Tuesday, July 29       5:28 am

Yeah, apparently Casey’s Papa Richer used to be pretty damn big around here in Tupper Lake, somewhere in upstate new york. Everyone still knows his name in town, but he isn’t the head of so many societies and clubs anymore. We stopped by the “Tupper Lake Rod and Gun Club,” past the patch of daisies that Casey pointed out to me. She and Mollie had gone down there on the day of Jackie’s sister’s wedding to pick the flowers and returned with armfuls of daisies that smelled like bear piss and had to be thrown out back. We went up to the hall where the reception was held, and Casey told me to look in the windows at the hall. “These doors were never locked before,” she said after trying each entrance (including the bulkhead).

We walked back to the outdoor shooting range, where a strip of concrete met with overgrown grass that was littered with hundreds of different kinds of shells from just about every rifle in town. Further in the distance, starting at a couple hundred feet away, were targets that were striped and painted with numbers. Supposedly to keep track of how dead you could actually kill something if your target weren’t wood and enamel. Casey kicked the shells in the sandy reeds by her feet and said, “Uncle Jim used to pay us five dollars if we could fill up a Gatorade bottle with these shells.”
“Oh, can you melt them down for metal or copper or something?”
“No, they’re usless. He just used to pay us.”
Mollie looked out to the open lot behind the range and said, “This place was so much better when Papa was in charge here. Do you remember he used to fill this place up with vendors and indians selling furs and–”
“I remember dancing in the pavillion with Bill Ingerham on the night of Auntie Patty’s wedding.”
And now we were simply looking at the shells in the dust.
Casey’s cousin jumped, reading aloud a sign that said, “STOP!! Smile, you are on camera.” Fearing security cameras, an installation that would never have been present ten years ago at the wedding, Casey shouted to the invisible lenses, “DON’T WORRY. WE BELONG TO ARTHUR RICHER!”

They looked around at the new tarnishes marring their  old memories and sighed. Everything in Tupper Lake is slipping like the Rod and Gun Club. Papa Richer sold the house on the lake and moved everyone to this campground, and here we can’t even see the water through the trees. The factory downtown down town shut down around the time of the wedding, and now the townspeople are seriously considering building a ski resort on White Face Mountain to kick in some real income. Jackie, Casey’s mom, sat at the steering wheel contemplating the town as we drove through from the airport, “You know, this all used to be beautiful when I was younger.” And now the sisters sit here with me in the near-abandoned Rod and Gun Club, and I look at them picking up the shells of their fallen kingdom in the high grass. Casey sticks a gold-colored metal piece from the ground into the pocket of my jeans, saying, “Look, this one’s never been used.”

Wednesday, July 30 10:00 am

This place has been good for me. I feel better. Something was wrong with me before I came, but I arrived and began socializing like I belonged here and forgot that last week my place was at the corner of some party, getting drunk by myself. But I come here and get a refill, and now I am one hundred percent full of creation again, and I can write a song or paddle around the whole lake and it would be worthy of a couple of pages. Grandmother Richer said that the combination of the pollen of hundreds of different kinds of balsams and poplars mixes in the air to make every breath a narcotic sensation; it makes you hungry and sleepy and happy. Papa Richer said that Grandmother might have put mushrooms in the zucchini parmisean that  I ate last night. Regardless, I’ve been having strange dreams and I have my appetite back, and I guess I’m starting to look forward to the future again.

I think I’ll go for a run today.

Thursday, July 31st    11:30 pm

Papa Richer is sick. He has been taking steriods for his chronic asthma for thirty two years. He takes the steriods because, forty years back, when Art Richer was still an undertaker for the village of Tupper Lake, there was no ventilation inside of the enbalming rooms. The formaldyhyde vapors saturated the air and Art’s lungs, leaving his skin fragile and his mucosal membranes coarsing with the same fluid as that which lay stagnant inside the bodies on the table.

Jackie remembers the embalming rooms in the basement of their victorian home that doubled as a funeral parlor. I remember her sipping wine on the leather sofa back in North Andover, smiling in her glasses and scrubs after working 12 hours sewing up bursted arteries at the hospital, telling me of the sleep overs she would have at the home.
“Oh, yeah, I’d have the girls over and we’d all pile into the basement. The bodies would be in the room right next to us. But the door was always locked, and I never looked.” And that was where Papa worked, behind the locked door in the funeral home, without any vents or fans, breathing dead air for hours on end. And that is why, at 65, Papa seems to be about 80.

Michael still works digging graves, but the girls say that he’s crazy. He’s Papa’s nephew. There is a sign hung up on his barn, once black but now a faded grey, saying “FRESH EggS”. He lives near the cemetery. As we drove by Michael’s farm and the cemetary, his plot of land, the old Richer farm, is falling apart at just about the same pace as Papa. The smaller pastures are enclosed with wood plank fences that are grey as the lower case Gs in “EggS,” but the wider lawns still seem well mowed. The barn with the red roof needs painting, but it’s  red all the same and still capitavating as we coast by at the daring pace of fifteen miles per hour. As we pass the cemetary on our left, Papa looks into the rear view mirror and asks, “How many people you think are dead in there?”
Casey’s quick: “All of them.”