Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

“I hear you,” I replied; and I did. I never wanted to own a gun, or shoot someone with a gun (again). But the truth is that my investigations often make people angry, and they’re usually angry at me (which isn’t fair/just/right no matter how you look at it, because I don’t start people’s problems, I just happen to be good at sorting problems out). While I didn’t want to shoot/kill anyone, I also didn’t want anyone to shoot/kill me, which presented a challenge: how to balance risk and protection in a manner that kept me out of the hospital/morgue and also out of jail (for weapons charges, the state of New York has strong feelings about firearms and other lethal devices).

  “I’ve got a few ideas to bolster the door-bar, and help out when I’m on the road or camping also. Thanks, Barry,” I said, and closed my fake cell phone, thus ending my real conversation with the ghost of a man I’d killed 10 months earlier (the curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’ is attributed to the Chinese, although I’ve been unable to verify its origins when, over the years, my life has been ‘interesting’ enough to warrant giving the curse some thought).

  Barry gave me a desultory ‘yah’ and a wave over his shoulder as he wandered back towards the waterfront, muttering something about hot waterskiers, and I drove back into town, parking behind what I thought of as the SmartPig Building (although it housed other people and businesses as well), and walked up and into my own personal batcave.

  Hope seemed happy to see me, but gave lots of sniffs and judging looks around my hands and face and shorts; she could smell my lunch and was jealous. Hope and I met under adverse conditions made manageable by shared donuts and jerky and canned beef stew and ice cream; her love of junk food is an integral part, possibly a cornerstone, of our relationship, and she sulks when I indulge without her. I managed to talk her out of a snit with the offer of a walk, sweetened with a slice of Velveeta cheese before we headed out; the combination was apparently irresistible, and we were friends again. I took a nearly freezing Coke from the Coke-fridge, scratched Hope’s butt, and stepped lightly down the stairs after her stiff and slow thumping steps.

  Walking down the (thankfully Irish Setter free) street, I got a few ideas for death/injury/crime/jail preventative methods of making myself a bit safer if things took a violent or angry or aggressive turn. I didn’t think that they would, but neither had I thought that the previous year, until I was already neck deep in trouble; so I decided to make the small investment in time and money, and hoped that I would feel foolish about it later.

  Hope pulled at my arm, intent of getting to the dead sunfish that someone had left by the water as we walked through Riverside Park towards the boat launch, drew me back, reluctantly, to her. It didn’t make sense to me that someone would/could hurt my ancient and gassy beagle mix, but I tend to underestimate people’s capacity to act illogically (and violently) in almost any given situation, especially stressful/criminal ones. It would probably be safer for her if she stayed with Dot and Lisa for a few days, but living with Hope is not always a picnic; she hates the cats in their apartment, and has been known to get between the ladies in bed and then growl at Lisa, wanting Dot all to herself. The real reason for my reticence was twofold I suspected: I didn’t want things to get out of hand like they had last year, and I didn’t want to be alone. Neither of those were good/logical enough reasons to warrant putting Hope in danger, so after some quality growling at geese, and a quick off-lead swim, we headed back to SmartPig, where I had decided to call Dot and ask about a sleepover for Hope (at least for a few days).

  Dorothy said that she and Lisa would love to have Hope come and stay for a few days (an exaggeration, I’m certain), but hinted during our conversation that she wanted to help me out, especially if it got ‘tricky.’ It made me feel good that she wanted to help … less alone. It also reinforced my decision to avoid putting her in harm’s way, especially before I knew which direction harm/danger/threats might come from this time around.

  I packed Hope’s bed and toys and bowls and a five-gallon bucket of kibble for her visit. For myself, I grabbed a Bushnell monocular that I like to bring along for scouting paddling/camping options, a gravity-feed water filter which is basically a bag that you hang on a tree and let gravity pull the water through a filter … (pump water filters are for chumps, I either use the gravity filter or Clorox at 3-4 drops per liter), a gallon Ziploc bag with Tyler-kibble (which is enough for 3-4 days, more if I didn’t mind going hungry, which I do, so I don’t), and shoved six ice-cold cans of Coke into the stuff-sack … they wouldn’t be cold for long, but the lake would keep them cool-ish, and the worst Coke I ever drank was pretty good.

  We were in Dorothy and Lisa’s little house out near the TLAS, conveniently located for the shelter, but not much else (beside “The Red Fox,” a restaurant that always feels just slightly too fancy to me, but has great fresh bread that they bring out in tiny loaves, throughout your meal if you eat as much, and tip as well, as I do). “Tyler, promise me you’ll give me more to help out with than babysitting Hope. That mess last year was cool; scary, but cool. I know you’re nervous about me helping with your stuff, but don’t be. I want to help, especially because it’s Kitty; her help over the years kept a hundred dogs like Hope alive and fed and warm.”

  This last made sense to me, so I acquiesced. “If something comes up that you can help with, and I’m reasonably certain that it won’t put you and/or Lisa and/or Miss Hope at risk, then I’ll get in touch.” I bent down to give Hope a kiss, and Dot surprised me with a hug, and whispered into my left ear to be careful. I told her that I would and walked out and away from two of my favorite lifeforms on the planet.

  I stopped twice on the way out of town, at Blue Line Sports (which is the only store for sporting goods in town) and at Aubuchon Hardware (which isn’t the only, or even the best, hardware store in town, but I’d seen the items I wanted in there a week ago, so I knew they would have them). I opened one of the Cokes, and downed it while speeding by the hospital facing Lake Colby. I was tempted briefly to buy an ice cream cone at Donnelly’s, but was able to resist the pull, knowing that their one flavor (‘you choose the size, we’ll choose the flavor’) was ‘nut surprise,’ my least favorite in their flavor rotation. I made the turn onto Route 186, and found myself keeping an eye on my rearview mirror. The concept of ‘a tail’ in the Adirondacks is almost silly, as there is generally only one way to get from anywhere to anywhere else up here; if I picked up a tail, losing it would be quite a chore. At any rate, I didn’t see anyone following me, and just in case they were really good, I neglected to use my turn signal when I made the right-hand turn into the boat launch for Follensby Clear Pond (something that would have disappointed both Mickey and Niko’s father, who had taught me to drive … a skill my father thought useless when living in Manhattan).

  There were some people struggling to get their canoe and gear from an overnight trip out of the water, and into/onto their cars; I offered to help, in the interest of helping to empty the parking lot. Once they rolled cautiously out and onto Route 30, towards Tupper Lake and points west, I crossed the street and ran into the woods before anyone came along the road from either direction. It was somewhat nasty bushwhacking through the woods: buggy and sweaty and scratchy, and the confusion and tangle of dead and down and new and growing trees did their best to pull my backpack (containing my camping gear and supplies) from my shoulders. Giving in to my paranoia, and feeling rightly/properly foolish about it at the same time, I stopped every few minutes to listen to the dense woods behind me for anyone following; there wasn’t … it would have been impossible for anything other than a blackfly to move through those woods without making enough noise for me to hear.

  I moved west parallel to the road, but staying roughly thirty feet in, and eventually found my canoe and paddle, just where I’d left it. I debated making two trips, and decided that I had no desire to cover this ground any more than was absolutely necessary. I found that I could balance the Hornbeck canoe on my head, and make reasonably good (not fa
st, but faster than I had thought) time towards the lake. In about the same amount of scratches and bug-bites (a better measurement than time when traversing the deep woods) as it had taken me to find the canoe, I found the lake … admittedly a bigger target. I stopped to breathe for a minute, and to definitively kill a deer-fly that had been harassing me inside my canoe-hat for the last few hundred yards, and then climbed into the water.

  I paddled along the shore northerly for a bit, and then pulled out, so that I was fifty yards out, which seemed right to maximize my view of the camps and buildings and occupancy levels, while minimizing the notice of people on the docks and boathouses and walking around the camps. One quarter of the camps that I passed seemed occupied only by people working on the buildings in some fashion. I had learned from my conversation with Mike Crocker and with others, over the years, that the great camps always have one or more roofs in need of repair, as well as frequent plumbing and electrical needs, stemming largely from their age and the seasonal nature of their occupancy. Some great camps are jointly owned by a group of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who originally built the camp; these collectives often rent the camps for much of the summer to support the maintenance and tax costs of owning a piece of Adirondack history. Others, like Topsail, are still held by the patriarch or matriarch of the family, and are often visited by the owners only during the long-preferred month of August (a part of my back-brain wonders if this will change as climate change continues to rampage across the globe, including this corner of the Park). I tried to guess which camps were peopled by renters versus owners, doing repairs versus opening camp for the season, and which were some combination; it was interesting to try, but I kept finding myself back in the Topsail boathouse, living the life of people who could/would stay for a month or more, like the Crockers.

  I paddled north to the top of the lake, around the bay with the boat launch and the one next to it, until I ran out of camps. At this point, I began to paddle in a southwest direction across a big open section of the lake, that would take me between Dry and Goose islands (both private, which for no logical reason, bothers me more than landlocked private property … jealousy maybe), and bringing me to Green Island, where I would be camping tonight.

  Green Island is shaped like a piece of candy corn, laying on its side, with the pointier end facing towards the western shore (where most of the camps are). The DEC campsite was on the eastern end of the island, with a nice protected beach and cove for landing and launching, flat spaces for plenty of tents, and nice rocky faces for sitting and sunning (if that’s the sort of relationship that you have with the sun. I avoid it like it’s trying to kill me, because it is). I had seen upon launching from my hidden spot in the woods that this spot was occupied, which didn’t matter to me as I was planning on stealth camping anyway. I paddled around the north side of the island to the pointy tip, checked to make sure that the wooden rib-bones of the old sunken rowboat were still there (they were/are), and made for shore. There’s a nice spot to picnic at this end of the island, but that was not my goal. As soon as my feet were on rock I chucked my pack up into the woods, and then followed with my canoe and paddle. The Hornbeck Blackjack is dark grey in color and once I was fifty feet up from the shore, I was certain that nobody would see it. I went back for my pack and headed up to the high point of Green Island. The whole south side of the island has cliffs, and at some point in time, people must have snuck in and cleared a spot at the top of one of them and made a bench of logs and this was my chosen spot for the night.

  Nobody knew where I was at the moment (the parking spot of the Porsche suggested that I was on Follensby Clear Pond, which had dozens of legal campsites … not to mention the stealth sites that I often used); Hope and Dorothy were safe from risks that I couldn’t see or even imagine (although Barry could); I had a couple of irons in the fire (and was hopeful that both Frank and my contact at the Adirondack Museum, Terry, would open some informational doors for me by tomorrow or the next day); and I was getting to camp while arguably working at the same time … life was pretty good. From my spot up in the highlands of Green Island, I could see all of the camps along the western shore of Upper Saranac, some from my hammock through the tree with my 10X monocular, others with a short walk across the island to another rocky highpoint.

  I reached into my pack and got my iPad, which (intentionally or not) Apple sized perfectly to fit in a gallon sized ziplock baggie (the freezer-weight bag, in combination with a swaddling of fleece, rendered it ready for camping and rough handling). I leaned back into the hug of my hammock, and really looked at the pictures of Deirdre Crocker for the first time. Human men and women would notice her beauty and poise and confidence; the pictures said that with my initial flip-through … she looked symmetrical and unmarred by scars/blemishes, and healthy and happy and as though her appearance mattered to her (she didn’t evoke any response in me beyond that, which is par for the course with me). To prep for this session, I had done some background research into clothing and jewelry in the late 1950s. My research and interpretation of the pictures on my iPad indicated that the nice clothes and jewelry, were slightly nicer and more expensive and fashion-forward than her peers in the pictures. Indeed, looking at the group pictures more closely on a third time through the ‘folder,’ focusing on postures and facial expressions (admittedly not my strong suit, but I’m an eager student) and relative proximities, she could arguably be said to be the alpha female in her group, any group that she established herself in. If I were to look at similar pictures from my past, I would have always been the one taking the picture, or off in a corner facing the wrong way, or at the extreme edge of a back row in organized pictures … outcasts understand social structure and hierarchies, even if we don’t understand the forces that shape them very well.

  I had by now memorized the features of Deirdre and her contemporaries in the other pictures, and felt confident of being able to identify them in other settings/scenes, which had been my original point in acquiring them, so I now turned my attention to the camps that I could see from my hammock. One had workmen and owners/renters at it (each party scrupulously avoiding the other) and the other had just workmen, seemingly occupied with tasks all over the camp (possibly getting it ready for the arrival of the owners). The camps were similar in layout to Topsail, many buildings spread out facing the water and in orbit around a main lodge; by changing my angle of observation slightly, I could see between the front row to some of the support and infrastructure buildings beyond. It initially struck me as odd that workmen had parked their trucks in back, in the huge hangar/garage in one camp, while in the other, the trucks were all over the place. Eventually it clicked that the trucks were out of site in the camp inhabited by owners/renters, and out in plain sight in the otherwise empty camp.

  I rolled out of my Grand Trunk hammock (which is lighter/smaller than my Hennessy mostly due to the lack of insect screening ... I could get away with it as we were enjoying a shockingly light summer in terms of biting insects), shoveled in a few mouthfuls of Tyler-Kibble, emptied and then refilled my Nalgene container from the hanging filter, and headed across the island to spy on some other camps for a bit. The other camps that I could see seemed much the same as the first two, although only one of six had trucks out and working in the camp (I threw this back into the hopper at the back of my head, hoping that information gained further down the road would relate to it in some meaningful way). Having put in a fun day of nearly no work, I stealthed my way back to camp, listening to the people camping less than 200 yards from me, enjoying the feeling of being hidden, found a good tree to pee against, and got ready for some quality hammock-time.

  I went to sleep after loading up on more kibble and water, and reading with my iPad (which allowed me to avoid using a headlamp, bonus stealth points!) and didn’t wake up until the first light was creeping into the sky at nearly five the next morning (significantly longer than my lifelong habit of cat naps, but longer periods of sleep had
been the norm in the last year).

  Follensby Clear Pond boat launch, Lake Clear, 7/16/2013, 9:48 a.m.

  By the time I had eaten some breakfast (which was the same as dinner in this case, kibble and water), and broken camp, there was light slanting across the water of the lake from the east, between the mountains. I made my way back down to my canoe and the shore as quietly as possible, and slipped into the water, quiet as the wisps of fog rising from the warm lake in this cold morning. I paddled back across to the spot I’d entered the lake from the day before, unseen except by a pair of loons working the shallows in the first morning light. I pulled my boat up into the woods, far enough back into the State Forest Preserve land to be invisible from the water, and walked out to Moss Rock Road again. From there I walked down to the boat launch for Follensby Clear Pond, where I’d left Mike Crocker’s car. I decided that I had been too paranoid the previous afternoon, when walking through the heavy brush and downed trees the entire way (apparently there are shades of useful paranoia, and then a line where it is just too much); I was surprised to see one of the Adirondack Watershed Institute Stewardship Program interns already at work so early in the morning.

  The Adirondack Watershed Institute Stewardship Program, run by Paul Smith’s College, places interns at boat launches and on the top of St. Regis Mountain to track usage numbers, inform the public about invasive species, track and map loon nesting, and assist with trail maintenance. I often run into them and they’re always friendly and helpful. I asked the young lady about her early start, and she seemed surprised to see me (of course, most people arrive at her station either by canoe or car, so it made sense that my approach on foot would startle her). We talked about the futility and expense of divers harvesting invasive plants from one part of a lake, but not a connected pond and stream system that feeds into it, and the number of people using this launch as opposed to the old launch at Spider Creek … this launch is easier and nicer and puts you more in the middle of the pond more quickly than the old one, but more than a decade later it’s still ‘the new launch.’