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a double-dog porcupine quill extraction
Saturday, November 23 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning I made myself a french press of coffee and ate a bagel with that olive-oil-based cheese, sauerkraut, and Grey Poupon mustard. But the bagel wasn't quite as good as I expected it to be, possibly because it wasn't sufficiently toasted. While I'd been toasting it, the toaster's extravagant power demands unexpectedly caused the SolArk inverter to shut off the cabin's power, the first time this has happened since back in March. My East Cabin Basement Controller and its algorithms have been good at keeping the battery from being depleted, but I'd let the battery drop down to near 20%, and when that happens (as I know from the time before algorithmic power controls), all it takes is a sudden ramping up of power needs and the SolArk goes Chicken Little on the situation. Once the power was out, I tried turning on the generator using the SolArk Co-pilot, but it's plugged into a normal outlet that was dead along with the rest of the cabin. The only things still running were the cellular hotspot and its watchdog (which have a 12v lead acid battery backup) and the East Cabin Basement Controller, which now uses the generator battery for backup power. I could use that to power the SolArk Co-pilot, but I didn't have any suitable 12v-to-5v adapters. I briefly considered using a solar charge controller, since that's one function it provides. But I lacked other things I needed to hook it up without making a complete rat's nest if wires. Some weeks ago I'd tried tapping into the SolArk's WiFi dongle, which still has power even when the inverter turns off cabin power. But I hadn't been able to find a pin that could provide 3.3v at enough milliamps.
As the morning wore on, the sun came out, and enough power went into the battery for the inverter to decide to turn the power back on. It was looking like it might not be a terrible day to try to winterize the dock. There was a harsh wind blowing, though, so I procrastinated going and doing that chore until late morning. Before I went out, I made sure to put something warm around my neck.
Both dogs came with me when I hiked down to the dock via the old dock trail. I would've made for a more round-about hike to the dock, but Charlotte seemed intent on going straight there.
Down at the dock, conditions were fairly sunny and there were a couple bufflehead ducks alarmed by our sudden arrival. I immediately began pulling out the cotter pins securing a pipe that forms the hinge pin between the half-floating and fully-floating parts of the dock. As I worked, I used a piece of 14 gauge insulated copper wire to wrapped around the cotter pins so that when they came out, they couldn't slip away and fall irretrievably into the lake (which is seven or eight feet deep just below where I was working). Once I had the fully-floating part of the dock detached, I paddled it over to the short patch of stoneless lakeshore just north of the tree dock and tethered it so it couldn't float away. Then I got out the big long "wintering pole" that I use to prop up the floating end of the half-floating section of dock to protect it from the coming ice. I placed its solid steel footing (an old automotive brake disk) on the lake bottom off the end of the half-floating dock, hung a small hand winch off the end of it, and then used that to ratchet the floating end up out of the water. I figured there was no harm in raising it a good foot above the surface. Once I had it up, I used chains to secure it in place so I could use the winch for other things.
Last year I'd experimented with using an electric winch attached to a marine battery to pull the floating dock out of the lake onto the shore. This had worked, but it was a messy process and required a big battery and hooking up the winch to different trees as I worked. All that equipment was still down at the dock, but I wasn't sure if the battery had enough juice to two out the floating dock for a second season. (I'd kept meaning to charge it with a solar panel, but never got around to it.) So this season I wanted to see if I could pull the dock out just using the little hand winch. My only concern about doing this was that there was a danger of being whipped by a cable or a chain if something were to fail; the advantage of the motorized winch is that you can operate it from outside the danger zone for such accidents.
Using the cable system I rigged up last fall, featuring a pulley high up in a stout sugar maple, I was able to slowly winch the dock out of the lake. As I worked, I kept my back to the winch and the attached chains just in case it failed. I also held an arm up in the back of my head and neck to protect that area should anything snap. The little winch has a tiny arm which doesn't offer much leverage, but I was making good progress, something I kept running over to check on.
The dogs, meanwhile, weren't too impressed. Neville hung around for awhile and Charlotte kept showing up at high speed with great enthusiasm and then disappearing again. At some point Charlotte barked about something, so I ran over to where they were and saw that they'd found a place along the lakeshore just inside Shane's parcel where some creature was hiding and tried to dig him or her out. That seemed like a good project to keep them out of trouble, allowing me to work in peace.
But then, an hour or more later, I heard Charlotte's distinctly piercing bark from much further away, perhaps over at public dock. Something was extremely exciting over there, and, because it was late Novemeber, a time when there are few porcupines, I wondered if this might be Charlotte's first experience with a bear. So I went running in the direction of her barking, not saying or shouting anything, since I know from experience that that can interfere with a bear being able to get away. I ran along the shore all the way to the public dock, though as I did so, the barking never sounded like I was getting any closer to it. Was she somewhere south of Woodworth Lake Road? By then the woods were silent. So I called for her and Neville. (There was a strong likelihood they were together and that Neville had also been barking, but when he's more than about 100 yards away, his bark is so quiet it's impossible to hear.)
I ended up walking all the way back to the cabin via the road and driveway without every seeing or hearing the dogs. But then as I approached the cabin, I saw Charlotte dart past, and she clearly had a sprinkling of porcupine quills near her mouth. They were the long white kind that come from mature porcupines. I'd seen a porcupine once before in November, but that was in early November. And none of our dogs had ever been quilled in November. I hoped Charlotte's light quilling was the extent of the... but then Neville showed up, and he had a good patch of quills on the right side of his face and on the side and back of his right hand. He was quilled worse than Charlotte, but not too severely. I was able to pluck a few out near his right eye before he got wise to me and started threatening to bite me.
If I could somehow get these dogs to fall asleep, I figured I could get these quills out of them. But the only sedative I had available was diphenhydramine. When I take it as a sleep aid, I take a big 150mg dose which usually knocks me out pretty solid. So gave them each a dose of that size, figuring that, at a quarter to a third of my weight, it would soon have them sleeping like corpses. I figured if I hung around waiting for the diphenhydramine to kick in, I'd be tempted to try extracting quills too soon, so I decided to return to the dock and continue my work extracting the floating dock for the winter. The dogs didn't seem all that uncomfortable, and it would take hours to get their quill out no matter how it was done.
I grabbed a beer and a big coil for wire rope, along with the fittings to make tow hoops at either end of it. I also took another pulley. Down at the dock, I used the ladder to climb up high in a hemlock a little further south from the sugar maple where I have that other pulley. I'd already put a loop of chain up in the this hemlock; all I had to do was attach the pulley and feed through the wire rope. With some tow loops at either end, I'd have a whole new angle to winch from, which would keep the dock from ending up on some rocks a little north of where I would prefer it to spend the winter. I made great progress winching from this second direction, which was pulling upward at such a steep angle that the southwest corner of the dock ended up a good six inches above the ground. But then suddenly the cable went slack as something gave way. Fortunately nothing came whipping through the air as god knows how much energy was released in an instant. When I went to investigate, it seemed that the cable had pulled completely out of its clips, leaving the thimble there at the dock. The clips had been flung off to points unknown, and the cable was up in the branches overhead. Apparently I hadn't sufficiently tightened the nuts on the wire clips. It's the kind of lesson that can only come from experience (since I'm completely self-taught when it comes to using such equipment).
I tried to set up for another attempt from the new pulley angle, but something about that sudden release of energy had damaged something inside the hand winch and it no longer would allow its two chain to be let back out. So I had to call it quits for the day. At this point the dock was about 75% out of the water and might've been fine where it was for the winter. But I'll have another go at it before the lake freezes.
I returned to the cabin wondering if the dogs would be in frightening coma-like states. But Neville, who was up in the loft on the beanbag, seemed absolutely wide awake and still menaced me whenever I got too close to the quills in his face. As for Charlotte, I looked everywhere, and she wasn't anywhere in the cabin. So I went outside and called her name. It took awhile for her to materialize, and when she did, she absolutely refused to enter the cabin. It was getting cold and I was worried she might try to spend the night outside, so I decided to try to get her into the Forester. I convinced Neville to come down the stairs, go outside, and get in the car. And when he did, Charlotte jumped in as well. It was looking like I was going to have to head back to Hurley. I sent Gretchen a message saying what had happened, and in the course of our communication, I said that Neville was probably going to have to see the emergency vet. I wasn't sure yet what to do about Charlotte, who only had a smattering of visible quills. I should mention that I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning, which gave a slightly recreational cast to this whole crazy crisis.
After a hurried and somewhat-incomplete cleanup, I started driving back to Hurley via the Middleburgh route. Charlotte was in the back as usual and Neville, also as usual, was riding shotgun. Charlotte likes to climb up to sit with Neville in the front seat sometimes, and she tried to do this a few times on this evening's drive. But I always told her no, that she couldn't do that (since that would likely bang the quills in even further), and she always immediately complied with my instructions.
The plan was to meet Gretchen at the emergency vet there along the railroad tracks near Boices Lane. I arrived a little early, and when I had Charlotte briefly trapped in a narrow "air-lock"-style space between inner and outer doors, I grabbed her and pulled out a few quills. She was really not loving it, and then some employee came and offered me a leash (as Charlotte had jumped out of the Forester without one). At that point Gretchen arrived. I made a few more attempts to extract quills there in the waiting room as the receptionist and another employee tried to strongly caution me not to, saying the quills might break off and then be harder to extract. But I know more about porcupine quills that most people, and just ignored them. But Gretchen is the kind of person who always puts more faith in the opinions of people she considers experts than in anything I have to say, and I think my behavior was causing her social embarrassment. So I had to stop to make peace with my wife.
Eventually a doctor came out and gave us an enormous estimate for how much money it was going to cost to remove quills from both dogs (the figure was $1700 total). I asked Gretchen if she still didn't want me to pull Charlotte's quills out, and she said she didn't. So we agreed to that estimate and even said we wanted our dogs to receive CPR if the worst happened and they started to die under anesthesia (a question we'd never been asked before).
During the hour or so when the quills were being removed, Gretchen and I went off to get dinner nearby. Initially we thought we'd go to La Florentina for purple pie, but then Gretchen said something about there being vegan options at a big Albany Avenue diner we'd never been to before called the King's Valley Diner. So we ended up there instead. It was busy, and one of the only other dog parents we'd seen at the emergency vet were also dining there. We both ordered the exact same thing: the Impossible Burger. It comes with avocado for some reason, which Gretchen had them put on the side so I could have hers. It came with fries, though Gretchen also ordered the spaghetti marinara to see how it measured up against other diners' spaghettis marinara. (It was pretty good, though not as good as the spaghetti marinara made at the Plaza Diner in New Paltz.) I also ordered coffee, and it was the best diner coffee I think I've ever had.
[REDACTED]
When our meal was done and the dogs were ready to be picked up, Gretchen dropped me off at the Forester and went in to handle the business of paying. By some miracle, the bill only came to $924, which was very reasonable for dequilling two dogs in this lame-duck Biden economy.
Back at the house, a power outage that had begun at 3:00pm continued, so Gretchen and I each used separate little 120v inverters attached to Ryobi batteries for light and to charge our phones. We had a good fire in the woodstove keeping us warm, though the rest of the house wasn't too cold. I was able to hang out on the laboratory beanbag watching clips of Alone on my phone with Diane the cat in my lap and a glass of booze in my hand. Due to widespread outages caused by recent winds, I wondered if it would take days for power to be restored, but, like a carriage miraculously turning into a pumpkin, the power came back on at the stroke of midnight (or close to it).
At some point I disassembled the hand winch I'd been using today to do all that dock winterizing. Nothing inside it seemed broken, but I couldn't figure out what mechanism was supposed to push the pawl out of the way of the teeth to make it so the pulling hook could be let out again. With part of the housing removed, I could push on the pawl manually and get all the functionality I needed out of it. But that would expose me to more of the moving parts, which could theoretically be dangerous when winching heavy objects.
Initially the dogs were very sleepy, more so from the anesthesia than from the diphenhydramine (which, let's all agree, must be worthless on dogs). Eventually Neville started whimpering from the pain of all those quills having been plucked from his face, something he would end up doing through most of the night. Charlotte didn't seem anywhere near as uncomfortable.
I myself had taken 150 mg of diphenhydramine, but between the coffee and the pseudoephedrine, I didn't have any desire to go to sleep until well after 1:00am.
Charlotte and Neville with porcupine quills in their faces this afternoon. Note the minisplit air handler on the kitchen wall. I installed that last weekend.
Click to enlarge.
Neville's quills include the right side of his face and his right hand.
Click to enlarge.
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