My Grampa's Woods, The Adirondacks

My Dad, Laurence Patrick Beahan, was born in a logging camp on the Little River near Aldrich, New York. My grandfather, Tom Beahan, together with his older brothers, John and Barty, jobbed a logging contract there for Peter Yousey from 1902 to 1907. Gramma, Minnie Gifford Beahan, and my great aunt, Oliva Jonas Beahan, came along to live in the log camps with them. The women cooked for thirty men while they tended and bore children.The family never made much of this history which seemed so romantic to me after I discovered it. Dad was only three when they moved to a camp near Natural Bridge so he hardly remembered Aldrich at all. The big thing early in his life was coming to the city and making a decent living, something that was not easily done up there. Uncle Raymond and cousin Bessie were older so they were able to describe the Camp on the Little River to me, once they began to mellow and grow nostalgic.I never knew much about our family in the Adirondacks or the Adirondacks themselves till my life was half over. When I was a kid Dad used to take us to visit Gramma and Grampa in Carthage every summer. It was just outside the Park, to the west. Their home there had the flavor of the Adirondacks. It's just that they and I did not realize it or put any value on it.The picture of Grampa's logging crew, on the cover of this book, hung on their living room wall. Their house was decorated with deer hides and dinner-plate fungus painted with deer drinking from lakes among red-leafed alders. Grampa had double-bitted axes and two-man saws in the old barn-garage that leaned toward the out-house out back. In the yard, stood a grindstone for sharpening axes and a wooden vise bench for making axe handles. We kids climbed all over them, loving them without having a clue to their history.Dad used to let me help split wood for Gramma's old wood stove. I carried the wood into the shed, off the kitchen, for her. I helped Grampa plant potatoes in the patch beside the house.My city-bred mother warned me away from the neighbors who lived in a tumble down shanty. I went anyway, which Mom found out. The old blind man telling us stories on the porch over there didn't know exactly where I was sitting and spit tobacco juice on my dainty white shirt.I loved Gramma's homemade bread toasted over the wood fire and her doughnuts. I loved swimming in the Deer River and fishing in ponds up there. Once, we went to a real barn dance on Tug Hill where Gramma was from.For a long time I got away from all that. Then, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when I was pushing fifty, I began to ask about our origins. It pleased me to find that our family came from such a wonderful place as the Adirondacks.Dad had not gotten us into the Adirondack Park much, but he had taken us into other woods and wild places every chance he could. He gave us the opportunity to camp, hike, ski and canoe. When I found out about us and the Adirondacks, I turned loose on them.The Adirondack Mountain Club made it easy to do that. It is a gang of other people who respect and enjoy the Adirondack Park and are full of ideas about ways to use it. After I started with them I began to write accounts of experiences there including trip descriptions and stories stimulated by family tales and other Adirondack lore. Many of the articles in this book were first published in the ADK magazine, Adirondac.