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cranberries and sundews
Saturday, August 20 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
All day today I suffered from upper-gastrointestinal trouble that felt like acid reflux, though antacids didn't seem to help much. I'm not sure what brought my condition on, though I suspect it had something to do with having taken ambien last night. I'd made the mistake once of taking ambien instead of antacids and spent a whole day suffering the consequences, although this time I hadn't remembered much heartburn last night while sipping on a glass of gin on the rocks.
With Nancy and Sarah the Vegan visiting, the cabin had a fresh influx of food items. This morning that meant we'd all be eating big fluffy bagels with all the fixings. I took the kayak out a couple times around breakfast, including once with Ramona and Neville out to the Cape of Bad Boat. There we got out and walked around through the dense forest, got a look at the old abandoned canoe that gives the cape its name, and of course (since my guts were acting up) I had to take a dump and bury it well enough to keep Ramona from immediately eating it. The carpet of organic matter is so ubiquitous and tightly-knitted-together that it's hard to find loose rocks except right on the shoreline, so I had to cover my excrement with sticks and logs. Back near where I'd beached the kayak (43.831553N, 74.012172W), I found cranberries growing between the waterline and where the trees began. They weren't quite ripe, but they tasted like cranberries.
Ramona, Neville, and I returning from the Cape of Bad Boat today.
Later, Gretchen and the ladies took the three dogs on a walk down the access road while I banked up a few more articles at my closer-by cellphone spot (which doesn't work as well for Gretchen's Verizon-based phone; mine connects through AT&T). By this point my gut was feeling bad enough that I wanted to lie down. Interestingly, just lying on my back seemed to make all the discomfort go away. Meanwhile Gretchen had plans of making the rest of the bagels into garlic bread, but she couldn't find any bagels. It soon became clear that Nancy's dog Jack must've stolen and eaten them. He's a lot better than he used to be (until fairly recently he was so destructive that he had to be caged every time Nancy or Ray left him alone), but stealing food from countertops is still very much something he does. Gretchen managed to make garlic bread from regular bread instead, and she also made a bean salad. I got up from the bed to eat these things and felt okay for awhile, especially while sunning myself on the dock. Nancy and Sarah went for a kayak paddle that included Ramona for a time. Jack didn't want to get in the kayak, but he didn't want to be left out either, and several times he attempted to swim out to meet the kayak, though he always turned around before getting half-way across the lake (which can be as much as 400 feet across east-to-west).
At some point I got a snorkel (which I'd brought with me yesterday) so I could swim easily; I don't normally have enough buoyancy to easily get my nose and mouth up into air. This allowed me to swim out to the diving platform (70 feet from the dock), sun myself for awhile, and then swim back. I'd hoped the goggles would open up a world of wildlife before my eyes, but the water was murky and brown, visibility was poor, and the few small fish I saw would've been just as easy to spot from the dock.
Eventually my gut caused me to lie down again, and this time I actually slept for awhile. A little after 5:00pm, Nancy, Sarah & Jack loaded into Nancy's car and they began their drive back to Hurley.
This would be the last night for Gretchen and me at the cabin, and as is customary, we decided to make a fire in the fire pit and barbecue some things. The supply of wood wasn't great, so I kayaked across the lake to the place where a clearing beneath the powerline came down to the water's edge (43.830026, -74.010696). I was hoping to find some dry wood there, though there was only a token amount. But I did make another plant discovery. I saw an inconspicuous plant growing directly on the top surfaces of dry logs and was intrigued. What could that be? On closer inspection, I saw it featured small flat leaves with curved spines on them, something I remembered as being a characteristic of yet another carnivorous plant: the sundew. Twenty Ninth Pond has plenty of spectacular pitcher plants, but I'd never noticed the sundews before. Back at the cabin, I confirmed the plant was indeed a sundew. The only plant Twenty Ninth Pond needs now is a venus fly trap, and then it will have the carnivorous plant trifecta.
The only food we had to barbecue was faux hamburger patties; some portobello caps I'd bought two weeks ago had gone rancid in their plastic packaging despite refrigeration; they smelled so bad that Gretchen had to put the compost bucket outside. Another bad smell came from some bowtie noodles Gretchen had made several days ago. She'd left it out too long and it had developed that characteristic bad pasta smell. It's not the kind of smell that dogs have any problem with, so they ate well tonight.
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