I have a confession to make: I’ve been up here for a week.

I could make several valid excuses for not posting sooner. I could, for example, insist that my negligence was only really a lack of opportunity — that I’ve been too busy working on Camp. I labored through lunch the past two days and only stopped for dinner at 8:30 last night, but this excuse fails under its usual response in my household: You have to make time. And I could have.

Or, I could draw excuse number two: I have no internet access here. (Or, you know, cell coverage or TV [which has been rather liberating] or dishwasher or washing machine [which has been decidedly not.]) This is true, but should not have prevented me from posting for so long. In fact, I stopped at the McDonald’s in Malone — the nearest town, almost half an hour north — soon after I drove up here, while I was out on a supply mission. (They and the library are the only two places with free, relatively reliable wifi.) I’ve made two trips into town on various errands since then. I could even have resorted to that well-tried option, the sympathy-provoking, “It’s taken some time to settle in, and to start feeling comfortable being up here alone.” This could conceivably be contrived to contain some connection to truth, but does not really represent the real reason.

Okay, I have a second confession to make: I actually wrote (almost) an entire first post soon after I got here, and promptly abandoned it. That post is why I haven’t been writing. Originally, I convinced myself the way to approach this blog was to detail my work, adventures, meals, trivial daily activities, local weather patterns, and frog sighting counts in writing, right here. This is (more or less) what I started forcing out with that first post: an account of my trip up and thoughts and feelings about it. Sure, it was well-written. There were even some witty little gems in there. It read too much like a college application essay though, and I could tell it would take much too long to cover everything. After a while I realized I was approaching the writing the wrong way. What guided me to my ultimate blog-plan were the following two epiphanies:

1. I like writing about whatever the hell I want. As my new policy, this will lead to sporadic posts that usually have something to do with my adventure, but may occasionally be farther out than a tripping unicorn on a spacewalk.
2. I’ve been taking pictures of pretty much every interesting thing I do. Provided I have enough bandwidth or patience to upload them, a well-captioned photo album would actually make a pretty great chronicle of my activities. Therefore, I expect most of my writing to come in this form. Plus, I (lazy bum that I am) find explaining photos easier than starting features from scratch. (It works so well, in fact, that I sometimes end up venturing into genuinely interesting topics by the sheer momentum of my freshly catalyzed imagination, much the same way small rocket motors can tip a spacecraft into a 25,000 mph plummet toward the earth’s surface. Actually, speaking of atmospheric reentry, I read about this cool thing……)

Anyway:

If you want to know what I’m up to and see what I’m working on or doing, check out my photos. If you enjoy my writing, follow my posts and check out my photos. (Yes, it’s that simple!)

And so, because I trashed my original method of delivery, a brief description of Camp and my objectives this month are in order:

“Camp” is my family’s 120 year old cabin in the northern Adirondack Mountains. We have a barn-red main house with a wrap-around screen porch and green roof, a matching dilapidated little guest house (which hasn’t been used in thirty years), a teal ice house with peeling paint, a rusty “tin” roof and a charming 10 degree slant into the mossy ground on one side (the building is mostly below-ground – they used to cut blocks of lake ice and store them in wood chips. They’d have ice for months after the snow melted. Pretty freaking awesome…) and a red and white boathouse (we’re on a channel between two small lakes) with a badly tilting dock. My parents have owned the camp since 1989, and (on account of its deep roots in my memory and the rustic, natural serenity of its surroundings) it is dearer to my heart than any other place. The nearest real town (the only things in the village by the lake are a single restaurant and a chapel [which is where I’m getting married someday]), Malone, is almost half an hour north. It’s actually outside the Adirondack Park, and you can see Canada (and the St. Lawrence Seaway) from McDonald’s. My parents have always offered the same explanation for our distance north of basically everything: “We spent every weekend that year looking at camps farther and farther north… Until we found the ones we could afford.”

This past spring, while I was considering my summer job options, Dad mentioned to Mom one night that I could spend time working up here if I didn’t land anything worthwhile. It made sense to him; we had been putting off a few big jobs here for too many years, and the place desperately needed some work. To Mom it was strictly a back-up plan, but she made the mistake of mentioning it to me later that week. I immediately set my mind on it. It seemed like the perfect thing to do with my last flexible summer: the ultimate adventure, and the ideal right of passage for an eager, hands-on, mountain-loving kid leaving home. Pretty soon I began my standard course of parental crazy scheme introduction: a couple weeks of casual mention, with increasing reference in the context of definite summer plans. Then I began introducing logistics. I’d be driving the minivan, taking Mom to an appointment or doing errands (chances to build a surplus of good karma are as important as the driving practice itself in these delicate transitional periods). We’d be turning a corner in silence, and I’d break it with something like, “So I could drive Grandma’s car back from Cleveland when we visit them next week, and we could drop it off again on our way out to Stanford. Then Dad could use it for work, and I could take his car up to Camp…”

She’d glance at me, and I’d make sure I kept my eyes out on the road. Then she’d turn her head back and say, almost to herself, “But if anything happened to Papa’s car, they wouldn’t have hers as a backup…” The remark was music to my ears. She dismissed my idea, but she didn’t say anything about my plan to go up to Camp. Dang, I thought, it’s really gonna happen.

My main goals home-repair wise are to repaint the guest house and to fix the dock. I’ll cover the details later, but suffice it to say these two things alone will keep me busy (and, if I succeed, save my folks at least as much money as I’d have made with a real job). The guest house is going to take (by my estimate) over a week just to scrape, and will require full precautions against the spread of the lead paint dust I’ll be creating. Then come several coats of paint… The dock, which used to be supported by four oil drums filled with concrete and four horizontal 700lb train tracks, is now held only by the rusting rebar and a small bit of concrete in one of the drums (the drum, concrete, and rebar have crumbled from the waterline of the other four, on account of years of repeatedly freezing lake water and constant immersion). This means 1400+ pounds of steel and wood are resting precariously on a few spindly metal bars and a couple inches of old concrete surrounding them, and I have to engineer a system to install new supports while the dock is in place, with no expensive machinery, and with the water level at full height (they used to let water out at the dam on the smaller of the two lakes every fall so people could have jobs like this done). If I can manage to complete both of those tasks by the close of my stay, the boathouse is in dire need of attention as well. Most of the paint on it (what is left, as least) is even older than that on the guest house, and the reinforced concrete foundation on one side has (like the dock supports) crumbled almost all the way through. If I can’t get to this, it will have to fall to someone else very soon, lest our slowly sinking building end up like those silent, abandoned ruins on the more remote shores of our lakes.

Since I got here I’ve kept myself busy with smaller jobs, and I’ve just started the scraping. To keep up with my work, be sure to check out my photos and read the captions. Stay tuned!

-Wyatt