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into the mouth of the dog
Sunday, July 20 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After our usual coffee & Spelling Bee, Gretchen thought Charlotte needed a real walk, so she wanted to hike to Lake Edward, so eventually that was what we did. (I did the whole hike in my flip flops without incident.) We followed the Lake Edward Trail, which in places had become so indistinct that I had to search to find the line of sticks that form sort of a breadcumb trail. (This works well for making a trail, though after a heavy leaf fall, the sticks can get buried. Also, other sticks and trees can fall, seemingly blocking the trail or redirecting it.) When we got to Lake Edward, we saw a canoe with four people in it fishing several hundred feet from us out in the water. They could probably hear us and we could hear them, but we ignored each other.
Back at the house, I saw that Neville had never even left.
Soon thereafter, Gretchen headed off to the dock with Charlotte, joined shortly thereafter by me, and then bit later by Neville. I'd bought a travel mug containing orange juice and gin, which I drank while floating in an inner tube. Conditions were overcast, but the water was warm enough to make this a pleasant activity. I gradually drifted into the outflow bay, eventually coming ashore at the makeshift tree dock I made along its southern shore.
I soon returned to the cabin, where the gin had so completely robbed me of motivation that I took a nap in the couch in the upstairs loft. When I awoke some unknown amount of time later, a thunderstorm was booming outside. This eventually brought Gretchen and the dogs back. At that point, I was ready to drive back to Hurley. In this case, Gretchen and the dogs would be staying behind without a car. The plan is that Gretchen's childhood friend Dina will be arriving from Boston to pick them up and eventually drive everyone back to Hurley.
I made good time on the drive home. Interestingly, temperatures remained in the 70s for most of my drive. But as I passed the Cairo Hannaford, I suddenly realized how hot and humid it was in the car (I was driving with the windows down). It was as if I'd driven into the mouth of a dog. I looked a the temperature on the dashboard and it said 89 degrees. That would reach as high as 93 a the Kingston traffic circle before dropping down to 86 up on Hurley Mountain.
For most of the drive, I'd been listening to country music radio stations. There's a song in the bro country genre by an entity named Hardy called "Truck Bed" whose whole conceit is about waking up on the wrong side of the "truck bed." Get it? Because in the tiny universe of bro country, there's almost nothing to sing about except trucks, tequila shots, and tight blue jeans. What interesting about this song is that it seems to owe a lot to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," though with a melody more like "Come As You Are." It's the got the same chorus-pedal-heavy guitar bouncing around the verses and ends with a passage that even in grunge would be considered loud. But it's still a deeply stupid bro country song.
There wasn't much I had to do back in Hurley except feed the cats. So I drank some scotch, ate a wad of very old cannabis, and took a bath. The cannabis did eventually kick in and was surprisingly powerful for how little I had eaten. It was definitely stronger than the 'shrooms I'd eaten yesterday.
Starting at some point in the middle of last night, there had been repeated Amber alerts on our phones about a 9 year old "Indian" girl supposedly abducted and last seen in a white van, like something out of every parent's nightmares. The alerts continued all day, and I even saw one appear on a screen near a cash register when I stopped at the Stewarts in Schoharie to buy a four pack of IPA. At some point this evening, though, the Amber alert was canceled. When Gretchen looked to see what had happened, she found an article saying that the story of the father who had reported the girl's abduction didn't hold up to scrutiny, and by the evening he must've spilled the beans on murdering her, and her body was found in Ticonderoga. Upon learning this, I was reminded of the many shoddy tales of mysterious strangers spun by people who murdered their family members. It's definitely a thing.
Fisherfolks on Lake Edward today. Click to enlarge.
A chicken of the woods growing on a completely dead log (which is unusual) along the Mossy Rock Trail today. Click to enlarge.
Neville on our dock late this morning. Click to enlarge.
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