One could almost feel sorry for them

In the fifties, my father sold stuff on the road: business machines, appliances, shoes, encyclopedias--he could sell shoes to a snake. I lived in a dozen different places before the age of 4, when my family finally washed up in Potsdam, chasing the Seaway boom. When the boom went bust, he saw the North Country as a place to make a stand and put down roots. I'm glad he did; I've never left. Our station manager, Ellen Rocco, came to the North Country in the early seventies, part of the back-to-the-land wave of settlement, and never left. We, and many others here in the rural reaches of the land, form a countercurrent to a way of life in which Americans uproot their families on the average of once in five years. This long-haul view is almost invisible to the media, except as hoked-up Norman Rockwell nostalgia. But there's good news below for those who think NPR suffers from an urbocentric, inside-the-beltway picture of the nation and the world. They're going to have to answer to Ellen!

Tune in, turn under, toss out

Spring came to our house in July, spring cleaning at least. Simple physics tells you that, if more stuff goes into your house than comes back out--eventually the house will blow up. I hate that. Imminent houseguests shamed us into lightening our load just before the beams began to creak. Loading up for a dump run, it became clear that our stategy of letting Darwinian forces shape the ecology of the flowerbeds was less than successful. But the greenhouses are refreshingly uncrowded in July, and anything left to buy has a proven track record of surviving mistreatment. Just as well. If my calendar continues to slip, I'll be transplanting and pruning in February.

"The wood is full of shinng eyes; the wood is full of creeping feet..."

It's getting harder to tell where the Ice Storm of '98 ended, thank God. If you ignore the windfalls choking the undergrowth, the forest canopy is filling in and the big lone trees have lost that clipped-poodle look, caused when only the oldest and strongest, or newest and most flexible limbs survived the waxing days of sleet. They say we have more forest now in the North Country than we did a century ago. Forest fills in behind the failed farms and the deer travel in gangs, stalking SUVs. Bear turn up in the kitchen, raccoons under the Barcalounger. Here's an old poem about second growth forest for the peak of the growing season.

Who's Gruntled?

My brother-in-law likes to talk about the time when his son, then around four years of age, gave him a disconcerting look in the mirror. The boy was dragging his father's heavy briefcase down the hall, shaking his head in disgust, and lamenting over and over, "Work--damn it" Summer brings that attitude out in wage slaves everywhere. Why just this morning Radio Bob asked me to share a tedious afternoon monitoring signal strength in the St. Lawrence Valley aboard his aquatic leisure-research vessel Mona I was obliged to plead a prior work commitment,
"No trunks--damn it!"

A Little Prayer

The 4th of July weekend is when the seasonal migration of Adirondack summer-lovers really kicks in. The community calendar is off the chart with arts and social events--huge quantities of 2-stroke oil and French's mustard are sold. I was a summer person myself--not here--but in southern Indiana, leaving Potsdam for a few weeks each year to visit my father's Hoosier kin. Serious summer out there, triple-digit hot. You could sweat a pitcher-an-hour of sweet iced tea just rocking on the porch, waiting for the evening's thunderstorm to come over the cornfields from Illinois. After the streets dried, crowds of teens would cruise slowly up and down the main drag, raising a bit of breeze at $.30/gallon. So send up the skyrockets again: one for fireflies, one for iced tea, and one for the bobbing boat. And send up a prayer for a future as easy to love as the velvet summers of the past.