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Blair Witching from the bear
Sunday, July 9 2017
With a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit, this morning Gretchen called in sick to her shift working at the bookstore in Woodstock. At some point yesterday she'd decided her problems might be symptoms of acute Lyme disease. It had all started with back aches and then progressed to flu-like symptoms, which seemed more like Lyme disease than just a simple flu. So she started a course of doxycycline, the broad-spectrum antibiotic used to treat both malaria and Lyme. (We had a lot on hand in preparation for the malaria-fighting course we'll be taking while we are in Uganda.)
I tried to take advantage of my Sunday by getting some chores done. The first of these was an attempt to add some threads to a partially-threaded quarter inch nylon bolt. This was to replace a broken plastic bolt attaching the detector coil to my working metal detector. I assumed that this had to be made of plastic because the device is trying to detect metal, and a fat steel bolt might throw the whole thing off. Unfortunately, the only replacement I'd been able to find the other day at Home Depot had been partially threaded. No problem, I'd thought, I have a tap & die set! What a mistaken thought that was! Using a tap and die set on a plastic rod (partially-threaded or otherwise) doesn't work. Well, it sort of works. You can maybe cut a turn or two of threads before it bogs down in the swarf and the whole process has to be stopped, the die rotated off, and the swarf cut away. There's also the problem that nylon bolts aren't really strong enough to handle the high torque necessary to cut thread, and the threads that are cut aren't as deep as they would've been in metal, since the plastic tends to squeeze away from the the blades in the die. Nevertheless, I managed to cut about a half inch of thread before giving up. This was not quite enough.
Another chore was the planting of new lettuce from seed in the garden, which has a lot of fallow ground this year. We have mature lettuce planted from seedlings, but that's going to be gone before long, and one can never plant to much lettuce.
After yet more of The Ben Heck Show down in the greenhouse (followed by a nap), I resumed work on the stalled screened-in porch Gretchen wants for her library. I'd decided that if I could get one of the corner posts vertical at about the place it needs to be, everything else could be positioned relative to it. So after coating three feet of the end of a 16 foot 4X4 with tar, I carried it down to the building site and set it vertically in the hole I'd dug. I'd attached four ropes to its top end, and I used these to position it as close to vertical as I could by tying them to things in four different directions (a pillar of the east deck to the north, the fat tree of heaven to the south, a small white pine to the east, and to a hook attached to the house to the west). By successively tightening the ropes and taking measurements of plumbness, I was able to get the pillar very nearly vertical and close to where I'd originally intended (it ended up being a couple inches to the south, but that location was arbitrary and that was okay). Once I had it perfect, I mixed up 80 pounds of concrete and dumped it into the bottom of the hole, though there wasn't enough to fill the three foot hole to a depth of more than a foot.
Meanwhile, Gretchen's health kept improving and declining in mysterious cycles. This evening while watching Claws with Andrea, Gretchen went into a steep decline and was so ill she sent Andrea to get me. She decided she needed to go to Emergency One and also that she desperately needed laxatives, since she hadn't pooped in days (she'd never had a need for laxatives ever before). So I drove her to Emergency One on Hurley Avenue. It was about 10:30pm, and damn if that place wasn't closed. It turns out that it's not a 24 hour emergency facility. Gretchen didn't want to go to an actual hospital, so the only thing left to do on this errand was purchase laxatives. We did that at the CVS on Washington Avenue. Not knowing anything about laxatives, we bought two different store-brands containing two different active ingredients: bisacodyl and senna. We also needed gas, and the only open gas station was the huge QuickChek near the traffic circle. For the first time ever, we noticed a long line of parking spaces next to charging stations (right there at the QuickChek) exclusively for use by Teslas (the premium-brand electric car). It was like something from the near future, such as one would see in an episode of Black Mirror. I should mention that I've never actually seen a Tesla in nature, though I might have and not noticed.
Back at the house, as I walked from the car, I could hear yet again the distant smeared-out sound of our dogs barking at something in the distant forest. It was almost certainly that same enormous male bear that has been in the neighborhood. I would have to go retrieve them again, though Gretchen was too sick to help.
So there I was, trudging through the dark forest, using a hand-powered flashlight (which I had to keep cranking) to illuminate my way. The barking lead me up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then off-trail through dense clusters of young pines. The moon was full and I could rely on that to some extent as I narrowed in on the dogs. Neville was the first dog I saw, and he was running around chaotically. But I didn't care about him: I focused on Ramona's reflective collar, the only part of her I could see (she was near 41.924114N, 74.104694W). I walked up and grabbed her, attached a leash, and headed for home. I never saw what was treed, though I did pause for a moment to shine the flashlight into the tree Ramona had been beneath. Initially Neville seemed to be following us, but then he doubled back and could be heard barking again. (His bark is much quieter and less insistent than Ramona's.) But I knew that if I could get Ramona home, Neville would soon grow weary of barking at the bear and come home on his own. First, though, I would have to get myself home. That part was no fun at all. It involved arduously Blair Witching myself through the forest, lighting my way as best I could with my marginal hand-cranked flashlight while dragging a whimpering dog who wanted nothing more than to join her brother Neville under that damn treed bear. Once home, I got Ramona inside and set the pet door so that it only allowed creatures to enter, not exit. (Clarence can still come and go as he pleases, since he knows how to pull the door open enough to escape; I think Celeste — aka "the Baby" — can do this too.) Within a half hour, Neville returned. Neither dogs had been injured during this experience.
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