Rural Electrifification

onnie Monroe was in his early eighties and slowing down by the time he sat for these recordings. He lived out along the Saranac in a nice old clapboard house surrounded by piles of salvaged metal roofing, barn siding, two-by-fours and random boards, and a corral containing two Morgan bay horses. He drove a Power Wagon he’d assembled from scavenged parts, and always wore nattily pressed green slacks, a khaki work shirt, and a rakish Moose River hat. On those afternoons, we sat at the table in the bar where the old people usually kept to themselves or received the entreaties and inquiries of the young—new arrivals mostly, who were searching (as I was) for the distilled human essence of the place they had adopted and idealized. Usually they sat outside on the deck overhanging the river, played guitars on the enclosed porch or pool in the bar. For them the Trap Dyke was (as was Lake Aurora itself, and other small Adirondack towns) a grad school of authenticity, a living north woods Symposium and Agora overseen by alcoholic Solons, Diotemas, and Socrateses. Eventually old and new grew into a mutually dependent and happy, if unlikely, hybrid alliance that flourished for three