Gettin Stuck, Upstate Style

I went for a little drive up the Adirondack Northway, I-87 north, from my Albany suburb of Latham to Warrrensburg in Warren County. After getting the twin essentials of gas and coffee at the all night Cumberland Farms(I love good chain gas/conveniences like them, only our free enterprise system can produce this, imagine the Soviets!) Cut to the chase: I got stuck on a seasonal town road in the Town of Stoney Creek, Warren County in the S.E. corner of the Adirondack Parks. In case you didn't know, there's tons of snow and -25F temps these days. Seasonal road means no winter maintenance so it' doubles as part of the local snowmobile trail network in the winter. So, I found that my all-wheel drive Eagle Summit doesn't cut it on uphill narrow snowmobile trails and got stuck about 4:30 AM. So I roughed it in the back till about 8:30, always have blankets and sleeping bags with me. The first guy I met was pretty disabled so all he did was drive me into the hamlet to the general store, Emericks. I warmed up on cafe and a breakfast sandwich. The lady who ran it presented my dilemma to the local workers. After it warmed up to about -5F, the lady told me to walk down the road to the Town of Stoney Creek Highway yard. But another one of Emerick's customers picked me up in his Jeep Cherokee and we almost got the Eagel free with a tow chain until he almost got stuck and I ditched it again. So we went back to the Town of Stoney Creek Highway yard and got the supervisor on the case. Since it was a town road, he felt obligated to help unstick me. So he sent a payloader up there after we mounted chains on it. But the payloader almost got stuck and had to turn around, tearing up the trail with his 30 ton rig. Then the guy with the Jeep got come-alongs from the Town of Stoney Creek Highway Department and he got me out of the frozen rut and I got it about 150' downhill till it ditched again. So I went back and tried to enlist more help. Then I returned to my stuck Eagle, built a fire and ate lunch and read. Then the Warren County Sheriff and the Town of Stoney Creek Highway Supervisor drove up to the end-of-plowing turn around and ambled up. The supervisor had a 3/4 ton diesel 4x4 Ford pickup and he got me me with a chain, three times! till I was free. My new wife was understandably angry and releived when I finally called her in Warrensburg from the Cumby's where I filled up at 4:00 am. It was five pm then!


This is how you get treated in the Adirondacks when you are stranded. People are so cool up there. Even the sheriff was helpful and all he did was check my plates; no snooping or let's see some i.d. crap like the assholes around here. In the Capital District, most people are assholes period. Most of them work for the state and they have sort of a Mandarin attitude with pygmy brains and surely demeanor. My throttle cable snapped in the middle of US 9 a mile from here and not one lazy asshole got out to help. Around here, I'd have to pay some local wrecker shyster to yank me out and the cops would be itching to write tickets and harass me. The highway supervisor there just asked me to vote for him if I ever moved up there; sure thing, vote early, vote often! He even told the people who maintained the snowmobile trails to lay off since it was his road not their trail. I gave the jeep guy a good old pair of ski gloves to assuage my guilt at tying up about 10 man-hours of local labor. It's the cool rural parts of New York State that I love, we all hate the city types and all the lawyer/psychiatrist/social worker/leftist radical crap that emanates from our state's more notorious cities. DOn't you just hate it when some flatlander acts like you should know some goombah in Nassau County.