Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (13 page)

I paddled north to the top of the lake, around the bay with the boat launch and the one next to it, until I ran out of camps. At this point, I began to paddle in a southwest direction across a big open section of the lake, that would take me between Dry and Goose islands (
both private, which for no logical reason, bothers me more than landlocked private property … jealousy maybe
), and bringing me to Green Island, where I would be camping tonight.

Green Island is shaped like a piece of candy corn, laying on its side, with the pointier end facing towards the western shore (
where most of the camps are
). The DEC campsite was on the eastern end of the island, with a nice protected beach and cove for landing and launching, flat spaces for plenty of tents, and nice rocky faces for sitting and sunning (
if that’s the sort of relationship that you have with the sun. I avoid it like it’s trying to kill me, because it is
). I had seen upon launching from my hidden spot in the woods that this spot was occupied, which didn’t matter to me as I was planning on stealth camping anyway. I paddled around the north side of the island to the pointy tip, checked to make sure that the wooden rib-bones of the old sunken rowboat were still there (
they were/are
), and made for shore. There’s a nice spot to picnic at this end of the island, but that was not my goal. As soon as my feet were on rock I chucked my pack up into the woods, and then followed with my canoe and paddle. The Hornbeck Blackjack is dark grey in color and once I was fifty feet up from the shore, I was certain that nobody would see it. I went back for my pack and headed up to the high point of Green Island. The whole south side of the island has cliffs, and at some point in time, people must have snuck in and cleared a spot at the top of one of them and made a bench of logs and this was my chosen spot for the night.

Nobody knew where I was at the moment (
the parking spot of the Porsche suggested that I was on Follensby Clear Pond, which had dozens of legal campsites … not to mention the stealth sites that I often used
); Hope and Dorothy were safe from risks that I couldn’t see or even imagine (
although Barry could
); I had a couple of irons in the fire (
and was hopeful that both Frank and my contact at the Adirondack Museum, Terry, would open some informational doors for me by tomorrow or the next day
); and I was getting to camp while arguably working at the same time … life was pretty good. From my spot up in the highlands of Green Island, I could see all of the camps along the western shore of Upper Saranac, some from my hammock through the tree with my 10X monocular, others with a short walk across the island to another rocky highpoint.

I reach
ed into my pack and got my iPad, which (
intentionally or not
) Apple sized perfectly to fit in a gallon sized ziplock baggie (
the freezer-weight bag, in combination with a swaddling of fleece, rendered it ready for camping and rough handling
). I leaned back into the hug of my hammock, and really looked at the pictures of Deirdre Crocker for the first time. Human men and women would notice her beauty and poise and confidence; the pictures said that with my initial flip-through … she looked symmetrical and unmarred by scars/blemishes, and healthy and happy and as though her appearance mattered to her (
she didn’t evoke any response in me beyond that, which is par for the course with me
). To prep for this session, I had done some background research into clothing and jewelry in the late 1950s. My research and interpretation of the pictures on my iPad indicated that the nice clothes and jewelry, were slightly nicer and more expensive and fashion-forward than her peers in the pictures. Indeed, looking at the group pictures more closely on a third time through the ‘folder,’ focusing on postures and facial expressions (
admittedly not my strong suit, but I’m an eager student
) and relative proximities, she could arguably be said to be the alpha female in her group, any group that she established herself in. If I were to look at similar pictures from my past, I would have always been the one taking the picture, or off in a corner facing the wrong way, or at the extreme edge of a back row in organized pictures … outcasts understand social structure and hierarchies, even if we don’t understand the forces that shape them very well.

I had by now memorized the features of Deirdre and her contemporaries in the other pictures, and felt confident of being able to identify them in other settings/scenes, which had been my original point in acquiring them, so I now turned my attention to the camps that I could see from my hammock. One had workmen and owners/renters at it (
each party scrupulously avoiding the other)
and the other had just workmen, seemingly occupied with tasks all over the camp (
possibly getting it ready for the arrival of the owners
). The camps were similar in layout to Topsail, many buildings spread out facing the water and in orbit around a main lodge; by changing my angle of observation slightly, I could see between the front row to some of the support and infrastructure buildings beyond. It initially struck me as odd that workmen had parked their trucks in back, in the huge hangar/garage in one camp, while in the other, the trucks were all over the place. Eventually it clicked that the trucks were out of site in the camp inhabited by owners/renters, and out in plain sight in the otherwise empty camp.

I rolled out of my Grand Trunk hammock (
which is lighter/smaller than my Hennessy mostly due to the lack of insect screening ... I could get away with it as we were enjoying a shockingly light summer in terms of biting insects
), shoveled in a few mouthfuls of Tyler-Kibble, emptied and then refilled my Nalgene container from the hanging filter, and headed across the island to spy on some other camps for a bit. The other camps that I could see seemed much the same as the first two, although only one of six had trucks out and working in the camp (
I threw this back into the hopper at the back of my head, hoping that information gained further down the road would relate to it in some meaningful way
). Having put in a fun day of nearly no work, I stealthed my way back to camp, listening to the people camping less than 200 yards from me, enjoying the feeling of being hidden, found a good tree to pee against, and got ready for some quality hammock-time.

I went to sleep after loading up on more kibble and water, and reading with my iPad (
which allowed me to avoid using a headlamp, bonus stealth points!
) and didn’t wake up until the first light was creeping into the sky at nearly five the next morning (
significantly longer than my lifelong habit of cat naps, but longer periods of sleep had been the norm in the last year
).

Follensby Clear Pond boat launch, Lake Clear, 7/16/2013, 9:48 a.m.

By the time I had eaten some breakfast (
which was the same as dinner in this case, kibble and water
), and broken camp, there was light slanting across the water of the lake from the east, between the mountains. I made my way back down to my canoe and the shore as quietly as possible, and slipped into the water, quiet as the wisps of fog rising from the warm lake in this cold morning. I paddled back across to the spot I’d entered the lake from the day before, unseen except by a pair of loons working the shallows in the first morning light. I pulled my boat up into the woods, far enough back into the State Forest Preserve land to be invisible from the water, and walked out to Moss Rock Road again. From there I walked down to the boat launch for Follensby Clear Pond, where I’d left Mike Crocker’s car. I decided that I had been too paranoid the previous afternoon, when walking through the heavy brush and downed trees the entire way (
apparently there are shades of useful paranoia, and then a line where it is just too much
); I was surprised to see one of the Adirondack Watershed Institute Stewardship Program interns already at work so early in the morning.

The Adirondack Watershed Institute Stewardship Program, run by Paul Smith’s College, places interns at boat launches and on the top of St. Regis Mountain to track usage numbers, inform the public about invasive species, track and map loon nesting, and assist with trail maintenance. I often run into them and they’re always friendly and helpful. I asked the young lady about her early start, and she seemed surprised to see me (
of course, most people arrive at her station either by canoe or car, so it made sense that my approach on foot would startle her
). We talked about the futility and expense of divers harvesting invasive plants from one part of a lake, but not a connected pond and stream system that feeds into it, and the number of people using this launch as opposed to the old launch at Spider Creek … this launch is easier and nicer and puts you more in the middle of the pond more quickly than the old one, but more than a decade later it’s still ‘the new launch.’

When I walked back to unlock and throw my stuff into the Porsche, I saw/felt her watching me walk back through the sparsely filled lot, and was a bit suspicious/surprised to see her make a call when I stopped by the 993. The Porsche was bumping its way out of the parking lot a minute later (
the low-slung car had to straddle dips in the road that I just ignored, or didn’t even see when driving the Element
). She returned my wave, but seemed to have her mind on other things, and was messing around with her clipboard and writing stuff down as I pulled out, although when I gave a last look in the rearview before turning left and towards Saranac Lake, it looked as though she was watching again, and speaking into her phone again.

I drove up past all of the great camps that I’d paddled past the day before, only much quicker, and completely unable to see any of the buildings or people, or the secrets they might hold from this side. A beauty strip of trees blocked the camps from the road (
and vice versa
), the trees and space absorbed the sounds and sights that might dispel the illusion of enjoying Adirondack great camp life of 50 or 100 years ago. As I neared the point where I knew the top of the lake was, I entered a series of turns that were both fun and challenging in the Porsche; and, channeling Niko’s father as best I could, I accelerated through the turns, rather than braking as my instincts told me to do. When I got through the turns, and was slowing down a bit to cross the golf course (
I worried each time about a retiree intent on his play driving his golf cart straight into the road
), I noticed a beat up white van closing on me, jouncing and bouncing as it came out of the last of the turns that dumped it onto the relative straightaway of the golf-course crossing, and right behind me. The van began flashing, as if for me to pull over and stop.

As soon as I saw it, I pressed the gas to the floor. I reconsidered a half-second later as the 400 plus horsepower that the 993 could deliver pushed me back into my seat. I brought the speed up until I was clearly pulling away from the van, and then considered the road ahead with my built-in mental map. The turn I wanted was less than a mile away, so I tried to open up the distance between the van and I a bit by downshifting and using the gears to help me grab the road with the car’s nimble power. I hit the right-turn signal only moments before turning left onto Fish Hatchery Road, then made another left onto a dirt road leading back into the woods, to a series of little ponds. I straddled the potholes and dips and mudholes in the road as best I could, but I heard the bottom scraping a few times.

A part of me had hoped that the van might miss the turn, but it was too easily visible (
as was the speeding Porsche)
and I could see it coming after me; only now I had just four choices, all of them dead ends. As I bumped across the train tracks, I could have turned either left or right down dirt paths that followed the tracks for miles, but even my Element had trouble on these paths, so I went straight. My next choice point was a fork in the road, the left led to Little Green Pond and the right would take me to Little Clear Pond. I had only a split second to think/decide, and picked right, to Little Clear Pond; it was, in my experience, marginally busier, and the road would be easier on the Porsche.

Having decided, I rocketed down the dirt road, way off on the left edge to avoid the biggest dips, but still having a jouncy and noisy ride. Barry was waiting by a pickup at the far right hand end of the parking lot when I jounced in, and I noted that there was nobody loading or unloading boats for a trip. I pulled in by Barry and grabbed a pair of the countermeasures that I’d picked up the previous afternoon; Barry sneered when he saw them.

“Tyler, what’s with the junior-varsity solutions buddy? Don’t you remember last year? How did your shoulder (
where Justin, Barry’s partner, had shot me
) feel all last winter in the cold?”

“Shut up Barry, it’s possible that I have a broken tail-light or a tire going flat, or he needs directions. I don’t want to hurt someone who may need my help, or be trying to help me.” This noble line of reasoning died in my throat as a trickle, as the van parked sideways across the entrance to the parking lot, and the driver got out, wearing a balaclava that hid his face entirely.

“You were saying?” Barry said. “I bet you wish that you’d grabbed what was behind door number two now, don’t you.” As he said that I looked on the floor behind the driver’s seat at another of my self-defense ideas/items, and indeed wished that I’d grabbed it.

“Well, this is what we’ve got, so get ready,” I said, to myself really, as Barry had nothing to worry about from this guy alive or dead.

“What did you say, Mr. Cunningham?” said balaclava-guy, who was now about thirty feet from me, and must have heard part of my discussion with Barry. It was not particularly heartening that he knew my name … it eliminated the possibility of a mistaken identity (
although that had, admittedly, been a long shot even before he opened his mouth
).

“Nothing. What do you want? What can I do for you?” I asked, in a voice that barely betrayed the adrenalin
e thumping through my heart and brain and lungs … I felt that every part of me was pulsing/jumping/humming in time with my heart, which was way up over 100 bpm (
I forced myself to stop panting for a few seconds to count and extrapolate … 132
).

“You’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Stirring things up. What you can do for me is leave this shit alone! Forget the Crocker bitch
and leave town.” I wondered briefly if he was referring to Deirdre or Kitty, but realized that it a) didn’t matter much, and b) would just push an angry masked man further if I asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“What?” the masked man asked me, clearly ready for some other, perhaps movie-macho answer/repartee.

“Okay. I was doing this as a favor for a friend, but I don’t need this. I’m out.” I shrugged and half-turned, as if to get in my car, not entirely sure if I meant it ... hoping that I didn’t.

“Stop!” he shouted (
argh, I thought to myself, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Barry smile and nod, either knowingly or approvingly, I couldn’t tell
). “The time to get out painlessly was before this morning, before you started asking questions. Now you get a stomping.” Barry smirked a bit at this, and pantomimed stomping and grinding something beneath his heel, then shrugged as if it were bush-league in the world of thuggery. The man started towards me, cracking knuckles and shaking out kinks in his arms and shoulders as he closed the distance between us.

I tried to peer down various probability hallways for a better way of getting home without getting hurt, couldn’t see one, and so pulled both pins and yelled as loudly as I could, “You’ll never take me alive … GRENADE!!!”

I’m not proud of it, but I was reasonably certain that it would give him pause for a second while he sorted through the shouted and visual input. There were objects bouncing and rolling towards him on the uneven ground, and after years of movies where people sometimes have grenades, he might have even convinced himself that I had thrown a pair of grenades at him. He reversed his progress and stutter-stepped back a few half paces, while his brain chewed on all of the data; that was exactly what I had been waiting/hoping/praying for … I turned and ran at full speed into the woods and away from him.

Of course they weren’t grenades, I got them at Aubuchon Hardware (
not my shady underground ex-military contacts, which parenthetically, since these are parentheses, I wish that I had … not for grenades, but because it’d be cool
). They were a pair of personal safety alarms, rated to scream in alternating tones and pitches at 130 decibels; I heard them begin to shriek before I made it into the woods. I had been expecting the noise, and it still came close to scrambling my thoughts (
which were simply ‘run’
); I was betting that even if he had figured that they weren’t the exploding type of grenades, he was trying to fit his brain around the new information involved with sound grenades. There were people around somewhere … at the campsites ringing Little Green Pond, at the hatchery, hiking the trails all around us ... somewhere. He was a man in a mask, with his van blocking a parking lot; he had new problems besides me, and I was willing to bet that he wouldn’t try to catch me, since I had to have at least a five second head start, was quick and wiry (
compared to his strong and brawny, which is awesome for stomping, but not so good for running people down in dense woods
), and wasn’t doing anything wrong in the eyes of anyone who we/I happened to run into.

Just to be on the safe side, I kept running and dodging my way through the woods for a few hundred yards before I stopped. By then he had silenced the noise-grenades (
by stomping I was willing to bet
), and it was quiet enough in the woods so that I would have heard his sounds of pursuit, if there were any to hear … there weren’t. I thought that I could hear the sound of glass breaking, then a car starting and eventually receding. I (
my aching lungs and wobbly legs, really
) decided to wait in hiding for a few minutes before heading back to the parking lot.

“Boy, Tyler, that was really impressive how you ran away like that. Really taught him a lesson he’s not likely to forget. Back in the ‘Sand Box
,’ we called that ‘retreating with extreme prejudice.’ Hah!” I doubted that Barry had served in the military, but kept it to myself, as I didn’t feel like trying to score points off of my imaginary friend just then.

“Barry, shut up.” He did, although he was still chuckling to himself every few seconds. “Did I get out
of that shut-ended situation without getting ‘stomped’? Was I able to avoid shooting anyone? Do I live to fight another day? I’m going to consider this a win, and if it will make you happier, I’ll go with the heavier countermeasures next time … if there’s a next time.”

“There will be. Mask-boy came ready to play. So are we going to go back and ask the lake-greeter about who she called?” I had gotten there as soon as the van came into my field of vision, so it only made sense that Barry had as well.

“Yup, but I bet either of us can think of ways that it was done that won’t leave a trail back to him. Still though, better to try and fail, than to not try, and miss something easy.”

I walked slowly back, as quietly as I could manage (
which honestly, was pretty quiet ... what I lack in brave and strong, I make up for in quick and quiet
). I backtracked the dirt road a bit, looking for the van or the guy, and could see neither; I snuck up on the parking lot, and sat watching it for twenty minutes … nothing. I broke cover and made cautiously for the Porsche, ready to run again if needed (
or even if need was hinted at
); it wasn’t.

The man and van were gone from the pond (
the fact that this sounded like the beginning of a nursery rhyme didn’t make it any less gratifying or satisfying … or confusing
). Playing the scene back in my head, I could now see the faded printing on the side of the van; it had been one of the junkers from Hickok’s Boat Livery, roughly 1.6 miles away. His vans schlepp people renting his boats all over the area, and are ‘borrowed’ by locals wishing to prank Hickok, because of his well-known policy for keeping keys in the machines. They’re so run down and well-known in the area, that nobody would worry too seriously if one went missing for a couple of hours during some summer day; when locals see the vans left somewhere, they simply call Hickok’s and tell them where to pick it up. My assumption was that following up on the van was a non-starter, but I made a mental note to get there sometime soon, today if possible, to speak with whoever had been around.