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Stony Pond
Monday, August 8 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
After Gretchen had walked the dogs and we'd had our breakfast of strong coffee and bagel sandwiches, Gretchen had the idea that we should canoe with the dogs to the north end of the lake and hike the mostly-unknown trail that passes nearby. This was almost certainly the first time Neville had ever been in a boat of any description, and while Ramona (who is familiar with boats and the adventures they enable) hopped in immediately, Gretchen had to physically place Neville in the canoe twice before he stuck (and then only because I held his collar). But once out on the water, he seemed to relax into the experience in a way that, say, Eleanor, never quite approached. Neville might end up becoming more of a Ramona than an Eleanor when it comes to watercraft (and, for that matter, sketchy bridges). We rowed to the canoe landing at the north end of the lake. As with most public and partially-public lakes in the Adirondacks, there's beater canoe there for public use, though the makeshift patches made from bicycle inner tubes suggest it isn't particularly seaworthy.
The trail from the lakeshore leads to a trailing running just past the Twenty Ninth Pond along the north. It's called the Stony Pond Trail, and it's been set up as a snowmobile trail. Last time we'd walked on it, we first walked west out to 28N and then tried walking east past the trail to Twenty Ninth Pond, but the biting flies were so aggressive and terrible that we had to turn back. This time, though, we immediately turned east. The flies gradually accumulated like ionic-charge-diminishing electrons around the nuclei of our heads, though they mostly stayed in orbit, and were only annoying due to the sound of their nearby buzzing. For some reason, they never attacked other exposed parts of our bodies like our arms or legs (even though I never put any repellant on those).
We hiked up over a ridge and then down into a new watershed, one with at least one tall well-maintained beaver dam and the meadows remaining from beaver dams past. As we crossed every minor stream and temporary brook, there was always a brand new snowmobile bridge made of treated lumber, each having two deck coarses made from two by ten planks, one oriented 90 degrees from the other (the topmost one running parallel to the trail). The forest for much of the walk was a decidious mix of mostly birch and beech, with a good number of sugar maples and an occasional aggressive understory of some species of spruce.
Eventually the trail passed an audible waterfall, the kind that forms where retreating glaciers have dumped an enormous pile of rubble in a valley, forming a natural dam and, above it, a substantial lake. The lake (Stony Pond) was evident before we reached it as an emerging opening in the forest. The lake itself, though called a "pond," was considerably bigger the one we're staying on. It included a small low-relief island a little offshore from where the trail had placed us, precisely the kind loons like to nest on. Gretchen immediately took off all her clothes and jumped into the water and began swimming aggressively away from shore. As is usual for me, I took off all my clothes and waded gingerly in until the water was little above my knee. It wasn't very cold, but I couldn't psyche myself up enough to get in. Eventually Gretchen returned to shore and we both walked (still naked) down a side trail directing us to an unexpected Catskill State Park lean-to. The lean-to itself was well-maintained, without trash or decay. There were four or five liquor bottles lined up along one of the horizontal support beams, though none had any more than a thimble's worth of liquor remaining in them. In the log book, someone wrote about having taken the lake's public canoe our for a paddle. It had apparently worked for awhile, despite water "shooting up" from a hole in the bottom. We saw that canoe and it had been repaired in a few places with duct tape. By now Neville was running around with a large red splotch between his eyes from where I'd smushed a deer fly.
We timed it, and it took us 36 minutes to hike back to Twenty Ninth Pond from Stony Pond. Gretchen had initially planned to swim home from where we'd paked our canoe, but she was now too hungry for that, so we loaded up the dogs and paddled home. Ramona somehow managed to dip herself ear-deep in the black mud before getting into our canoe; somehow I'll have to find a way to clean up that mess.
I took a beer with me on the walk on the access road up to the ridgetop where one can get a cellphone signal. I've been a news junkie for days so of course I wanted to have updates on the ongoing Donald Trump derpnado. The hope was to surf to some of my my usual web haunts on my smartphone, download the pages locally, and then read them at my leisure, far away from the deer flies trying to burrow through my hair to my scalp. But I soon discovered that there is no intuitively obvious way to save a web page using an Android phone. You can't bring up any menu to "save page as." In desperation, I clicked on the networking icon (the one with the little dots with connections between them and was saw something about Drive and thought, "Cool, I want to put this on the local media, often referred to as 'drive'." But of course the Drive being referred to is Google Drive, a proprietary network-only storage solution. Things stored there weren't going to be accessible once I was back at the cabin. I don't have much experience trying to use smartphones for much more than the 80% of tasks most people use them for, so their annoying differences between their operating systems and those of desktop operating systems have rarely been a problem.
That beer (and the gin & tonic that followed) made me sleepy and unmotivated, though it was in the middle of the afternoon. So I decided to take a bath. That was a great idea. I fell asleep there in the tub, later to awake unaware of where I was (both with respect to the bathtub and the Adirondack cabin).
This evening I prepared a simplified version of my "bean glurp" concoction, using mushrooms, onions, black beans, and a whole package of Upton's Naturals Chili Lime Carnitas flavored jackfruit, which is something of a meat substitute. I wasn't delighted by the flavor and texture of the jackfruit itself, which seemed similar to artichoke hearts. But in the context of everything else (which, in this case, included Honest Weight Vegan Spinach Dip and Daiya-brand medium cheddar "cheese"), the resulting tacos were damn good. Overall, not a bad Mexican Monday in the semi-offgrid wilderness.
Near the end of our meal, the dogs ran off in pursuit of something they'd heard, and the we heard sounds of crashing through the forest that sounded like they were coming from across the lake. I paddled over there in a kayak to see what was going on, but found nothing. I soon decided the sounds we'd heard had actually been echoes; it's common for sounds made on one side of a lake the richochet off the tree front on the lake's opposite side. The dogs eventually materialized, but it took a long time.
All day I'd been plagued by a strange feeling in and around my right ear. To brush the skin beneath my right ear produced a deep-flesh sound absent when I did the same beneath my left ear. Was my right ear getting an infection from all the picking at it that I do using a variety of tools I keep near my main computer? I decided the only easy solution was to pick at my right ear some more. So I found a small aluminum nail in amongst the tools and hardware in the cabin's special room for such things and proceeded to scrape out my ear using the nail's wide head end (which could be viewed as a tiny radially-symmetrical hoe). I didn't manage to remove much wax, and most of what came out was white (not orange), but the effect was dramatic; that weird sound when I touched the skin near my ear was gone.
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