This picture was taken in 1975 or so. It shows you, among other certainties, that a couple little guys rode around a man's yard in a man's Fiat convertible. From the flattened grass it looks like we took more than one lap. When you are 9, or 3, or 36 maybe, there is nothing cooler than this.
This is either the least relevant post here or the most relevant. Me? I don't care. Just thinking of friends and remembering great times and wondering why if it can't last (and it sometimes seems like it can't) it leaves so many happy tracks to follow.
No one but one got to Moose River, as far as I can tell. But all are welcome should they choose to appear.
-MJ
One of about seven Adirondack postcards I have. I love it because it's the first mountain I climbed (with my grandfather leading the way as the rest of us huffed and puffed behind him in 1973. It's also the place I huffed and puffed up last (2010ish) and reminds me I need to wheeze myself up it again soon. But the thing that hits me (being me, and neglecting the thought of Snell's Bald Mt. Rest remaining at the bottom for cold Cokes-or Heineken's, depending on things) is Colvin's tower. Big fan of Verplanck Colvin, I. Anyway, who cares? It's a hill a lot of us have scaled and it's a beautiful place. It's even an easy postcard to take a picture of; set up a sweatshirt on a bedspread after trying other things, open the flash, and hit click.
This may have nothing at all to do with Moose River, but I suspect it matters.
On June 24, 1984, before my graduation from high school, my dad gave me this watch. It had belonged to his grandfather, and my grandfather, and him, and then me. At the time I received this gift, it was not in working order so far as anyone could discern.
I loved it anyway.
Since then it has been loved, placed somewhere no one could find it for thirty-five years, found in that place (which believe me is all I wanted to know all that time: where was it?).
But last year it showed up. And last year I wound it. And last year it ran. As it did when I took this video of it tonight.
You might think I'd have all kinds of thoughts about this development, but mostly I just have questions. And those questions all go back to one central wonder: what does this watch know about time? I mean, what does it really know?
I wonder because it seems odd that I could wind it and my actions seem to have made it run again after maybe 60 years; I don't know anyone alive who can confirm having seen these hands move until recently. That's puzzling.
I also wonder because it runs fast. I looked online and found the controls to slow it down but no matter what I have done (and these are things I will do no longer) it runs fast. I would imagine not one 1898 pocketwatch in a thousand runs fast, when it spent so many years not running at all.
It leads me to further suspicions:
* Maybe the watch is trying to catch up with now, and purposely increases its speed by almost unnoticeable increments in an attempt to make up for its many years of non-ticking.
* Maybe the watch is taunting me, trying to get me to get someone knowledgeable to "fix" it.
* Maybe the watch doesn't care at all and just does what it chooses as it pleases.
* Maybe the watch is trying to show me and anyone else who notices that time is a man-made construct that really doesn't matter.
All of which is enough to give me a headache (though it hasn't yet) but there's a fifth suspicion I hesitate to mention, though it's where my heart and mind lead me:
* Maybe time was faster in 1898 than it is now.
I'm not sure that would be possible, but I can't say it isn't. It does seem like people had more to do in a hurry back then. And it also seems like those people would have measured their time by their own assumptions about its measurement; if time is truly a man-made construct then they would have to have done so. It doesn't explain why the watch can't be slowed, unless those people didn't foresee a time it would need to be so slowed as to measure now.
***
All I know is a watch made by people long passed is running 120+years after it was assembled. I don't know how, nor do I know why, and if I never know either answer, I'm totally cool with it. Which is great, because we all know I never will.
