Mitch Lee: Adirondack Storyteller

Adirondack tall tales from Inlet and beyond

By Janet Reynolds

Mention an idea or place about the Adirondacks and chances are good Mitch Lee has a story to go with it. The self-proclaimed Adirondack Storyteller has been creating and telling stories about the Adirondacks for over 30 years, amassing 7-8,000 stories in three-ring binders ready to pull out at the right moment. About 2,500 of his stories are already recorded in the Adirondack Experience archives

Recently retired as Inlet’s director of parks and recreation and assistant director of tourism, Lee still remembers his first story. A tall tale inspired by a poem he found in a book, “The Two Way Hound” is about a hunting dog who, after a misadventure with a sharp plow, is put back together by a young boy. The only issue is that two feet are up and two feet are down, making him the two-way hound. “I found it so amusing, so Adirondack,” he says of the story he created. “It had a lot of things people are familiar with in stories—Adirondack muster, magic, intrigue.”

Lee told that story at an open house at a Unitarian Church at the urging of his Syracuse University friends who loved the stories he would spin about the Adirondacks. “The audience would not let me off the stage,” he says. “That’s when I caught the bug.”

Lee’s interest in storytelling started young. His father was a forest ranger in the West Canada Lake Wilderness, where the family lived right next to the iconoclastic hunter/trapper French Louie’s fireplace. His mother was a librarian who encouraged and and all reading. The family moved to Inlet, Lee says, after his mother got tired of living without running water or electricity. 

Adirondack storyteller

Everything from historical characters to overheard conversation tidbits are potential story fodder for Lee. “I may take the old hermit French Louie story and make it my own,” he says. “I don’t fall away from who French Louie was. He was a real person but I will fold him into the new story. It creates an expectation that Louie did that, whatever it was. The story is not something that happened per se. Most stories like that—half truths to weave a tale.”

Lee, who got his first cell phone three months ago, relies on his steel trap mind and the trusty sketch book he carries with him everywhere to jot down notes and snippets. “If you’re always looking and always collecting, the gems are there daily,” he says. “I think of my stories like if you’re at the beach hunting for shells. The 3,000 other people are just using the beach. But someone is always collecting the shells. As I go through my day, I’m also always listening for the gems.”

Lee doesn’t necessarily tell a story as soon as he develops it. “Sometimes you get excited about a story but a story has to be in my heart and ready to go. That’s based on life experiences,” he says. “Something happens in the course of your day or year and then you’re ready to do that particular story. It puts me back in the moment when that story was a truth to me.”

People expecting to hear Lee spin a yarn for 45 minutes might be surprised. The sweet spot of storytelling is 13 minutes, he says. “I have found a rhythm for an audience for their absorption of a story in and of itself. I usually plant a seed at minute 3-4 that will appear at the end. It will be the aha. If you move the story too far after 13 minutes you lose the effect of the aha moment.“

While some storytellers take workshops to hone their craft, Lee credits the Adirondacks as his teacher. “I was taught by the school of Adirondack imagery, the tone and tenor of the way young and middle-aged and old men spoke, whether they were visitors or lived here,” he says. “Just studying the people and how they interacted was the greatest teacher. I was witnessing the real occurrences of the human condition. It’s what I always wanted to convey.”