Where we breathe

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

The world looks back

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

A child's garden

These days my gardening efforts are pretty much reduced to weeding the perennials that survived another winter and the predation of the deer. Life in Millennium 3 seems to leave less and less time for playing in the mud. But I'm finding that each year of neglect brings my yard more closely into line with what I remember from my childhood. The hardy survivors seem to be those favored by earlier generations of North Country gardeners. The honeysuckle and mock orange will probably outlive me. Day lilies and bearded iris grow where they've always grown, and have even spread to the old compost pile where I dumped the spade-damaged thinnings. Exotics and annuals have long gone extinct, but the lily of the valley and the myrtle undergird the thick old lilacs each season. The peony transplanted from my grandfather's house sprawls each spring in aromatic disarray.

Dutchman's Pipe shaded many a North Country porch

The elms of my childhood are long gone, supplanted by maples that struggle now with their own blights. Much else that once shaped the North Country yard is also gone rare. As a once-voracious grazer of my neighbors' bounty, I can tell you that style has changed from "eating apples" to flowering crab apple in most places, and that the ubiquitous twin patches, one for rhubarb and one for raspberries, are now a rarity in town. And in the age before air conditioning, a vine-shaded front porch was the summer living room. Now only the Potsdam Food Co-op seems to sport the huge-leaved vine (I forget its name) that once broke the summer sun all over town. And I miss other old-fashioned favorites—few plant gladioli and more, or the simple miniature cabbage roses--modest, but hardy.

But then there was also that rash affection for japonica, or "bamboo"—three and four generations later, we still pay the toll on our knees, digging out the roots that extend without end—who knows—all the way through the earth to their Pacific island home. Long after we're all gone, japonica can fight it out with the cockroaches.

All in

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.

Modest fare

It may just be my nicotine-withdrawal munchies, but the topic of food seems to be everywhere lately: Hidden Kitchens specials, the steady stream of food book stories and recipes, the Very Special Places series that has highlighted traditional diners, ice cream and hot dog stands. Also, my lunch hour is approaching soon, but not soon enough.

One lack I have noticed in the food discussion so far has been tavern fare. Time was when beer was considered an essential part of a balanced lunch. In Potsdam, in the '60s and early '70s, the best place for the balancing act was Blanche's, a modest green brick establishment tucked between the Roxy Theater and the Arlington Hotel. Blanche and her brother Harold ran the show, dispensing draft and bottled beer along with the core elements of tavern lunch--burgers, dogs, chips, pickled eggs (AKA "boneless chicken dinner"), and French fries topped with a mysterious fluid made from "brown gravy base." I've never been sure what kind of creature a brown is, but this concoction constituted half of many 50-cent lunches during my lean college years.

The other half consisted of a "frosty," which was one pound of draft beer tapped off into two pounds of glass mug that had been chilled to near absolute zero in the freezer behind the bar. Oh yeah. One day my friend Paul walked up to the bar and asked Harold for one. He drew the brew and said, "That'll be 25 cents." The guy standing behind Paul asked for the same. Harold said, "That'll be 30 cents." "Wait a minute--you charged him a quarter!" he protested. Harold gave the bar a thoughtful wipe and told him "Price had to go up sometime."

Floating world

A placid stretch of the Raquette River, Sugar Island Flow, runs just behind my place and I have not been out on it since a falling tree during the great Ice Storm tragically snapped the back of my old canoe—a bizarre yellow and black job my father had "customized" by replacing the cane seats with an untidy cat's cradle of nylon clothesline, then shored up the rotted gunwales with split PVC pipe bolted through the hull. I've long been in the market for a low-budget replacement.

In discussing the possibilities, I quickly ran into the phenomenon of kayak evangelism. I have nothing against kayaks—they’re perfect for walrus hunting. Next time I go, I'll wish I had one. But kayakers shill their chosen craft with fanatic devotion. They natter on about hydrodynamics, ergonomics, maneuverability and speed. Yawn. If I was in a hurry, I’d take the car. No whitewater thrills for me--rapids are a nice place to put in above for a picnic. I can gnosh a little and watch the crash-helmeted kayakers suck Kryptonite-colored energy drinks from their CamelBacks while battling back up the drops by brute force and iron will. Then I might catch a little nap.

So despite the arm-twisting, I've settled on another canoe. It may be a sun-faded, scraped-up red slab of petrochemicals, but it will keep me in and the water out. It will go upstream under a moderate supply of muscle power, and will drift back down powered by nothing but the grace of God. As soon as I mail this out, you know where I’ll be.

Food sports

After six weeks of kitchen renovation, I had revisited most of the North Country restaurants in easy commuting distance, and was heartily sick of dining out. Not that you can’t get good food in the North Country, it’s just that most of the really top-end cuisine comes out of personal kitchens. Especially since fast food chains have ground down the heights formerly, if erratically, reached by the mom and pop establishments that used to abound. You can still transcend the merely nutritional in places like Donnelly’s, the seasonal ice cream stand near Saranac Lake that gives me an excuse to visit the Adirondacks as soon as Memorial Day rolls around, or the pie palace of Keene Valley--the Noon Mark Diner. And there are bright spots still throughout the region. But the average is—pretty average.

While I’m sure that Boston (where I spent the weekend) also has its share of average food, the good stuff is pursued with religious zeal. Tracking down the best little spots is the urban substitute for bloodsports—long walks, long waits, high overhead: nothing deters the enthusiast. And everyone has their own secrets, the way a fly fisherman knows the river, or an elderly uncle hides the spot where he always bags his buck. But the rewards! Divine chicken-potato curry consumed beneath a benignly beaming portrait of the Dalai Lama. Top cooks from a hundred nations appear to have washed ashore in the harbor. For Mother’s Day brunch we took a long ride on the T and waited over an hour for a table in Zaftig’s, a Coolidge Corners deli. The line outside was so impressive, I thought it was a bus stop. You could build a shrine to the crunchy and creamy potato pancakes, the melt-in-the-mouth pastrami. I could go on, but I would want to be alone with my memories. Now that I’m home, I’m thrown back on my own devices, albeit with a much classier kitchen. And now that I have been to the mountaintop, as it were, it’s harder to please myself, like picking out a tune on the guitar after listening to a Django Reinhardt CD. I know how it is supposed to be.