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convenience stores in the Upstate hinterland
Wednesday, August 10 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
We'd forgotten a few things important to Gretchen on our way to the cabin. These included decaf coffee, sufficient water, and a pair of pants (she'd somehow been wearing mine during the occasions of colder conditions, and they hadn't seemed ridiculously oversize). So this morning, we decided to drive out to civilization to obtain a few things. Gretchen headed off down the access road as usual with the dogs, and ten minutes later I drove out to meet them in the Subaru. Our first destination was a little over three miles to the south in the village of Minerva. (I will always have a soft spot for places named after pagan gods in the hinterland.) There's a general store there called Mammy & Pap's. Inside, it looks the kind of store one sees in third world nations, with shelves just empty enough to expose the makeshift materials with which they'd been built. On the side (as there always is in Upstate convenience stores, including the Stewarts in Hurley) was a place for people to sit, read the newspaper, and eat whatever food the little kitchen could prepare. As always, the people hanging out in this area were older white guys with big white beards, suspenders, and plaid shirts. We quickly determined that there was no decaf for sale here, though they did have toilet paper (which we needed) and even a pretty-good onion (and, though it looked like it had been earmarked for kitchen use, the woman working the counter was happy to sell it to us). We were also allowed to fill our jugs with water; we'd brought four gallon's worth of containers.
We continued south to the next village, Olmstedville, returning to Sullivan's Grocery Store (where they also have eating area with the guys in suspenders). Not only did they have decaf, but they also had a Sierra Nevada Torpedo, which Gretchen knows I like. She was so surprised to see it that she bought me a sixpack without bothering to ask if I wanted it. I also filled the car's tank with gas.
Back at the cabin, I was sitting on the dock trying to figure out how to get between the tabs (or is it windows?) on Gretchen's Android smartphone, which she'd loaded with webpages from the New York Times. Then I realized it was showing one bar of cellphone reception. At that point an update came in on Facebook. Wow, did we really have a cellphone signal on the dock? But that freakish moment of connectivity didn't last; perhaps the signal had been reflected off a passing airplane. But it did make me wonder if perhaps I could find a closer cellphone signal than up on that ridge on the access road. Last year, before we'd discovered the cellphone hotspot on the access road, we'd gone into the forest north of the house. But getting a good signal had required serious bushwacking, and I'd remembered the biting flies being terrible. Also, Gretchen had gotten herself lost up there on at least one occasion. Still, it was worth performing something of a site survey. So I grabbed my phone and started hiking. I was only a couple hundred feet from the house (and still on an identifiable trail) when a bar appeared on my phone. Then it told me I had 4G access. Maybe that would be good enough. In short order, I'd downloaded all the web pages I needed, though of course a misleadingly-labeled download button on SourceForge had caused me to download a piece of malware for Android instead of an ePub reader for Windows. Later, though, I returned to the same spot and had no problem downloading a 26 megabyte ePub reader from a different site. (I couldn't figure out how to download non-Android applications from SourceForge; evidently there isn't much demand from people using their cellphones as sneakernet internet portals for offline Windows machines.)
The wild animals living near the cabin are noticeably tamer than animals elsewhere, even on other parts of the same pond. This indicates to me that the people who stay here are unusally animal-friendly (and don't include many large groups of eleven-year old boys). It's not just that the frogs (I've seen as many as seven) continue relaxing undisturbed on their lily pads as we come and go, it's also that the garter snakes who sun themselves near the steps to the dock only slither away when you're almost stepping on them. But most remarkable of all are the chipmunks, who are so tame that I suspect they're in the habit of eating food out of human hands. Today I saw a chipmunk casually walking around in the living room, not at all concerned by my presence. Fortunately, he'd disappeared before the dogs showed up. The dogs spend a lot of mental and physical effort pursuing chipmunks (they've even got a chipmunk mine started in the cabin's front yard), and they might consider a tame or suicidal chipmunk a divine reward for all the costs sunk to date.
This evening Gretchen tried to hike to my new cellphone spot north of the house, but somehow she got hopelessly lost, bushwacking aimlessly through the forest without a view of the lake or an idea of which way was home for a terrifying amount of time, hollering helplessly in hopes I would hear her, before realizing she could just use her phone to navigate back to the cabin.
Tonight I made us a dinner of pasta with a red sauce rich in mushrooms, seitan, and onions. Later, we watched the two first episodes of the fourth season of Orange is the New Black, which picked up exactly where the last season had left off (the prisoners had all escaped and were frolicking in a lake just outside the fence).
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