by Bud Kenny
John started the car, then turned to me. “I would really appreciate it if you’d spend the night here. My family could use the distraction.”
That evening we met many of Nancy’s family and friends, and we heard lots of stories about her. And each story, be it funny or otherwise, illustrated a woman of unconditional compassion and generosity.
The next day, in the resort town of Sylvan Beach, we stopped at the Beachy Clean Laundromat so Patricia could wash some clothes. Della and I were outside when a middle aged man stopped on the sidewalk and asked about our trip. “So where do you stay at night? Where were you last night?”
“We camped behind Pier 31 Restaurant.”
A big smile sprang to his face. “Oh yeah? A friend of mine lives there. Nancy. She’s one of the finest people I know.”
It began to sprinkle as I carefully said, “You know she died yesterday.”
A look of horror dashed the smile away as he exclaimed, “What? No!”
He was a tall man and his whole body shook as his face got red. “Excuse me.”
Then he whirled around and quickly walked away as the sprinkles gave way to a shower worthy of my rain coat. Several minutes later, it had slowed to a drizzle when the man returned with red eyes and said, “I’m sorry about running off like that.” He choked back tears. “I didn’t know Nancy had died. Do you know when the funeral is?”
I told him Tuesday, then said, “We sure have met a lot of folks who knew her. She must have been a really special lady.”
The man was petting Della’s neck as he fought tears. “When somebody dies, everyone has something nice to say about them. You just naturally do that. But with Nancy, there really is nothing else to say about her.”
When we walked away from Onieda Lake, Patricia and I felt like we were in mourning. Nancy was a great woman. We missed her. I wish we could have met her
“So, you’re just wasting your life.”
This boy was probably twelve or thirteen, and had a face full of pimples. He rode one of those small bikes that kids do stunts on. With him was another boy on a scooter. On our way into Rome, New York, Patricia spotted a Big Lots store and went in to pick up a few things. Della and I were waiting under a shade tree across the street when the boys stopped to talk.
I asked the kid on the bike, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re just walking your life away. You ought to do something worthwhile.”
“Like what?”
“Get a job! That’s what I’m going to do when I grow up. People around here, that’s what they do. They stay here, get a job and have a family.”
In reality, fewer people were doing that in Rome. According to the 2000 census, the city lost nearly ten thousand people over the past decade. This city of 34,334 used to be a manufacturing center for steel and copper products, but many of those companies were gone. When we walked into town we passed lots of boarded-up buildings.
I said, “So that’s your idea of a worthwhile life? Stay in Rome, get a job and be a slave to the system?”
“I won’t be a slave,” he snapped. “They’ll pay me. I’ll have a house. I’ll have a car. I’ll have a family. I’ll have a life!”
He paused, then pointed at me and snarled, “It’s better than just walking around doing nothing!”
Then he turned around in the direction they had come from, motioned for his friend to follow and peddled away.
While I watched them roll down the sidewalk, I couldn’t help but wonder, Is he right? Am I just walking around doing nothing? He may be just a pimple--faced kid on a bike, but he could have a point. Just like the customer in the restaurant back in Indiana who told his everyday waitress, “In other words, they don’t really have a life!”
Under that shade tree across from the Big Lots store I wondered, Are they right?
Near the heart of Rome we stopped at an Eckert Drug Store to get a roll of film developed at their one-hour photo. We were waiting under a tree in a nearby parking lot, when a woman in her mid-forties approached us pushing a wheelchair. Strapped into it was a tall lean man with jet black hair. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. His head bobbed slowly from side to side as his arms and hands kept moving spastically.
After the woman introduced herself, she said, “This is my son Shawn. He has Cerebral Palsy.” She had a wide grin on her face and a note of pride in her voice as she added, “But he doesn’t let it get him down. Do you honey?”
He blurted out, “Nope, not me!”
His speech was a bit halted, but he was easy to understand. A contorted smile lit up his handsome face as he stammered through, “I just graduated from high school.”
While it was painful to watch him try to contain the erratic movement of his body, there was a confident aura about Shawn that made him irresistible. His brown eyes had a sparkle that beckoned you to engage him.
I said, “So what are you going to do now that you’ve graduated?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I could go around the world with you guys.” He laughed.
“I guess we could hook your chair up to the back of the cart.”
“Naw, I’ll just have Mom push it.”
She said, “In your dreams.”
After we all laughed, Shawn stuttered, “There’s lots of things I’d like to do. I just haven’t decided what yet. Maybe go to college. Who knows?”
His mother chimed in, “He has his whole life ahead of him. Whatever he does, I know he’ll be great at it!”
He raised his trembling right arm and tried to point at me as he asked, “What did you do before you started walking?”
“Oh, I’ve done a lot of different things in my life. I’ve been a disc jockey, a tour guide, a salesman and I ran a coffee house for a few years. For a short time I was an emcee at a strip club.”
Suddenly both of his arms shot up in the air and flailed above his head as Shawn sputtered and shouted, “Whoa, baby! That’s the job for me!”
His mother grabbed both arms and gently pushed them down onto the arm rests of the chair as she laughed. “I don’t think so honey.”
Fun was in his voice as Shawn whined, “Aw, come on mom. Working with naked girls all the time, what a cool job!”
Truthfully I said, “I thought so too, but it was one of the worst jobs I ever had. Never in my life have I been around so many miserable people. I’d never do it again.”
Shawn had a serious tone as he said, “So what’s the favorite thing you’ve done?”
“What I’m doing right now–walking across the country.”
For a moment Shawn’s body was still as he asked, “What’s the best part?”
“Meeting people like you.”
A few minutes after they left, a motorized wheel chair rolled into the parking lot and headed toward us. The man driving it had shoulder-length light brown hair with a few silver strands in it. His beard was the same color and had a big grin beaming from it.
I was sitting on Della’s water bucket in front of her when he stopped the chair a dozen feet away and said, “I don’t want to get too close and spook your horse.”
“She’s a mule, and she’s okay if you go up to her slowly.”
The chair whined softly as it moved him closer. “So what are you doing?”
Every time someone in a wheel chair asked me that question and I answered “Walking to Maine,” I always felt a bit of guilt when the word “walking” came out. Each time it happened I expected one of them to look up at me and say something like, “Well, aren’t you special!” But it never happened. Like this man, they always responded in the positive with some version of, “That’s really cool!”
After I answered Bob’s questions, he slapped the left arm rest with his hand. “This is my new ride. Only had it out a couple of times. Gets forty miles to a charge.”
Like Shawn, this wheelchair rider had an air of confidence about him that made it comfortable to ask, “So, how did you come to be in that thing?”
“
I fell through the roof of a burning house.”
What else could I say? “Wow!”
Bob sounded like a news man on the radio when he said, “It happened a little over three years ago. I used to be a fireman and I knew the roof could cave in. But we heard there were children inside. We couldn’t get in the house because of the smoke and flames. So someone had to chop a hole in the roof to vent the fire. We had to get those kids out.”
He went on to tell me that after the roof fell in, he was able to crawl out of the burning house to safety. But he hadn’t walked since then. “Turned out no one was inside. They got the kids out before we arrived. Nobody told us.”
Bob paused and grimaced a bit before he said, “That hurt. I didn’t have to be on that roof, and I got bad bitter about it. The first year was really tough.”
The fireman laughed and stroked his beard as he said, “Yes sir, had myself a damn good pity-party and everyone was invited.” Bob shook his head. “I wore everybody out.”
He leaned back in the chair with his head against the rest. “But it’s better now. One day I was rolling through town in my old chair all hunched over when something out the corner of my eye caught my attention. It wasn’t anything special. I think it was one of the trees in this parking lot. Maybe this one. But whatever it was it made me sit up and look around. Suddenly I saw things in my own neighborhood I had never seen before.”
Like a master of ceremonies presenting a stage full of pageant beauties, Bob gestured to his right and left as he said, “Finally I had the time to look at where I was.”
Bob smacked his forehead with the palm of his right hand. “Then it hit me, ‘I’ve got it made!’ I mean, I don’t have to work another day in my life. I can do anything I want as long as I don’t have to be on my feet.”
He slapped both hands down on their corresponding knees and said, “I get around and see more these days than I did when I could walk. It’s really not bad–especially now that I’ve got this new super ride.”
And Bob had a dream. “I want to ride this chair from here down to Daytona, Florida. Always wanted to go there. Wouldn’t that be a great ride?”
“It sure would!”
Then, for the next half hour we talked about the possibilities. Maybe he could get the company that made his chair sponsor the trip. Maybe he could rig it up with solar panels to keep the thing charged. He said, “Wow, wouldn’t that be something?”
So there we were, two middle-aged guys in a parking lot in Rome, New York, kicking around ideas on how to make a dream come true. Does life get any better than that?
Watching him roll away, I started thinking about the pimple faced kid on the bike. He had his health, he could walk and had his whole life was ahead of him. It’s too bad he was so crippled with tunnel vision.
CHAPTER 19
THE ADIRONDACKS
WE TOOK HIGHWAY 28 NORTH into the Adirondack Mountains. Above Woodgate, the roundness of the foothills turned into steep slopes with huge boulders and rugged crags. All around us were monumental rock formations interspersed with the green of towering pines and tamaracks. It was as if all of nature aspired to soar there. The scenery was majestic. The traffic non-stop.
Adirondack Park was established in 1892, making it one of the oldest parks in America. Yellowstone and Yosemite are older, but at six million acres, Adirondack Park is bigger than the two of them–plus Glacier and Grand Canyon National Parks combined. At 5,433 feet, Mount Marcy is the highest in the Adirondacks. The park has forty-five other peaks that are over 4,000 feet.
The first white men to exploit the Adirondacks were trappers and loggers. In those days, hemlock bark was used to tan leather, and the forest was full of it. Around 1810, tanneries began to spring up throughout the mountains. In just eighty years, so much hemlock had been stripped from the forest that the tanning industry collapsed.
The headwaters for five major rivers–including the Hudson–are in the Adirondacks. With more than 30,000 miles of streams and rivers, getting timber out of the mountains to markets in the east was no problem. Furniture factories opened all over the Adirondacks. At one time, Ethan Allen had a dozen factories in the area. Now there’s only the one in Boonville.
“And it’s barely running.”
He was a retired logger who had worked in the woods all his life. As a young man, he skidded logs with mules–he had to stop and see Della. While he was petting her with a hand that was missing the last two fingers, he said, “The problem with the furniture industry ain’t that there’s no wood.” He toddled a bit when he turned around and gestured toward the tree-covered slope behind me. “Just look around you, there’s timber everywhere! What the factories around here ain’t got, is workers. Everybody around here has priced themselves out of a job.”
In the 1830’s, a famous geologist by the name of Ebenezer Emmons explored the area and wrote extensively about the beauty of the mountains. His published stories sparked the beginning of the Adirondacks tourist industry. In the 1850s, so many people were visiting the mountains that railroads were built to bring them. Luxurious hotels and resorts sprang up everywhere. People like the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Carnegies bought vast tracks of wilderness and built palatial vacation homes called “Great Camps.”
By the 1870s, exploitation of the Adirondacks was so out of control that conservationists, journalists and politicians began to lobby the state to save them. In 1892 the New York State Legislature created Adirondack Park.
Even so, when we were there, more than half of the six million acres in the park was private property. So you can’t set up camp just anywhere. As we got further into the park, we were astounded by the increase of “No Trespassing” signs. At one point, Patricia said, “I think it was easier to find a place to camp in Buffalo than it is here.”
One of the major tourist destinations in the park was the hamlet of Old Forge. It’s on the west end of First Lake in the Fulton Chain of Lakes. Tuesday, when we arrived, the lake was covered with boats, and the town jammed with tourists.
Tourism was a year-round industry. Some winters, Old Forge gets over 300 inches of snow. Nearby McCauley Mountain had twenty-one ski trails on it, but the big winter draw were the hundreds of miles of snowmobile trails. Old Forge touts itself as “The Snowmobile Capital of the East”.
The biggest tourist season of the year, however, was summer. Besides all the lakes and streams, Old Forge also had the largest water theme park in New York. “Enchanted Forest Water Safari” had over fifty rides, and averaged 3,000 visitors a day. And Old Forge had lots of shopping. Five miles of Highway 28 was lined with restaurants, hotels and shops. Most of the shops were in old houses whose locations were too valuable to be lived in. They sold everything a tourist would want. The more stately homes, those with verandas and bay windows, were mostly high-end antique shops. While the smaller houses had whirly-gigs spinning in their front yards, with racks of tee-shirts on their porches.
When we got to Old Forge, Officer Brombacher arranged for us to camp in a town park adjacent to the soccer fields. On our way to the park, we were amazed at all of the deer roaming the residential areas. People in Old Forge didn’t have dogs laying in their front yards. It was all deer.
While we walked through Old Forge, Della was on constant deer-alert. She didn’t freak out or try to go to them, like she did the llamas. For her, deer were a bother. The Big Sis didn’t like having them around. If they were too close, she’d snort. By the time we got to the town park, my right arm was covered with mule snot.
We stayed for two nights. Our camp was on the side of a mountain that had been terraced to make way for athletic fields. We set up the tent and staked out Della on the second terrace. Because of all the grass on the mountainside, and down on the playing fields, it was a popular destination for hungry deer. The second sundown we were there, I watched a herd of thirty graze and poop on the soccer field below us. Earlier that afternoon it had been mowed and lined for games the next day. I tried to imagine what it would be
like for some preppy-goalie diving for a save and landing in a pile of deer dung.
Della may not have cared for the deer, but they were fascinated with her. Most checked her out from a distance and then went on about their business. But there was a group of four who had to know more. They came twice during the two days we were there. We could tell it was the same group, because one of them had a limp. She was the first to approach Della.
While the other three waited below, the doe slowly made her way up onto the first terrace. Della’s ears were rigid as she stared at it. When the doe got halfway up the hill to the second terrace, Della let loose with a fierce snort, stomped her right foot and shook her head angrily.
Immediately, the doe whirled around and in gimpy leaps charged down the hill to her companions. They all ran across the soccer field where they stopped, turned and looked back at Della. Within a few minutes they were back on our side of the park, and another one made its way toward our girl. She chased that one off too–only to have them return for another try. This went on for a couple of hours before they wandered off. But the next morning I woke to Della snorting at them again.
“Yeah, the deer can be a pain, but it’s the bears you’ve got to watch out for,” said the old guy at the other end of the bar.
It was Wednesday afternoon and we had stopped at the Tow Bar Inn for a beer after doing our laundry. I had just finished telling the bartender about the deer and Della, when the man down the bar started in with bear stories.
“This morning I had to rebuild the back wall of my garage. One clawed right through it last night to get to my garbage can. Tore up the siding and broke a couple of studs just so it could get in my goddam trash.”
The bartender said, “Didn’t one tear up your garage door last spring?”
“Sure did.” The man slammed his beer mug down on the bar. “Ripped the boards right off it. So I replaced it with a steel door. Now what does he do? Son-of-a-bitch plows right through the damn wall.”
From that point on, it was bear-story-time in the Tow Bar Inn. Nearly everyone in the place had one to tell. Tales of porches demolished, kitchen doors ripped off their hinges and camps ransacked by bears on the prowl for people food.