Summer, 1958. I was in temporary remission from higher education and looking for work. I possessed a copy of “On the Road” that I read rather as a bible. I still have it; it’s about eight feet behind me on the bookshelf. I was driving a 1946 Plymouth sedan with no upholstery, no carpets, and no seats, except for a single seat salvaged from a delivery van.
I was perpetually searching. Gas didn’t cost much, but jobs didn’t pay much. After stints as a receptionist/pay clerk/telephone operator at a job on 43rd Street and a copy boy at the old Syracuse Post-Standard, I decided to try my luck in a small village in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. My prep school roommate had come from there and introduced me to it. To my romantic eyes, it was beautiful beyond belief, with the mountains climbing steeply from the valley floor and a pristine little river flowing swiftly through the village.
It’s also in many ways a very small town, especially after Labor Day, when the summer residents leave their cottages and return to their cities. So you can imagine the stir caused by a genuine beatnik in an old car, wearing a thin, scraggly first beard and with no visible means of support, showing up suddenly looking for work, haunting the coffee shop (where Jeanie occasionally slipped me something a day old), and sleeping here and there in his car (remember the missing seats? Lots of room there for a mattress and sleeping bag). It was clean living on short commons.
Jeanie one day gave me the name of a local contractor whom, she said, she’d go see about work if she needed it. I did, I did, and I got it. $1.35 an hour, 45 hours a week; on Saturday noon, I got, after taxes, just about $45, which was about enough to live on, if I dined cautiously and did my own car repairs. The local garage owner let me use his back bay and tools and sold me parts at just about his cost.
I still needed a place to call home, as it were. When I was working in the woods, I could sleep in the camp bunkhouse and wash my duds in the lake, but between stints I was back in the car. Then somebody suggested a leanto (a three-sided shelter with a fireplace in front, sometimes called, by the uninitiated, an Adirondack shelter) about a mile and a half up a side brook valley, unmarked and unadvertised and thus likely little used. “Just beyond the Deer Brook crossing,” he said, if you look left, you’ll see a very faint trail heading down toward the brook.” I slept there that night, and the next evening brought my gear up with me.
Life there could hardly have been simpler. Balsam bough floor, fireplace (never used; too wasteful), a narrow shelf on one log wall about shoulder-high, used only to keep things up out of the way; it was readily accessible to mice, raccoons, porcupines, and bears. Comestibles in a metal container; a two-burner Coleman stove, a one-gallon white gas can. For sleeping: an Ensolite pad and a war-surplus sleeping bag; clothes in a stuff sack for a pillow. Flashlight for checking out nighttime sounds.
The brook was icy, good for keeping my milk and bacon cold, but almost insufferable for bathing. The stove worked beautifully. Oatmeal or Cream of Wheat for breakfast with chunks of crisp bacon, and hamburger, a vegetable, and instant potatoes for supper, with lots of cold water (readily available).
I generally read till it was too dark, but was far too frugal (a child of World War II) to read by flashlight. Dickens, mostly, and Twain. Thoreau, too, was inspired by his “I went to the woods because…” essay, but found him too preachy. Having just come off 23 years of preaching and rectitude, I found him a poor companion and guiltily took him back out to the library in the car.
The car was parked in a lot a mile and a half from the leanto, and about that same distance from the village. Eventually, old George Lamb lent me the use of a free-standing screen porch – sort of a gazebo – out behind his house, which had the luxury of a cot and a hanging light bulb. One weekend, I actually entertained two Bennington coeds and Phil Everly there, but that’s another story.
I bathed daily in the river, which was a dam sight warmer than the brook, but by November it was getting a bit too brisk even for me. So I found a truly basic apartment for $10 a month with a water heater and began to join the human race.
