Last Call

Posted On October 7, 2025

With a month long string of record breaking temperatures, low water extremes, droughtlike conditions, and a fire hazard driven state wide burn ban, as I climbed from my old friend the Saranac River’s waters after an unseasonably warm October afternoon bottle dive, I couldn’t help but wonder.

Was this some sort of climate anomoly?

Or was it…

Last Call.

In Saranac Lake, in the ’70’s and ’80’s, to a young teenage outlaw Dagwood’s Pizza gunslinger in a town where the bars closed on the weekends at 3:30am, Last Call meant one thing: Better make damn sure you’ve got two slice pies hot & ready to go & at least one more in the oven, ’cause the evening’s exceptionally well lubricated late night crowd is about to start pouring in. With the Harrigan sisters as managing mentors, at 3:30 a.m., Saranac Lake’s last call social scene flourished, with Dagwood’s at its hub.

I worked those late night weekend Dagwood’s shifts from my junior year of high school until I graduated from college. After the last wobbly patron had finally been chased out the door so that we could complete Dagwood’s pizza oven cleaning & closing, some mornings found me at my kitchen table at 5 a.m. breakfasting on a quart of milk and half a leftover slice pie. Other mornings found me coming in a bit wobbly myself after hooking up with some friends and hitting an after party.

It was a wild time for young outlaws growing up in SL. By the time I graduated college and pinned on my 2nd lieutenant’s gold bars, my friends & I had killed enough kegs, slammed enough ‘bamas & downed enough Kamikazes to raise the Saranac River six inches.

But none of that was neither here nor there as I prepared to slip into the Saranac River, in search of a grail, on a sunny Sunday morning in early October, a week shy of my 62nd birthday, in the fall of 2025.

Prior to this year’s October dive, the latest I’d ever slipped into the water to bottle dive the Saranac River was early September. However, with record breaking temperatures predicted and strikingly low water levels, I decided that this year’s conditions presented a golden opportunity for me to explore some of the river’s deepest current driven holes that on past dives had eluded my grail searching grasp.

As the early afternoon air temperature climbed into the 80’s, with the river’s low levels, I was finally able to to safely search my Saranac River friend’s remaining secrets and eventually, score one last bottle.

There was a time during my many river dive forays when I’d routinely leave the water with 10-15 of these beauties. But after a decade of dives and over 200 bottles, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that at this point in life I may have finally & forevermore fished this grail hole out.

So, there I was, bottle diving the Saranac River, in 80 degree temperatures, in October. The water was cold, but not prohibitively so. Before the shivers set in and my limb movements slowed and got clumsy, I was able to functionally bottle dive for nearly an hour, no wet suit required. I didn’t need any scientific studies or emperical data to tell me something about this year’s weather was distinctly different.

After I dried myself off, I found a sunny spot in Triangle Park,

where I sat and took in some survivor’s nourishment across the street from my heart’s boyhood home.

Whilst I did so I noticed that a big shoreline silver maple that I had grown up with was now leaning precariously over my lifelong river friend’s rapids, clearly in peril and on it’s last legs.

As I sat being one with the moment, soaking in boyhood memories, basking in this day’s record breaking October sun, I couldn’t help wondering:

Was the tree’s plight a harbinger?

Was I experiencing some sort of climate anomaly?

Were there more Saranac River grail finds in my future?

Or was this…

Last Call.

**********

Until Our Trails Cross Again:

ADKO