A Memory A Day

My sister and I took a trip down memory lane this weekend. We went up to Indian Lake, a quiet little town in the Adirondack Mountains that our family has been going to for about 70 years. Well, that was one of the debates we had, was about what year we first went up there, because Jeanie said it was about 1945 or so and I said no, because my folks always told me I was the result of a warm afternoon during hunting season when no deer came past the lookout they were at. Which may explain why I love that area so much, and am definitely a ‘mountain person’ as opposed to an ‘ocean person’.
Anyway, in the course of our two + days of reminiscing, we agreed that the trouble with people getting old and leaving us is that then all of their stories are gone with them and that is a shame because the stories are such a nice part of them. So we both vowed to try to write down some of the stories we have and we remember. And, I thought since some are worth sharing, that this would be a nice place to do some of it.
So here goes. Well, no, not here goes, because I have to tell about the weekend. It was Indian Lake’s Winter Carnival. Indian Lake, as I said, is a small town, I’ll guess somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 year-round population, which swells during the summer and hunting and snowmobiling seasons. It’s not a resort, not what I call ‘plastic tourist’, with tacky souvenir stands on every corner, although you can find a few of those in the area stores, along with the day-to-day merchandise the residents need. It’s a quiet little place where people can go and relax, swim, go boating, fishing, things like that – no amusement park, no ‘house of wax’, like Lake George, about 50 miles south. And the mountains all around: Snowy, Sawyer, Blue, Chimney, and so many more. And lakes and rivers and streams – the Hudson River starts a ways north, but there’s lovely little Cedar River, and of course man-made Indian Lake and the Indian River, Lake Adirondack, Abanakee, Blue, and again so many more.
Our family has a plot in the local cemetery, my parents are there and I will probably join them, and I can’t think of a nicer place to spend eternity, in the shadow of the trees, next Cedar River Road – and a little highway where a few trucks will go by to keep me company.
Anyway – this weekend, the carnival – nope, no big parades, although there was a torch run down the ski slope and fireworks there last night (we didn’t stay, it would have gotten us home quite late). But there was a snowmobile poker run and a snowshoe walk, and a book sale at the town hall, craft sale at the American Legion Hall, breakfast at the firehouse both days, pasta dinner at the high school, roast beef dinner at the Methodist church, and time to go sightseeing and visiting in between.
The high point of the weekend, though, seemed to be the Tricky Trays at the high school on Saturday night. If you’ve never done tricky trays: you buy an envelop of slips of paper with a number on them, 10 for $1.00 – of course you need more than one, you need at least 5 and probably more like 10 or 20. It’s all for the Junior Class. Then you join a long line of people winding around rows of tables set up on the gym floor, with things on trays set out on them (the assortment included several spaghetti dinners; pasta, sauce, cheese, a tool box, lots of shampoo and conditioner combos, lotions, fish poles, t-shirts, toys, and so on), pick the ones you’d like to win and put a slip with your number on in a cup or coffee can next to the those. Then you sit down and a couple of the school kids announce the winners and pass out the prizes. And you cheer and clap when someone in your group wins. I didn’t win a thing, but our group got several things including a tray filled with candy bars, an oil change (a door prize, won by a teenager who didn’t live there and doesn’t drive, never mind have a car, so she passed it to the strangers behind us, it’s that sort of an event), and a nice folding camp chair.
It seemed to be that a few people won quite a few things, but overall it was pretty much spread out. The kids doing the drawing were quite entertaining – there were several boxes of homemade cookies (yes, I did put a number in every one of those) and each time they’d announce ‘donated by ‘so-and-so’ – oh, yeah, she makes some goo-ood cookies, you're gonna like these!’
The next day, everyone we went to visit who hadn’t been there wanted to know if we won anything, so it is obviously a big event. Who would have thought. Yup, it’s as cornball as it gets, but it made the class about $2,500 as near as I can figure, and in a town that size, to make that much in one evening is a pretty good deal.
And I bet that some of the things will be back on the tables next year. I may have to go back to see.
As far as the stories go, we went down to the old farm our friends used to own, and sighed at the changes. The house has been remodeled, the big porch across the front is gone, as is the kitchen wing to one side. The old smoke house is still there, and a little chicken coop, but the big barn is gone, victim of a fire many years ago. The foundation is still there, and we had a lively debate about if that was where the barn was, because we remembered it being closer to the house, but turns out we were remembering a long gone garage. We both remembered playing in the barn, I remembered playing in a huge long tank of some sort, and my sister remembered having her first cigarette in the chicken coop. We remembered swimming in Griffin Brook, just down the road, and playing ‘Pooh Sticks’ (and if you don’t know how to play Pooh Sticks, just ask) on the bridge. The brook is grown in now and probably you couldn’t swim in it at all, but it was deep enough then to jump off the bridge and not hit bottom.
They had a collie dog who would go up on the mountain by the farm to get the sheep, and an old horse - who came to live on our farm, along with the remaining cow they had, when the family moved in to town. When I was little, I used to get terribly car sick on the ride up there, but my parents called it ‘horse fever’, they said it was because I was so excited ( was ‘crazy over horses’) that I would see the horse and get to ride him.
Yup, it was a memory lane trip for sure. We stopped a few places to look at the view and I got out and scrambled around on snow banks to take pictures and my sister sat in the car and sketched. Visited our friends there. Ate too much. Had a good time.
We also spotted the old bar that we went to the night before the ‘which mom is my mom’ morning, but that’s another story. And it may take a few days to get to another one, but I will keep them coming as much as I can.