Chris Shaw’s “The Crazy Wisdom — Memoir of a Friendship” begins with a picture of his friend, Jeff, Jeff’s sister, and himself from the mid-1950s, at a Mountain Days festival near Stony Creek. Shaw was visiting from Schenectady, staying at the camp Jeff’s family owned in the southwest Warren County woods. The photo sparks Shaw’s winding memory — rich, elliptical, self-effacing — of his own life in the Adirondacks and another friend, Jon Cody.

“Crazy Wisdom” has nine sections. The first, “Free Beer and Go-Go Girls,” describes Shaw meeting Jon Cody for the first time. It was a few years after Woodstock clogged the state Thruway in 1969, and Shaw was among the young people living in cabins, searching for themselves in the woods. The title of the section came from a sign at a camp on a dirt road. It was whimsical, but also true: there was always beer, as well as pot. Jon Cody was there, too.

Cody was a magnetic personality, and the friendship of this memoir survived two rather haphazard employment histories. Shaw worked at the ski lift at Gore Mountain, ran rafts on the Hudson, cared for a fishing camp owned by rich people, and thought about becoming a writer. Some financial support came from his wife, part of the wait staff at a Lake George restaurant. Cody, who had lost his left arm in an automobile accident, made a pretty good living selling pot.

Then Cody opened a leather goods store in Lake George, with Shaw as his apprentice. Cody had the skill, the tools, and the passion to do fine work, and watching him impacted Shaw: “The things we made in the shop were beautifully designed and crafted, one of a kind, and reflected what I can only call Cody’s creative vision. So the work satisfied me by that deep insistent standard a young idealist and fantasist values above all–meaning, in the work, rather than the income.”

They were not only making a good product, their relationship was also changing: “At any rate, in those circumstances, the two of us in the shop focusing on the work and the meaning of how we were living and what we were making, a subtle transmission took place.” This transmission has something to do with the “Crazy Wisdom” of the title, that feeling, chemistry, tension, shared by friends who produce beauty.

But the leather shop’s success was short-lived. A fire destroyed it, and both men struggled, with Shaw living in his Jeep for about five years. They tried various ways to get by, including a pack basket business with a Watertown woman.

Yet, they survived. One of their ventures was also a metaphor. Working with and for a Lake Placid outfitter, they went to Waitsfield, Vermont, to pick up four canoes and put them on the modified roof rack of the Ford Escort they drove over Lake Champlain. Four 16 foot canoes on top of a 14 foot car, driving through heavy rain and sleet and big winds from Vermont to Lake Placid … but they made it.

Shaw did become a writer, editing Adirondack Life, authoring “The Power Line,” and teaching at Middlebury.

This is a humorous, sad and true book. Shaw does not spare us. In addition to “Free Beer & Go-Go Girls” in the woods, there are “Truth and Sorrow” and “Death of Cody” sections — this is no saccharine Hallmark card. Shaw’s recollection of him and Cody over 50 years reminded me of the Dylan Thomas line old readers cannot forget: “I see the boys of summer in their ruin.”