Up on a Hill and Thereabouts: An Adirondack Childhood
by Gloria Stubing Rist

Everyone should want Gloria Stubing Rist as her grandmother. Because at night, when you asked, “Tell me a story,” there would be one: touching, raucous, mischievous, and often very funny. And there would be a new one every night—ninetytwo short chapters make up this book. Within each chapter live hobos and gypsies, drunks and “crazy” women, sweet boys and prostitutes. Reading Up on a Hill and Thereabouts is to be in the presence of a wonderful storyteller, one who doesn’t analyze or make meaning of her rich material: She just tells the stories of life in the Adirondacks in the 1930s.

At age five, Gloria’s mother Mary (Mim) pulls a gun on her husband and takes Gloria (nicknamed Yada) and her brother Harland (nicknamed Bubby) from their home in the Bronx to the town of Chilson in the Adirondacks. This is where Mim grew up. There, in the rugged wilderness with winter coming on, things are dire: Mim has no money, no food, nobody to help, and two little kids, aged five and three. That relief is available through the New Deal is not an option: “What a horrible thing that would have been—pride would not allow it.” If you can’t take care of yourself, tough luck.

Mim soon finds a boyfriend, Cowboy, who helps out as he drifts in and out of their lives for a few years. And she finds a way to make money: homebrewing. She is a loose-handed parent, repeating, “Yada, what am I going to do with you?” when Gloria gets into mischief. It is easy getting into trouble with a mother who is often absent for days at a time: “At that time, Mim decided to go on one of her disappearances again, I don’t know to where” (239). The reader wonders as well, but the older narrator doesn’t try and fill in that gap, or many others. These tales are told largely from the perspective of the child, who learns about drunks and homelessness, tuberculosis and the clap. An adult understanding would have made this a memoir, which it is not. Up on a Hill reads more like an oral history, one that creates a portrait of life in the North Country during the Depression. It’s a portrait of a rugged life, marked by poverty. There is no self-pity in that poverty, as Stubing plays up the fun, the good, the treasres; her life is filled with high jinx and freedom.

The world we are taken into is beautiful and hard. Beautiful for taking us to a place where kids used their imaginations to invent games like “stick can” (played on the ice) and where a sense of humor is essential. Beautiful for the connections made. A black man (the first Gloria has ever met) arrives in Chilson to work as a lumberjack. He is gentle and attentive, and introduces her to Poe’s “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee.” He also saves her from her drunken stepfather, Robert Ford. Then there’s the starving, fourteen-year-old orphan, Buck, who flees his abusive foster family and comes to work in the pulp mill one summer (he’s the one who gets the clap after one night in town), and stays with them for the next few years as an older-brother figure.

But it’s not all open doors and love: Food is too scarce (one meal consists of skunk), tempers too quick, and the men often drunk. The drinking is a fact, like the sex that happens up on the hill; there is no judgment here, no moralizing. In one chapter, bums buy “canned heat,” which they light and burn until the contents liquefy. They then strain it through a handkerchief and drink the dark red liquid. That’s drunk.

The nearest doctors are in Ticonderoga. And so Stubing learns to accept loss at a young age—her first crush to tuberculosis, a friend to leukemia, another to appendicitis (the parents didn’t believe in surgery), a neighbor to cancer, and then a long list of dogs and cats lost, killed, or even rabid.

The outside world hardly touches these rustic lives until the summer of 1939. Indeed, this is a near-lawless world of outracing the police while transporting a stock of liquor, and of having a house of ill repute just up the hill (her great grandpa “up and marries the lady who ran the house of ill-repute!”). Or, most astonishingly, one day Bob and Mim tell Gloria and her brother Bub to set fire to a field they want to clear. Then the adults, laughing, go back to bed, leaving responsibility to the children—if the fire jumps the road and burns the woods, the children won’t be charged.

There is some description of the vast natural world that surrounds these people: whippoorwills call from the woods, and a local boy, considered a happy fool, shows her where an owl roosts and where bats hang. But I wished for a greater sense of the land—it’s not until well into the tales that those legendary Adirondack mosquitoes are even mentioned.

Stubing is sure of her audience: Young ones wanting to know what life was like “back then.” This folksy quality runs through the book, which is part of the appeal. We are being spoken to, and the intimacy and warmth of that is palpable. It also means that there’s an artless quality to the narrative, with many a “but that’s another story” thrown in. (The most remarkable of these is: “A few years later, Bob tried to kill Mim, but that’s another story.”)

Though each of the chapters could stand alone, by the end we know some of the central characters well. So when Cowboy—the only decent “father” that Gloria ever had—is shot in a hunting accident, the sadness is shared.

Grainy black and white photos offer a wonderful dimension: We see Yada in all of her youthful energy and beauty, the smile on her face matching the energetic humor of these stories of a place and time we are grateful to be able to read about, grateful thatin her nineties, she has had the energy to put pen to paper and share.

- Susan Fox Rogers, Bard College