I once met a boy as he was walking by the library door in the school I attended in Schroon.  He had a different stride to his walk, with those leather Red Wing boots that he always had on his feet.  He wore a strange kind of jeans, different, not Levis, they hung at his hips, brass colored buttons on his fly, but not sagging like the silliness of today.  He wore a flannel shirt with a colored tee underneath. He was the new kid in school but yet looked so at ease.

His name was Joe.  I have since seen his face at night in quiet peace filled dreams as though he was passing through like a cool summer night breeze.  I welcome the sight and hope he is well.  For decades I have enjoyed the feeling of him being there for a moment but then he is gone.  I first met this boy decades ago.

I learned to ski with him over the hills that rose above Pepper Hollow.  Pepper Hollow where we all would sit in the cold Adirondack night air around a warm camp fire and talk for hours. We were a tight little group of kids that grew up in the hills. I can see the fire light up the smiles of Barb and Katie, Joe, Mike and Rue, my twin brother Bill and I. The sound of our laughter must have awakened the mountains around.  Innocent youth forever to be friends.  

I soon realized that I had a best friend. We back packed in summer, rode bikes to school, ice skated on a patch of ice in the gravel pit. So important to this boy Bob, that didn’t feel he fit it.   For several years I felt the love of these friends.  

Time goes and lives change.  I found my way to the Pacific and a life of adventure beyond the wildest dreams I could have had.  I never heard from that boy Joe.  I wondered and worried if he were safe, if he was peaceful and loved.  I often felt sadness when thinking of him. I never stopped wondering and worrying until this sad day.  Today I got word that he passed away.  My mind was flooded with vivid memories of this boy Joe.  Then came the tears, many tears. I had held them for years knowing that someday this news would come.

I hope that he is at peace, looking down today at his friends and family, the family that loved him so much.  I hope he can feel the warm embrace that we all wanted to give him over the years.  Perhaps he is going over the mountains with the glistening snow toward the warm winter Adirondack sun, looking back at us all, waving his final goodbye.  I love you Joe and will miss you forever. Please visit my dreams again.

Robert James Lantiegne

March 20th, 2015

I am a regular guy, rugged some say, kind and generous, I've heard.  Sometimes impatient and abrupt as the child that learned.  At times with a streak so mean it breaks my old heart.

I've traveled a rough road and stumbled over many a treasure. I have seen beauty beyond words.  My spirit is ever evolving but sometimes nowhere to be felt.  Then before I realize, I am on the precipice of a rocky mountain spire, touching the heavens with such joy my soul shouts.

Some nights are cold and scary as a midnight storm to a babe.  Others are warm, muffled noises blending with peaceful threads of my dreams.

Morning can come as tender rays of light, tugging at my soul to awaken the day. I have had the sun come up and jolt me awake.  It comes as crushing thunder from a purple lightning flash, burying its icy spear into the mattress beside.  Throwing me to the floor with no hope of hiding from the day beneath comforters warm and thick.

I have so often been to the benthos below. Witnessed the beauty of the undersea world bursting to color in the narrow beam of the latest high tech gadgetry. I'm suspended in the pea soup murk of the Salish Sea.

I've resisted the drift, anchoring only a finger on an invertebrate crowded rock. I’ve been the lone observer of a tiny shrimp. Her most fragile claws waving as if playing the violin.  While there, in the company of so many souls of marine creatures past, I've tried to capture the beauty on the digital tapestry only to find a skeleton of what I had seen.

I've twice felt the cold, dead spirits of the deep sea gripping my throat. They were groaning you are dead, sadness to their tone.  I gazed up to unseen ripples from the dark, lonely fathoms below.  I was telling little boy Bobby who hides in my mind, “Your life is now over, I’m so sorry but I tried.”

Now I look down the dim forest path to the future ahead.  Wiping blurry eyes in hopes of seeing beyond. There is no clear route and I hear primal whispers from within.  I want to flee screaming but know I would not last. They would pounce me tearing the flesh from my bones.

Then it appears, the faint green orb aglow. It asks me to join as it floats to the warm meadows unknown.  Once there I discover that I am not mad. I've only traveled the unknown from the shadows I've come.  There will be more struggles and adventures that thrill.  I keep going as only I can.

Robert James Lantiegne

December 1st, 2014

I find myself fasting for cause not my own. No food, that I take for granted like the air that I breathe.  Food that I swallow without respect. Gifts from Earth and Great Spirit from where it came.

After two dawns, all has more color, more clear.  My thoughts become visions that float in with ease. Not madness but gentle journeys of my mind's eye. It is good for the body.  It is good for the soul, the spirit.

Spirit grows as if the fast is the cool mountain stream that nourishes and refreshes my spirit that has wilted in the choking smoke of the fires in my life. Could it be Great Spirit that comes to me when my body has flushed the poisons long held. Those warm, loving spirits bringing strength and wisdom to me when mind and body are clear and willing to accept.

If I were to fast often, powerful mind and the treasures that there lay, could be mine as each sun rises. Wise understandings etched in my brain like scrimshaw on the moose antler. Conscious awareness that is only a visitor from time to time.

If only these thoughts could be sticks that beaver builds the dam for his glistening pond. The pond of my mind where tired geese rest, so peaceful, so still that every rising May fly leaves a million rings.

I sit on the ridge listening to the choir of ripples from the creek below.  I wonder if it will be as peaceful when I go to the Great Spirit in the sky.  Will I then bask in the warm breeze that the sun has so gently lifted from the valley below?  My mind quiet, soul content, body no longer aching, heart not breaking.

The time will come but it is not now. There is more to do, gifts of wisdom to accept, knowledge to share. There is more love, more kindness that I must leave in this world. I think about leaving but know I cannot.

Robert James Lantiegne

December 26th, 2014

For one day, the world’s held at bay.

When we will hold each other, it’s like we’ve held no other.

To our families we try to explain, when in each others’ arms we feel no pain.

All my life I’ve longed, for love this strong.

We didn’t make a pair a time or two, we will only know when our lives are through.

One week alone without your kiss, reminds me again and again it’s you I miss.

Another night is here that’s full of joy, I can’t wait til morning to hold my boy.

I’ll always love ya, you know it’s true, yours is the embrace I need when my life is through.

-Robert Lantiegne

The frogs are singing their little hearts out. This is the first night this year that they have been singing. The geese are also getting more and more boisterous on the lake throughout the nocturne. Those flocks of geese on the lake just joined in on the serenade to the Great Spirit this night. Do you think one little tree frog decides that he is bored or is wanting a girlfriend and just starts singing? Maybe that one little frog is the reason all the frogs in the area start proclaiming that the winter is over, that their lives are good. It is impossible to not recognize the geese calling, while on the lake, as being so excited to travel up north to the wilderness in which they relax. Every night this week while my goldens play at the lake, I realized that small groups of geese take to wing in the middle of the night.  The mature geese are training the younger yearlings how to navigate by the stars. When each small group comes back to raft up on the lake with their kin that are resting on the water, the geese that watched their comrades do the night flights are calling them back to where they are on the dark lake that is smooth as glass.  I can't tell yet if the geese on the water are heckling or cheering their own on. I'll have to spend a few more nights with these majestic souls before they leave on their travels a thousand miles to the north, away from civilization.

I had just walked out the front door into the cool night air and had taken one step down the porch steps. I had one more load of gear to bring in from my trailered boat still dripping salt water onto my driveway.  I was tired from a full day of being on the Salish Sea with my best friends, Tokota and Ruckus. They are two golden retrievers that accompany me on my adventures and then are the first ones to reach their dream world when the three of us lay down for the night. They are already doing puppy dog twitches while I'm staring at the ceiling, concerned about the work ahead. The work of bringing my gardens out of hibernation. That little singing frog that started off the peeper's beautiful chorus last night can sing until the next snow flies again and the stubborn garden will not budge.  The garden requires that first working of the year to slowly come awake for this coming color

season of dahlias and the veggies that cheer me on as the frogs and geese do. The garden needs human hands massaging its soil. The garden prefers that the masseure uses bare warm hands so it can ease back into activity.

I hear the sounds of the frogs and geese enter my dark, quiet bedroom through my partially opened window. My thoughts leave the garden and return to the calm seas glistening under the warm spring sun.  Within minutes my boys are roused out of their deep sleep by my puppy dog twitches.

I had only reached the second wooden step on my way to the boat. I was tired, the spring in my step had vanished hours ago. The task at hand was momentarily interrupted by the singing amphibians. By the time the geese applauded the frogs' anthem, I was motionless with both feet comfortably resting on the second step, leaning some of my weight into my right hand gently placed on the rail. After a few minutes of standing rejuvenation, I took a slow deep breath in through my nose and exhaled effortlessly out my mouth trying to somehow hold within my soul what I was so blessed to be witnessing,  the night's official closing ceremonies of the winter of 2018-2019. Thirty minutes later, still standing on that second step, I was confident and grateful that I had captured some of the magic, mysticism and magistry of that moment. The frogs and geese survived another year. I survived another year.

-Robert Lantiegne, March 2019

Is there something innate, something instinctual at my core, born in conjunction with my soul, that is at peace when I am in the wilds? The world in the wilds is where I am solid in my footing.

The world in which most live is so erratic and loud, constant motion, unceasing clamor, save for those few precious quiet hours from midnight until the eastern horizon stirs.

There is such constant barrage of stimulation to my seven senses that my adrenaline raises, which causes me to be in that all too familiar state of heightened awareness and vigilance. In that state there is a relief though, that gives me a slight respite.

Being alert, intensely aware of my surroundings gives me confidence that I am safe, safe from letting some threat get too close, permeate into my immediate surrounds and attack.

There is no let up of the loud hum of voices, and noise from technologic gadgets and gizmos.

The daylight agitates the cells of my retinas, as they transfer massive unending bundles of information, that race through the nerves routed to my brain.

Is this the treatment for this daily subliminal anxiety. Simplify and slow my surrounding.

The bare Christmas tree. In the past, obligated to having tradition of a decorated tree, my eyes and thoughts engulfed, as my attention jumps from one ornament, to a certain pattern of Christmas tree lights, to another frivolous glistening object, devoid of any meaning. These trees bare the burden of a plethora of ornaments, unnaturally tugging at the tip of its straining boughs

Instead, I have part of the natural scene of the wilds, right in my midst. The spirits of the animals memorialized on my walls, finally feel at home, back in their element.

There shall be a fresh cut subalpine fir in the center of the room when that day comes when the few, sit together, reminiscing about this old man, spending the last fleeting moments of my soul and spirit in this human realm. That vigorous perfect creation of tree will tell the story of Ranger Bob. From the instant of his beginning to the sparkling wisps that trail his soul as it shoots from this world.

• Robert Lantiegne, 2024

Someone once asked me about the rush of adrenaline while pheasant hunting.

It is actually an experience of anticipation and controlled excitement during hours of arduous hustling through brush and fields, behind my dogs.

Goldens are a breed that flush pheasant that they track, locate and jump. In hunting terminology, a flush is when a game bird takes to flight to escape a predator, dog or person. Pointing breeds instantly freeze in a motionless stance when they locate a pheasant. They were bred to locate birds and then stand motionless as to not flush the bird. Hunters with pointing breeds recognize the unique pointing stance and then rush to the dog and move in on the bird for the flush. When the plan all comes together for me and my three goldens, it is flat out adrenaline when you hear the very first sound of pheasant wings taking off through the brush after it jumps into the air to launch and you hear the clucks of flushed hens, and louder cackles of flushed roosters. Instantaneously, there is intense visual searching for the bird and if spotted, instinctively looking ahead of the bird for an opening in the brush to get that shot. The sense of relieve and accomplishment is when you see a feather or two eject from the bird and the head and neck transition from intently pointing straight ahead in its flight path, to limp and loosely laying over the bird’s back or along it's side. The mass and momentum of the birds body propelled it forward along its course like a football, but not spiraling. The trajectory decreases a couple moments after the neck goes limp, wings stop beating, and then begins its decent and fall into the thick brush of blackberry hedges, tall canary grass or the dense under story growth beneath the closed canopy of alder trees.

That is when the dogs transfer to task #2, locating and retrieving the bird. 

Man, Tony, I have visualized it from memory hundreds of times but never once described it verbally much less written it.

• Robert Lantiegne, 2024