Uncle Ernie

On his business card he was Ernest N. Warren, Counselor at Law, and students addressed him as Professor Warren, but among themselves, they called him Uncle Ernie. I'm the only one who called him Daddy Ernie, and he wasn't actually my father, but without him I would have had no family. I emulated his high forehead, like the bluffs over Lake Bonaparte, tanned from rebuilding the boathouse, cutting firewood,, raking the leaves and shoveling snow, fishing, and canoeing, walking up the hill to the law school mornings, then back for lunch, and then back and forth again in the afternoon. Not that I could hope to develop a forehead like his, or wanted to do much of all that work.

He was a torts specialist who never tried a case, and an expert on law of the sea who never went to sea. In practice, he was a family counselor: too straight-forward, nonconfrontational , and dignified to be a trial lawyer.
He worked to help people avoid confrontations with the law and with each other. He comforted and protected those who were threatened by death and taxes. As Dean of Admissions and Dean of Students in the Cornell Law School, he not only helped hundreds of students into school, through school, and into careers afterwards, but also helped a lot of young applicants convince their fathers that they should not be forced into law school just because their fathers had wanted to be lawyers. By his example, he even persuaded some of those reluctant law school applicants that not all lawyers were liars, cheats, and bullies, and that there might be a place in the profession for themselves after all.
He was a pillar of kindness, civility, and prudence. Never cruel or tyranical. Only slightly impressed by his full professorship, only sometimes a ham.
Not only was he loved and trusted by most everyone, he had received the highest security clearance from the F.B. I and the Defense Department. He liked Ike and Ike liked him. He was a friend of the Attorney General William Rodgers, and he cried when Ed Muskie cried.



When Alaska was just becoming a state and had even fewer lawyers than it had cities, he sent a wave of new Cornell Law graduates to take positions in the government. During World War II he volunteered for the Navy and was turned down for being near-sighted, but during the Cold War, he belonged to a commission, the purpose of which, in case Washington was vaporized by the enemy, was to reconstitute the U.S. government in a secret. underground installation somewhere in Virginia. He could not even tell Mama Dot about his secret service, until Eisenhower's bunker had long since become a mushroom farm or a U.P.S. shipping center. He was asked to go to a new African nation and start a law school, but he declined in order to stay in place with family.


He loved the history of his North Country landscape, knew from his practice the real estate history of the logging and power company lands of the NW Adirondack foot hill country, and he wrote the incorporation document of the Eljah Lake hunting club, which from that beginning included his Mama Dot's father and her Gradfather Doctor Drury of Natural Bridge. Daddy Ernie was a hunter himslef because of family tradition, although he himself never fired a shot that I know of, except from on top of the boat house at cans in the water. He was a boy scout leader, though he had never been a boy scout. Or maybe he was. He had sponsors among the men of the church who helped him toward a schollarship at Hamilton college, where he placed second or third base, and half back possitions, and was called Stub by his teaj and classmates, and married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Drury Failing, the only child, of the only child, of Dr. Dury from Natuaral Bridge . She had gone to Elmira college with a banjo from her Gramps, and after she graduated there, and he from Hamilton, she moved to Ithaca. She lived at the Clinton Hotel and studied Oral English at Ithaca College in order to be near him until he could graduate from Law School and they got married.
She taught English in Camillus for one semester, then retired to become a homemaker. As a master of Oral English, after many private performances of HuckleBerry Finn, Stewart Little, her one recorded performance is of Davey;s Rhinocers hills story Daddy Ernie enjoyed so much, but like I said it had the dubious fictional flaw....that I was totally left out of the story. So its an antique and slanted story but Mama Dot has got to be good on it, although I haven't heard it yet. Davey has it on a tape sister Delight made, and I will ask him to figure out how to post it HERE, and when he does, I will have him activate the HERE so you can click on it and Mama Dot takes over. .



Mama Dot and Grandpa Ernie were a great pair for canoeing and fishing together. Up the Oswegatche Inlet where the grandfathers had gone before, with the same pack baskets, coffee pot, and thirty-inch frying pan, and the kids. Loved, as they went, to repeat the names of the landings and campsites along the way, High Rock, Griffen Rapids, Wolf Creek Spring Hole, Carter's Landing, the places
Daddy Ernie fished with every one , but never by himself. He loved fishing, never cared if he didn't catch any, always said, we saw a lot of nice country anyway, and that was the important thing. So he said. The truth is, he was a deeply social person, almost as deeply religious, with deep faith in law, but most of all social and emotional. He swam just under the surface and never broke it. He seldom said I love you because it would make him cry, and he could cry. His children could make him cry. I know from having been in the closet with the guns a couple of times when I was young and Davey had quit high school foot ball, and trumpet lessons or whatever.
Fishing with Family was sacred. I was joined onto what was a very fishing family back then, with several kinds of devotion to fishing, especially to trout fishing, Daddy Ernie's was probably the most spiritual devotion, with actual fish not being necessary. But he liked catching fish too, because then you had something to feed the family and something to show: it was a better yarn, and he loved fishing yarns.

He managed to work North Country yarns and refereences into his populsr Law school lectures. I never went to one of his lectures, nor even did Davey, unlike brother Herb who actually enrolled in the law school and now calls himself a recovering lawyer, but he was a star lecturer and he would sometinmes work out his lectures at the dinner table.
Like about the time he and Mama Dot actually went to Cannada to fish in a famous trout Lake where it rained and they caught nothing, but on their way back they stopped at the little Bonaparte inlet, and caught a dozen speckled trout ....... and one day we....and I was with him and Herb that day....we were on our way back from Jerden Falls where we hadn't caught a thing and he recalled that story, and so we stopped at Bonaparte Inlet, and caught half a dozen or maybe it was three, nice little brookies. The best eating. That's precedent for you.




Admirality was his favorite legal subject. It was the only sort of international law back then. The law of the sea.
We were a small time boating family,with row boats runabouts, canoe, and a sunfish he sailed around Little Sand Bay with Mama Dot in leiu of the trip to Europe which neither of them much wanted, or the trip to Alaska which he always said was the one, almost foreign place he would like them to travel to after he retired, but he would never retire..
By canoe, by row boat, by Mercury, and Johnson, and Evenrude we had always gone down the Bonaparte outlet to little Mud Lake for evening bass fishing and on down to the small dam at Alpine which had only raised the Bonaparte level a few feet, but flooded miles of connected swamps, bogs, and meadows. All that flow beyond Bonaparte's shore was within the Pine Camp, later called Fort Drum Military Reseration. Some time after the change From Pine Camp to Fort Drum, the military tried to keep boats and people from going beyond the outlet bay of the lake. But Daddy Ernie, who was always on the New York State Law Revision Comission was able to help settle the question of just exactly what a navigable waterway was, made it clear that rivers, and flows or lakes accessible by them are certainly navigable if you can drive logs, or paddle canoes. .
After that original showdown he would periodically have to deal with a new Fort Drum commanding general who thought he had spotted a pennetration of the legitimate defense perimeter And each time, Daddy Ernie would review for all, the past, the precedent, the course of reason and justice established, and each time it gave him satisfaction.
He was a satisfied man. Except,he was sometimes dismayed by his children and by me his charge.



Daddy Ernie's own father, a mild-mannered, northern Baptist pastor, died of cancer when Daddy Ernie was twelve years old. He was brought up by his mother, who had been an orphan herself before she was a wife and a widow. She had an uncorrected undershot jaw that gave her a bull dog look which must have helped her make way through the world. She was fierce as a bull dog an broody like a hen.
When Reverend Warren died, she, Bertha Bonney Warren, took over the church pulpit for a few weeks until a new pastor could be found, and later accompanied young Ernest to Hamilton college where he had a scholarship and both of them worked in the dining halls. Among the upstanding church and business men who sponserd her and her young Ernest, was a newspaper man, Charles Brownell, they called him Chucky, which was the name of a little memoir of the North Country he wrote. Often on Sundays he would come and take Mother Warren for a ride in his automobile, and the family always hoped something might develop there, but she stayed single and lived into old age as a rich old Box Factory Widow's head made and companion, traveling winters with her, the butler, and the maid to a suite in Hawaii. Besides Ernie, as long as he need her, she assisted a woman named Emma, an iillegitimate child of some family member, the note on the back of the picture in Mama Dot's hand, does not say who.
She looks like a lot of those Warrens and Lockwoods.
Having no father and having a single mother who went to college with him,
Daddy Ernie became various kinds of father to many, but, like i said, it was a little rough back home parenting Davey and me.

Davey was always worrisome to his parents: so inward and secretive, but there was still hope for him, if for no other reason but that, according to special tests, he was operating way below his potential.
In my case, I showed no particular potential so I could hardly dissappoint, but I did my most to dismay.

Setting Free the Boys

After he had gathered a couple of degrees and spent three years as a college instructor, my brother Davey quit academic life to do yard work and odd jobs, with a specific goal of working his way up the outside of houses to a career peak of roofing, which seemed to him a colorful trade, yet dirty, dangerous, and difficult enough, that even in hard times, he would be able to work if he really had to.

Daddy Ernie didn't require another lawyer in the family, but he had been hoping for something beyond that..... like a philosopher. He himself admired the thought of Shopenhauer.
On his death bed, he told Davey that he had joined the Baptist church when we came to Ithaca, because his mother insisted....on account of his father having been a Baptist minister. Although a deacon in the Baptist church, he was not a believer in miracles or theological doctrine, excpept for the particularly Baptist creedo that the individual needs no priest to stand between him and his truth. Not that a person didn't need a couselor, a pastor, or a father.
Out of indecision, Davey had become a philosophy major, though he finally decided that he disliked the game as practiced so much that he tried to use the same term paper in all his philosophy classes. His unified theoery didn't go over well, so it took an extra term to graduate.

Davey did get a graduate degree and did publish a couple of weird little books back then, but his overstuffed suitcase of a story, Lake Bonaparte, My Grandfather, and the Treasure of the Rhinoceros Hills, (which he left me out of) was about the only one Daddy Ernie really liked, and and there seemed to be little hope for professionalization of Davey..

One day I had been helping Davey with a basement clean-out job and Daddy Ernie came home for lunch as we were trying to bungie cord a couple of his garbage cans to the roof of the car.
Bungie cords really suck for tying garbage cans to the top of a car, especially when you have no roof rack.
Daddy Ernie took his brief case inside, and came back out with a rope .
As Davey and I wrapped it round the cans and through the windows to each other, Daddy Ernie suggested that if there was anything..... any regular business..... Davey would like to get into, then he would be glad to help out in any way possible.
Davey balled up the rope end, ,n threw it over the garbage cans to me, then said well, he would kind of like to have a fish farm.

Daddy Ernie stepped back, and grabbed his chin to keep his mouth from falling open. As if maybe the reply had been a sarcastic joke. Maybe he actually thought that, or maybe he imagined a chaos, with fish in trees.
Anyway, the subject never came up between them again.

And what do you know!....Davey has his fish farm now, more or less.





As for me: there were no suspicions of underachieving and no fond hopes I could frustrate, but I had perplexed Daddy Ernie from the beginning, What did I want other than wildness and solitude? I was unsuited for public education or regular employment.
As I drifted more and more to the feral life, hitch-hiking back and forth form Ithaca to Northern New York, so that it was never clear whether I was lurking here or there, Daddy Ernie patiently tolerated my comings and goings, and my informal use of the family home. He would not see me for weeks, then one morning find me in the bath tub, asleep in my clothing, smelling like something the dog rolled in.
During those years, my main Ithaca area residence was the Ellis Hollow Beaver meadow, where I had banked the dirt up against the old beaver lodge and planted it around with concentric circles of vine crops from pumpkins which clambered over the meadow to potatoes, and then beans which covered the whole lodge by midsummer. And then I had half a dozen digs in the secret places of Ithaca, particularly in my Cemetery Gorge cliff shelter, where Davey would sometimes leave me a note on the stone with the quartz X on it,which served as my mail drop.



My finger-farming in the beaver meadow was maybe my one independent activity that looked something like a working vocation. but it was often a bust, because of the deer . i could keep out the rabbits by surrounding the plot with a many layered palisade of bramblle stalks , but even three feet deep, the deer were jumping right over it.
A gun seemed to be the answer. I loved guns. Partly because I was such a little guy, but also they were the artifacts of family tradition. When I was younger, we each had our own B.B. gun which we were free to roam and shoot out the eyes of birds with until we graduated to twenty twos, and exploding frogs, but even at that young age, I would sometimes stand in the dark at the back of that same closet among the real guns: the Remmington pump twenty two which Grandpa Failing had taken to pay a debt at his garage and which Mama Dot considered to be hers. Grandpa Failing's Fox double barrel, the two Marlin thirty-thirty carbines deer rifles, the bolt action twenty gauge shot gun Daddy Ernie carried , and the Civil War musket with four notches, which we sometimes brought out for our war games Davey and I had cap pistols we converted to zip guns which could break a Coke bottle at ten paces, and I became a fast draw maniac. When I was old enough, I hunted with the Fox double, and usually got off both barrels before the bird was twenty feet into the brush and either pulped it with lead, or missed it entirely.



In defense of my vine patch, I hitched in from Ellis Hollow to borrow the the Fox double barrel. It was late afternoon and I had entered by way of the wysteria vine and the front porch roof deck, so as to disturb no one, but Daddy Ernie came home a little early , so when he stepped into the clostet to hang up his tie,he found me standing there , the gun in my arms,
It wasn't exactly my gun, but it was the gun I commonly used. Daddy Ernie and I had gone hunting together the previous Fall, and I had nearly shot his face off when a grouse flew up beside us.
I got the grouse though. And Daddy Ernie seemed to be more impressed by the hit than by the near miss.

Surprised by me in the closet, he maintained his equanimity. And of the gun was still in its two component parts and it the case, so it was not like I was going to be triggered by my own surprise . I froze.
Daddy Ernie deliberated for a few seconds.
Then said, You know, young man, you will always have a home with us here at Edgewood Place, any time you care to actually move back in to a room and a bed.
But, he said, if there is some place you would like to go, something you would like to accomplish, or make of yourself, I would be glad to help you in any way possible.

If there had been a just war going on then, and even if there was not, I like many another boy of that time, although I had not killed anyone so far, would have cheerfully gone off as a soldier, and, with very little coaching, I would have made an excellent sniper or assassin. For worse or better however, I didn't meet the Army minimum requirement for formal education, and of course I would have come up short at the Army physical.
But every since I ran off from Aunt Sammy in Florida and my confusion about the term "North Country" had led me half way to Yukon before I got redirected .....ever since then, and more so as I had heard it talked of at the family talble and picture in the National Graphics by the hearth at Loon island... I had kind of wanted to go to Alaska.

Alaska, I said, I want to go to Alaska.

Daddy Ernie stepped back just a little into the light of the room, but he looked up and far away through the dark closet sky, then he looked down at me and said Alaska was not completely out of the question.
He must have been of two minds about it.
I sure was.

Why did I want to go to Alaska? I had learned to survive on the edge of civilization, but up there, in those boreal forests I would never be able to feed, comfort, and protect myself.
And the bears! In the Geographic pictures, there appeared to be more bears along the rivers of Alaska than fisherman on opening day anywhere. Black Bears, Brown Bears, Grizzly Bears, Kodiak Bears, and Polar Bears.
My experience of being dragged off by a bear, however well meaning she might have been, had made me shy about them, to say the least. I must have wanted to kill one.