Operation “Purge”

Posted On March 31, 2025

My 2025 Mission

As with most of my missions, it arose from a mix of epiphany, frustration, cold calculation, determination and boredom. It was late February. With hopes and plans for winter snow’s exit and spring’s at some point arrival seeping into my brain, I suddenly realized I had a dilemma. Due to another hard north country winter’s mechanical mishaps and snow driven demands, I was now the proud owner of not one but TWO snowblowers. As a result, in order to accommodate their combined garage space demands, my push mower and hose reel cart had taken up residency in my basement. That was okay temporarily, but I was not even going to attempt horsing a snowblower into my basement for storage, and dragging my mower and hose reel cart up and down the basement stairs umpteen times a week wasn’t going to fly for two minutes come summer. My problem was simple. I needed to develop a plan for creating more garage space.

I visually scanned my garage and thought things through for a moment. We have an old storage shed out back in the yard. I had North Country Storage Barns deliver it some thirty plus years ago, shortly after we bought our house. Because somehow “putting a new roof on the shed” never quite made it to the top of my project “to-do” list, the shed roof now leaked like a sieve. It had become a disgusting mouse house, its wooden construct molding and rotten. So, my immediate plan was to clean out my garage, then clean out the shed, then store the things from the shed that I wanted in the garage temporarily while I hired someone to tear down and replace the old shed.

I gave my new mission a codename: “Operation Purge”. As Operation Purge slowly took shape, Phase I was clear: “Garage Clean-Out”. It’s amazing how much useless crap one man can accumulate. For starters, I had twenty empty plastic five-gallon gas cans. My Y2K stockpile. Along the way in Phase I, I managed to throw in a good bit of unused/broken/obsolete junk from my basement. I wasn’t listing it on Facebook. I wasn’t asking “Does anybody want this” (Because someone’s answer to that question will invariably be “Yes!”. The problem is that particular someone never actually comes and gets it!). The only exceptions I made were for two heavy duty grooming tables and three of our seven dog kennel cages. (Since we have just one dog, seven carry kennels seemed excessive). All of those items went to our local dog breeder.

Over my dead body were we having a garage sale. (If anyone ever sees Dick Monroe having a garage sale, please take me out behind the barn & put me out of my misery). By the time Phase I was finished, I had taken six pick-up truck loads of miscellaneous crap to the dump. So, with “Operation Purge: Phase I” complete, I now had room in my garage to temporarily store all the miscellaneous garden machines, tools and crap from my woebegone worn-out excuse for a shed.

Thus, as February turned to March, Phase II: “Shed Replacement” kicked in. However, as I perused my accumulated shed inventory, I quickly realized that most of it was garbage. There was very little inside the shed that I actually needed. So, Phase II morphed into “Shed Elimination”. Instead of replacing the shed, I would simply empty it out and hire someone to tear it down and haul it away. A new shed was going to cost me upwards of five grand. “Operation Purge” had taken me to a point of epiphany. Why make that investment? I didn’t need more space. What I truly needed was less stuff.

So, the three machines my shed held had all worked when I last put them away over a decade ago, for what I had no idea at the time was the last time I would ever use them. There was my dad’s old manually bar lubed Homelite chainsaw that I kept around as a back-up, a wheeled Craftsman string trimmer, and an ancient lead gas rototiller that my mother rescued from a lawn sale half a century ago. I smiled as my mind’s eye reminisced about all the times I could hear my son muttering to himself on hot summer days as he wrestled those beasts across our food plots back when we first cleared them. I can still hear him yelling to no one in particular. “This is stupid!” “I just want to be done!” I never let him know I was listening. The only time I went out to see what he was up to was when things went silent. That was when I figured my twelve-year-old really had trouble. Those three machines went to a family friend who repairs and sells small engines. I hope he is actually able to get them all back into operational order and get a few bucks for them.

There were some hand tools in the shed that I actually wanted. Those migrated to my newly cleaned out garage. By the time my pick-up truck tally had hit thirteen loads, everything else inside the old shed had gone to the dump.

Once the old shed was cleaned out on the inside, my Operation Purge focus turned to Phase III: “Exterior Shed Clean-up”, which quickly morphed into “Complete Property Clean-Up”. As I planned and piled each dump run’s load, I amazed even myself as to how much junk I’d through the years accumulated. Amongst that collection of assorted stuff were two unused boats.

One was a blue and white youth kayak I had bought for our own kids at one point. I think it only ever actually got used a few times. Once our kids had all long since outgrown it, it took up residence upside down out behind the old shed, where it had become nothing more than an elaborate mouse house. My wife and I cleaned it up good. I bought a new plug for the front as the other had disappeared, and we bequeathed it, paddle and all, to our nephew. I hope he enjoys it.

Then there was the old aluminum jon boat that had sprung leaks in about fifteen places. I smiled to myself as I dragged it up to the house, recalling the time I took my two daughters duck hunting on Perch River Refuge. I stood in chest waders cooking bacon & eggs on my Coleman stove, waiting for a shot at passing ducks while they sat huddled under a blanket in that boat waiting for breakfast.

Then there was the time I took my then three-year-old son RJ duck hunting. He sat in the boat while I stood next to it in chest waders in Perch River. A drake mallard circled in and hovered over my decoys. I was afraid to shoot because right at that moment, RJ had stood up and was peeing off the back of the boat.

Then there was the time, probably the last time that old jon boat was ever afloat. I had rowed it down through South Creek into Middle Saranac Lake and our family’s annual Bull Rush Bay camp. One afternoon, RJ and I took it down the river, leaks and all, fishing. By that time some of the leaks where pop-rivets had come out were like little mini boat fountains. A pair of ECOs came upriver and accosted us. RJ was fifteen at the time. Those two ECOs must have been bored. They kept asking us the same questions over and over, ” I thought you said you didn’t have any fish. What’s that line in the water?” (That’s a bow line officer.” “That one’s a stern line, officer.”)

They tried fifteen ways from Sunday to find something to ticket us for. “What’s your story again?” They kept asking RJ, in their desire for his license. “We told you already, Officer. He’s still fifteen. He doesn’t need a license.” I’ve always wondered about that day, and what inspired or why it took two ECOs on a DEC speedboat to harass a father and son out for an afternoon on the water. That may have been the point in time where I began to embrace my identity as an Adirondack Outlaw.

That old jon boat, along with an assortment of miscellaneous metal shedside poles, pipes, fencing, rusted out farm equipment and tools that I had salvaged as “treasure” back when I first researched and excavated the old farm lot next to us, all amounted to such an impressive collection that it was going to take me at least four pick-up truck loads to get it all to the dump. And that was not even including the jon boat! So, I dug out an old business card I had kept from my old vacant farm lot clean up days and dialed the number. Sure enough, the number was still good. Tim from “Scrap Dogs” showed up the next morning with a big trailer and took all of it, even the boat.

All in all, during “Operation Purge”, a trailer load of scrap metal got hauled away. All of my old wooden lawn furniture and a big picnic table went up in a bonfire (BEFORE this spring’s NYS burn ban, of course), and sixteen pick-up truck loads of junk went to the dump. The last load, completing my property cleanup, consisted of five waterlogged old danger buoys that I had at amassed into a buoy collection, convincing myself it was “pond art”. That collection had started with one. Somehow word got out that “Uncle Dick likes old buoys”. Before I knew it, my brother and nephews were bringing me every waterlogged Middle Saranac Lake buoy that had broken free of its mooring.

The final Phases of “Operation Purge” involve making a plan (one that does not involve my garage) for our family’s old golf cart, along with hiring someone to tear down and haul away what is now nothing but an empty old shed.

I had no idea when I started just how massive a mission “Operation Purge” would become. Sixteen pick-up truck loads, one “Scrap Dog” trailer full of scrap metal, one big backyard bonfire, and two boats.

I can’t help but think that someday, when my time finally comes, my children will thank me.

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Until Our Trails Cross Again:

ADKO