Twenty years ago there was many storms in my life, Hurricane Katarina was just another news story I was listening to in my 1998 Ford Ranger pickup truck I was driving back up to college in Plattsburgh after a weekend down with my family in Westerlo. Mostly I remember how pricey gas had gotten after the storm – as high as $2.20 or $2.30 a gallon in some of the off-the-beat gas stations – and how the news coverage was about how bad the President George Bush’s response was to the hurricane.
I made the drive between Westerlo and Plattsburgh many times in college. The vast Adirondack forest, rolling through the Northway in my pickup with the cowboy hat on the dashboard. First passing Lake George and the last 24 hour gas station, watching the miles tick upwards on mile marker along the highway then eventually reaching the High Peaks Exit then Four Mile Meadows, little more then a place of interest in my mind due to it’s name on map but for decades now just seen as a flat convient place to lay down miles of concrete and asphalt before reaching Lincoln Pond and the long drop to Lewis. Sometimes when I was trying to be frugal, I’d knock the truck out of over-drive and coast all the way to down Lewis. Then there that little hamlet the Northway roared through with that old house with burn barrel outback.
I honestly could not remember if Katarina was first or second semester as I was finishing up my college experience at Plattsburgh State during those two semesters, but it appears it was in 2005 so it would have been the first of two. The pungent smells of silage and manure reaching the fields near Adirondack Farms in Peru and then Apple Orchards. Soon to be at Plattsburgh, it’s just a flat roll down the road at this point. There was that mobile home with a burn barrel in Peru right along the Northway, they later started to get paid trash service that second semester I was at Plattsburgh State.
After getting kicked out of the University at Albany I am sure many people had my doubts I would ever go back to college or finish up my degree. But ultimately I did, even though I have to admit transferring in so much credit to Plattsburgh State and doing the internship meant that I barely got to know the school. But I did spend a lot of time on the backroads, though admitly finding good places to camp near college wasn’t as easy as you’d think. Plattsburgh advertises having a lot of connections to the Adirondack Park, but let’s be honest, it’s 30 miles outside of it and there isn’t as many places to roadside camp in that part of as other parts of the park.
Time always strikes me as a bit strange. I remember a few years back when the first batch of people born after September 11, 2001 became old enough to vote. Seemed werid, as I remember those days as a freshman at the Hudson Valley Community College when the planes hit. It was a similar time of seemingly unlimited options in my life, a peak time of growth, just like that time when I started at Plattsburgh State. It was good to get out and spend some time in a different part of state, a rural, agricultural area. Not just because I liked seeing the rundown homesteads with their stinky but then legal if frowned upon burn barrels. And their cattle and livestock. Rundown trailers, definately could find a lot of people just scraping together a life on those often rocky and denuded forest lands north of Dannemora and Altona. I joined as many clubs as possible of interest in college, the Plattsburgh Progressives, the Campus Democrats, Environmental Advocacy and Environmental Science Club. But being there only two fall semesters, and traveling back and forth to Albany, I spent relatively little time there.
In the end it wasn’t a bad time, though it’s also a chapter I’m sort of glad is closed in my life. Struggles never truly go away. It seems hard to believe that come Columbus Day I will have been with the NYS Assembly for 18 years, still in many ways trying to find direction with both excitement and challenges every day. It seems odd to think I probably don’t have 20 years left until retirement, that is from government work, until I actually build that off-grid homestead I want. Hoping to retire from government work age 55 or 60, then I can focus on the homestead and maybe other ventures. And two decades isn’t that long ago, as I can easily put my mind back into those college days both in the lecture hall, driving the Adirondack Northway and exploring the back country in my pickup.