Nobody's Fool [antikvár]

WEDNESDAY "l^r " "pper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the H town's two-block-long business district, was quietly residential H for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural ^^^^ along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-hcels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it— although Main, from its "lower" end by the IGA and Tastce Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter mile—^were mostiy dinosaurs, big, aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats. The most impressive featiu-c of Upper Main was not its houses, however, but the regiment of ancient elms, whose upper limbs arched over the steeply pitched roofs of these elderly houses, as well as the street below, to green cathedral effect, bathing the street in breeze-blown shadows that masked the peeling paint and rendered the sloping porchcs and crooked eaves of the houses quaint in their decay. City people on their way north, getting off the interstate in search of food and fuel, often slowed as they drove through the village and peered nostalgically out their windows at the old houses, wondering idly what they cost and what