Been out in some of the most desolate and depopulated country in NYS these last couple of days.

The post-industrial regions of the Adirondack Park are truly strange. Many towns have lost more than 50% of their population since 1960. In quite a few of these towns, there are no longer any publicly-operating businesses at all.

But it turns out that when iron mines and paper mills shut down, not everybody actually leaves. A certain percentage of the inhabitants and their progeny stay on indefinitely, scraping by in what anyone could reasonably call total obscurity and isolation.

Many are likely commuting an hour (or much longer on snowy roads) to fairly low-wage jobs. Others are marginal self-employed types, and others are content with a combination of welfare, hard liquor, scrap metal, and long days of hunting and fishing. And a handful of lucky ones, of course, work for the DOT or the school. Tourism is virtually non-existent this far north and west.

I could live out here. I like it. The quiet is incomparable. The people are still real "characters" of a sort that seem to be going extinct practically everywhere else these days. There is one State Highway with a trickle of traffic that supports a few tiny businesses -- but no chain stores, no gaudy condos and resorts, no corporate presence of any kind save for a single tired old Circle K.

Truly, if "civilization" and all that goes with it is not your thing, this is a place that challenges you to imagine what it'd really be like to live at its furthest fringes, on the near-abandoned edges of deep primeval wilderness.