"There were a lot of trees to go around. Knees were scraped up, a lot of bruises suffered and Dodge got a bump on his head, but it went off as planned," said Pabst.

The storm continued all day Sunday, July 1.  Plastered on everything at the summit was a thick coating of ice measuring as much as eighteen inches in spots.  Attendees stayed inside all day, content with the thought that, given the brutality of the storm, Curtis and Ormsbee would have turned around early on and returned to Crawford Notch.

And the reason she was strange was ’cause all her life, over fifty years, she kept telling stories to the people. She even sang songs about it. She was telling the folks that if she ever left this island, she’d take it with her. People thought she was crazy. But it happened. 

And from there, I went to Memphis, Tennessee. I was in Memphis when Doctor King was killed. 

Not that I knew that much about Doctor King at the time. But I was there at that time.

Absurd as it is, Old Joe's association of Big Island with the maybe real, maybe legendary 16th-Century Indian leader Hiawatha persists to this day.

Sweet America.

There are certain things that have been very constant, but prayers have changed and often changed with the times. So, I believe any ritual or practice needs to—make sense isn’t the right word. But, even if it’s an ancient practice, for me, it needs to be in harmony with the physical plane in 2016.

The story of Warren Street and of Hudson’s recent past—of natives and newcomers, of property tax bills and reassessments, of work and morphing rents, of sparring cultural currents—is a complicated one to tell. Makes me tired to think of trying to tell it. 

There was a mystical quality about Helen and the things she witnessed during her tenure on this planet. I noted in the introduction to my Interviews From 2015 book that, “when Helen Henderson was born, World War I was still three years away. The world population, at roughly 1.8 billion, was less than a third of today. Automobiles were a novelty for the cutting-edge wealthy. Electricity and indoor plumbing were still a decade or two away for most rural homes in the Hudson Valley. And many veterans of America’s Civil War were still walking around and telling their tales.”

Summer's not over till we all agree it's over.