The large crowd at the recent Howl Story Slam in Saranac Lake indicated that even though movies are full of special effects and television offers abundant options, there is an audience for stories told by our neighbors. The Harrietstown Town Hall audience welcomed and listened to storytellers who had won slams hosted by the Adirondack Center for Writing and North Country Public Radio over the last year.

The success of story slams prompted me to revisit Bill Smith’s 1994 “Tales from the Featherbed — Adirondack Stories and Songs.” Smith was born in Colton, in the northwest corner of the Adirondack Park, in 1937. The youngest of 10 children, he is an award-winning craftsman of Adirondack pack-baskets, and a wonderful storyteller. I saw him at Pointe Au Roche State Park in the mid ’80s, where he entertained both children and adults. He told a story about an injured dog who was put back together incorrectly, which was at first sad and then humorously preposterous. The story has often been re-told by someone I know, usually without attribution.

“Featherbed” has almost 40 stories, many tall tales drawn from Smith’s childhood on the family’s small farm. “Habits a Great Thing” describes how his father got venison for the family by luring deer into getting their tongues frozen on metal pipes in the yard. Think of the flagpole scene in Jean Shepherd’s movie “A Christmas Story” with antlers. This was the same father who “claimed he could tell the age of a horse within 20 minutes just by the length of their teeth.” In the same deer-trap story, Smith tells us that on one minus 40 degree night, the mercury in the thermometer nailed to the barn plummeted and “pulled that corner of the barn right down into the ground there.”

There is something refreshing in Smith’s old stories, a gentle self-effacing humanity. A lost (always rich and snobby) traveler asks a tobacco-chewing and poorly-dressed local, “How do you get to Potsdam?” He ponders for a moment and then says, “Usually my sister takes me.” Such stories offer community, often a smiling absurdity, in our polarized world.

Like the ACW/NCPR Howl Story Slams, Bill Smith gives voice to an old Adirondack tradition.

(Smith is available via recordings in local libraries and online — as is Saranac Lake’s Fran Yardley, among others.)