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buffleheads, a loon, a pair of mallards, and a beaver
Sunday, April 20 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today was significantly cooler than yesterday, though the sun shone through nearly cloudless skies all day, so by the time we started our drive back homeward, the Bolt, which had arrived at the cabin with about 90 miles of range left, had a nearly full battery (about 190 miles of range, according its every-shifting algorithm).
But I am getting ahead of myself. At some point Gretchen and Charlotte took advantage of the sunny conditions to walk down to the newly-deployed dock, and conditions were so pleasant there that Gretchen ended up staying there for several hours reading. I'd assumed it was too cold for such sedentary outdoor activity, so I gradually became concerned that Gretchen had hiked off the edge of the known universe and was now lost in unbounded Adirondack wilderness. She hadn't taken her phone, so she had no way to navigate except the sun and the lay of the land, and I'm not confident in her ability to do it using such traditional methods.
Then while I puttered around the cabin cleaning it up in anticipation of leaving it for the week, I realized that Neville, who hadn't left with Gretchen and Neville, had disappeared. It's unusual for Neville to decide to join a walk late, so I assumed he'd gone outside to piss and then maybe seen some wildlife to chase. I continued cleaning and puttering to keep my mind off such things. But eventually Gretchen appeared, saying Neville had joined her and Charlotte down at the dock and he'd become fascinated by something hiding beneath a big pile of sticks on the shore. (It's a pile that may have been started by beavers years ago, but I've added to it significantly since then with sticks removed from the lake bottom around the dock to make it a more pleasant place to wade.)
Neville was so slow in returning to the cabin, that at some point I grabbed a beer and headed to the lake with the plan of seeing what he was up to. (I was limping slightly on the way, as I'd sliced a dime-sized flap of skin loose from the sole of my right foot when I stepped on a deer antler in the great room that had been serving as a dog toy.) When I encountered him on the trail heading back, I continued to the lake and drank most of my beer on the dock, where Gretchen had set up our usual assemblage of summer outdoor furniture. The sky was light blue and the lake was dark blue and there were lots of little ducks in various small flocks scattered about on it. Eventually I hiked to the lake's outflow, where I counted as many as 14 small ducks (probably buffleheads) in the outflow bay. They were joined briefly by a pair of mallards. Then, off beyond the rocky islands that separate the outflow bay from the rest of the lake, I could see the profile of a solitary loon. And then a beaver dramatically smacked the water with his or her tail near that loon.
We left the cabin at around 5:30pm and took the Thruway to Albany so we could do some much-needed shopping at the Trader Joes near the airport. (There are some things that can only be bought there, including the extra-tart cherry juice Gretchen prefers to use when making smoothies.) We ended up filling a single cart to overflowing with lots of goodies, including prepared foods suitable for me to eat at work. When we checked out, the price of it all came to about $430, which is a lot but might not be a record.
Gretchen was asking some questions at Trader Joe's customer service while I was loading the bags into the back of our Bolt when someone in a car driving past behind me in the parking lot asked "Trump or Kamala?" I turned around and asked, "What?" and he, a young man who looked to be of south Asian ethnicity, asked the question again, using the first name of one presidential candidate and the last name of the other. "Oh, Kamala of course," I said, accenting the name wrong after months of disuse. At that point the questioner's eyes got big and the driver, a bro-ish young white man, hurled some insult about me being a faggot or something. I hadn't dealt with such disrespect from someone that age since I was (or at least looked) that age. I shouted something profane at the guy but then worried that the situation could escalate, and in America, such escalations could get deadly. But what the fuck did these bros expect for answers interrogating shoppers in an Trader Joes parking lot in liberal Albany, NY? The bros actually drove around the parking lot to hassle me one more time, and this time I charged at their truck, causing the driver to speed away. By then Gretchen had joined me, and when the bros shouted at us from Wolf Road, Gretchen shouted "Fuuuuuuuuuck you!" back at them. "That felt good," she said moments later. The whole thing was so stupid that it didn't even get my heart rate up and I felt blasé about it moments later. But it was a bit of worrying sign of how our society is coarsening now that there is an unchained fascist running the country. I told Gretchen that the interaction was especially odd given that the brown young man who'd randomly quizzed me about my politics stands a non-zero chance of being deported by the existing regime just for looking the way he does.
Back home in Hurley, Gretchen cooked up some vegan ravioli we'd just bought at Trader Joes and we watched Jeopardy! and an episode of Hello Tomorrow!. Then I holed up in the laboratory mostly watching YouTube videos debunking the Telepathy Tapes and part of the homework I felt compelled to do by the sheer force of Gretchen's failed critical thinking skills. It didn't take long to muster a good set of talking points. It also made me want to watch an episode of the the Telepathy Tapes themselves just to see how its authors manipulated their audience.
The lake beneath the clear blue sky this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
The newer of the two outflow dams today. Click to enlarge.
The older of the two outflow dams today, with the lake beyond. Click to enlarge.
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