|
|
|
Trump steps in it in Charlottesville
Saturday, August 12 2017
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
I got up early because that's what I've been doing since getting back from Uganda. In the stillness of an early Twenty Ninth Pond morning, one could theoretically get a lot done. But it was just a little too cold to be comfortable doing anything too sedentary. I went up to the internet spot on the hill a couple hundred feet north of the cabin and checked in on the scary world at large, where Donald Trump's counterproductive saber rattling with regard to North Korea had some (particularly in Guam) fearing the end of the world. But World War III had not yet begun.
Down at the dock, I noticed that the water was higher than it had been in previous years, covering rocks that had once been exposed. And, as Gretchen had mentioned in an email, there didn't appear to be any frogs. These changes probably had something to do with the arrival of beavers on Twenty Ninth Pond. We'd seen evidence of them in the past, but not active evidence. This year, though, for the first time Gretchen actually saw a beaver, which swam across the lake. And she's heard them slapping their tails on the water. And the dogs have been so interested in the beavers that they've actually walked around the lake's south end to explore its east shore, the place where the beavers have built two of there three lodges.
Gretchen also got up early, though considerably after me. We had our customary breakfast down on the dock: coffee for both of us, a sandwich for me, and cereal for Gretchen. The options for sandwich making were all kind of weird, so the sandwich ended up being based mainly around cumin-rich hummus, sauerkraut, and pickles. It was foggy on the pond this morning, with a thinly-translucent wall of grey to the north that blotted out all details except the floaters inside my eyes. One of them looked like a ball of nucleated cells with a tail.
Eventually I took Ramona on a kayak ride across the pond to the Cape of Bad Boats (43.831541N, 74.012036W), where we got out and walked around. I quickly found three golf balls in the woods near the shore, suggesting someone had been practicing their golf shots off the dock. (Unfortunately, the balls seem to sink in water, which probably means the pond has many on its bottom.) Meanwhile Ramona had wandered out into the open fen to the west and found something disgusting to roll in. I paddled over to her and, after some persuasion, convinced her to jump back in the kayak. Whatever she had been rolling in had put a disgusting glop of yellow (similar to an egg yolk) on her shoulder. But it had the usual funky fungal fragrance she goes for (which in this case came on top of a mild skunking she'd experienced while we were in Uganda). Back at the dock, Gretchen threw Ramona in the pond soon after she'd gotten out of my kayak. The alternative (her bringing that disgusting goo into the cabin) was too horrible to contemplate.
Meanwhile Janet the Kitten was delighting in the outdoors. In Hurley, she'd only just begun coming down the stairs and hesitantly venturing out into the yard through the open front door for about a day before we left for the Adirondacks. But here at the cabin, she was running around and frolicking in the vegetation, which provided many more things to bat at with her tiny black paws.
I set up my laptop (Hyrax) on the table on the front porch where I like to work at Twenty Ninth Pond and eventually got around to doing some TinyMCE plugin hacking and experimentation, though this required a couple trips to the places where cellphone reception was available so I could download things I'd failed to bring. At one point I wanted to copy a chunk of code from a web page on my phone to paste using a text editor in a document on my laptop. This should've been easy, but it isn't using a stock Android. I was able to create what I thought was a text file containing the copied text using a program called Memo. And I was able to find that file (after some searching) in the Android's file system. But once copied to the laptop, this file was useless. It was in some weird binary format, not the ASCII format that would've made my life easy. For the love of God, why? I ended up having to download a text editor (Coastline) from the Android store so I could do things like this. Later I also downloaded a code editor called Quoda.
I couldn't find any black tea at the cabin, but I still had some kratom tea that had traveled with me to Uganda and back in my computer bag. So I made a big cup of that. The great thing about kratom tea is you can just keep adding hot water to it and drinking it indefinitely. In this case it gave me a mild body buzz that was good in some respects but also a little like sickness and hunger. (Though the unpleasant effects might've been partly because of the antibiotics I'd been taking as a prophylaxis against malaria, though I stopped taking them today.)
The cabin's water supply (which is pumped directly out of the pond and not considered potable) had been acting oddly for all of Gretchen's stay. There seem to be lots of air pockets in the plumbing, which make for irregular water delivery from the sinks. Today I noticed that the pump pressurizing the system was on all the time. That wasn't good; those pumps are designed to only run intermittently. So I switched off the circuit breaker, only turning it on when we needed to flush toilets or wash dishes.
After drinking an orange-juice-and-gin cocktail, I started craving one of those Becks beers I'd left in the Prius. So I eventually walked down the driveway to fetch one. Along the way, I took note of the work done by the beavers at the south outflow of the pond. They'd built a dam mostly from mud and raised the level of the pond a foot or so, causing some of the big dead tree trunks cluttering the water in the south end to float.
Up at the Prius, I checked the internet and learned that a neo-nazi/white supremacist rally held in Charlottesville (ostensibly in support of Confederate memorials) had turned violent and even murderous. A car driven by one of the white supremacist had plowed into counter-protestors on the Downtown Mall, injuring many people and killing at least one. It was big news, and President Donald J. Trump had already fucked up his response, calling for calm on "all sides." On the walk back to the pond, I found myself worrying about the people I know in Charlottesville. Had any of them been injured?
When I told Gretchen the news from Charlottesville, she suggested I call my childhood friend Nathan, something I never normally think to do (unlike Gretchen, and really most people, I'm not a call-friends kind of person). So we returned to the Prius, checked the news some more, and called Nathan. The both of us ended up talking to both Nathan and Janine, both of us on speakerphone. Janine was the one who had seen most of the craziness. She'd attended some sort of anti-fascist meeting at a Methodist church and heard lots of uplifting words, and then seen brawls between well-dressed would-be fascists (they'd been told to wear white polo shirts and khaki pants) and counter-protestors. All the violence she'd seen had been instigated by the preppy nazis, though counter demonstrators had defended themselves. She'd even seen one of the speakers at the Methodist church swinging a heavy wooden dowel. She didn't mention it at the time, but a lot of the neo-nazis had shown up armed with assault rifles (which they were apparently legally allowed to brandish), and their heavily-armed nature made it impossible for Charlottesville police to intervene and maintain the peace. While we were discussing these things, a cloud burst came out of nowhere and it was fortunate we had the Prius to shelter in.
Back at the cabin, I was feeling cold, drunk, and perhaps a little sleepy, so I climbed into bed and ended up sleeping twelve hours.
Garter snakes sunning themselves near the dock. (Click to enlarge.)
Twenty Ninth Pond, looking south. (Click to enlarge.)
Twenty Ninth Pond, looking north (the structure is the boathouse, partially flooded by beaver activity). (Click to enlarge.)
Gretchen on the front porch with the critters, included Janet the kitten in her lap. (Click to enlarge.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170812 feedback
previous | next |
