Let’s raise a glass (of Busch Light) to Saranac Lake, New York

You can’t quite appreciate the individual charm of Saranac Lake until you’ve left it behind.

It’s funny how your perspective changes when your environment changes.

Like when you’re feeling good about your DQ Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Smash Blizzard because you went with the mini, and then your sister drags you to Jamba Juice and orders something distrustfully green and suddenly you don’t feel so health-conscious anymore.

Or when you’re passionately belting out “679” and then Granny B flounders into the backseat with her cane and her dentures, causing you to become painfully aware of the vulgarity in Fetty’s contemplation as to whether he is qualified to “hit it from behind though.”

But of all the perspective-giving circumstances I have encountered in my life, leaving home for college was the most significant.

As I began to share stories of my hometown with my newfound friends, it was brought to my attention that many things I had grown up with and considered fairly mundane were really not that way at all.

“What do you mean?” I’d ask in bewilderment. “You’re parents didn’t drive around with a shotgun in the trunk in case they hit a deer and had no choice but to put it out of it’s misery??”

Inquiries such as this were met with blank expressions.

Some things, I learned, were only understood in Saranac Lake.

With a population of around 5,000, the village of Saranac Lake lies within the boundaries of the Adirondack Park, which, unlike most conserves, contains a large portion of privately owned land, meaning human communities reside within a state park. 

Saranac Lake is notable for a few things. First of all, it’s nice to look at. We’ve got mountains and lakes and some of best fall foliage in the country. We like to hike and swim and ski and do cool things outside.

During winter months, it’s also been known to be the coldest place in the nation. It is in these frigid times that Saranac Lakers look for comfort in their beloved Winter Carnival.

Winter Carnival is a ten day festivity in the beginning of February. The town votes on a Winter Carnival King and Queen from the most active community members, a prince and princess from local colleges, and a court from the high school. From the moment they emerge from the womb, it is every Saranac Lake youth’s biggest aspiration to be selected for the prestigious Winter Carnival Court.

Together, the villagers gather in the town hall to watch the royalty put on a coronation complete with a dance that the court prepares months in advance. A palace is built downtown that is made purely of ice. The main roads are shut down for the parade where villagers of all ages drunkenly congregate on the streets in the name of Carnival.

If you are not from the area, it may sound like I am describing to you a particularly obscure dream I had last night. I am not. This is very real.

Living in a state park means lots of nature. Lots of nature means lots of trees and lots of trees means the frequent and inevitable presence of camouflage attire. This results in a few colorful (or not so colorful) occurrences.

A large presence of trees has also has its perks to the corrupted public school punks of Saranac Lake. They provide perfect coverage to reach levels of belligerence in the forest. Who needs house parties when you can load up your pickup truck with a pile of pallets and a few thirty racks of Busch Light and venture into the woods. Playlists are strictly country, of course. You can only control the aux if you play Dirt Road Anthem at least eight times.

Each spring, prom-goers are elated to feast their eyes upon elegant camo prom dresses completed with dad’s H&R Handi Rifle for a more authentic photographing experience. Students are also delighted to be graced with the presence of kids arriving to school on roaring, noble four-wheelers, their hands still covered in dirt from yesterday’s muddin’ exploit, their back pockets stuffed with endless cans of Grizzly Wintergreen.

Here at Notre Dame, these are the kids your mother warned you about. Stay away from those public school kids, she’d say. They pee in water bottles on the school bus and snort adderall in the bathroom. They call the five-second rule the ten-second rule and they only go to mass on Christmas and Easter.

But despite it’s quirks, Saranac Lake is not immune to small town restlessness.

Kids want to get out, go somewhere where their best friend’s dad isn’t also their math teacher. But after some months of separation from our dear hometown, we recognize the inadequacies that exist in other places. We discern that most ice cream stands aren’t located on lakes, so we won’t be able to feed our cones to the ducks. We realize strip malls and cornfields don’t hold quite the same allure as our majestic mountains did. We begrudgingly accept that never again will we get out of Spanish class because our teacher hit a deer on the way to school. Saranac Lake is weird and small and isolated and people eat way too much venison.

But it’s home and we wouldn’t have it any different.