While at Watertown, I was looking for a good book to explain the neighbouring zone of New York State, the North Country. Lucky man that I am, I hit upon the right book first go. Twenty-five or so essays called Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York edited by Singer and Burdick. The collection was a collaborative effort to define the place by both old-timers and newcomers, academics and the little published. Nice coming from the Maritimes to read a book about an economically depressed area that neither mentions a government arts grant or advocates a tourism oriented point of view:

To demographers, the region leads the state in unemployment, incest and illiteracy. It is cold, springless, hobbled by it's inhabitants sense of defeat, stubbornly conservative. But it's home and I embrace it with an affinity I cannot embrace well.

The North Country is defined by Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River and Lake Champlain. Its southern border is not so boldly marked in blue. Every road feels like a backroad, even from the more northern perspective. To a southern New Yorker it must seem like rural Utah, trailer home on untended lots, old farms in the country and old mills in the towns. A little too far for most cottagers, buffered from the south by the forest and mountain playland of the Adirondacks. Here's one guy's view of the place. Here's the publisher's info - seems the website's still pending for North Country Books, Inc.