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the curiosity of Clide the beaver and Throckmorton the loon
Saturday, July 22 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Lisa was the first person up this morning, and she made a french press of coffee and then went to hang out on the upstairs deck (she and Bill had slept in the upstairs bedroom and Gretchen and I were treating the whole upstairs as their private suite while they were visiting). After I got up, I wrote the letters for the day's Spelling Bee on a piece of cardboard so that later the four of us could all play collaboratively the way Gretchen and I play at the cabin.
When all played together, Bill was working partly on an iPad and Lisa insisted on writing her answers down on a piece of paper. The panagram was "hemlock," and part of the rules of playing collaboratively is never to shout out the panagram. I got it first, then Bill, and then Gretchen, who accidentally said it out loud, spoiling it for Lisa.
Later, while the others were walking down Woodworth Lake to see the old Boy Scout buildings, I resumed work on my foundation insulation project. Wanting to bulk-install three sheets of Wonderboard on the styrofoam along the east wall, I leveled a long two-by-four to provide a ledge to set the sheets on at the proper height. Then I squinked out a bunch of adhesive on the foam and set the three sheets against it, using numerous sticks (which I'd cut up yesterday from small beech trees and saplings) to press it in place until the glue could dry.
Meanwhile, the others had returned from their hike and gone down to the lake. When I got there, everyone was swimming. Bill was closest at the time and could tell me that Throckmorton the loon had made an appearance. I looked east, to the part of the lake where loons are usually seen, and thought I saw two loons. But it was just Gretchen and Lisa swimming very far away, their black swimming caps and white faces giving loon-like mirages. Throckmorton was to the northeast, taking a break between fishing swims.
I'd developed a painful scrape on the top side (that is, adjacent to the top of my foot) of my right ankle. I think I'd gotten it from rubbing it too hard on the edge of a piece of furniture to scratch mosquito bites, though it might've then been aggravated by sunburn. Ideally I would've just put tape on it, but there was no tape (or any medical supplies) at the dock. There was, however, a bottle of Gorilla Glue that I use for sticking down splintering pieces of wood sproinging up from the dock. I hate getting Gorilla Glue on my fingers, but decided it might work as an artificial scab. So I slathered it over the scrape injury, which worked okay (though it wasn't all that comfortable once it dried in place). While I had the glue out, I also used it to fill some splits that had formed in the wood structure of the dock.
Then I climbed on to an inner tube to do my usual floating near the dock, periodically kicking myself out towards the middle of the lake and then drifting (or paddling) back while the others chit-chatted. By then, Gretchen and Lisa had swum back. Lisa was saying this was one of the best lakes she'd ever been in.
After I'd had enough of being on the inner tube, I climbed into a kayak and paddled slowly out towards Throckmorton the loon, who was now due east of our dock. By paddling slowly, I managed to get pretty close. That's when I saw that Throckmorton was actually sleeping; he had his head tucked under his wing while bobbing on the surface more than a hundred feet from the southeast lakeshore.
Meanwhile, Lisa was hangry, so Gretchen went ahead back to the cabin to prepare lunch. It ended up being a fancy meal of pasta with grilled tofu and little cups of chilled pea soup that was surprisingly good. Lunch conversation was mostly about one of Lisa's in-laws (the father-in-law of her sister) who molested many dozens of girls during his career as a pediatrician and will soon find out how much he has to cough up in a settlement with ninety women.
After lunch, the others returned to the lake for yet more water-based fun while I began digging in ernest a hole just west of the Bilco doors on the cabin's north foundation. I would have to dig in such a way that I could get into and out of the hole I was digging, since it was unconnected to any existing trench I could get down into. As I worked, I piled the removed material in front of the Bilco doors' steps, as I felt that part of the terrain needed more soil so as to be closer to level with the top of those basement steps.
Eventually the others returned from the lake and then Lisa and Bill started their long drive back to Woodstock, taking the same backroad route they'd taken to get to the cabin. Gretchen later told me that Bill had managed to capsize one of the kayaks while trying to get into it from the dock. In so doing, he managed to lose his sunglasses in twelve feet of water. Fortunately, Gretchen was able to retrieve those sunglasses after strapping on some goggles and diving down to a depth that she could "really feel" in her ears.
By then, I decided that the way to avoid having to dig as much of a starter hole to begin new trenches (I'll have to begin two different ones on either side of the generator at the northwest corner of the cabin) would be to have a short piece of ladder in the hole. That way, I wouldn't have to cut in a set of stair steps, which requires more digging to install and are subject to collapse. So I took some old naily two-by-sixes leftover from the building of the cabin and made a nice little three foot ladder complete with three angled rungs, each 12 inches apart. I made sure the rungs were solid by using Gorilla glue in addition to long screws to attach them, and then I added lag bolts to either end of the two rungs that weren't supported by the sides of the ladder. With this ladder, I was able to quickly dig my way down to the foundation for the four-foot-wide slot necessary to install a sheet of styrofoam. As I worked, I mostly shoveled material into a five gallon bucket that I set on a shelf half-way up and then pulled out of the hole. There was a minor wall collapse near the end (since I found myself having to step on the shelf I'd made for the bucket) but that was easily cleaned up.
I'd been listening to the local retard rock station Q105 for months (which is easy to do on a radio with no visible feedback when engaging the tuner), but this evening they played Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator" one two many times, and I switched back to WFNY, the Gloversville-based oldies station that plays everything from Frank Sinatra to Green Day. They are also famous for their locally-produced advertisements, which are poorly read even by the staff who are paid to "act" in them.
Hot and sweaty (and now noticeably sunburned on my legs from my lower thighs down), I went down to the lake naked and, without needing to put on any clothes, climbed onto one of the small floaty rafts Gretchen had gotten last summer that allow you to lie as if in a hammock. With my drink between my knees, I could maneuver around very effectively on that thing, sometimes paddling with my hands completely underwater so as to avoid making sounds. I was so low and silent in the water that the smaller of the lake's beavers (the one we call "Clide") came swimming towards me in that back-and-forth sinusoidal way that curious beavers do. He got to within about thirty feet (which is very close for a wild beaver) before deciding he needed to slap the water in alarm. He did this a few times while I watched with delight. At some point I noticed Throckmorton the loon had swum up behind Clide and was watching from only a little further away. Eventually I climbed out of the water repositioned the kayak Bill had flooded so it could drain more effectively. As I did these things, both Clide and Throckmorton remained where they'd been, watching me with a mix of bemusement and suspicion. And Clide no longer felt the need to slap the water with his tail. Unfortunately, I didn't happen to have my camera with me.
Back at the cabin, I told Gretchen about what I'd just seen at the lake, and she was initially interested in going down there and seeing for herself. But then she decided it was too cold, so all she ended up doing was seeing that deep hole beside the Bilco doors that I'd excavated almost entirely in a single afternoon.
This evening Gretchen seemed cranky and withdrawn, something she later attributed to melancholy and "too much socializing." She wanted to watch teevee, so I checked how our bandwidth at Cricket was doing and it looked like we could spare a gigabyte for that, so I told her she could watch one.
Throckmorton the loon to the northeast of our dock (along the north shore of Woodworth Lake). Click to enlarge.
A sleep Throckmorton later that same afternoon near the southeast corner of the lake. Click to enlarge.
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