HOBBY

Ron Jardin recently built an authentic Sioux tipi in front of his home in the village of Mexico. It has attracted the attention of many residents. Photos by Ken Sturtz

Mexico Man’s Tipi Project More Than a Hobby

‘I wanted to pass something on’

By Ken Sturtz

It was a warm summer morning on an otherwise quiet street, but nearly everyone who passed Ron Jardin’s house did a double-take when they spotted the full-size tipi in his front yard.

He didn’t mind the gawking. Jardin invited each person onto his lawn for a closer look, encouraged them to step inside the structure and promised to give a tour later once he finished with an interview.

Jardin, 71, of Mexico, began building the authentic Sioux tipi last October. He was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago and has received treatment on and off since then. But he’s been determined to make sure that fact doesn’t define his existence.

“I’m not a quitter,” he said. “I continue to smile every day faced with this little inconvenience.”

An avid outdoorsman, he’s remained active, camping often and spending time with family, including his adult son and daughter. Last summer he and his wife vacationed out West, visiting Mount Rushmore, Wounded Knee, and Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

As busy as Jardin was, however, he realized last year that he needed a new project to focus on.

“This tipi project was a mental health project,” he said. “It kept my mind off of me.”

He wasn’t exactly starting from zero. He had already constructed three tipis in the past, but they had deteriorated over time. The last one, which he built about 30 years ago, had been damaged by squirrels while in storage.

Love of tipis

Jardin’s love of tipis began nearly half a century ago. He was born and raised in Fulton, but attended college in Colorado. The summer after his senior year he spent several weeks staying with friends who were living in a tipi.

LEFT Tipi poles, 24 feet in length, rest on sawhorses at Ron Jardin’s home in Mexico. He purchased the poles, but had to trim and smooth off all the tiny knots and branches with a hatchet.

RIGHT The tipi was constructed by creating a tripod out of three main poles. The other poles are added around the tripod and wrapped with rope to bind them together and strengthen the structure.

“I was just fascinated by being inside one,” he said. “The sun wakes you up in the morning and you can see the stars at night.”

He became so enamored that when he returned to Central New York he decided to make one himself. He got a copy of Reginald and Gladys Laubin’s “The Indian Tipi,” the bible on Native American tipis, and began doing research. He gathered the necessary materials and cobbled together a serviceable tipi.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “It just looked neat.”

After college, Jardin became an elementary school teacher in the Mexico school district, teaching physical education for 42 years, including a 10-year stint teaching art, before retiring in 2016. He also coached track and cross-country for 45 years.

Tipi-building is but one of the unique hobbies he’s had. He joined the rodeo team in college and, for the first seven years of his teaching career, spent Christmas breaks riding broncos bareback with the rodeo.

He and his family were involved in historical reenacting. They’ve also built a snow sculpture in their front yard each winter for the last 30 years. The sculptures grew so elaborate that they became an annual neighborhood attraction. But rodeo favors the young and snow sculptures, no matter how beautiful, eventually melt. A tipi, however, can last for decades.

Attention to details

Each subsequent tipi Jardin’s made has been better than the one before. On the surface it’s a fairly simple structure, consisting of a conical framework of poles, a cover, a liner and stakes to hold it down. But making a quality tipi — one that remains cool in summer, warm in winter and dry during rainstorms — requires careful attention to detail.

Once Jardin decided to make a new tipi he began by ordering 84 yards of canvas. Native Americans originally used buffalo hides, but canvas became popular in the second half of the 19th century. Jardin spread the canvas out in his driveway and measured it to be sewn together into a giant semicircle that would wrap around the framework of the tipi. The seams are placed at diagonals so rain doesn’t build up anywhere.

By the time he’d found someone to sew the canvas, winter was on the way and the weather made it impossible to paint the cover, so he worked on the tipi liner and carved the wooden stakes and lacing pins he needed.

Jardin still needed to find poles, 15 for the tipi’s framework and two for the smoke flaps. The tallest needed to be 24 feet long, but only about four inches wide at the base.

He spent several months making trips to eastern Oswego County and the North Country until he finally found an Amish carpenter whose brother harvests 30-foot poles that he sizes and uses in furniture making.

Jardin knew from experience that he’d have to wait several months to get the poles he needed with the bark trimmed off.

“If you cut them in winter you can’t get the bark off, so you have to wait until spring,” he said.

In the spring Jardin picked up the poles. He took 19 so he’d have a few extras. He tied the 24-foot poles onto the luggage rack of his car with the help of a trailer-hitch mounted shelf and took the backroads home.

The poles didn’t have bark on them, but all the tiny knots and branches had to be trimmed off and smoothed with a hatchet. Otherwise they can rip the canvas or collect raindrops inside.

“If it’s raining out, it will rain inside your tipi two hours after it stops raining,” Jardin said. “This way it’s so smooth the water goes right off it and out the tent.”

Jardin was receiving cancer treatments at the time, which sapped his energy and slowed his progress to trimming just a few poles each day. That was also the case when it came time to paint the canvas, which proved to be the most challenging part of the project. He could only work on days he had both the energy and good weather.

The canvas was also so large that it had to be staked tightly outside on the ground. He would unfold the canvas, stake it down and begin painting with a two-and-a-half-inch brush. He had to leave enough time for the paint to dry by evening.

“By 7 o’clock at night I had it all packed up and back in the house,” he said.

He knew if he made a mistake he’d be stuck with it. He used a compass, nail and string to measure out the stripes, a dinner plate for the circles and cardboard templates to trace the animals and other designs in pencil on the canvas.

Native American tipis weren’t always painted, but when they were the overall design was unique to the owner. They often included geometric shapes, animals and battle scenes. Jardin wanted the finished product to resemble an authentic, functional tipi rather than a piece of artwork, but he still decided to incorporate images relevant to him as well as traditional symbols.

“I don’t want it to be a Rembrandt, it’s not a painting,” he said. “I wanted it to be meaningful with Sioux designs and my designs and I also wanted it to look like they did it.”

The circles represent the sun, the moon and the circle of life; the bottom border and triangles symbolize the Adirondack Mountains; and the top border represents the sky, the heavens and the Great Spirit. The bison signifies sacred life and abundance while the bears represent strength and courage and the pine tree stands for peace, longevity and wisdom. The loon symbolizes the wilderness of the North.

Ready to go

Jardin set the tipi up in his backyard to test it out. He lashed the three main poles together, pulled one of them apart to make a giant X that he propped up with a step ladder, and then held the frame up with rope and a stake. He pulled the third pole out to form a giant tripod. The other poles went up around the tripod, wrapped with rope to bind them together. The final pole, known as the lifting pole, had the canvas tied to it at the top so it could be wrapped around the framework and staked down.

After he set the tipi up in his backyard, Jardin took it down, packed everything up and set it up at his family’s camp in Redfield.

He invited family and close friends to celebrate the tipi’s completion and take a tour. He served a meal that included corn on the cob, venison and bison burgers.

Afterward he moved it back to his house and set it up in the front yard and a steady stream of people began stopping to ask questions.

Jardin, who said his wife and daughter helped him throughout the tipi’s construction, plans to take it down soon, but he’s already thinking about making another. The next one would be a smaller version roughly seven feet tall that his daughter could easily set up and take down on camping trips.

As for the current tipi, it’s been about more than just satisfying a mild tipi addiction or finding a project to focus on. For all the joy he took from building it, Jardin said the project was about creating something that his family could enjoy for years to come.

He’s quick to point out that it’s not just the physical tipi that he’s sharing, but also his knowledge. He said his wife and daughter have learned how to put up and take down the tipi and that his daughter helped with enough of the construction that she could probably make a brand-new tipi someday if she wanted.

“I’ve always been interested in this and I wanted to pass something on,” he said. “So, this is what I wanted to pass on.”

Sandra Scott in Myanmar with her late husband John. The country is one of her favorite places. She has visited over 70 countries in the last several decades, often writing about them. Photo provided.

MYANMAR

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS SANDRA SCOTT?

Well, she is in Oswego now — after more than four decades traveling the world. In total she visited more than 70 countries writing about many of them for a variety of publications and companies, including 55 PLUS

By Steve Yablonski

Travel writer reflects on her decades of exploring the world

EUROPE

VIETNAM

Sandra Scott started traveling the world in 1986. And, she’s still on the go.

“It’s sort of an interesting story. I always wanted to travel. But Mexico is a great place to bring up kids,” the octogenarian said of The Mother of Towns in Oswego County.

She’d gotten to the point where she realized that she probably wasn’t going to be able to travel, she said.

“I had three kids in college and I had an 8-year-old at home. So I thought, ‘well, it isn’t going to happen.’ I made sure all four kids did a foreign experience. I didn’t want them to think that Mexico was the center of the universe,” she explained.

OPPORTUNITY CALLS

Then, the phone rang. It was her father.

He had been cleaning out the safe and found canceled checks from before World War II. They used to send money to her grandmother in eastern Czechoslovakia, she said.

There was an address; so they wrote to it. The person they wrote to had died — but it was a small town so everybody in town knew who they were.

They got three letters back inviting them to come. It was behind the Iron Curtain.

“My father said, ‘your mom wants to go and your aunt wants to go.’ He said if I plan everything, he’d pay my way. So I was on that!” she said. “I started thinking — I’m not sure I want to leave an 8-year-old home with three college kids. So I said I’m going to take him with me.

“And then, my husband decided he didn’t want to stay home with three college kids, either. So, all six of us went.”

It was an eye-opening experience.

The next year, they decided to go to the Soviet Union.

“And then we just never stopped [traveling], she said.

After she retired, they ventured into Asia and started spending four months there in the winters.

“We have done a lot of South America, too. We actually traveled around Europe and then we went to South America,” she said.

When her youngest son got to college, he had a foreign semester in Singapore. They went to visit him for his 21st birthday.

“Asia was easier than Latin America,” she said. “They are much better organized and things are relatively inexpensive. They have budget airlines; where you can fly from one country to another for like $100.”

In the process, she started writing for a lot of people. At one point, she wrote for all the in-flight magazines for the Latin American airlines.

“And I wrote for Copley News Service. I don’t think anybody knows who they were. They were a syndicate and so actually some of my articles appeared in the Syracuse newspaper; that’s how the Syracuse people knew about me,” she said. “One day I came home from [teaching] school and found that they asked me to write a travel column. So I did that for 10 years, while I was still teaching (seventh grade social studies at Mexico Middle School)—it was like doing mini term papers every week.”

Every time they went to Asia they had to plan their visit according to the visas, most are good for 28 days.

“We’d bounce around; went to almost every place in Asia except Yutan (a sub-district in Ningxiang City, Hunan Province, China). It’s just too expensive to go to,” she explained.

“We’d always spend four weeks in Thailand. One of the things we learned is that if you go to the popular places, that Americans go, then the prices are high. So what you want to do is you want to go to the places where the Europeans are going; they go and stay all winter. It’s kind of like us going to the Caribbean or something.”

One of her favorite places is in Myanmar.

“I think we’ve been there eight times. When we first went there it was pretty closed off. But it changed rapidly. That’s why they’ve run into problems — I think they just changed too fast,” she said. “They have a lovely beach there [Ngapali Beach] on the Bay of Bengal. It was like two miles long. There was nobody on it. And of course they are Buddhist; so they’re all easy to live with and kind and caring.”

TRY IT, YOU’LL LIKE IT

“I really like Vietnamese food. Actually, most of the food in foreign countries isn’t very exotic,” she said. “We did go to a place — didn’t eat there, but we did go years ago in Vietnam — where you could pick out your wild animal. You could get food with snakes in it and stuff like that. My husband was good at trying just about anything. Those things are usually expensive, anyhow.

“I like Thai food, too. It’s a bit hotter. Vietnamese food generally isn’t too hot. If you go from Thailand and then go to Cambodia and so on, the food gets milder. Unless you go to Chongqing — that’s very hot. The spicy hot food [hot pot] in China is found In Chongqing and other places which is part of the Sichuan cuisine. Definitely Asian food is the best, I think. It’s more diverse and a lot of vegetables. Japanese food is not my favorite.

“We found it interesting that Chongqing had a museum dedicated to an American World War II general — General Joe Stilwell — and across the street is one to the Flying Tigers,” she added. “We were told that Chinese students learn that Claire Lee Chennaut was the leader of the Flying Tigers. So much to know, so little time.”

Actually, the world is very safe, she noted. There have been some trouble spots from time to time.

“We were supposed to go to Kiev or Kyiv as it is today, and that was when Chernobyl happened. So we had to go north to Warsaw and then we took the train from Warsaw over to Moscow,” she said.

“Actually, we never had any real problems. Because we traveled for such a long period of time, we ended up being on the way to places when things happened; a tsunami in Thailand for example,” she said. “Before everything was deregulated, there used to be a travel company in California; they had wonderful things — they had ‘round the world tickets for $900, they had circle the Pacific, they had circle Southeast Asia. We were already on our way. So, when we got to Thailand we hadn’t planned to go down to where the tsunami happened, but they were offering buy one airplane ticket, get the second one free. So, we went down and stayed there, then continued on.”

“When we were in Saipan, it was when the Japanese tsunami hit and so we had to go to our room, which was on the seventh floor. The tsunami wasn’t really great in our area; just about three feet or so,” she added.

“We went to Japan a couple weeks later. It actually worked in our favor because it was cherry blossom time. We were like the only people there. In fact, the hotel we stayed at had closed off all the top floors. There were like no tourists there, it was beautiful.”

When traveling, she speaks English.

“I used to know some Russian and I try to stammer through Spanish,” she said. “English is the first most common second language. If you go to Asian countries, they want their kids to learn English because it helps get them a better job. I learned to say hello and thank you in a bunch of different languages. If you’re traveling, more people speak English than you might imagine.” In China, she had a free guide; they’re usually college kids who are learning English, she explained.

“They take you places where a regular tour guide wouldn’t. You’re not supposed to tip them or feed them,” she said with a sly smile that hinted she didn’t adhere to the policy.

She loves to go to natural heritage sites.

“The Great Wall, the pyramids — it’s amazing the things mankind has built over the centuries,” she said. “I’ve been to Easter Island, and the Inca walls; we have no idea how they moved those stones. They shaped those stones so you can’t get a piece of paper in between them.

“That’s one of the things about travel — it opens your eyes all these possibilities. Also one of the things I learned is that the world is much safer than it looks like. And number two, people are nice almost everywhere. We just have to learn to get along.”

She recalled her first time in Red Square.

“It was the Soviet Union then — and the little girls from school, they were all so cute. They had braids and

PALAU

these big puff white ribbons in their hair. I said to myself, ‘I don’t know whose enemy they are, but they’re not mine,’” she said.

Does she ever wonder how many miles she’s logged over the years?

“No. But my husband loved to fly. He actually had a pilot’s log and he kept track of every flight he ever took from the time he was 12 years old and went to Ireland,” she said. “He went through three books.”

STAYING IN TOUCH

There are a couple people they’ve been in touch with.

“During the Communist days, we had to pay for everything up front, including our food. When we were leaving what was then Czechoslovakia, we had a stack of food coupons and we were getting ready to go to Germany,” she recalled. “We saw this man and woman walk out of a restaurant. I said, ‘could you use these?’ They said, ‘yes.’ We exchanged addresses; we went back and met with them later.”

“I said to one guy in Saipan, or maybe it was Guam, if you are ever in the States let me know. So, wouldn’t ya know, six months later he was in Toronto and I said if you get to Kingston, we’ll come and pick you up. And that’s what we did. It was Fourth of July weekend and trying to cross the border then wasn’t a pretty story. But we made it,” she said.

“The U.S. was very, very slow in getting hepatitis shots; so we’d go to a clinic in Syracuse and get the vaccination that would raise our immune system for several weeks,” she said. “When we went to Guatemala, we had to get polio vaccine again. It was quite a few years ago, but they had had an outbreak there. I was glad that we got them because when we went down into the Amazon, if you couldn’t show that you’d had the vaccination, they gave it to you in the airport.”

“I used to say to my son, when he was young and traveling with us, ‘where would you like to go this summer?’ and that’s what we’d do. He finally got to the point where he said, ‘I’d like to go somewhere where I don’t have to get shots!’” she laughed.

She currently has several mementos of her journeys scattered around her apartment in downtown Oswego. Among them are Shillelaghs and other Irish walking sticks, vases from Nicaragua, a scenic picture from Budapest, a couple pictures that a painter from Prague gifted her with, and a large wooden box that was handcarved in Honduras.

“When I moved [from Mexico, New York[, I really downsized,” she explained.

She’s planned and coordinated travel to more than 70 counties plus many United States locations.

“When I wasn’t traveling, I was volunteering. I am one of the founders of the Mexico Historical Society and Mexico Point Park. I am a trustee for both organizations,” she said. “I coauthored two of the local historical books.”

“When winter comes, I’m going to Panama for the third or fourth time and just stay at a hotel — I have a lot of hotel credit,” she added. “And then, we’ll all go to Jamaica in January, the family; we rented a house. When we get done with Jamaica, I’ll come home for a couple days and then I’ll go to Cancun for three or four weeks.”

An Incident at Polish-Russian border

Still Traveling

Sandra Scott recalled a sojourn in Eastern Europe. Her son, Jim, was 9 at the time.

It was an overnight train trip and it was his first sleeper train.

“When we got on the train, he hopped up on the bunk and went to sleep. When we got to the Polish – Russian border, the guards came. They said, ‘get your luggage and come on!’ I spoke some Russian and I tried to tell them my son was up there sleeping; but they weren’t listening,” she said.

Her husband, John, grabbed some luggage. She grabbed some and followed him down to the tarmac.

“I asked him, ‘what are you doing down here?’ And he said, ‘this is where the man with the gun told me to go,’” she said.

As she got off the train, the train

left.

“And my son was still on it!” she exclaimed.

“The guard came along and I am babbling as much Russian as I know. We went into the station and a room where they started ripping all my luggage apart—I mean really taking everything apart! I had a Hungarian dictionary with me that was my grandfather’s. The cover was gone. My grandfather had taken a cover, a cover from an Episcopal hymn book and put it on there. The Russians got really tense over that. So, they’re getting tense and I’m getting tense and then I saw a guy that was on our train, he was from Africa, and he spoke seven languages. He was coming from London on the train. I asked him and he said, ‘the train will be back at 5 in the morning.’ I went out on the tarmac and thought I was in the film Casablanca. It was foggy, there was the noise of all the trains and cars and everything. And, finally, at 5 the train came back. I got on the train and opened the door of the compartment; Jim picked up his head and said, ‘what’s going on?’ I said, ‘nothing. Go back to sleep,” she said with a laugh. I always say we learned

Sandra Scott plans to retire from writing but travel plans include

visiting ‘sunny, warm areas— with a pool’

Sandra Scott said she plans cut back on her writing; but she still wants to continue traveling, albeit at a more leisurely pace.

For decades, she and her husband journeyed around the globe.

John Scott, 80, died Jan. 22, 2019. The couple had been married for 57 years.

“When I started travel writing in the ‘80s, to help play for our travel, the internet was not a factor,” she said. “Most of the countries in Latin America had their own airline, and then they consolidated.”

She wrote for the in-flight magazines for those airlines and also had articles in TWA’s and United inflight magazines, she added.

When she was writing the travel column for the Syracuse newspapers, she was also teaching at Mexico Middle School.

“So I stopped pitching articles to inflights during which time the internet changed things,” she explained.

But, she continued to write for several other outlets, including the Oswego County Business Magazine.

“We reviewed hotels for an agency, mainly in Asia. I wrote a cooking column for a magazine that didn’t survive COVID-19,” she said.

She continues to travel.

“I recently returned from an Alaskan cruise and took Amtrak home from Seattle,” she said. “During COVID-19 I went to Cancun, Panama City, Belize, and Ixtapa Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Other countries were most COVID-19 strict, especially the hotels.”

As she slows down a bit, she said she misses spending four months in Asia.

Her favorite trips were “the early adventurous ones—traveling in La Mosquita and staying in a native village; and spending a week on a felucca on the Nile (no amenities),” she everything the hard way.”

At the Polish-Russian border, the train detoured to another station and put on different wheels because the tracks in Russia are a different size than those in Europe.

According to legend, the Russians made their railway gauge 89 mm broader than the 1435 mm “Stephenson gauge” in order to thwart an invasion.

The track gauge of European railways outside Russia is, mainly, 4-foot 8-inches. The gauge of the Russian railway is mainly 5-foot 3-inches. Despite the existence of dual-gauge trains, there are still gauge change sheds on the railway lines into Russia, just across the border. The train stops there for an hour or so while a team of laborers changes the bogies. The bogie is a set of either four wheels or six wheels. There are two kinds of bogies. Bo-Bo type bogie contains four wheels as two pairs of wheels. The CoCo type contains six wheels as three pairs of wheels.

said. “I also loved exploring the rivers in other countries: Vietnam, Myanmar, China, etc.

Because they traveled alone, planned everything themselves and often went to places that were not wellknown (“less expensive,” she added), they had many interesting experiences and met many wonderful people.

“The world is a wonderful place and much safer than a lot of people think — travel behind the Iron Curtain taught us that! We were very fortunate!” she said.

As they got older, they “upgraded themselves” and have stayed in some luxurious hotels.

“I will keep traveling as long as I can; but now it is mainly going to hotels in a sunny, warm area with a pool,” she said with a smile.

Her upcoming travel schedule includes: Caribbean cruise, Panama City, Jamaica, “and then probably Cancun again.”