Sometimes I am left scratching my head over human made products that are so weird, sometimes stupid, often so painful to use that one wonders why they were ever invented in the first place. They leave me wondering if the inventors of these things hated humans. Those very questions always roll through my mind every time I pass an Adirondack chair. And pass them is what I do. For me, there will be no sitting.

Were they created by people hating people? In the old days they were made out of wood so that if one could actually sit in them or better get up out of them, one was often left with a backside and back thighs festooned with large and painful splinters, often green because in the old days Adirondack chairs were always painted green.

Let’s be honest here. Who over the age of 30 can actually get up out of those chairs of torture? Getting into them? OK if you’re young as said, but once in, one is mentally focused for the rest of their time in them on how to get back out without some help from smirking relatives and a lot of fulcrum savvy.

Adirondack chairs, all the rage for so many years, were usually painted dark green, were very heavy, and built to outlast the pyramids. Dragging them out into the back yard for potential barbecues and cook-outs was an annual spring rite of abuse to be repeated when they had to be dragged back into a shed for the winter. It was quite like pulling a Sherman tank with a rope and with its brakes locked. How I hated that job and suggested the horrid chairs just be left out all winter, but I’d be ignored.

I looked it up. These tortuous chairs were invented by one Thomas Lee in 1903. He owned a big cottage in yes, the Adirondack mountains. He’d go there with his 22 family members, and everyone complained that there weren’t enough chairs to go around. So old Tom, eager to keep that mob happy and not whining all the time about seating, cut down one tree, a pine, and out of that one single tree, made a bunch of simple, knot-free chairs for them all to test. He was proud to be able to make chairs out of no more, no less than 11 pieces of wood. The one everyone lied and said they liked was the low chair with the “gentle” recline as they called it. Gentle? Ha! More like a perpendicular slant. He made wide arm rests on which the sitter could place their leaky paper plates or their mugs of booze while their elbows were getting stabbed with green splinters. Thus, the wooden Adirondack chair was born. What were they thinking?

Tom was in business, but alas, he asked for help in manufacturing them from one Harry Bunnell, a trusted friend, who stole Tom’s idea, made the chairs himself, calling them Westport Chairs (it’s where he lived) applied for and got a patent, and made a ton of money. There is no record if our boy Tom went after him in any fashion, but I personally hope he did, with one thick, knot-free splintery two-by-four in his hands, ready for business.

There doesn’t seem to be a record of when those chairs from hell became known as Adirondack chairs, but no matter, they were excruciatingly painful. Short legged people had their blood supply cut off below their knees, and when the cook-outs were over one had to scream at parting guests to please, please come back and haul the remaining folks with perhaps a bit more avoir du pois than they’d like to admit to, up and out of those low and sharply sloped seats. Those party-goers who had the double handicap of advanced age were special victims who also might need help both getting in and out of their chairs. Smart people positioned those cook-out Adirondack chairs of misery on slanted lawns, reversing the seat angle so they might struggle out of them more readily when nature called or when the gatherings ended. I’ve so often thought that if prison wardens were interested in keeping inmates from escaping, they should just seat them in rows of Adirondack chairs. Naked.

The chairs made today are smooth, splinter-free plastic and look a whole lot more user friendly than the ones of old. One can sit in them wearing a pair of shorts and not have to be rushed to the hospital for splinter excision. They are beautiful colors now, not that institutional dark green, and look gorgeous on lawns and porches. I think they’ve even been nicely redesigned over the years to now be very comfortable and to have less slant and more propping-up although I have not had the courage to try any of the new ones.

Alas, for the likes of me, they are still slanted back to such a degree that it’s a total embarrassment for me to have to struggle grotesquely up and out of them when even a modern Adirondack chair is offered. So, thanks anyway.  I’ll just stand, if you don’t mind.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.

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