Leaky Boots

If you have never been to Northern New York State's Adirondack Mountains, there is one book that will make you want to go there -- but perhaps not in bitter cold January. It is LEAKY BOOTS AND OTHER COMPLAINTS (self-published 2007 second edition) by Carol Gregson. The book contains 44 short autobiographical essays by a sprightly, creative octogenarian who did her toddlering and girling way out west in Seattle. In 1945 she fell in love with and married Albert Allen Gregson, a U. S. Navy sailor. Disliking any variants of Albert and Allen, Carol dubbed him Greg. They moved back east to where he had grown up in a mountainous area north of Albany and west of the Hudson River. Adirondack! *** With the exception of six intermediate years following her husband, children in tow, from one far away place to another in search of more lucrative employment, Carol has lived continuously to this very day in a rugged, heavily forested land intersected by I- 87, the "Northway" connecting Albany to Montreal. In late June 2012 I met Mrs Gregson and daughter Kris, the oldest of the seven Gregson children, at the rotating annual conference of IATC (International Association of Torch Clubs), this year held in Portsmouth, Virginia across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. With Carol and her married daughter Mrs Kris Moss (Kris makes her name pretty much rhyme with "Christmas") my wife and I and others with us from the higher mountains of Western North Carolina engaged in some of the wittiest, most shrewd and imaginatively stimulating conversations we have had in decades. *** Carol Gregson is a wonderful raconteur and autobiographer. If she had stayed on in Seattle, you would still want her, just because she is Carol, to tell you what wherever she chose to live was like. But from 1945 onward her life was and remains the Adirondack Region of Northern New York. And Carol's wry, detailed impressions of the passing parade of bears, skunks, woodsmen and other humans make you want to go there yourself well before you die. *** We are talking about what has been called "a six-million-acre civilized wilderness," with over 3,000 bodies of water and maybe 137,000 year round residents. Young Mrs Gregson's first impression of her husband's ancestral home in 1945: "I found that his mountains were certainly wild and untidy, but they were not very high. ... I was used to a more vertical landscape. On the other hand, I had not actually lived in the middle of it." How did she look to her new mother-in-law when the young couple temporarily moved in? "I was young, pregnant and inept. We more or less circled each other." ***And so it goes. One yarn after another. "Adirondack is the name of a disease. Something on the order of diabetes, perhaps. It's a condition you might not die of, though the complications thereof might do you in." Especially winter, more especially January (Carol devotes a whole chapter to January). And after a very long winter, the ice and snow finally melt. "It is called mud season. ... Boots that tried to be warm all winter turned out not to be water-proof in the spring." It's a long ride just about anywhere: to church, school, junior college. The big not terribly close metropolis is Glens Falls, population 14,700, immortalized for its waterfall veiled cave in James Fenimore Cooper's adventure novel THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Mrs. Gregson devotes three chapters to modes of transport she has used down the decades. *** My favorite chapter is the unnumbered 19th, "It's the Berries." Paragraph by paragraph Carol Gregson tells us of the joys of searching out, gathering and eating blueberries, blackberries (the bears compete with you for them at season's end) and wild apple trees. Then after the first frost she and family sought out cranberries in the bogs and at the very end of season wild grapes. When her woodsman husband was alive (he died in 1973 of his second heart attack), the family was always awash in maple syrup. *** Other topics of LEAKY BOOTS include tourists and their "leaf peeping," square dancing, the family's experience building and running a 100 acre RV and wilderness camping site 1800 feet above sea level atop a steep hill 3 1/2 miles from the nearest paved road. Also we learn why it is not a good idea to dig what proves to be a gushing artesian well on the very top of that hill. Its exposed machinery gets struck by lightning every winter during powerful storms and put expensively out of commission. *** For several seasons Carol worked in nearby Frontier Town, where tourists came to see what life had been like long, long ago in a mythical wonderland only partially Adirondackian, complete with saloons and shootouts in the streets. Her specialty: to display old-timey weaving skills. These she had already mastered. But her tough 99 year old boss lady said she would also have to demonstrate spinning -- so learn it fast! Later Carol was assigned every day at 2:00 p.m. to walk to Frontier Town's saloon where she beat a drunkard with a broom and berated him soundly. "Then he'd wander out into the street and get shot." *** "1973 was the year Greg died." During World War II, Carol had lived with her brother in Fort Worth and did war work. There she learned mechanical drafting. In the Adirondacks the author later became very active in Parent-Teacher work. When she was 50, around 1976, Carol decided that to do more than eke out a living, she would become a teacher -- of art. The chapter "Wheels III" describes some of the toil that went into her enrolling in a community college and then a four-year college farther from home. In 1980 she took her degree in art education. Finally Carol could count on steady income during the long, harsh, very, very cold months of winter. In 1984 she received tenure and her financial future remained modest but for the first time as a widow secure. *** One final thing to note about LEAKY BOOTS: it is illustrated by black and white drawings by the author herself. I counted 45 of them, including two of -- what else? -- a pair of clunky, battered, presumably leaky boots. Read this book for facts and lore of the Adirondacks, for Carol Gregson's winning cartoons and for dry-witted, dead pan, talkative Carol herself, for her husband Greg, her seven children, and for more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than she cares to make individual photo albums of. -OOO-