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Reflecting on today, plotting tomorrow.
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Author: rdmonroe5

Speaking In Tongues

An Adirondack Outlaw’s fight to give his survivor’s journey a voice. “You will most likely never speak again.”      Those words were spoken as part of my Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer surgeon’s final grim prognosis.  Just before they put me under and wheeled me into the operating room. Just...
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How Much Wood?

It’s An Age-Old Question: “How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood?”      It’s a mystery I’ve been pondering since I was a lad.  I’ve dedicated a lifetime of serious research and study seeking to answer to this question. I’ve chucked my own fair...
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2022 Mountains & Valleys

My Adirondack Outlaw 2022 Year End Review      2022 was certainly a year of high peaks and steep valleys. Some days I felt like I had just successfully constructed and climbed my own mountain. Other days I felt like I’d just been run over thirty-six times by a snowplow....
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North Country Stylin’

To Hell with Diamonds & Pearls When a North Country Man Loves a Woman He buys her Patagonia And Snowshoes ********** Until Our Trails Cross Again: ADKO Wife Stylin’...
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Lake Effect Life

Surviving a Christmas Blizzard North Country Style A Lake Effect Snowstorm Flashback           I’m a north country boy. I’ve lived here all my life. I grew up in Saranac Lake, served my country with 10th Mountain at Fort Drum, where I met and married my wife. We bought our...
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Rogue Ranger

How an Adirondack Outlaw survived U.S. Army Ranger School      Whether it was TV series like “Hogan’s Heroes”, movies like the “The Dirty Dozen”, “The Great Escape”, or the comic book heroes I worshipped, my die was cast at an early age.  From matching wits with the local ECOs,...
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Sharpshooter

Never captured. Still believed to be at large. Outstanding warrants remain in two counties, both Essex & Franklin. Still sought by police. Last seen in and around the village of Saranac Lake. Goes by the Alias “Sharpshooter”. This Polariod image is his only know photograph. If spotted, contact authorities...
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Call of the Crow

      He sat perched on a flat, sloping, moss-covered boulder at the edge of a cliff, overwatching the hardwood forest below him. The hunter scanned predawn silence through late October’s mid-fall morning mist.      The year was 1981, more than a decade before cell phones. A time when hunters...
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An Adirondack Outlaw Announcement

I’ve been selected! I was just notified. My story “Olympic Outlaws” has been selected by Harmonny Performing Arts Community to be read aloud at their upcoming event at The Sackets Harbor Ballroom on November 16, 2022! As a cancer survivor with no tongue, this is especially meaningful to me....
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Demon

He’s out there, hunting.      My hands are shaking right now. I don’t know where to begin.  My heartbeat is racing. I fear he is following me. I can’t catch my breath.      It started innocently enough. I had no warning. Well, maybe I did. I don’t know. I...
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