CONTENTS
WINTER 2018 Volume 7, No. 1
ON THE COVER | Kimberly Kedenburg races in the SnoFatShu Dualthon at Winona State Forest. |
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Out & About NNY events calendar
22 Tug Hill Plateau offers Winter Playground
outdoor adventure
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COVER STORY Ice fishing in NNY is a favorite pastime
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NNY Food & Wellness Healthy recipes, meditation tips and yoga practices
exhibit at TIAC
the Plunge 30 Taking Polar Bear dip raises
Online @ nnyliving.com
money for hospital
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Art Feature 34 NNY The ‘Art of Winter’
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[ ARTS. MUSIC. CULTURE. FAMILIES. ]
TIMES FILE PHOTO
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27
Raymond and Eve Whalen Joint Exhibition, Town Hall Gallery, 18 Elm St., Potsdam, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Raymond Whalen is an art educator at Parishville-Hopkinton Cental School. His daughter Eve is studying environmental studies and animal conservation at the University of New Hampshire. She took her first drawing class last spring, which is where the majority of the work in this exhibit comes from. Cost: free. Information: www.slcartscouncil.org
SATURDAY, MARCH 3
THURSDAY, MARCH 8
Basic Yoga in the Galleries with Heather Barkley, Frederic
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Snowmobile Drag Races, Copenhagen Fire Department, 9950 State Route 12, 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The Copenhagen Fire Department firematic drill team, the Copenhagen Cubs, will host two snowmobile drag races this winter, both to raise money to assist with maintaining firetrucks and equipment. Refreshments available. Cash prizes will be awarded to first- and second-place finishers based on the amount brought in per class. Cost: free. Information: 315-767-9208, 315-489-5367 or 315-783-0230.
2018 North Country Heart Walk
The 2018 North Country Heart Walk will be held on April 14 at Jefferson Community College, Coffeen St., Watertown. from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Each year the event encourages community members to get moving to help the community’s health with an emphasis on heart heath. The North Country Heart Walk is a fundraiser for the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. All walkers are asked to set a fundraising goal of $300 and official Heart Walk t-shirts are given to those who raise $100 or more. Incentive prizes are available for participants who raise $250 or more. A minimum of $25 in donations is highly encouraged (the day of the event) for all participants 18 years or older. Event registration, the health and vendor fair, and entertainment will begin at 8 a.m. Check out all sponsors’ areas and enjoy food, heart and stroke health education, survivor celebrations, advocacy, kid’s activities and plenty of fun inside. No dogs allowed on campus. Survivor and opening ceremonies begin at 9:30 a.m. and the walk officially begins at 10 a.m. The walk route is a 1 – 3 mile, non-competitive course around the Fairgrounds and Jefferson Community College. This walk is rain or shine, participants should dress appropriately. To Register visit www.northcountryheartwalk.org.
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CHASING
THE FLAG
North Country ice fishermen do it for the love of the sport
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AMANDA MORRISON n NNY LIVING A tip-up sits undisturbed in the waters by the public docks in Sackets Harbor.
[ NNY FEATURE ]
AMANDA MORRISON n NNY LIVING 26th Annual Alex Bay Polar Bear Dip
AMANDA MORRISON n NNY LIVING (Above) Jodey Mcavoy gets strapped into a harness while dressed as Superman for the 26th Annual Alex Bay Polar Bear Dip.
AMANDA MORRISON n NNY LIVING (Below) Matt Bennett picks up Kristen Epstein, throwing her off of the dock into the St. Lawrence River.
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…WELL, THERE MAY BE A FEW UNOFFICIAL RULES, TOO. LIKE THE COSTUMES. “We encourage creative costumes,” said Andrea Pfeiffer, River Hospital’s director of marketing and community relations. In addition to the aforementioned characters, the River Hospital dips of the past have included Amish get-ups, one Jamaican bobsled team, and the infamous, well-endowed woman in a bikini (“a bit of an exhibitionist,” former organizers and judges say). We’re talking sumo wrestlers, lumberjacks, and the Left Shark from Katy Perry’s Super Bowl XLIX performance. Members of the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team (also known as—you guessed it—the Polar Bears), have also jumped. Then you’ve got your local celebrities; people like Raymond “Smitty” Smith. He’s the longest-running dipper, who selects a costume each year designed to get him across the water unscathed: Evel Knievel. Aladdin. “Smitty” Walenda. Moses. One by one (or all together)—they plunge directly into the river, and claw their way back out of the water as fast as their frigid limbs can carry them. There was the year local favorite “Bud Man” jumped in a union suit, climbed out of the freezing water, unbuttoned the long underwear, and proceeded to pull live bait from inside the suit’s legs. Then there was the SCUBA diver. “Ahead of him, this little girl was dressed as a ballerina,” recalled Karen Peters, former chair of Friends of River Hospital. “After she jumped, she came out and her shoe was missing. He jumped in after her, and he stayed under the water a while. When he finally reappeared, he had her shoe in his hand.” THIS YEAR, THE HOSPITAL IS FOCUSED ON “HOPE AND HEALING.” River Hospital is using funds from the 2018 dip for its Hope and Healing Capital Campaign, an upgrade plan representing the hospital’s most significant renovation and expansion to date. The project, made possible through grants and matching funds, maps out a
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ANTHONY MACHIA n NNY LIVING Blake Dolan, Snow Ridge ski instructor, assists student Mason Lee down the hill.
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[ NORTH COUNTRY NOTES ]
Mapping Out The Past
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By NEAL BURDICK
've always liked maps. When I was a child growing up in Plattsburgh, my grandfather Burdick would sit me down with a card table between us, set a globe on it and quiz me on the nations of the world. “Spain!” he would call out in his stentorian voice, curved-stem pipe clenched in his teeth, and it was my task to point out that country for him. For some reason, I always got lost trying to find Brazil, one of the largest countries in the world, but had no trouble with the likes of tiny Luxembourg and Monaco. These early home-grown geography lessons are one reason why I've always nailed categories like “European Countries” on “Jeopardy!” even though they are so different today, sixty years later. (Lest you think I brag, note that if “The Oscars” or “Pop Culture” appears, I'm toast.) “Gramp,” incidentally, grew up in Lewis County and was the first in his family to go to college. He became a doctor, then an administrator in the state mental health system, posted at a succession of institutions throughout New York. But he retained affection for his native north country, where he returned whenever he could to pursue his passion, fly-fishing. One of my most prized inheritances from him is a set of early United States Geologic Survey (USGS) topographic (aka “quadrangle”) maps of the north country, accumulated, I imagine, as aides in his fishing expeditions. Published mostly in the “nineteen-oh-ohs,” they cover almost the entirety of the northern tier, from a line roughly connecting Lowville to Raquette Lake to Ticonderoga, north to the St. Lawrence River and the “Dominion of Canada,” the maps say, sixty years before Canada gained its independence. Printed on flimsy, deteriorating paper that Gramp bound
securely into a sturdy leather cover, they are destined one day for Blue Mountain Lake's Adirondack Experience (formerly “Museum”), where they can be digitized or otherwise preserved for future generations to peruse, ponder and learn from. And what can one learn from a sheath of 115-year-old “topo” maps? Superficially, how much our territory has changed across the intervening years. But deeper than that, they reveal how differently people work, play, and educate and transport themselves today compared to the turn of the 20th century. For one, they tell us farms were ubiquitous in the early 1900s. Today, where once farmhouses, barns and outbuildings stood and fields stretched to the horizon, ancient lilacs ringing a cellar hole may be the only hints that people lived and labored and loved and died there, while the land has reverted to brush and woods. These old maps indicate that agriculture is no longer the dominant enterprise that it once was in the north country, at least concerning land use. There were also more schools in those days – every half-dozen miles on country roads, often at an intersection, stood a one-room schoolhouse, identifiable by its symbol: a black square with a peaked gable and a flag. They were also usually identified by name: School No. 9, or So-and-So Corners School. One of my favorites is Podunk School, near Trout Lake in St. Lawrence County. The dawn of centralization was half a century in the future in those days, but by now most of those iconic old schoolhouses are gone from the landscape. Some remain, repurposed but visible reminders of another era. And there were more railroads – lots more. The North Country was woven together by a web of train tracks back then, especially in the Adirondacks, where logging lines penetrated even the most remote sections; the maps prove the mountains were not the silent, empty
forest we think they were. And in the valleys, trains were how people got around. You could go from Heuvelton to Chateaugay by train. Three different railroads served Ogdensburg from three different directions. Most of those tracks have been torn up now, their roadbeds given over to power line rights-of-way or snowmobile trails. The same can be said for towns – there aren't so many now. One map alone, the 1905 St. Regis quad, shows three communities that no longer exist. Derrick, Bay Pond and Brandon all had stores, hotels, sawmills, schools, train stations and thriving populations. But they vanished as soon as the timber on which they depended was reduced to stumps and slash. They are now barely ghost towns, wide spots on lonely one-lane dirt roads to scattered hunting camps. The maps show that transportation has changed in other ways too. There was no road from Tupper Lake to Long Lake, but one could ply both lakes by steamboat – the routes appear on the maps. There's more. Mines that flourished then have been abandoned. So have many local roads. Lakes weren't ringed with camps; folks didn't recreate that way in those days. There were no hiking trails circling Cranberry Lake, no ski trails on Whiteface. Lake Placid, soon to become a world-renowned resort, was a sleepy lumber town. There was no St. Lawrence Seaway; the river was narrower and full of rapids and islands that were drowned by the hydro dams of the 1950s. Nor were there any bridges across it; the maps show ferry routes instead. Back then, there were lots of country churches, but no numbered highways. A century later, it's nearly the other way around. Old maps say a lot about how we once lived. Study some in a library or online sometime. You'll be surprised.