and you’re smart enough to ask me questions along the way. Once you get the lay of the land, I’ll introduce you to the intern that’ll be helping connect your brain with our collections. Sound good?” I nodded, and gestured for him to go. I was eager to see what they had ‘in back.’
I’d helped Terry a few years back with a problem, and he’d seen something of my gift for research. We’d spent days poring over old maps and letters from people dead for a generation, and at the end of the time, my brain had somehow digested/processed the mass of information and excreted an answer letting me know the who and where in that particular challenge. It occurred to me that he might want to watch me work in his environment, to see either: how/why it worked, or if it was luck the last time around. I turned the concept around in my head, looking at it from all sides, and decided that he probably wasn’t … but that even if he was, I didn’t care, as I was getting what I wanted.
We had been walking down a fairly ordinary workplace hall … coffee-makers, desks, Dilbert, Far Side, elderly desktop computers, acoustic tile ceilings, smiling people taking a break from their work to look up as we passed by … and then we passed through a sturdy metal door with rubber gasketing all the way around and into the first of the collections. The air-handling system buried the office sounds entirely, completing the feeling of isolation/separation. Sealed concrete made up all sides of the container that I was in, and it felt cold to me. I walked over to the machines literally conditioning the air to optimize preservation of the museum’s collections, and saw the temperature was set for 55 degrees and 40% humidity.
“I hope you brought a sweater along, Tyler. We keep it this cold in all of the collection rooms, and the room you’ll be working in is set to the same environmental conditions to avoid condensation and such.”
“I’ll be fine, thanks. What about the lights?” It wasn’t that I actually needed to know, but I was curious.
“They’re specially formulated, carefully modulated wavelengths. Some people get headaches or feel funny after working under them for too long; shouldn’t be too bad for you though, you’re a short timer, and you spend a lot of time outside, getting the right kind of light.”
He grabbed the handle of what looked like a wheel on the side of a floor to ceiling bookcase, and cranked it over to one side, the bookcase rolled across the floor on tracks. “We can fit more shelving in each room this way. The museum has in excess of 70,000 photos, and thousands of diaries and letters and journals and ledgers, and that’s just the documents. We have rooms and rooms of artifacts: furniture, furs, guns, fishing rods, skis, clothes, tools, machines, and we get more all the time.”
“How?” I asked.
“People give it to us or loan it to us mostly, although we do buy pieces from time to time, mostly art or singular pieces of historical value.” Terry was starting to talk museum at me, so I pushed forward.
“I anticipate sticking to documents. Photos and letters and diaries/journals probably, but I might see what comes up through looking at a few of the ledgers. You never can tell.”
“Indeed not,” Terry said, warming to the subject, “shopping lists, menus, guest lists, construction materials, trips the owners completed during the course of a summer … some of the ledgers offer one a rare look into the life and times of the people who lived and worked and played in the great camps.” I might have felt guilty or creepy about invading the privacy of these people if: a) I had those sorts of feelings, and b) that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing I was down here looking for … Terry nodded his appreciation for the understanding of the power of these documents he could see (or thought he could see) in my eyes.
“Photographs are cataloged when we receive them with dates and subject matter and location and people when possible; we’re in the process of going through our entire collection to digitize them into a searchable database, but are only a bit better than 20% through the process. The best way to find what you’re looking for is still a brute-force attack; look at hundreds of pictures to find the one that you need” he said.
He talked more about the organization and searching, but in those areas, I would be a hostage to the people helping me, so I tuned it out, and just looked at the collections. We walked from one room to another to another to another to another, some needed keys, other touchpad codes; I remembered which keys Terry used, and the codes that he had entered for certain rooms, not through any desire or plan to make ill-use of the information, but simply because it passed in front of my eyes and into the stronghold of my brain. My excitement and anticipation at the upcoming massive research project had my entire sensorium highly tuned, I could feel the differences in the air in the hallways and stairways between collections rooms, and felt my brain plotting a map of the spaces that I visited with Terry, adding them to my pre-existing map of the public sections of the museum (I was surprised to see staff passing through tiny doors out and into the public displ
ay areas in places where I had never noticed entrances before). We went through seventeen different storage spaces in all, seeing even more things than Terry had promised; I could have spent a lifetime studying them (and felt a rare twang of jealousy at Terry’s being able to do exactly that). The tour ended in a climate and light controlled room next to the first photo-vault that we had seen.
“Okay, my guy will be here in a bit,” he said, checking his watch (and holding it to his ear as if it were stopped, although I’d heard it in the quiet depths of some of the collections rooms). “He’ll tell you all of this, I hope, but here are the biggies. Anything you touch, you touch with gloves.” He pointed with his elbow to a big box of cotton gloves on the table. “No food or drink is open or out in this room; there’s a picnic table out back, and you’ll need the air and sun after a few hours in here. You can’t take, or keep, anything. No flash photographs, this one is tough for some people ... okay?” he asked.
“Yessir, no problem, I brought my iPad, and it has a camera built-in, and I’ve got some document scanner apps … is that okay?” I knew the answer, but wanted to show my willingness to be compliant.
“Yup, it is; your iPad is passive, lightwise, so it can’t damage the documents,” he paused, finding his place before continuing. “If you need something copied, we have a special machine; it’s pricey per page, so don’t go nuts with it; but, you know, do what you need to do.” I always do.
A young man walked in, and waited by the door until Terry invited him to come over and join us with a summoning wave of his hand.
“Tyler Cunningham, this is Tom Bailey. Tom, Tyler. Tom’s brain may be a bit like yours Tyler, which I mean as a compliment to both of you. Tom has learned his way around the collections faster than anyone I’ve seen since I got here (which was just after the 1980 Olympics, up in Lake Placid). Tom, he knows the rules, but keep an eye on him; my friend Tyler has been known to cut a corner or two in his day. Everything should be back into storage in the same shape it was before his visit … better, because I want you to check the cataloging on everything you pull, and put it in line to get it scanned before you reshelve it. Questions?” Terry asked, looking at both of us; we both shook our heads side to side, and watched him leave before we were done.
“Well, Mr. Cunningham, where would you like to start?”
“Tom, I’m Tyler, not Mr. Cunningham. Let’s start there. Next, we should go to the room where Terry said it’s okay to eat, because I need to fuel up before I get started, and I want you to do the same. Grab your lunch or snack and a pen and paper, and we can talk while we eat.”
Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, 7/17/2013, 5:53 p.m.
We sat down at the table in a break room that smelled like … break room: burnt coffee at the bottom of the carafe, repeatedly-cooked tomato-based splatter on the inside of an unclean microwave, questionable leftovers in a communal and unpoliced fridge, lingering cigarette smoke from the last lungfull taken outside before coming back to work, paper, human sweat and oils. I ate three egg-salad sandwiches, five sticks of mozzarella, two bit-o-honey bars (I don’t see them often in stores, but whenever I do, I buy a stack for later consumption), four Cokes, and a liter of water (I considered rewriting this sentence to get the items in ascending numerical order, but decided that I liked having them listed in order of fuel efficiency better). Tom ate two PB&Js, and drank a Mountain Dew. While he watched me eat, I explained a bit about what I was looking for, and how I wanted to go about doing it.
“To start off, I’ll be looking for pictures of one person in particular, and a group of her associates,” I looked to ascertain that he was taking the word in its definitional sense, not as business jargon, he nodded that he was, “at parties/events/gathering on or around Upper Saranac Lake during the summer of 1958. I would like to establish, and then expand, a social circle of the target individual. I’m hoping to see patterns and maybe people or places that don’t fit in with the rest of the gestalt.” Tom nodded in understanding, so I continued.
“I anticipate the search changing to include more specifics, and shifting dates/places/people as we go. Once I’ve worked the pictures, I may ask you to dive into the written document archives with much the same goals.”
“Okay, Tyler, let me interrupt you, if I may. Lots of the pictures have useful and accurate cataloging information associated with them, but lots of them do not. If you give me a list of keywords, and we work off of just those, you may miss some of what you’re looking for.”
“Understood. My thinking is that we start with the keywords in a Boolean ‘OR’ search pattern, while limiting the scope of the search in dates from 1955 to 1965 initially; if that yields too few, or we feel that we’re missing too many, we can do an open-date search of the keywords. If your instincts or experience draw you to other pictures or groups of pictures, then by all means serve them up. I’m a big believer in our brains knowing more than our conscious selves, especially in seemingly chaotic environments (this was a bit of a test, I wanted to see if Tom’s head exploded, or if he gave me a ‘crazy-guy’ look … he did neither, which I took as a good sign).”
“So, our first set of keywords should be?” he asked.
“Crocker, Topsail, Upper Saranac, St. Regis, party, dinner, summer, 1958.”
“Those search parameters will yield thousands of pictures.” I nodded, and he continued, “That being the case, I would still suggest dropping the word ‘upper’, and just searching ‘Saranac’. You will get lots of false positives, but I’ve noticed lots of pictures where people mislabeled their pictures, leaving off accurate lake name identifiers. Similarly, I would drop ‘St.’ from ‘St. Regis’, and just search for ‘Regis’.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “While you’re fixing the list, add ‘Stanton’ as a keyword.” I was thinking of Kimberly Stanton, and establishing the linkage between her death and Deirdre Crocker’s disappearance (even though the latter preceded the former), and the possibility of finding out where a connection was … if indeed there was one.
“Got it,” said Tom, and he headed out to start his end of the search. “I can do a tiered search for you to start, which might get some quick and useful results for you, although it ends up being depressing as time goes by.”
“Explain, please?” I asked.
“I would use all of the keywords that we’ve established, and have the computer search the photos we’ve already entered into our computerized database; it’s about 23% of our photo collection. It would yield photos with the highest number of matching keywords first, and then continue in descending order. When I do this kind of search, I tend to get some great hits up front, and then it goes dead for a while before I start coming across interesting stuff somewhat randomly again.”
“Sounds good. I might get what I need right off the bat, and save you days of minioning for me.”
“Days?” Tom asked, looking a bit shocked at the prospect.
“Could be … we’ll see.” He nodded and headed out of the room.
“I should be bringing the first round of photos to you in the Exam Room within 15 or so minutes.”
I waved him off, went to the bathroom, and then headed down to the Exam Room. He was as good as his word, and was back in 14 minutes with a box of photos. I had a pair of cotton gloves on, and had been studying the pictures of Dee Crocker and those other people in the representative photos that her mother and brother had selected for me (although I tend to lock images in my memory with a single exposure, it never hurts to make certain) via my iPad. I started to flip through the first few pictures in the box. They were lined up from front to back, not top to bottom, so I could give each one a quick look without disturbing the museum’s arrangement, when I stopped Tom at the door (presumably on his way out to get more pictures for me).
“I can probably keep these in order. Do I need to?”
“No, If you take photos out of the box, and move on for any reason before replacing the photo, don’t put them back, leave them aside fo
r me to reorganize later. The code on the back of the picture will let me know where to replace it. That should also make it easier for you to separate out any pictures that you want me to copy for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I kept going through the first few pictures.
I was surprised to find a large number of relevant pictures immediately. I looked at the typed label on the outside of the box, and saw, ‘Camp Topsail (Crocker), Upper Saranac Lake, 1958, 60-5r34f-alb9’. I continued through the box pulling out the occasional picture to save for closer examination and/or copying later. When Tom next came into the room, I asked him about the box and photos.
“You know that the museum first opened in 1957. In the first few years, we were quite pro-active in acquiring historical documents or all sorts, both through direct and indirect appeals to Adirondack residents and visitors. This box, and lots of others like it, is the result of a drive to borrow photo albums, which could then be copied and preserved in our archives.” I flipped a couple of the pictures over, and saw...
“Nothing, right. Sadly that’s one of the failings in an otherwise super program. We are lacking the notation and identification that the original prints often have on the back or in the margins of the album. I hope that doesn’t throw you off.”
“It’s hard to say … we’ll see.” When I went back to my work, I heard Tom wait for a few seconds before leaving the room. I would have to try and remember that functioning humans are significantly more polite than I am naturally; Cynthia understood/accepted/forgave the incompleteness of my human emotional software installation, but I am told that it takes some getting used to. If I want to optimize the benefit from my time behind the curtain at the Adirondack Museum, I need to find a way to improve my Tyler to human interface.
Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Page 15