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a litter problem along the lower Chamomile
Saturday, April 26 2025
It rained fairly steadily all night long and kept raining throughout the day. Because of how early I get up during the week, I also woke up early today, that is, before 7:00am. When I was a kid, steady rain like this meant I could take a bath (since it would otherwise overflow the cistern collecting water from the roof, which was the only source of potable water). So I have a pavlovian response to rain that makes me want to take a bath. And, since Gretchen wasn't around to disturb, I could take it this early in the morning. And so I did.
Later in the morning, I had a smartphone to return to an eBay seller (it refused to detect my Cricket SIM card). So I boxed it up and drove down to Old Hurley. While I was out doing that, I thought I'd stop by the Tibetan Center thrift store out on Route 28 to get some dishware for use when preparing food at work. (I needed a bowl and a plate, hopefully microwave-safe.) The thrift store had moved out of its store front and been displaced by an expansion of the cleaning service business directly to its west. But it had just moved one building eastward. The new space mostly just contained clothes and things for the kitchen (including a fair amount of hand-made pottery). I couldn't really trust that such pottery could be put in a microwave, so I looked instead for commercial ceramic items. My tastes must be pretty good, because the plain white bowl I selected had come from the Pottery Barn. With it, I got a sage-green plate that would look good amongst the plates in our kitchen in Hurley. After I'd bought those (and a small glass decanter that looked almost like chemistry equipment), I went around back to see if I could find where all the eWaste that I like to pick through had gone. The little outbuildings containing most of that had been moved back there, but they were not open, at least not yet.
Back at the house, I took the dogs (both came) for an unusal walk on a trail mostly just used by Crazy Dave going down the Chamomile, ultimately ending up near the old bus turnaround. I hadn't been down that way in years. I saw that there was a disturbing amount of litter, mostly in the form of plastic packaging and occasional plastic bottles, along this trail. I knew from the type of litter that it had all come from Crazy Dave. He also uses the trails we frequent, and though he does occasionally litter there as well, he apparently does it much less there. (Many years ago, Gretchen complained about candy Crazy Dave was then dropping on the trail to old man Schneller, who was then Crazy Dave's landlord, and Schneller apparently talked to him about it.) Crazy Dave has also been assembling little structures of bluestone, though they tend to be small and don't suggest the kind of obsessive focus that I bring to such tasks.
I went back uphill off-trail and passed the Chamomile Wall again and made further improvements to its western extension.
Later I took a nap and then took Charlotte for her second walk of the day, a loop consisting mostly of the Stick Trail and the Chamomile Headwaters Trail.
This evening, Gretchen called from Pittsburgh, where she'd be staying with her sister-in-law and niece in their apartment. But she'd been given insufficient keys to get in and was hanging out in the corridor for however long it was going to take for them to get back. We talked about Gretchen's recent visit to Oberlin and Harkness specifically, the place Gretchen and I met over 36 years ago. Gretchen ate in the Harkness dining hall with her niece and found the food to be not very good. There was also a dishware shortage, which is a very Harkness crisis, so people were forced to eat off of the lids of tupperware containers. In chatting with current students, Gretchen found them all very nice, and she regaled them with tales of the old Harkness, which had been covered with graffiti and populated by whimisical people who wore capes and walked around barefoot. The showers in Harkness are no longer "coed"; back during the pandemic the one big shower room was broken up into separate individual stalls. Gretchen said she thought Oberlin was a lot more beautiful than she remembered it, but I pointed out that everything in the greater northeast is beautiful in late April.
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