|
|
|
communcating with the dock
Friday, August 22 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today I would be working from the cabin while Don did whatever he was going to do and Gretchen spent most of the day down at the lake. As usual, it took me a long time to actually start doing anything even vaguely work-related, and it certainly didn't help that I kept being distracted. It wasn't just that Don was pacing back and forth, muttering to himself and wanting to talk to me. It was also that Gretchen wanted to spend hours down at the lake but also needed to be monitoring a Signal chat related to her work as a volunteer manager of a team of intake volunteers for the New York Abortion Access Fund. So I'd brought two Quangsheng walkie-talkies, which I'd originally bought for their amazing hackability, though they also appear to be well-made communication equipment. I hoped they had a broadcast range wide enough to reach the lake (about 900 feet away), but wouldn't know until Gretchen went down there. (There is no cellphone signal down at the lake.)
[REDACTED]
Don didn't seem all that interested in the lake, but I'd told him there might be frogs and other amphibians, which are creatures that interest him. When he finally went, he opted to go by himself via the Mossy Rock Trail, which is well enough marked that he didn't get lost. Meanwhile, Gretchen took the older, longer lake trail.
When Gretchen got to the lake and sent me a message via a walkie-talkie at 144 MHz, it came in clear, though a lot of the signal was lost if I went inside the cabin, presumably due to the foil-covered foam panels providing insulation under the clapboards. But it was easy to leave my walkie talkie in front of the sliding-glass doorway out to the upper deck (I was at my desk nearby in the loft). The devices could, it turned out, be left on for hours without concern for battery usage, and whenever one of us needed to say something, we could just hit the talk button and speak. We tended to talk like truckers when communicating this way, saying things like "breaker one-nine" and speaking in Appalachian accents, as the technology seemed to steer us in that direction.
Meanwhile there was some chatter on Signal and I wasn't clear if Gretchen needed to respond to it. So during my lunch break, I walked down to the lake, where I found Don sitting in a chair on the lakeshore above the dock while Gretchen was swimming far out in the water. Don said that Gretchen had told him he couldn't come on the dock unless he took off his shoes. I had a feeling she'd done this because she knew it would be too much trouble for Don to take off and put on his shoes (the process takes something like ten minutes), and this would mean he'd leave his shoes on and she could hang out on the dock in peace, not being regaled with tiresome factoids Don had recently learned. About the only thing Don wanted to talk about while I was briefly at the lake (I didn't have time to wait for Gretchen to swim back) was how impressed he was at Gretchen's swimming abilities, gushing that if she was maybe thirty years younger she could be in the Olympics. (Don sees almost everything either through the lens of factoids learned in a narrow range of books or solo sports involving great endurance.)
Back at the cabin, I read Gretchen some posts from Signal and she dictated responses for me to type as her proxy. She even had me react to one post with a heart emoji. But then the Signal chat fell silent and I didn't have to worry about it for the rest of the afternoon.
By then Don was asking if I had a radio. He said that he loves listening to Science Friday on National Public Radio, and it comes on a 2:00pm (at the time it was a little before 1:00pm). So I fetched him my multi-feature speaker from the basement and said he was welcome to search for public radio stations, though I wouldn't know where they were (and the radio function of the speaker didn't have a dial or frequency readout to give a sense of where you were on the spectrum). Don isn't good at much, but he is persistent when it comes to some pursuits, and damned if he didn't find a public radio station, which was just beginning with The Moth Radio Hour, which is what is played on the public radio station he listen to back in Virginia just before Science Friday. The reception wasn't great, but I improved things by improvising an antenna out of a piece of telephone wire.
But then 2:00pm came and, to Don's horror, the program being broadcast was the locally-produced call-in show called Vox Pop, not Science Friday. All Don could do after that was put a blanket over his head and nap like a vampire.
Gretchen came up a little before the end of my workday just to check things for herself on her phone. Don, of course, wanted to praise her incredible swimming abilities, and he couldn't just do that once and move on to some other topic.
At the end of my workday, I went again to the dock, this time carrying a water bottle containing a boozy beverage. Gretchen was down there when I arrived, and we debriefed a little about Don, talking about such topics as how disgusting his eating is and how unpleasant he is to talk with given that he only cares about subjects that he himself brings up and whenever anyone else says anything, he rudely stares off into space like the distracted autistic person he is.
Eventually I climbed into a kayak and paddled out to the outflow beaver dam and back. The lake water was very low and the dam resembled a low wall made of sticks.
This evening we managed to feed Don yet another meal of leftover chili and rice. I myself ate rice mixed with leftover noodles, to which I also added a pretty spicy habañero-style pepper Gretchen had gotten from a neighbor. I also put some pepper in Don's chili, though I miscalculated and it ended up being very spicy, as the pieces I gave to him were from near the pepper's stem (which is much spicier than pieces from near the tip). Nevertheless, he managed to eat it anyway.
Don sitting above the dock. Click to enlarge.
I can read his thoughts just looking at his face. Here he's waiting to say yet again how impressed he is with Gretchen's swimming. Click to enlarge.
Okay Don, Gretchen is a great swimmer. Charlotte looks bored. Click to enlarge.
I tried to convince Don it was okay to walk on the dock while Gretchen wasn't looking, but he said she might see a photo of him on the dock. Click to enlarge.
The outflow bay this afternoon, looking southeast. Click to enlarge.
So peaceful! Click to enlarge.
The bow of the kayak, pointed at the makeshift second tree dock in the outflow bay. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250822 feedback
previous | next |
