A story: the beginning

The start.

I was born and raised in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. I went to school in Saranac—a town of about 4,000 people. My family lineage can be traced back to the settlers of the Town of Plattsburgh and the Town of Schuyler Falls and Ezra Turner in particular. A broach has been handed down by the women in my family since the early 1800s. For years it was on display in the Schuyler Falls town hall along with a photo of my Grandmother Elsie Allen. The town was named after the Schuyler family (Yes, that Schuyler family) who purchased a mill on the Salmon River.

It is believed that my mother’s father’s side of the family (Allen) is a decedent of American Revolutionary Ethan Allen who led the Green Mountain Boys and captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775.

Scars from the war of 1812 dot the landscape. Lake Champlain is filled with a rich history. The area is deeply connected to the birth of America.

It is also an area of the state, and the country, that is incredibly beautiful. New York is defined to most in the world by New York City—by skyscrapers, Broadway, high fashion, Wall Street, pizza and bagels. Mention New York to someone in Europe and they don’t even realize there is something more than the State’s namesake city. But upstate New York, and the Adirondack mountains in particular offer breathtaking vistas, a connection with nature, and one of the few places in the state without cellphone reception. It offers a chance to disconnect from the world.

A few years ago I discovered this quote in a book on the history of the town of Schuyler Falls:

"Our forest life was rough and rude, and dangers clothed us round; but here, amid the green old trees, a home we sought and found. Oft through our dwelling wintry blasts would rush with shriek and moan: we cared not- though they were but frail, we felt they were our own!"

- Ezra Turner, 1794

It is my home but like most kids, it was a place I didn’t appreciate growing up. I was determined to escape it and what I perceived as the deficiencies of living in a poor rural community. But time and distance gave me much needed perspective and appreciation for my home. Having lived on the other side of the planet, traveled the globe, and been away for more than half my life, it is a special place I look forward to returning to despite some of the pain that comes with it. It’s a place I have loved, loathed, been embarrassed by, been proud of, and found peace in.

There is so much tragedy that occurred in my family over the course of 200 years. A family that created a community from nothing, paved the way for generations, amassed property and achieved stability, only to see it all lost from neglect and tragedy. In may ways the generational trauma of my family shaped the very events that paved the roads in my life. It was ultimately luck and love that helped keep me heading in the right direction.

My first memories.

“What is your earliest memory?”, I asked myself as I started thinking about writing this. Not that I regularly talk in the third person, but it was an exercise of self-reflection and awareness. A question meant to prompt some direction in determining this story. I’ve found it a challenge to reflect on parts. Admittedly I have always excelled at compartmentalizing. This of course means that in order to even understand my own story, that I need to unpack some of these boxes I stored away—even the ones I would prefer to pretend don’t exist. You know, the boxes tucked in the back of your mind, behind the exercise equipment I keep telling myself I’m going to use. Behind the boxes of photos and the trinkets. That seems like a good place to start.

To be blunt, my two earliest memories are of trauma. The sort of trauma you typically spend years in therapy over. The sort of trauma that typically results in being a statistic in a crime report.

The first is of my childhood best friend Aaron choking on a pear and dying. I was little more than a toddler when it happened. We were living in a trailer somewhere—brown and tan if my memory serves me. The brown and tan that apparently were invented in the 1980s and allowed to run rampant. Aaron was trying to show how fast he could eat a pear. He was a kid—being just like any other kid using their imagination and sense of play to turn the most mundane activity into fun. The fun would sadly end in tragedy when a piece of pear got lodged in his throat and blocked his lungs from receiving oxygen.

I honestly don’t remember much more than that. The older I get the more fleeting the memory. Writing this I am struggling to remember Aaron’s last name. But this was the first instance of someone close to me dying. I didn’t understand as a kid but I knew a piece of me had changed. Even now, I think about Aaron every time I see someone goofing around while eating. It is a nebulous imprint on my soul.

My second childhood memory is of my father attempting to kidnap my sister and me. I use the word father, though I would find out sometime later that he was not my biological father. This was honestly a relief, but ultimately defined an absence throughout much of my life. More on that later.

Back to the kidnapping. My father was an abusive alcoholic who posed a significant threat to my mother and my sister and I. This is not hyperbole. He beat the shit out of my mother regularly. Eventually my mother had the strength to leave. She packed up her car, took my sister and I, and left our trailer. We moved from apartment to apartment, often bouncing checks to avoid eviction until we could find a new place. For a period of time we lived in Saranac, NY down the street from what would eventually be my high school. We had a two bedroom apartment on the second floor. I remember as a kid thinking how imposing the building was. It was little more than a two story a white box—its large wooden balconies extended out across the front of each floor.

One night the conflict between my mother and father would come to a head. Parts of that night I recall and other parts have been filled in over the years by my mother. A haze of sounds frames that night. Screaming, crashing, the sound of broken glass—the sound of violence. What I know is that my father forcefully entered the apartment at some point that evening. My mother took my sister and I and hid us in our bedroom. I was barely older than a toddler, my sister even younger. I remember holding her, trying my best to shelter her from the sounds. In front of us was a dresser that we painted together. My mother picked up some used furniture. She painted it white and let my sister and I put colored hand and foot prints all over. Red, blue, green, and yellow. My hand, her hand, my foot, her foot.

The evening ended with my father throwing an exercising bike through my mother’s femur—shattering it. The police arrived shortly thereafter and attempted to restrain my father. When he tried to fight the officers, they ended up beating him until they could put restraints on him. Even in handcuffs he pushed an officer down a flight of stairs. Bloodied, broken, and beaten, he left our lives.

Bloodied, broken and beaten, we began to pick up the pieces of ours.