There are watershed moments in everyone’s life. Like the first time you successfully used the potty, stopped wetting your bed, regurgitated pink cotton candy in a tilt-a-whirl, French kissed a bearded pig and swam at Buck’s Hollow in Seventh Lake. For me the first four were recent milestones but swimming at Buck’s Hollow goes back six decades. I’ve seen many changes at the Buck’s Hollow beach through the years, most of them detrimental due to parentally sanctioned vandalism by strip mining offspring.  These aren’t spoon and pail sandcastle architects. These quarry miners come armed with pointed garden shovels to dig Burmese tiger traps, throw the excavated sand in the lake and leave the craters exposed for old puds like me to fall into. Joni Mitchell reminds us, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Adirondack sand beaches are endangered species.

Anyhow on our May fishing trip Captain Tom purchased two Mountainman kayaks and we hauled them to Buck’s Hollow for a test drive. We dumped them in at the DEC boat launch and paddled along the shore towards Celebrity Island where luminaries go to see and be seen. I say what? Something’s amiss. Where in the Helen of Troy are the twin hemlock stumps that stood sentinel off the beach since my beginning of time. What the hey. They’re up on the beach. Those sphinx-like stumps had resided in Seventh Lake since the days of yore. Celebrated photographers not unlike Carl Heilman II and Nancy Battaglia preserved them in Kodachrome. Surely indigenous historians Ken Sprague and Charlie Herr know how long they’ve been there. Hysterical experts know everything. And, don’t call them Shirley.

Years ago in a Saranac Amber haze I baptized the twin stumps Remus and Romulus. Their father was Tsuga, the god of conifers. All of our kids and grandkids “shot the stumps,” i.e., paddled between them in their canoes and kayaks as a right of passage.  The extensive twin roots harbored generations of juvie smallmouth and rock bass who were too pusillanimous to venture out where the big boys cavort.  Now the ponderous stumps have mysteriously moved forty feet from four feet of water onto dry land.  I was thunderstruck by the spectacle.

I’ve always imagined that the twins were drowned when the Sixth Lake dam was installed in 1880 to hold back the Moose River and create the upper Fulton Chain of Lakes. Loggers removed the saleable logs and left the stumps sticking out of the newborn lake. In my feeble mind the pure lake water and cold winters embalmed them for posterity. They were immortal like the pyramids of Giza. The twins protected me from boat wakes on chilly September days as I waded forth with an adult beverage to look for cedar waxwings. The Mayans were astute. The apocalypse is imminent.

I trust that there’s a Mrs. Marple or Hercule Poirot in Expressland who can make sense of this phenomenon. I found no evidence of a front-end loader, so I assume that the beach miners didn’t relocate the stumps. We had little snow but plenty of lake ice this winter. One local friend, who shall remain anonymous to preserve his VIP status, suggested that the March thaw caused the lake ice to rise precipitously, plucking the twins from their century old anchorage and unceremoniously floating them ashore like so much flotsam. We found two remnant roots protruding from the lake floor where the stumps had been anchored. How does that explain that the formerly conjoined twins are now separated by twenty feet of beach?

This mystery seems impenetrable until we consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intervention. I’ve always maintained that extraterrestrials reside along Uncas Road and I’ve mentioned my notion in previous columns. It’s conceivable that ET chose to mess with my stumps outta spite. Steven Spielberg portrayals aside, I’ve found most extraterrestrials to be malicious buttheads. If anyone observed suspicious activity at Buck’s Hollow this spring including bright lights, UFOs, skyhooks or crop circles, please let me know. If you’re acquainted with the shamefaced extraterrestrials, tell them to put Remus and Romulus back in their root cavities.   

Although I continue to enjoy my daily cocktail hours, I won’t rest until someone provides me with a plausible explanation for this vexing conundrum. I know there’s a hydrophysicist or shaman somewhere who can restore my sanity such as it was. The itinerant stumps present all of the mystery of the Easter Island stone people, Stonehenge, the Plain of Jars, Kirsty Sutherland’s tomato bisque recipe and Central Adirondack Bunnyman. How is this unlike two cuddly pilot whales unwittingly stranding themselves on Farewell Spit, New Zealand.  At the very least companionate Inletians can organize a massive rescue effort and return Remus and Romulus to their birth holes. Comparatively speaking pilot whales are a dime a dozen. Until then I remain yours truly Stumped in Buck’s Hollow.