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news from the police scanner
Sunday, November 7 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning I went on another short poop walk a couple hundred feet west of the house, this time to get two things: some more firewood and a view of Lake Edward in the distance. Now that I knew it was possible to see Lake Edward from the cabin, I wanted to see what the range of possibilities for that view might be. I eventually found a spot where one could see a small, though glorious chunk of the lake, which on this clear November day was a dazzling blue. I realized it wouldn't take much brush removal to open up a much better view, though of course Gretchen would resist it.
Later, after we'd drunk our coffee and played the day's New York Times Spelling Bee (I found the panagram, which was "mollycoddled"), it was time to walk the dogs, so I took Gretchen over to the spot where once could see the distant blue waters of Lake Edward. From there, we followed the red-marked trail down to the lake and then followed the shoreline trail to the location of our future dock, which now features several large piles of lumber and two frameworks for future sections of dock. As we were looking out across the lake, a beaver swam past a hundred or so feet offshore, looking over at us the whole time and even swimming directly towards us at times. This caught the notice of Ramona, who went down to the water's edge and watched intently. But she never barked (as she sometimes does) and the beaver never slapped his or her tail (as he or she often does). Gretchen asked if we should go for a paddle, so we deployed the canoe off the tree dock (where I saw some fish or amphibean had laid eggs in the now-submerged grooves I'd cut for anti-slip purposes into the trunk, evidently confident that lake levels would stay high for the time being). We loaded up Ramona, but Neville was, as usual, reluctant to get anywhere near the canoe. So we paddled off without him. But we only made out to about the center of the lake before we heard him whimpering on the shoreline, so we turned back around and headed back to the tree dock. Neville was so delighted by our return that he started darting around, something he only does when he is very happy. And when we started walking back to the cabin, this behavior continued. He just wanted to snuggle next to a warm fire.
Back at the cabin, I was cleaning out the grout lines in the tile I'd set yesterday when Josh Furr called my cellphone. Gretchen picked it up and ran it over to me. It turned out that Josh has a fancy new police scanner and had been listening to it not fifteen minutes before when he heard something about an 84 year old woman in need of a rescue squad because she was stuck between two pieces of furniture out at my old childhood home on Stingy Hollow Road. Evidently that sort of information is still broadcast by dispatchers on analog frequencies with no encryption, possibly in violation of HIPAA laws. Josh didn't know anything else about it, and my brother wasn't answering his phone. But it sounded like my mother was in good hands, so I pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind and continued work on the cabin. (I did, however, have a little chuckle with Gretchen about Josh sitting around listening to the police scanner. It's possible there's a less redneck pastime, but we couldn't think of any. In this case, of course, it was great to have such fast access to this information.)
The next chore I did was properly route the ethernet cable from where it entered the basement, out the back of a junction box (where I used some packaging plastic as a custom gromet), through some joists, and then up through an unused hole in the bathroom floor (where the gas line to the dryer had originally been run). Initially my plan was to set up the mercury tilt switch thermostat to control the generator from the bathroom, which seems to be under-provisioned for heating. But the cabin was to be inspected on Monday as part of the certificate of occupancy process, and any visible mercury tilt switch might throw a spanner in the process (since mercury tilt switches, which contain a glorious blob of toxic mercury, have been banned for years). Since the upcoming week was predicted to be considerably warmer than last week, and thus present even less of a risk of frozen pipes, I decided I could kick the can of installing the auto-turn-on functionality for the generator to next weekend. So I coiled up the ethernet cable containing the two wires to turn on the generator and left it all as a little chore for me to do next weekend.
By this point Gretchen was an hour deep into a long call with Gilley out in Portland, so I took my battery powered chainsaw to a place at the edge of the cabin's clearing and began cutting away beech saplings blocking the view of Lake Edward. Beech trees tend to hold onto their leaves after they turn brown, and if it weren't for them, I figured I'd have a much better view of the lake. I worked for only about a half hour and succeeded in significantly opening up a little slot for a view of the lake. It certainly helped that the landscape drops away rather precipitously not far west of the cabin along a line of low granite cliffs, meaning I really only had to clear about fifty feet into the forest to have an immediate result. As I worked at this, I was fully aware of what my younger self would've thought about such a selfish act perpetrated against the natural environment for an artificial result. Clearly the forest didn't want me to have a clear view of Lake Edward, but here I was being a rich old asshole with a dream and a chainsaw.
As the sun began to set, Gretchen and I cleaned up the cabin, packed up the car, and then began our drive back to Hurley in a routine one or both of us has been doing every weekend for months. As we headed south, there a glorious spectacle hanging in the sky above us: a thin crescent moon curving away from Venus in a stretched version of the Turkish flag. I jokingly asked how anyone could not be Muslim after seeing such a thing.
At some point the song "Thousand Dollar Car" by the Bottle Rockets (which I'd never heard before) started playing from the radio (which was tuned to WEXT, the Amsterdam station that plays roots rock mixed with a lot less alternative than they used to play). "Thousand Dollar Car" is a hilarious song about the troubles of owning or, god forbid, buying, a very inexpensive used car. The best lyric goes as follows:
A thousand dollar car ain't even gonna roll
Until you throw at least another thousand in the hole.
Sink your money in it and there you are:
The owner of a two thousand dollar thousand dollar car.
Further down the road, Gretchen told me about two recent instances where she'd rubbed someone the wrong way and it was still eating at her. One involved a person she works for who was acting like a petulant child because Gretchen had responded to a press inquiry received in the general mailbox and then been quoted in a newspaper article. Evidently this boss was upset that Gretchen had received fame that the boss felt should've gone to, well, the boss. The other involved a royalty Gretchen was swindled out of by Heather, the owner of Willow Books for her book Visiting Days. The royalty was only about $70, but it caused a huge falling-out, and Gretchen regularly emails Heather to remind her that she, Gretchen, hasn't forgotten. She cc'd Randall, the editor-in-chief, on these emails, since Randall was the one who solicited Gretchen to publish with Willow. But then Randall was apparently thrown into a rage about being cc'd and wrote to Gretchen, "Don't fucking cc me on this shit!" Apparently Randall is going through some health problems and doesn't have time for this shit, or so he claims, but his response left Gretchen feeling wounded. I told Gretchen that, at least in the case of the petulant boss, don't worry about it. What kind of person begrudges an underling for perceived fame usurpation in a small upstate newspaper?
Our first destination was the room Powerful had been renting in Albany when he was briefly in a master's degree program, a phase that ended abruptly with severe heart problems that resulted in his getting a heart transplant. Now it's looking like Powerful will be living with friends in Tivoli after he is released from the hospital, and he will need to get all his things from his room in Albany. (The landlady has been understanding about the whole thing, as the room had been vacant for years before Powerful rented it, and she's a bleeding heart liberal who has made a life out of the promotion of recycling.) So there we were in Powerful's room, gathering up all his clothes in bags, including a large trash bag. Powerful also wanted us to get his electronics, but we just didn't have enough room what the dogs having to be somewhere in the back. As we collected things, the landlady's cat kept rubbing against things and wanting us to pet her. One of Powerful's attributes that made his stuff take up so much room was how big it all had to be to accommodate his massive size. Interestingly, though, his shoes looked tiny; evidently my feet are much larger than his, even though they have to support twice as much human mass.
Our last stop in Albany was at Little Anthony's, the vegan-friendly pizzeria we love. Recently Little Anthony's went from having some meat dishes to entirely vegetarian (though not vegan), something Gretchen was sure to ask about. They said business was still going great. (When we arrived, there were two sets of people eating in the small dingy dining room, and the people at one of the tables were grotesquely overweight.) As soon a we made it out to I-87, we broke open the hot "wings." They weren't very hot, but they were astoundingly delicious. After eating only a few of those, we switched to the Sicilian pizza we'd ordered, eating one square each. It was quite as good, but nothing in the world is.
Back home, we brought in all the stuff, put away the refrigerated items (though we'd left a fair amount of that out in the cabin's screened-in porch). After watching an episode of Jeopardy!, we saw the "Ggangbu" episode of Squid Game. It's the one where the contestants play marbles, and it comes with gut-wrenching twist early in the episode that sets up the mayhem and tragedy that then follows. I don't know if I've seen an episode of television this grim ever.
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