Category: Essays & Stories

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....

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’...

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...

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,...

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...

      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...

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....

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...

On the northern shores of Middle Saranac Lake Between Weller and Eden Rests a remote rock rimmed boulder bay Biding time’s weathered seasons Beyond lonely wail of coyote and loon Made legend by Reben Beware Hungry Bay’s windswept whitecap howl Stalking doomed souls it feasts on **********      It...

When the Laws of Man and Nature Collide in the Mountains      The year was 1983. July, to be exact, as a young man’s lone figure eased into an overgrown Adirondack trailhead parking lot and turned off his truck’s engine. He did a quick personal pat down; keys, pocket-knife,...