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Photo courtesy of Syracuse
University Press |
Catherine Petty with
her three sons (Clarence is on right). |
Giant of the woods
How can one man do so much in just 97 years?
By Philip G. Terrie
Clarence Petty is of one of the most interesting
and important people ever to carry a canoe, bushwhack through the
backcountry, or dedicate his life to protecting the Adirondack wilderness.
And he has lived through a period of high drama in Adirondack affairs.
As it winds through this crucial era of the region's history, Christopher
Angus's richly detailed account of Petty’s life and times
touches on the critical elements of decades of struggle to shape
the Adirondack Park and preserve the qualities that define it.
Petty is also a living link to an Adirondack past of loggers, trappers
and guides that is mostly remembered today through sepia photographs
in history books and displays at the Adirondack Museum.
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The Extraordinary Adirondack Journey
of Clarence Petty
By Chris Angus
Syracuse University Press, 2002
Hardcover, 288 pages, $29.95 |
Ellsworth Petty, Clarence’s father, was
born in 1862 in Crown Point and came to the Saranac Lake country
in the 1880s. He guided for wealthy summer people and met Catherine
Wandruska, a New York City girl employed as a summer cook at Bartlett’s
Carry Hotel, whom he married in 1901.They settled on state land
deep in the woods, at first in a tent and then in a cabin, from
which they were later evicted as squatters by the state. The second
of three sons, Clarence was born on August 8, 1905.
By 1911, the family was living at Coreys, a small guides’
settlement on the Stony Creek Ponds, in the very house where Clarence
Petty resides today. In the early 20th century, poor Adirondackers
still lived the life of the frontier: Everyone, including children,
worked hard, enjoying none of the amenities we take for granted.
But it was also a time and place of marvelous possibilities, especially
for a self-reliant boy who thrived in the woods. Learning to hunt,
trap and fish from his father, hiking alone at the age of 6 through
miles of lonely forest, guiding urban sportsmen by the time he was
11, Petty developed a lifelong love of wild places.
One of the joys of his early life was a close friendship with Noah
John Rondeau, the now-legendary hermit of Cold River. If Clarence
and his brother Bill had a few days off from chores, they would
hike the 13 miles to Rondeau’s campsite, where they fished
(catching five-pound brook trout!) and listened to tales of life
deep in the woods. Petty’s early existence was inextricably
bound to the forests around him, and he grew from a boy who killed
to eat to a man who appreciated the wilderness in all its fragile
complexity. Angus notes, “The transition from one who lived
off the land to one who lived to protect it is one of the signatory
elements of Petty’s life.”
Although his parents received little formal schooling, Catherine
Petty was determined to see her sons move up in the world, and she
knew that education was the key. “They loved the life of hunting
and fishing and could make good money as guides,” Angus tells
us. “But their mother had other ideas.”
In 1916 Clarence started sixth-grade classes at the Saranac Lake
School. This meant boarding in town and walking to and from Coreys
on the weekends. “Every Sunday,” Angus tells us, “Catherine
would cook an early dinner at one or two o’clock, and then
Clarence and Bill (a seventh grader) would walk the 16 miles to
Saranac Lake, where they would stay until the following Friday.”
Says Clarence: “No matter whether we were on snowshoes or
on bare ground,” the trek was “four hours every time,
go down, four hours coming back.” If it snowed during the
week, the boys would have to break trail on the way home. In winter,
Angus writes, “it was so dark they would have to find their
way by looking up at the treetops and following the path outlined
where the tall pines blotted out the stars.”
He and Bill contributed to the family economy however they could—driving
deer for a local sportsman before school, weeding a spinach farm
after school, shooting snowshoe hares on the trek to Saranac Lake
and selling them for 45 cents each at a local market, trapping and
guiding on weekends. But Clarence still found time to play football
and excel as a speedskater.
When he received his high-school diploma in 1925, he was voted by
his class both “most bashful” and “most handsome”
and was respected for his unfailing courtesy. During a life of environmental
activism that often led to overt conflict, Petty was never known
to treat anyone with less than perfect manners.
In the fall of 1925, he entered the State College of Forestry at
Syracuse. There he found the classes challenging, and again he had
to take on a variety of odd jobs to support himself. Graduating
in June of 1930, as the Depression was putting thousands out of
work, Petty scrambled for employment; his first job was with Western
Union, which sent him to Oklahoma to study telegraph poles. But
after only a few months, he was transferred to New York City, stuck
in a tedious office job in the middle of the nation’s biggest
and noisiest metropolis. He felt like a caged animal.
Looking for an escape, Petty learned to fly. This decision led to
adventures and opportunities that a poor boy from the Adirondacks
would never have dreamed of.
Receiving his pilot’s license in 1931, he still needed a job
that would get him back to the woods. This he found with the Civilian
Conservation Corps; even better, he was able to return to the Adirondacks,
reporting to work at a camp near Tupper Lake, a few miles from Corey’s.
Petty quickly moved up in the CCC hierarchy, and during this time
he met Ferne Hastings. They married in 1938.
Petty kept up his interest in flying, and when the CCC folded its
tents in 1942, he joined the Navy as a flight instructor, then headed
to the Pacific for work in Naval Transport. He flew to most of the
dangerous atolls—Midway, Guadalcanal, Guam, among others—and
was shot at but never hit. After the war, he landed a job as a district
ranger at Cranberry Lake for the state Conservation Department,
the beginning of over a half-century of conservation work in the
part of the world Clarence Petty loved the most. First as a state
employee, later as a citizen activist, he devoted the rest of the
20th century to protecting the Adirondacks, a vocation that often
set him at odds with neighbors and even family.
The Conservation Department at mid-century had little use for Article
14, the “forever-wild” provision of the state constitution.
Through “improvements” like jeep roads, horse trails
and vast modern campsites, it aimed to develop all sorts of recreation
in the Forest Preserve, and its employees were expected to share
this attitude. It didn’t take the new ranger at Cranberry
Lake long to show that he represented a radically different vision
of what was best for the public lands of the Adirondacks. During
his time with the Conservation Department, Petty resisted the efforts
of various bosses to maneuver around the spirit of Article 14, becoming,
Angus writes, “part of a new conservation leadership that
was moving relentlessly toward ever-greater protections for the
preserve.”
In 1951 the state legislature set up a Joint Legislative Committee
on Natural Resources. Known later as the Pomeroy Committee (after
Assemblyman Watson Pomeroy, who became its chair), it borrowed Clarence
Petty from the Conservation Department in the late 1950s to work
on an intensive study of the Forest Preserve, identifying those
areas especially suited for enhanced wilderness protection. This
was Petty’s dream job: He was paid good money and given a
ticket to paradise. In every season for the next four years, he
bushwhacked, paddled or flew over nearly every acre of state land
in the Adirondacks.
“I was always impressed with Clarence’s smooth walking
style,” recounted Neil Stout, his colleague in the studies.
“It often appeared that his feet barely touched the ground.
His field assistants [suggested] that Clarence must have embedded
roller bearings in the soles of his shoes. His stride may have benefited
from his ice-skating skills developed in earlier years.”
Petty’s work with the Pomeroy Committee led to a proposal
for designating large parts of the Forest Preserve as “Wilderness
Areas,” just as the U.S. Forest Service had done with selected
roadless parcels of the National Forests. Although this proposal
was not adopted, the immense store of data amassed by Petty and
others proved invaluable to the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) when
it drew up the State Land Master Plan a decade later.
He finished this work in 1962 and returned to the Conservation Department,
but before long he was back where he most wanted to be. In 1968
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller appointed a Temporary Study Commission on
the Future of the Adirondacks, and Petty was recruited to help develop
proposals that would lead to the establishment of the Adirondack
Park Agency (APA). His cohort George Davis recalls Clarence’s
workaholic ways, along with his aversion to alcohol and a deep-seated
sense of duty. “Our first field trip together was to a little-known
area northwest of Stillwater Reservoir, which later became classified
as the Pepperbox Wilderness. I soon learned that Clarence liked
to start his days early. He wanted us to be in a motel that Sunday
night in March and on the road by 5 a.m.”
They left hours before dawn the next morning for the outlet of Stillwater
Reservoir, “where we donned our snowshoes and headed into
the remote backcountry. It turned out to be a beautiful day, with
the sun shining and not a cloud in sight.
“We came out of the woods and back to our car at 4 p.m., an
11-hour workday. [At Big Moose] I pulled into the bar. Clarence
immediately became very nervous and asked me what I was doing. I
said, ‘Well, I feel like having a beer.’ And he just
kind of shook his head and couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘You
can’t do that. It’s not quitting time yet.’ I
pointed out that even though it wasn’t five o’clock,
it seemed like that might be enough for one day. And he said, ‘But
it’s not quitting time yet and also, we’ve got a state
car. We can’t park a state car at a bar.’
“I got out of the car and headed toward the bar, kinda looking
at Clarence, hoping he would get out. [He did, but] instead of coming
toward the bar, he went to the trunk of the car and opened it. He
pulled out his bright orange, unmarked raincoat. …He had his
conservation department uniform on and did not want to be seen wearing
it in a bar. At any rate, in we went, and I had my beer while Clarence
had a glass of branch water, as he called it, still muttering most
of the time we were there.”
Adds Angus: “George Davis is…one of the few who can
honestly say he ever had a drink with Clarence in a bar.”
In 1971, Petty retired—but not for long. He was soon working
for the newly established APA, where he refined the plans for zoning
the Forest Preserve, including the designation of a million acres
as Wilderness, where no motorized recreation would be allowed. His
field work was also instrumental in establishing a system of Wild,
Scenic and Recreational Rivers, for which he inventoried (by canoe
and by foot) some 1,300 miles of Adirondack rivers that would be
given special protection by the state legislature.
In 1974, Petty retired again, but life was anything but dull. His
boundless energy, his encyclopedic knowledge of the Adirondacks,
and his unrelenting dedication were repeatedly called upon. At one
time or another he has been a board member or trustee of just about
every environmental organization in or near the Adirondacks, and
he’s served on a nearly endless list of ad hoc committees
studying such issues as wolf reintroduction and open-space protection.
He also continues to write an average of 20 letters a week to his
elected representatives, batting them out on his ancient portable
typewriter to everyone from President Bush on down, on issues ranging
from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to the need to control
the growth in human population, which he considers the root cause
of most environmental problems.
Throughout much of his long life, he has also operated a flight-training
school, teaching three generations of new pilots. Petty taught flying
for an astonishing 65 years, finally calling it a day in 2000. At
95, he was the oldest flight instructor in the country.
During the decades of controversy since the establishment of the
APA, only a few native-born Adirondackers have openly espoused wilderness
preservation. Exceptions like Clarence Petty don’t seriously
challenge the general truth that local government and business interests
have dominated the regional debate, stubbornly resisting the agency
and its supporters and often characterizing environmentalists as
outsiders indifferent to the welfare of Adirondack families. But
for Clarence Petty there has never been any question about working—and
speaking out—for what he believes in. No criticism, from neighbor
or kin, has dampened his dedication to the cause of preserving the
Adirondacks.
Christopher Angus has given us a satisfying and full account of
the life of this extraordinary man. One could quibble with his repetition
of the insupportable claim that a hundred years ago the entire Adirondacks
had been clear-cut or with his suggestion that Edward Abbey is “the
father of the modern environmental movement.” Or one could
object to the sketchy citation of other Adirondack historians—mainly
Frank Graham, Jr.—on whose work he has relied. But mostly
one should thank him for insuring that future Adirondack historians
and activists will know how much a committed individual can accomplish.
Clarence Petty’s life has intersected with a watershed era
of Adirondack history. Stitching the details of that life into the
larger fabric, Angus tells a powerful and inspiring story.
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