After having spent a few days with Dennis in Bainbridge, New York, in Chenango county, I took off on my own, eventually up Route 28 and settled at Old Forge for the first night. There, the photograph of my shadow framed by the posts of the soon-to-be-illuminated sign bearing the silhouette of the forger—what can I say? There are resonances, more or less certain.
The next day I rode north again and claimed a room at the Adirondack Hotel, Long Lake, before continuing on through Tupper Lake, Saranac, Lake Placid, then Wilmington, on up the (ten dollar toll—Is it worth it? Yes! Yes!) highway to the summit of Whiteface. There through the grid of window panes, I could see in one the coin-operated sightseeing binocular facing out towards the marvelous landscape, and in the next pane the girl who saw the scene on her iPhone LCD screen as she took a selfie, the same marvelous vista presumably in the background.
I then went back to Long Lake and the Adriondack Hotel for the evening, for a dinner of barbecued ribs, the special of the evening, with pints of Switchback amber.
The cold I was nursing over the last couple of days became a thing, and I didn’t do a whole lot more over the next days, but I did have a chance to take a pontoon plane ride before heading home.
I keep thinking about the graffiti—the writing in blue on the wall of a garage in Long Lake: PLEASE Bring BACK, which I misremembered several times as PLEASE Bring Me BACK.
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August, 2014: Old Forge, New York; Tupper Lake, New York; Whiteface, New York; Long Lake, New York.