Krishna and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance
- Chapter Three -
What Would Jesus Do?
In the early seventies, another school year and the promise of a new season brought to Saratoga Springs a beehive of activity, with many new faces appearing on the streets for the very first time. This was a few years before I became a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
Sperry’s had just opened with the look of the fifties; Davis had recently become the new owner of Saratoga Traders and for live music the best was found every Wednesday night at Skidmore’s new basement coffeehouse: Lively Lucy’s.
Of course, certain things about Saratoga were perfect, just as they were, and especially for an early morning breakfast it was hard to beat the potatoes being served over at the Four Sons’ Cafe. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, my friend, David O’Neill, introduced me to Peter and his girlfriend. Late one afternoon we all took a short drive toward Wilton to look at a small cabin that Peter said I could live in.
At the time, I still owned the 1959 four-wheel drive, GMC panel truck that I had bought while I was in the Air Force and seeing how David’s friends mentioned that the road leading up to the cabin would be quite rough, I volunteered to drive. But a few months later after the owners of the property had asked me to be their caretaker, I decided that a recent offer to buy my GMC was just too good to pass up. Without hesitating, I sold it. Now that I was going to be living rent free and my utilities cut to zero, getting rid of this last big expense seemed like the right thing to do. It was always an invigorating experience walking to the cabin, especially in the dead of winter when I’d have to strap on my cross-country skis. Even so, nothing ever compared to the ebullience I felt when we all drove up on that first visit.
Including the two hundred acres that went along with the cabin, this location was much more isolated than the little house I found in Fischer, many years later. Instead of stone, this cabin had been built entirely out of logs—probably right after the turn of the century by some unknown Adirondack recluse. I remember when I first saw it I could hardly believe that something so beautiful and so old could still exist, and yet be completely abandoned. Inside and out everything had the unmistakable appearance of having withstood both the test of time and the ravages of man—a little forgotten cabin perched on top of a pine covered knoll, simply waiting for someone like me to come along and take care of it. When discovering something as incredible as this, one’s euphoria is boundless and every moment ecstatic.