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drftwood tree dock
Saturday, August 3 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Our friend Gilly in Portland shipped us a surprise gift this past week: a small magnetic whiteboard with markers, with the idea that we could use it to play Spelling Bee the way we do in the weekend. So this morning we sat out in the screened-in porch playing it that way while I entered the words into one of my Chromebooks. (Gretchen is the only one who actually looks at the written letters, but they're an important part of the way we play when we play collaboratively.) We'd gotten up kind of late, so we didn't spend too much time on Spelling Bee before Gretchen and Charlotte headed down to the dock to spend a large fraction of the daylight. After doing a little more work on the reporting code of my ESP8266 Remote Control system, I made myself a boozy drink and headed down to the dock myself. I'd taken 150 mg of pseudoephedrine a little earlier, so I expected to have a bissful soak in the lake.
I climbed on one of the water hammocks and slowly made my way towards the outflow bay. As I passed, I carefully studied the rocky island (when the water's low like it is now, there's really only one) looking to see how it might be modified to make it suitable for a nesting pair of loons to raise a clutch of loonlets on. It looked like if I just filled in one gap between two massive angular stones, there's be a suitable ramp up the "highland" in the middle of the island, where I'd have to add maybe a circle of stones and then dump in some buckets of sand. But that might be all I would have to do.
Further on, as I floated past a large chunk of driftwood bobbing at the surface in the middle of the outflow bay, I wondered if maybe I could tow it to shore and make it into a low-key "tree dock," similar to the one we have near our actual dock, a "dock" that greatly facilitated the building of our actual dock (and which is still the best dock for launching something as large as the canoe). Another tree dock would make it much easier to get into and out of our watercraft when we decide (as I often do) to go ashore in the outflow bay.
I ended getting out at the outflow beaver dam and then worked for awhile further improving the causeway at forms both a walking path and a third (lowest) dam across the outflow creek. At this point the causeway is a very nice surface for walking, with generally flat rocks to step on that don't move much (or at all) under force of human weight. But even when something is very good, I find ways to further improve it, by (for example) making the path even more level or laying down even wider flat rocks to step on.
Eventually I walked back to the dock carrying the water hammock (which is a very small thing) and returned to the cabin. On the way, I carried the large mattock back up the new Mossy Rock Trail and used it to even out the terrain in a few places. The thing about the Adirondacks is that the ground is often full of undulations at many different scales (that is, it undulates fractally) due to the chaotic state it was left in as the glaciers retreated. It seems the glaciers didn't just drop lots of random boulders of many different sizes, it also dropped chunks of ice, some of which were the size of cars and others of which were the size of aircraft carriers. These piece of ice were surrounded by mud, sand, and gravel, and as they melted away, they left behind pits. Some of these pits are fifty feet across and are now occupied by wetlands spread out between our cabin and the lake at several different levels of elevation. But others just form dips only several feet across that it's impossible to avoid when laying out a trail. So this afternoon I used the mattock to chop into the high points and use the resulting soil to fill in the low points to make the trail wiggle less in the z-dimension. In some places soil wasn't enough for this, and I built little mini-causeways out of stone. It might seem like a lot of fussy, unnecessary work, but the result is a trail that it significantly more pleasant to hike on.
Later in the early evening, I hiked back down to the dock and took set out in the kayak with a piece of rope that I normally just use to help me decommission the dock in the fall. I paddled out to that log of bobbing driftwood in the outflow bay and used the rope to lasso the log and then tow it over to the south shoreline of the bay, something I was able to do entirely with the force of rowing the canoe. Evidently this towing caused the log to pull out of the muck on the bottom, which exposed a part of the log that was a light pink color. (Based on the knots along its length, I think the log was a piece of hemlock.) After getting out of the kayak and wading through the muck of the shoreline, I was able to tow the driftwood log to a rock that would be easy to jump to from the shoreline. I then positioned the long between that rock and another one further out in the water so that it formed a convenient bridge, or, makeshift dock. The main problem with it now was that it tended to rotate under my weight, though that can be solved with the addition of more rocks and sticks angled up against it, catching against various knots. Another thing I will have to do to make it usable is to cut hatches into its top surface so it won't get uselessly slippery when wet. But if I can make it into a useful tree dock, I can apply the lessons learned to making a tree dock on Lake Edward at some point in the future.
Back at the cabin, Gretchen had made a meal of some sort of bucatini with pesto sauce and a side of overcooked kale. It was a good meal, but then some hour or so later, as I was unsucessfully trying to find a USB-to-3v-serial adapter to perhaps further investigate potential digital data from the Navien boiler, I started feeling increasingly unwell. Eventually I had to give up all my plans and lie on the couch in the loft with my laptop, feeling just well enough to read articles and do little else. Normally I would've wanted to drink booze, but I held off on that for some time. When I finally made myself a cocktail, I was unable to finish it. Eventually I gave up on being able to do anything and went to bed. [REDACTED]
Meanwhile Mel, one of the other landowner on the lake, had a raging party happening at his place, over in the old Boy Scout main hall near the southeast corner of the lake. There had been the sounds of drunk revelers earlier when I'd been wrangling that piece of driftwood. And later this evening they blew up a king's ransome in fireworks, creating a constand din that at times resembled thunder if not war. It was irritating, but Mel is rarely at the lake, so if this was his one day to go nuts, there was no sense in begrudging it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240803 feedback
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