When We Don't Know What To Do

What do we do then?

Last March, in a moment of mental exhaustion from book writing and my last semester of grad school, I opened google maps and zoomed in on a tiny hamlet an hour south of my house. Once I found what I was looking for, I loaded up my snowshoes and poles, donned a hat and gloves, and set off.

At home there were just a few inches of snow still on the ground and temps were in the low 40s, but as I drove the snow grew thicker and thicker and the temperature dropped. We live right on the edge of the Adirondack Park, but the hamlet to which I was headed is in the thick of it. It borders a large lake with a particular eco-system, and if you’ve read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she talks extensively about the work she and her students do on and around this lake. It’s one of the quieter parts of the Adirondacks, especially in the off-season. There is no off-season in the more northern and western part of the ADKs because it’s winter sport country and home of an Olympic training center. The only reason people come to hamlets like the small southern one to which I was driving is because they have quiet lake houses or because they’re studying moss or fungi or particular species of lichen.

I park my car in front of one of the tiny one-stop shops that proliferate vacation towns, this one empty except a cheery-eyed man wearing a flannel shirt and puffy vest. Otto’s Abode has been a million things but for now they call it a “store/visitors center/performance + exhibition space its four creators view as a collaborative public art project.” If you know the ADK, you can envision exactly what it looks like down to its wood cladding and balsam smell and proliferation of convenience items mashed up against fine art. It is the quintessential ADK store.

I tell the proprietor where I’m headed and ask if I can leave my car parked there. He asks if I brought snow-shoes and I say I did, and that’s it. I set off, crossing a tiny bridge over a mostly iced up river.