Cultural Patchwork

Reading about the music of the Adirondacks gave me further evidence that the Adirondacks aren't just a place, but a real community. Loggers and settlers alike banded together in the fairly isolated northern wild to make music, tell stories, and dance, bringing with them influences from wherever they grew up or whatever job they had or whichever stories they'd heard. The impression I got from the Woods reading was that the culture of the Adirondacks (as least for the laypeople) was a rich and diverse one, but also a culture very much focused on the community. People gathered in bars or people's houses to entertain each other and share stories about the day's events. It seems to me (although I'm really only getting this from the one, biased article we read) that there was a real sense of camaraderie in these ADK logging towns that maybe wasn't as prevalent elsewhere in the country by that time. I think that because of the relative isolation of the Adirondack towns and the lack of technology (especially roads and vehicles), the people of the Adirondacks were able to focus on each other and the songs and stories that their neighbors had to tell. In a way, this seems to be one of the gifts of "wild" places like the Adirondacks: places without all the technological amenities that we're so used to nowadays make you tune into your surroundings and actually interact with and learn from the people you're around. With the philosopher's camps we've talked a lot about how people can learn from nature by immersing themselves in the natural world, but I think that something can also be said for what people can learn from other people in the landscape of the wilderness. This idea reminds me of when we talked in class about Aldo Leopold's definition of land and how that definition included not just the rocky earthen crust, but also the animals and plants and people that use that earth together in a community, interacting not just with abiotic features but with each other as well. When these elements of the land each bring to the table their own unique experiences and backgrounds, it creates an impressively diverse microcosm wherein individual differences are united under the common experience of place--of living in the Adirondacks. This is a bond that forms, on some level, in any region where its inhabitants feel a strong connection to their place/"home base," like Manhattan or the neighborhood I grew up in or even the U.S. as a whole. I think what's different about the Adirondacks, however, is that it developed so much later and in such a different place (ie. more "wild") than most other places that emanate a similarly strong sense of place, meaning that the historical, technological, and environmental forces aiding in the construction of the Adirondack culture were pretty different than those in places like New York City. In my eyes, it is this difference that gives way to the Adirondack's rich cultural experience as one that is closely linked to the particular circumstances of its founding.