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bifurcation
Thursday, May 30 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Ray and Nancy would be going to Fire Island and didn't have anyone else to watch their dog Jack, so we said we'd take him. They didn't flinch when Gretchen (who had other non-cabing plans this weekend) mentioned that I'd said I'd take him with me to the Adirondacks today (getting my weekend started early!) in what has been an unusually active porcupine season. This morning Nancy arrived with some treats for me (a bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos and a cold brew coffee from Stewarts), Jack the Dog, and all his supplies. Just jack and his parapharnalia was going to occupy a lot of the payload capacity of the Chevy Bolt, since it included a huge dog bed. But then Gretchen suggested I not take the dog bed. Then, without consulting me, she loaded two large trash bags full of trash into the car, hoping to take advantage of our free trash service at the cabin. But I myself had a few bulky things I wanted to take up there, including the big electric chainsaw, the 49-key-MIDI keyboard, and an African black-eyed susan I'd successfully kept alive through the winter. So I removed one of the trash bags only to catch Gretchen putting it back in a few minutes later. "You have plenty of room!" she insisted. "You really won't take no for an answer," I replied. But Gretchen was right; I was able to take all my stuff along with the two bags of trash and three dogs up to the cabin without any difficulty. On the way in, I stopped at the trash & recycling building to unload my trash bags and also gathered a few stones from the side of the road for one of my several ongoing stone-based projects.
After unloading the car, the dogs seemed so desperate for a walk that I spontaneously took them on one while I was still drinking a beer. I didn't even bother to put on any shoes.
Since Jack had never been to the cabin before, I thought it important to show him the late. So we hiked down to the dock, and he immediately waded out into the shallows and lay down for a brief soak. I then led them all to the outflow creek, which I proceeded to follow downstream, something I'd never actually done before. I know I hadn't done this because I encountered something I hadn't know about and didn't really know was physically possible in our particular universe: the creek split into two halves, a phenomenon called "bifurcation." This explained some of the confusion I'd had about the creeks I'd encountered further downhill. If a creek can split in half, it's possible to end up with more creeks than expected. I am, of course, aware of trivial examples of bifurcation, such as the presence of islands in rivers or the way a river will fan out into multiple channels in a delta. But that wasn't what was happening here. The outflow creek, which is almost small enough to jump across, was splitting into two equal hlves that each ran down different widely-separated channels with a rocky wooded hill between them. I would expect such a thing to be highly unstable, since surely the two channels erode at different rates and it wouln't take long for the fastest-eroding channel to capture the whole creek, leaving the other channel dry. Indeed, it wouldn't take much effort for me to build a small dam to completely shut off one of the channels.
The bifurcation also explained why there was so much stream in our parcel even though all the maps show the outflow creek crossing the parcel's west boundary about 700 feet below the beaver dam that separates the lake from the creek. Those maps don't show the bifurcation; all they show is the western half. The eastern half flows almost entirely within our parcel.
Having just discovered the bifurcation and the western half of the creek that I hadn't been aware of, I decided to follow it all the way to where yellow marks on the trees show it leaving our parcel and entering property belonging to Adirondack State Park. But I never actually saw any such marks and eventually I decided I must've gone far enough west that heading uphill would take me back to the cabin. (I didn't have either a phone or a compass, though my sense of direction wasn't bad because it was a clear sunny day.) But it turned out that I was further west than I thought, because after climbing up a few rocky escarpments, I saw a ribbon on a tree and a characteristic cut mark on a fallen log that indicated I'd just arrived at a very early version of the Lake Edward Trail. That meant I wasn't far from the actual trail. At some point I saw a familiar-looking wetland full of reeds, and moments later I found my way to where the actual Lake Edward Trail starts climbing the hill to our cabin roughly 650 feet to its west.
As I'd been walking, I'd had two concerns about the dogs. I was worried they might find a porcupine, though I wasn't that worried about anyone but Neville getting quilled. Jack is a bit like Charlotte in that, for a dog, he's unusually shy and nervous, and it wouldn't be like him to run up to a porcupine and take a bite. But my other worry was that Jack would get separated from us and, not knowing the landscape, get lost (much like Ramona did near Minerva back in 2018). Happily, while the other dogs pretty much disappeared after I got to the bifurcation, Jack stayed closed by, perhaps knowing that he had to do this in a completely unfamiliar place. But then around the time I started climbing the escarpments hoping to find myself near the cabin, he went missing. At around this time Charlotte showed up, so I started loudly calling for Neville and Jack just so they'd hear me in the distance and know where I was.
When Charlotte and I got back to the cabin, I found Neville waiting for me but no Jack. So I walked out to the lookout rock, the top of a rocky cliff about 250 feet west of the cabin where, in the winter, one can see Peck Lake and some of the houses near the northeast end of Lake Edward. From there I shouted Jack's name through cupped hands for awhile. And when that didn't produce him, I became worried. But maybe he'd found his way either out to Woodworth Lake Road or downhill all the way to Lake Edward. So told Charlotte and Neville we'd be going for "a ride in the cwar." I ended up driving all the way out to Route 309 and then north to Bleecker. I took Lake Drive through the little suburbia on the north shore of Lake Edward's southwest end, turning around in front of that house we rented for a week back in the summer of 2012. Not seeing Jack, I turned around and drove back, stopping along the way to gather some more large stones.
Back at the cabin, Jack was waiting for us. Charlotte was so happy he'd been found that she let out a little howl. As you can imagine, I was relieved that I wouldn't have to be telling Ray and Nancy some bad news on their first night of vacation. Now it was time to feed the dogs (Jack is the canine vacuum cleaner and must be separated from more dainty dogs during such times). Then I made myself some left over spaghetti and mixed myself a beverage containing gin.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, I happened to be following the news just as the judge in Donald Trump's New York hush money felony case was dismissing the deliberating jury for the evening only to learn that they'd reached a verdict: guilty on all thirty-four counts. The only social media I really use is Facebook, and it immediately exploded with deighted memes from all my lefty friends while the right seemed stunned into silence. It's not a perfect system, but juries have a way of cutting through the bullshit to the truth even as every other institution falls prey to disinformation and corruption.
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