ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN CABIN; ZOMBIE FLIES

The weather certainly hates me this fall, but until I figure out which rain gods I'm meant to be sacrificing to, I just try to get hiking or camping or outdoors-at-all at any possible opportunity. Jim, Ali and I have been talking about going to Jim's family house in the Adirondack mountains ever since he moved up here. Thanks to Life, it never happened... until now.

I figured the end of October would be perfect, with the leaves turning and the fall chill settling in for good. The foliage was indeed incredible, and there was plenty of it to see. Unfortunately, it seems to rain any time I might possibly step outdoors, and to my incredible frustration the forecast for this weekend was dismal—but the plans were made, and we weren't likely to get any hiking done if we waited until December and it was all that much colder. At the very, very last minute, Jim's parents also helpfully informed us that it was the first weekend of hunting season, and since we weren't going to be hiking in an actual state park, we were likely to get shot and possibly sodomized should we venture outside. High fives were exchanged in the general spirit of awesomeness.

After enjoying a Young's Double Chocolate Stout on the lovely train ride to Poughkeepsie, Ali and I marched to the newly-opened Hudson River Walkway while awaiting Jim's arrival. It was a bit of a hike to get there, but the Walkway is impressive enough to warrant it—incredibly impressive, actually, considering what I've come to expect from Poughkeepsie. If you've ever been to that asshole of a town, you've seen the train bridge lurking over the Hudson, a huge, strange, slightly-tragic marvel of 1800's engineering. It always looked like a ruin, obviously abandoned at a glance, and so mammoth that it seemed it would bring the whole town down with it, should it ever fall. Turning it into a public park, similar to the Highline in Manhattan, was a brilliant idea. The bridge seems no less vast from atop the modern, unadventurous concrete walkway that now spans it—in fact, it seems all the larger, as you have to walk a good fifteen minutes before you're even over the Hudson itself, and from there the bridge still spans so wide you can't tell what awaits at the other side. Unfortunately, I cannot personally vouch for that discovery, as the sky unleashed its wrath just as we began our trek across the Hudson, forcing us to turn back. It was a cruel torment, but we were starved and thirsty and not in possession of any rain gear, so we resolved to return in less hostile conditions and explore the bridge to its fullest.

A series of revisitations followed from there—Noah's, only to find that Honey Brown is sadly no longer on tap and that Marist students have only become douchier and more bro-tastic; Half Time, my old paramour; and Terrapin, that haven of upscale dining in isolated Rhinebeck. I learned that duck, when applied to a sandwich and bathed in BBQ sauce, is much like pulled-pork, and should never be eaten on a date. That shit is greasy like a Staten Island resident. Eventually, on that rainy eve, our frivolous little trio reached Jimmy's Mountain House in the Adirondacks.

I won't waste too many words trying to capture the sense of this place—Ali's photos will be more succinct. The nearest town, Warrensburg, is about half an hour away, and is about what you'd expect of a small town in the Adirondacks. There's a McDonalds and a gas station with a Dunkin Donuts in it. There's one street with actual streetlights and all that. There was a store called "Video Rental and Tanning." Out by the Mountain House there was even less, but at that point you're literally at the base of a mountain. The Post Office was a small shed-like building with a handpainted sign. People obviously stick close to their families up there—instead of one house to a single plot of land, many contained two or three small trailer homes and enough dilapidated pickup trucks to hold their own demolition derby. Small homes of exposed, unadorned plywood sat next to million-dollar, slickly modern wood cabins, the work of ex-hippie retirees settling in amongst the locals. There was a lot of charm in this, but then again, it could have been the view—from Jim's own house, literally sitting at the base of a mountain, you could see peaks and trees for miles, and a narrow gravel road winding up the hill and fading into the distance. The foliage was gorgeous. Of course, we couldn't really see any of this until Sunday, when the rain finally let up and the sky cleared, but our journey in the rain, cowering beneath the oppressive cold and wet, was equally successful in making us feel small and isolated.

Much of the Mearns family resides in the Adirondacks, and remains well-known around those parts. Jim's great uncle, Paul Schaefer, was an instrumental figure in making the state park what it is today, and mapped out a large chunk of the mountains. Most of Jim's family is still in the area, and his relatives own a couple properties on the same small backroad. The particular house in which we were staying is itself fairly modern. It's simply more fun to call it a cabin than a house, and it isn't a proper home anyway. It was never insulated in its 100-some year lifespan, and thus is only habitable in warm weather. We were the last to stay in it this year, and it was obvious why: there's no central heating, only a wood stove and a few electric space heaters. While the house has electricity, running more than two appliances at once seems to be more than it could handle, and many fuses were blown until we figured out what we could plug-in where. There was an impressively large wrap-around porch that made the building seem much larger than it actually is, a charmingly rustic living room with a bookshelf, and an awesomely archival archive of old manuscripts—histories of the area and of Scotland, ledgers of Scottish chiefs, guidebooks on field survival, a variety of old Bibles, maps and notebooks, and a few strange, weathered-looking manuscripts that were probably part of some strange Mearnsian occult practice.

This cabin was indeed an ideal place for occult practices or otherwise Spooky Activities. There was much discussion of serial killers and bear attacks when we arrived. Though it was readily agreed that if any of us were likely to go mad and start offing the others in the middle of the night, it was going to be me, I was still somewhat unnerved myself. Jim had warned me that the house suffers from insect plagues year round, again on account of the aforementioned occult practices, and possibly due to the Indian Burial Ground the house was constructed on top of. The most recent plague was that of common house flies, and the floors were disgustingly covered with their corpses. The stairs to the dim and eerie upstairs were littered with little black bodies, as if flies falling in autumn were as natural as leaves piling under a tree. There were literally thousands of the fuckers. The bedrooms were the worst, and obviously hadn't been cleaned of this plague in some time. Small, cramped, Serial Killer Approved, you couldn't walk between the bed and the wall without crunching over corpses. Jim helpfully informed us that someone had once died in the bedroom we were currently observing.

We huddled in the living room around a fireplace-shaped heater, complete with tacky ornamental fake-fire. The room—just the room, not the house—began to warm up. As we were talking, I started to hear buzzing. After a few minutes, the sound was unmistakable. One of the flies in the corner was flopping around on the ground, spinning in circles, trying to take flight. We disposed of it. A minute later, there was another.

We looked at each other. "Zombie flies," we said.

It was pretty fucked up. Apparently flies can hibernate through the cold—I'm really not sure how that works, or what was going on. Maybe the house had been warm enough for them to thrive a few days earlier, and the coldspell that hit just before we got there knocked them out. I'm not sure how many of the flies were actually dead and how many were just passed out on the floor. Some of them were obviously smashed or rotting and had been there a long time, but we disposed of most of them with vacuum cleaners and karate before the house could become too warm. Even still, throughout the weekend there were still flies littered on the ground in places where we had definitely already cleaned, and there were plenty more buzzing around normally and healthily. There were lady bugs too, a lot of them, and a couple bees. I'm not sure if they were all zombies, but fucking zombie bees are about the last thing I would ever want to deal with (though arguably not as bad as dogs which shoot bees out of their mouth when they bark, or even worse, zombie dogs that shoot zombie bees out of their mouths when they bark). On Saturday night, Jim and I spent a good ten minutes swatting at the wall with old Reader's Digests, a decisive battle in the epic bug war which the bards shall sing about for ages to come.

The highlight of the cabin, however, may have been the Mearns record collection. Ever true to their heritage, the family keeps stacks of old-timey traditional bagpipe music from various Scottish marching bands and Royale Orchestras, etc. As we set about cooking dinner, quaffing stouts and discussing literature, concertos and ballads tickled the fancy of our ears. Dinner itself was set to the Soviet Men's Choir, possibly the most fantastic thing I've ever heard: basically a dozen (obviously burly and shaggy) Russian men singing in harmony to traditional folk songs. It was... incredible. It was like the speakers were pouring vodka in my face. Cigars were enjoyed. Many, many beers were had. Lady Bugs were removed from our bowl of Pad Thai. Bears were wrestled. Mistakes were made. Some of those involved got carried away. It is my hope that Magnarr, King of the Bears, might accept the sincerity of my apology.

Driving around Saturday, I began frantically filling pages with notes, because the overall creepiness of the weekend was definitely conducive to creativity. I will be shamelessly harvesting the weekend for ideas, certainly. Expect quirky short stories sometime in the near future.