You may have seen Stuart Weiss riding his bicycle around town. At 85 years young, he favors orange polka-dot suspenders — a tan fedora when he’s on foot. “I’ve gone over 700 miles this year,” said Mr. Weiss earlier this month. “It’s good for me mentally and physically.”
But though he cuts a distinctive figure, it’s possible, too, that you haven’t seen Mr. Weiss.
“When you get to be an old person like me, people don’t notice you,” he said matter-of-factly, reflecting on the sort of anonymity that comes with both age and being new in town. Mr. Weiss moved to the Windmill II housing complex in East Hampton almost two years ago and has spent much of his time since then exploring the area by bike, the flat terrain perfect for easy cycling. “I love people-watching,” he said, and he often parks himself on a bench in the village to watch the world go by.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places, and my life has been very high and very low,” Mr. Weiss said. The highest of times were the 20 years he spent publishing California Explorer, a subscription-based backpacking magazine that he founded in 1978.
For the first 40 years of his life, Mr. Weiss said, he had floundered, unhappy with his work in sales for a New York City printing company that did direct mail and marketing, drinking too much, and lacking a real passion for anything in particular. “I wasn’t good at anything that I knew of.” A move to San Francisco for work, and the subsequent loss of his job there, sent him in a new direction.
He started to backpack and picked up a camera. “It took 40 years to find myself. With a camera, a pen, and a wood walking stick I did,” he writes on his photography website, stuartweissphotography.zenfolio.com. Inspired by the work of the photographer Eliot Porter, he began taking pictures of the Sierra Nevada range.
“My life changed, my outlook changed, my values changed, everything changed,” he said. “I really learned to like myself doing this.” The magazine he started not long after covered “trails less traveled in the American West,” he wrote on his website.
His first issue was just 12 black-and-white pages with no ads. “This was all new territory,” he said. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.” He researched the “geology, history, everything about that place in the middle of nowhere that I could find — and this was before computers. I wrote long, long stories about this place, so before anybody went there they knew what to expect.”
Just as he taught himself to take pictures, he also taught himself to write, all while exploring some of California’s most beautiful wilderness areas.
“I was 50 years old and I was in the best shape of my life,” Mr. Weiss said. “I went thousands of miles backpacking with my golden retrievers. . . . I never went out with anyone else. I didn’t want to.”
At its high point, California Explorer had 10,000 subscribers, Mr. Weiss said. “I built it up from nothing to making a reasonable living.” His photography was also published in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and AAA magazine.
The business changed and someone else took over the magazine. Mr. Weiss, who had long dealt with clinical depression, had some rough years after that. He sold his house, bought a motor home, and wandered, his love for his golden retriever sometimes the only thing that kept him going, he said. His travels brought him east to Woodstock, Vt., where he lived for 10 years, and then to Bath, Me., and eventually to the South Fork, where he had spent time as a young man, renting in Southampton and Water Mill.
Living since March 2018 at Windmill II, a subsidized complex for senior citizens, he said, “I think how lucky I am to be in a little cottage with a deck and beautiful trees, and I can just take my bike outside and ride around . . . I’m not in some high-rise apartment.”
And the experiences he had hiking, writing, and taking pictures for California Explorer still put a proverbial spring in his step all these years later. “Because of . . . what I did, my life is so much richer. . . . As an old man, what a delightful thing to look back on.”
His photographs appear, along with his reflections, on his Zenfolio site and are also available for purchase.
