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barefoot ladies at the point of bifurcation
Sunday, July 14 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning Gilly and I drank a large amount of strong coffee, which is in keeping with normal cabin ritual. But there was no collaborative playing of Spelling Bee, since there was never enough silence in the conversation being had for such an idea to pop up. We spent much of the morning in the sunny non-screened part of the east deck as Gilly told us all about her new job (for which, she jokingly said in reference to my continued unemployment, she feels "survivor guilt"). Gilly now works for some government agency tasked with the job of making ocean fisheries sustainable. The idea here is not really conservation; it's more about preserving jobs in fishing communities. If fisheries are overfished, then the fisheries collapse and the jobs go away. In the past, Gilly has worked more for environmental advocacy groups such as the Pew Charitable Trust, so the change of perspective has taken some adjustment. I joked that when Trump becomes president, she would immediately be replaced by a "bible college graduate," and she chuckled that "Project 2025" would definitely be her undoing. But Gilly isn't a good storyteller, and I increasingly felt trapped as she nattered on about her new job, going into detail about different fisheries, bycatch, and what not. Eventually I slipped away even though there was no point in her tale where this seemed appropriate, and I went off to do something more meditative like snipping off mugwort plants south of the cabin's entrance walkway.
Eventually Gretchen, Gilly, Charlotte, and Neville all went down to the lake via the older, less treacherous trail. I stayed back at the cabin fixing little issues with my SolArk Companion. To help with its debugging, I've built out a simple no-parameter reporting tool and added a utility that allows me to dump Apache access logs to a web page. Having these two tools keeps me from having to rely as much on shell access. (I don't normally mind using the shell, but the internet at the cabin is just flaky enough that connections don't last more than about ten minutes, and when I log back in, I have to find my way back to either the place in the file system or into the right database to continue my work.)
When I finally went down to the lake (via my more direct trail), I brought a travel mug containing a cocktail of gin and SPORTea. At the time, Gilly was in the lake on one of the two-bladder "water hammocks" and Gretchen was swimming around near the dock, perhaps using a swimming noodle at times so as not to have to tread water at all. I went and fetched the canoe because Gretchen had said something about wanting to show Gilly the outflow bay and apparently her shoulder is too fucked up to paddle herself. (Her knees are all scraped up from a fall; perhaps that is why her shoulder is injured.) Gretchen paddled in the front, I paddled in the back, and Gilly sat on the narrow yoke in the middle. When we got to the beaver dam at the outflow, we all managed to get out of the canoe (which was really only difficult for Gilly) and walked to solid ground (another thing Gilly had trouble finding). In fairness to Gilly, the surfaces near the outflow beaver dam are inconsistent, not too solid, slippery, and sometimes contain sharp sticks (and we were all barefoot). Wading through the pond between the outflow beaver dam and the next dam down, sometimes my feet plunged deep into mud and then other times immediately found a solid — if slippery — rock just below the water's surface. Gretchen, meanwhile, was helping Gilly find her way along the shoreline to the north.
We found our way to the old Boy Scout campground, which for some reason always impresses people despite not being much more than a nice picnic table and a solid steel fire pit. I suggested we walk to the nearby bifurcation point of the Woodworth Lake outflow creek, but Gretchen kept shooting me glances as if to say, "Can't you see Gilly isn't up to such a thing?" But it was less than a couple hundred feet away through mostly uncluttered woodland, and we walked over there, me clearing low branches and such out of the way before the others caught up. I think of the bifurcation point as almost magical given how geomorphically rare such bifurcations are, and I did what I could to hype what we were looking at, explaining that the bifurcation creates what is essentially a huge island. I then mentioned other bifurcations I'd read about, including the one on the continental divide. When I said that that creek splits in half, with one half going to the Pacific and the other to the Atlantic, I could tell that Gretchen doesn't have a firm grasp on how hydrology works because she said something implying that she thought the creek somehow jumped over other creeks and rivers along the way, a phenomenon that really would be magical. She seemed disappointed when I said that the creek going to the Atlantic did so via other rivers such as the Missouri, Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico.
When we paddled the canoe back to the dock, we found both the dogs patiently waiting for us, which was a lot better than then going off and doing something violent to the wildlife. After dropping Gilly and Gretchen off at the dock, I paddled over near the public dock to a place with a lot of loose rock on the lake floor. I gathered a fair amount of it and returned to our dock, unloaded it, and then used it to improve the stone wall between the two outermost piers on our dock. The idea for that wall is that it creates a barrier between the water near the shore and the water out in the lake. Hopefully this will facilitate the ice fracturing along this line later in the winter, thereby imposing less ice stress on the permanent part of the dock. As I was doing this, Gilly was telling a very long and digression-filled story about whitewater rafting in the Grand Canyon. I don't know if such stories are ever very good, since they rely a lot on hyperbole such as claims of multiple near-death experiences, but Gilly's telling of the tale was especially bad, and again I felt trapped. Fortunately, though, I had a nearby project involving stones I could resume working on with the plausible possibility that I was still close enough to hear Gilly's tale.
Back at the cabin, we had leftover lasagna (still just as good), overcooked collards, and salad for dinner out in the screened-in porch. Later, while I continued tinkering with my SolArk Copilot, Gilly and Gretchen had a long discussion of Gretchen's friend-breakup with her friend Carrie (of Carrie & Michæl), a story that has fresh significance because Gretchen and Carrie have begun emailing each other again.
Gretchen snapped this picture of me and Charlotte sleeping back to back this morning in the bigger of the two first floor bedrooms at the cabin.
Click to enlarge.
Gretchen and Gilly in the lake when I first arrived at the dock today.
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Charlotte near the dock today.
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Gretchen and Gilly at the point of bifurcation today.
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An irridescent green damselfly (probably an ebony jewelwing) near the point of bifurcation. Such damselflies aren't present along the lakeshore and seem to only operate along streams. I remember damselflies like this one when I was kid playing in Folly Mills Creek.
Click to enlarge.
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