It's nice being back in Tupper Lake. Lots of people I used to know in this town have moved away. Some stayed. Some new faces, too. I'm living with my parents until I find permanent work somewhere. It would be nice to afford a decent living here while working per diem jobs, but I'm not too optimistic.
People who live here are tough and smart. Survivors to some extent, every one. There is no such thing as an easy life for any Tupper Laker. People have known hardship and simultaneously felt enough of a connection to the land and people to press on and create for themselves a life, a home, and a family.
Tupper Lake is like one big family. Perhaps a dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless. People here help one another. We are grateful for what we have, not focused on what we don't. People like to have conversations, sip on hot cocoa, bake pies, drink wine, dance, sing, pray, and make love. Of course I'm not making any love. But I suspect everyone else is.
Which reminds me. Last weekend I binged on pizza from Little Italy, a very nice restaurant uptown. I've been juicing all week to pay my penance. I don't mind it. It keeps mornings simple and feel-good.
I'm "working" for a vacation resort in Lake Placid as an on-call sitter. I'm also on a sub call list for schools, but still have yet to get a call. I wake up at 5 a.m., weave in and out of sleep for two hours waiting for my phone to ring with a job assignment, then go back to sleep till 9:00. It's not so bad.
I've tackled the vacuuming and dusting of my parents' entire home. I found areas of dust that were several years old. It was disgusting. My mom has a powerful vacuum with lots of attachments, which I used for vacuuming walls, ceilings, lampshades, floors, heater rims, upholstery, and everything in-between, though my dad and I had to get a wood chip out of the hose at one point and it was quite the process.
My dad keeps the wood-stove burning around the clock. My mother works a home office job and sometimes travels. My dogs nap all day and get antsy for a walk in the mid-afternoon. I've been walking them down the street and letting them run freely on the snowmobile trails around here. I love it. Even when it's cold. You just have to bundle up. And if you gain weight, no one can tell, at least not during the months of November-March.
My mom walked with me tonight and fell and hurt her shoulder. She was in a lot of pain and could barely move, but I told her to try and walk it off. She did, and made it home. She was tough. But my dad is now driving her to the hospital because she can barely move her shoulder.
I've been making peanut butter cookie dough batches and cooking six warm cookies a day since I moved home ten days ago. I also made chicken vegetable soup and then added diced bacon and potatoes. It came out really well. I made so many things actually, that if I listed them, it would be obvious I have a cooking addiction.
I'm very happy to be back, though it was good to escape for a little while. I prefer the people here to most I've met in the outside wider landscape of New England these past five years. People here are just more real. Or maybe they're just more like me. Tupper Lakers are my people. And I love the homes here. There are so many homes in Tupper Lake that have been built with hands and hearts, not by industrial-sized machines and big corporations. They were built on great spreads of land with wide roads and fresh air in-between.
Tupper Lake has very little light pollution, making for exceptional stargazing. It's just a wonderful, frankly overly well kept secret. Maybe I shouldn't be blogging about it so it remains a secret a little longer.
I hope Tupper doesn't get too much more populated. The town is a perfect community size, just big enough for anybody to know everybody through a mutual somebody. If that makes any sense.
The local economy is greatly comprised of care-giving jobs. This says a lot in and of itself about the kind of people that call Tupper Lake home. Towards the bottom of this article I show a picture of a friend of mine who is a fantastic nurse and mother of 3.
There are year-round outdoor activities in Tupper Lake. My current favorite activity is walking on snowmobile trails. I'm thankful to the snowmobilers for padding down a walkway into the woods for me. It's incredible. I've already discovered one secret house that a certain snowmobile trail goes by, set back and hidden from the main road. There are no overground power lines around it, but I did see a strange bright fluorescent light coming from some windows. I wonder if they are having seances, or does a movie star live there? Is this the ex-home of a vagabond or a rich widow who secretly murdered her husband? Is somebody hiding from the government and living off the grid, and maybe has extreme social anxiety? I don't know.
There are tight-knit groups here. Friendships are long-lasting.
You don't have to take yourself too seriously when you grow up in the wood.
You can even move here from Thailand and publish an Asian cookbook. Like my friend's mom did.
You can visit the Wild Center, a museum with penguins and stuff. Or otters. I forget. And they have butterfly hatchings every Fall and you can take your kids or senile grandparents to watch all the butterflies fly away at once. It's beautiful. And they make maple syrup there too, and give demonstrations, and free samples sometimes (just tell the maple syrup dude you know Erin Boyea) and make sure to buy a bottle to support the maple tree industry afterwards.
You can fill up your own spring water from Lumberjack Springs (although this picture was taken from an Amish springs just outside of Tupper Lake, going towards St. Regis Falls):
There are plenty of bars that support live music, if you care to listen. And open mics, if you care to play.
You can air out your dirty laundry and your neighbors won't mind.
This is my friend Christine, who started her own line of Adirondack Bloody Mary Tonic, sold around the country. I used to drink it before I quit drinking, and it does make the best bloody mary's ever! You can get it regular or extra spicy! It's sold at a few stores in Tupper Lake or you can find and order it online as well.
Tupper Lake is great for weddings. The country club is a beautiful venue.
Don't forget to invite me to your bridal shower first!
People are transparent and honest with one another. Families are close. Those few stragglers that don't initially fit in - often find their way in - after being shown kindness by a few Tupper Lake residents. We care for each other. People come here to be cared for and others stay or move here to work in a care-giving capacity. There's a natural symbiotic relationship going on. Care-giving people don't profit in the way modern wall street tycoons do. As promised, this is my friend Melissa, who is a nurse and mom of three. She amazes me. Just look at her smile! She's one of the most beautiful people I know.
We work hard for our money around these parts.
(That's actually money I made when I left Tupper Lake a couple years later and got a teaching job in Rhode Island)
'Round here something radiates. People don't drive like city morons around here, beeping like lunatics and running pedestrians off the road.
Chances are - if somebody did drive like that in Tupper Lake - they'd get gunned down.
Just kidding. Dogs
can run around and children can play in back yards and even ride their bikes down the road and around town. There are a couple prisons here, but security is tight and trust me, if those inmates got out, they'd be running into the woods and making their break to Canada, which is just a hop jump skip away.
Men can go hunting and fishing while women take
care of the kids, although many women work a job and hunt and fish, too. I have a girlfriend who splits her own firewood. Her arms are stacked! It's sad that we've gotten away from that, in society in general. Tupper Lake, a six hour drive from NYC and a two hour drive from the nearest highway, is all water and woods. We're frozen in time, in a time before women had to leave their kids with a babysitter or nanny for 12 hours a day. Lots of family time is had in these parts.
My mother stayed home with my sister and I when we were growing up, so I got some of that delicious spillover from the good old days as well. I got the taste of simplicity: a small television, curly-corded land-line phone, two-dimensional A and B and directional-button-controlled video game and cassette tapes and walkmen and dolls and physical toys and swingset and slides and sleds and snow and dirty knees and long walks to school and chores and allowance and rules and respect and naptime and imagination and Grandma's house. The past seems so distant now. But you can always go back. When you're here. You can taste it if you can remember, touch it if you can dream.
Things can get creepy and mysterious around here, too. Nature really owns this place, and we live the best we can with it. There are organizations and activity groups, several health food stores and small farms and co-ops, church communities, bar crowds, small successful businesses, and happily retired bearded mountain men (and some women). There was a saying when I moved here in 8th grade. I was told: "Tupper Lake: Where the men are men and the women are too."
There are beautiful sunsets, scary winter storms, mountain-lined horizons, snakes, bears, foxes, deer, moose, mosquitoes, black flies, rodents, skunks, frogs, fish, beavers, lakes, streams, waterfalls, and so much more. More animals than there are people, more trees than there are animals, and more oxygen than the entire state of NY can breath. It's fresh air. Robert Louis Stevenson started a movement 100 years ago, getting people from the city who had tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses (probably caused by city air) to come vacation in the Adirondacks. The sick and dying bundled up and slept on cure cottage porches and within months (and sometimes weeks) were healed. Some returned to the city, most did not.
I'm so thankful for this place. There's a harmony here. You learn in school to separate logic from emotions, but that line dissolves when surrounded by the raw beauty and chaos of this town and the wild people who've weather it's storms amidst it.
