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fire beind the boulder at the lake
Saturday, July 27 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After drinking our respective coffees and playing Spelling Bee collaboratively, Gretchen and I each went separately down to the dock in the late morning. Gretchen and Charlotte set off first via the older trail, and I came later down the Mossy Rock Trail, where I made further improvements to the steps and other places where the ground wasn't great for walking. Again, I got Neville to follow me, but he never made it down to the lake and it turned out he'd eventually returned to the cabin.
Down at the lake, I climbed into the innertube and, while sipping a boozy drink from my travel mug, I leisurely paddled over the vicinity of the public dock, because at the time I was still wondering where Neville was and wanted to see if he was over there looking for that deer fawn from several weeks back. I came ashore a hundred feet or more short of the pubic dock and walked to it along the shore. Nobody was there, human or canine, so I sat for a brief moment on the bench that is permanently mounted to the dock and looked out across the water. Then I walked through the water back to my innertube. The bottom wasn't very good for this, as it was either extremely soft and muddy or covered with random rocks in a way that tended to make me stumble. In one place my foot sank into the mud only to find a sharp stick waiting for me a little further down. Once I was back in the innertube, it didn't take long to paddle back to our dock straight across the lake.
After doing a little work on the "ice wall" (a rock wall to separate the ice beyond the dock's two outermost piers from the ice closer to shore) and, in looking for new rocks for this, found a number of planks that suggested there had once been another dock at this very same site.
Our friends Lisa P and her husband Bill were supposed to be arriving this afternoon, and the original plan was for them to come down to the lake once they did. But then I began to worry that if Neville was all by himself at the house when they arrived, he might regard them with suspicion and act in ways they might find intimidating. So I hurried back up the Mossy Rock Trail, and, as I did, I heard Neville barking. Sure enough, he wasn't taking too kindly to the arrival of our guests. I told him to be a good boy and showed our guests where their room would be and that sort of thing. Bill had brought an inflatable paddleboard, which he then proceeded to inflate with an electric pump attached to his and Lisa's Chevy Bolt (it looks almost exactly like ours). Gretchen returned about ten minutes later, and before long we were all back down at the dock. Both dogs came with us, but at some point they heard something in the woods and ran after it, and we didn't see them again for awhile.
Bill took the paddleboard out on a tour of the lake. Then Gretchen did the same. Initially I was impressed at Gretchen's ability to stay upright, since Bill had said it had been difficult to stand on at first. But then I got on it and found it no problem to stand as I paddled over to the lake's southeast corner. I liked the standing "heron's eye-view" of the water, which allowed me to see at least one interesting thing: a painted turtle swimming up to the surface from the depths over near the mouth of the lake's biggest tributary.
After chatting with Bill about this and that back at the dock, I became concerned about the continued absence of the dogs. So I decided to get into a kayak and paddle south along the shoreline down to where I'd last heard noises that I'd thought they'd made. I soon found Charlotte walking along the shoreline. Not far away was Neville, who was sitting on the ground just above the beaver lodge on the shoreline that marks the boundary between Ibrahim's and Shane's respective parcels. I could smell the unmistakable smell of a rotting carcass and knew that that must be what Neville had found. (It also accounted for the turkey vultures we'd been seeing flying low over the lake.) I got out of the kayak using a handy fallen tree as a dock and soon saw what had attracted Neville: a large rotting deer fawn. It was bigger than anything he could possibly kill and was far too intact to have been the one he infamously spent five hours guarding back in June. I got within about ten feet of him before he snarled at me and I retreated back to the kayak. I expected him to spend the rest of the day guarding that fawn, but he returned to the dock only about an hour later, leaving the fawn for the vultures.
We spent a long time at the dock while people went back and forth between sunning themselves, swimming, and navigating watercraft (mostly just the paddleboard). Eventually Gretchen left for the cabin so she could prepare dinner, and I wasn't far behind.
We have the model of InstantPot with the least-intuitive user interface ever devised. It looks like it might have touch-sensitive buttons, but no, you have to turn a knob to make various things light up. Then you push the knob to set something, at which point you can change another setting. But what exactly you're doing is something that is unknowable without consulting a manual. And if you think you've started your rice cooking, there's a good chance you're wrong and your rice is just sitting there in the dark doing nothing. All of this played out this evening, though somehow we managed to produce three cups of perfect rice despite all that. We ate it with cubes of tofu in gochujang sauce and a side of cooked greens that Gretchen almost threw out due to all the green caterpillars she kept finding in it (it was great!).
Over dinner, we discussed a range of things, but the thing Lisa most wanted to hear about was our respective experiences on psychedelics. It was a weird question coming from such a goodie two-shoes, but apparently she's considering going on a guided psilocybin trip. They're apparently now so mainstream that even goodie two-shoes go on them. So Gretchen told us about her various trips, which have involved mushrooms, LSD, and mescaline. She'd had a particularly good trip while in Big Bend National Park, she said. She didn't, however, mention the time she'd been tripping on mescaline with Sarah the Korean in the Oberlin arboretum when I'd come riding out of the forest on a bicycle, which I was pedalling barefoot (this was a year or more after our estrangement). Then Bill talked about his crazy young adulthood in Richmond, Virginia. He talked about a caf&eactute; he'd worked at where his boss would cut lines of cocaine for him on the counter to help him get through the drudgery of dishwashing. He'd had plenty of psychedelics as well, and had once even been a drug runner, driving shipments of magic mushrooms from Charlottesville to Richmond. (He'd grown up in Lynchburg.) All this came as a bit of a surprise, since Bill is pretty old (67) and I'd just assumed he was the same kind of goodie two-shoes as Lisa. As for my psychedelic stories, you've heard them before and they're not particularly remarkable.
After we'd gone inside and the others had eaten icecream and cookies, we developed a plan to go down to the dock and have a bonfire in the firepit next to the huge molar-shaped boulder near our dock. So off we went with bag of cardboard kindling, various alcoholic drinks, and flashlights. This time, the only dog who came was Charlotte.
Initially Pyotr had a bright light shining from the boat house that was kind of spoiling the mood. But then someone over there thankfully switched it off and the lake was mostly dark. I built a nice fire using cardboard, sticks, and some long-dried driftwood and we sat in front of it while Bill talked at length about one his sisters who had died of ALS during the pandemic. Gretchen took one of the kayaks out and came back to report on how magical it was, so I did the same. From out in the lake, our bonfire was a smudgy glow, with the flames hidden behind the boulder but casting a ghostly glow on the trees from below. Meanwhile over at Joel's cabin, just about every light was on and people could be heard talking in the loud manner typical of drunks.
Eventually I separated the burning logs so the fire would die out and we returned to the cabin. Lisa, Gretchen, and Charlotte took the old, most established trail, while Bill and I took the shorter, steeper Mossy Rock Trail. Interestingly, we got back at exactly the same time (though I suspect Gretchen might've sprinted at the end) and for much of the walk, Bill and I could see our wives' flashlights through the woods on the other trail.
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