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Scottish friends arrive
Thursday, May 2 2024
Early this afternoon Gretchen drove down to the New Paltz bus station to pick up our friends Kelly and Brian, both of whom live in Scotland and who we know from two vegan cruises (one on the Danube River and the other in the Baltic Sea). They'd been in Manhattan and Brooklyn for a few days doing the big city thing (and seeing shows in theatres) but would now spend the next five days Upstate with us. Gretchen had of course prepared lots of food, and I'd done a little work straightening up the yard and, this morning, vacuuming on all three floors of the house (and the stairways, which attract debris like magnets). When our guests arrived, it wasn't long before we were taking advantage of the nice weather, sitting out on the east deck having a lunch of orzo, quiche, and delicious pickled mushrooms topped with some sort of ruddy paste. Gretchen had bought vinho verde for the occasion. Kelly and Brian had recently said goodbye to their dog Bramble, so that hung like a dark cloud over their "holiday" in America, so Gretchen was doing her best to keep them happy. They both have a similar sense of humor to ours, which accounts for our friendship, and we all had a rollicking good time talking about a wide range of things, pausing at times to take note of differences in our respective forms of English.
After lunch, we all went for a hike up the Farm Road and then on a loop through the forest that Gretchen often takes but that I never go on except when I am with her. It's not an especially interesting walk, and there was almost nothing to point out to our guests. I suggested we make a detour over to the waterfall (41.92345N, 74.11440W) on the way back (which I hadn't visited in nine years), since it's something a little more spectacular than forest, which hadn't really come up in conversation (the whole time Gretchen and Kelly were talking about various other things). Gretchen had only been to the waterfall once recently and had had trouble finding it, but I once I firmly know where something is, it's doubtful I will ever forget how to find it. Still, as I was heading through the forest out ahead of the others, Gretchen kept trying to convince me I was going the wrong way, that I should I head towards what I'd already seen was a steep precipice that, due to the nature of the landscape, had to be east of the waterfall. I eventually found the waterfall, which, though not flowing very strongly at the time, was impressive enough to briefly become a topic of conversation. Kelly and Brian marveled at how freely we were allowing the dogs to romp around through the landscape (which now featured treacherous drop-offs). They would later admit that they had never let their late dog free in any such unfenced unlimited environment. Indeed, Brian kept being concerned whenever one of our dogs disappeared or (in the case of Neville) failed to keep up with our pace. But we're used to telling our guests and friends not to worry about them, that even if they get separated from us, they know their way home.
But as we were leaving the waterfall, we suddenly heard Charlotte barking far off to the southwest, down somewhere in the ravine below the waterfall. Had she treed a bear? She's too new to us for me to be able to parse meaning out of her various yipping vocalizations, but it was possible she was expressing distress, though she didn't sound as if she'd injured herself. I told Gretchen to go on with the others while I would go around to the other side of the waterfall and see if Charlotte needed help. Once I got over to the west side of the waterfall, I could tell Charlotte was somewhere far down below me, I called to her again and contemplated hiking down into the ravine (which, given the grade of the terrain, wouldn't've been easy). But just as I reached the edge of the escarpment, Charlotte came bounding up out of it. She glanced at me and then headed off towards the Neville and the other humans, leaving me in the dust. My working theory is that she'd been trapped by some steep feature of the landscape down in the ravine and couldn't figure how to come up in the direction she heard our voices coming from, but once I'd gone to her west, she could see a path up to the top and made quick work of taking advantage of it. After that, she had no further use for me.
Later this evening, Gretchen's original plan was to go out to La Florentina for "purple pie," but Kelly said she'd be happier not going out and just eating more of whatever we'd had for lunch. So Gretchen cooked up some asparagus and indeed served that with leftover quiche, orzo, and maybe a salad. We ate out on the east deck even though the little flies were attacking us the whole time, leaving the kind of welts on my arm that reminded me of bites from Scottish midges.
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