Elizabeth Folwell’s audio version of “Short Carries: Essays from Adirondack Life” may be just the antidote we need now. I’ve been listening on my evening walks, and the stories transport me to the 6 million-acre park. Sometimes I play the beautifully spoken audiobook, read by Linda Jones, as I drift off to sleep, dreaming about life within the blue line.
“Short Carries,” a nod to carrying a canoe a short distance between bodies of water, is also the name of her longstanding column in Adirondack Life magazine. The book version of “Short Carries” was published in 2009. Folwell, known as Betsy, also took the opportunity to add pieces, like the poignant final one titled “Looking for Daniel,” about searching for a lost hiker.
Folwell called the audiobook her pandemic project and a way to allow others to experience her work. “Not much of my writing is accessible to people who can’t read in a conventional way. So I started thinking it seems kind of ironic that I’m visually impaired and what I’m doing is for people who are fully visual so let’s see if we can make my work more accessible.” With the help of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Nathalie Thill, Folwell turned the collection into spoken words through Audible.
Folwell began losing her sight in 2001 and has since been diagnosed with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION). “I’m not totally blind, which I am eternally grateful for,” she said. Folwell paddles with friends and uses two poles when she hikes, avoiding rocky trails. “I’m happy that there are a lot of bird songs this year,” she said in a phone interview. “Some years there are not. Boy, I’m hearing a lot of thrushes and broad-wing hawks. Out on the lake you hear loons. And this summer’s been especially fragrant.”
Like everyone else who ends up in the Adirondacks, Folwell, 67, became entranced. She came in 1976, coming for a position with the Adirondack Museum. She also worked at Traveler's Aid and the 1980 Olympics before landing at Adirondack Life.
“She is such a force. So deeply ingrained in this place that it’s almost easy to overlook her single greatest talent: her own writing. What a pleasure to have this book so we can renew our appreciation of it regularly,” said Bill McKibben in the introduction of “Short Carries.”
The Adirondack experience of the book’s narrator was limited to what she saw from the train heading to Montreal.
“I loved these pieces,” said the narrator Jones. “And I particularly loved that she added a few new ones to an already remarkable collection. Her piece, ‘Looking for Daniel,’ was very moving, a testament to the power of nature and the danger of underestimating it. A number of pieces deal with being quite human in the face of a vast natural wilderness, and the wonder and awe that can inspire.
"She describes the natural world with such precision and clarity (and frankly humor and groundedness) that the reader can’t help but be welcomed into it," Jones continued. "‘Seeing in the Dark,’ was another particular favorite, for words like this describing an aurora: ‘Around any bend of an Adirondack river may be a glimpse of terrestrial grandeur, and we may be lucky enough to have looked down on the clouds from a mountaintop, but looking up on a frosty night is a lesson in humility. In our urgency to love a piece of land, we forget the sky from which we fell’." Jones has also read work from the book on Voices of Calm, a pandemic-related series on YouTube; Folwell’s work proved perfect for the series.
The audiobook runs 8 hours and 16 minutes. Most of the 60 essays are short, between 5 and 10 minutes. “Short Carries” is divided into two sections: Shades of Blue and Shades of Green. The first section contains many essays about small-town, Adirondack life, especially in Blue Mountain Lake, where Folwell lives. There’s often a dash of humor, like in “Why We Bagged It,” about her brief turn as a grocer. In “Wild Life Refuge,” Folwell talks about some of the folks who’ve fled to the Adirondacks, both rumored and confirmed, for the “splendid isolation.” Those luminaries include Albert Einstein’s companion, a Russian spy; gangster Dutch Schultz, Richard Nixon and Monica Lewinsky. “I can’t respond to that sorry saga, but I do salute her alleged choice for refuge. Our North Country is about as far from the seat of political power as an American can get without crossing the border,” Folwell wrote.
And now, the Adirondacks have drawn crowds seeking refuge from the stress and anxiety of coronavirus. “This is a place of both dismal exile and safe haven,” Folwell wrote.
In the Shades of Green section, the focus is on nature, and includes a story about a hummingbird, fishing and the light of the Adirondacks. Asked what she wanted people to take away from the book, Folwell said, “I hope respect for wilderness, wild creatures, respect for small towns and the way people live in small towns. Right now, the Adirondacks is inundated with people who don’t really have an agenda. People who are kind of wandering.”
Donna Liquori is a frequent contributor to the Times Union, and writes the Bibliofiles books column in Unwind.
To learn more about and download the audiobook, visit audible.com/pd/Short-Carries-Audiobook/B08CWYHXY6.
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August 12, 2020 at 07:28PM
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"Short Carries" on Adirondack life now an audiobook - Times Union
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