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Neville's fondness for Little Feat
Monday, September 1 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning after I'd had my coffee and toast, I took the dogs for a walk (Charlotte was super impatient) a short ways down the Lake Edward Trail. But only made it down to the bottom of the hill that our cabin sits near the top of and from there turned north. Initially it seemed Neville was coming, but in the end it was just me and Charlotte. The walk didn't end up being a long one, as I scrambled back up through the tiers of cliffs.Today being Labor Day, I had it off from work. But the main plan for today was to clean up the cabin and drive back to Hurley. As part of that, though, I decided to straighten up around the outside of the cabin. The specific issue was piles of local rocks that I'd mostly gathered along the side of Woodworth Lake Road for building retaining walls. But now I don't know if I will be building those walls, and yet the rock piles persist. One is near where I charge the Bolt and it occurred to me that I should do something about it. My new thinking about rocks is that, when possible, I should try to make something with them even if I am just storing them temporarily. I can always break down whatever I build and use the stones for something else. Doing so runs counter to my general desire to only build in a positive direction (that is, never destroying things that I took the time to build, a philosophy that also weakens my desire to put much effort into preparing food). But recently I'd begun amassing rocks I'd found up near the top of our driveway, just east of where it exits our parcel. And as I was amassing them, it occurred to me that I should build something with them. So I built a little stone wall that, while not amazing, is a lot better than a pile of rocks.
I took a beer with me down to the dock when I went down to make sure the zero gravity chair I'd been using was collapsed and wouldn't be blown into the lake. There was a fairly constant wind blowing at the time, but no signs of wildlife.
I started the drive back to Hurley a little before 2:00pm and took the Middleburgh route. But two things acted to slow me down: slow cars in front of me on Route 145 south of Middleburgh and a traffic jam southbound on the Thruway between Saugerties and the Ulster Travel Plaza, where the presence of a firetruck suggested someone had had a heart attack (it makes no sense for a firetruck to respond to a heart attack, but that is how things are done in the United States of America).
This evening I would be meeting Gretchen in Woodstock, and we'd be driving from there to the Bear Cantina in Bearsville to meet Lynn and Gregg for dinner. I was pretty nasty from my days spent as a mountain man in the Adirondacks, so I took a shower and shaved before setting out.
I brought the dogs with me, though I left them in the car when I went to poke my head into the bookstore. At that point Charlotte started losing her mind about a dog she saw on the sidewalk nearby. Gretchen and I ended up turning our dogs loose so they could run to the bookstore, but of course they wanted to run up to various nearby dogs on the way there. Both Neville and Charlotte seemed delighted to be in the bookstore once they entered. At the time Gretchen was about to close it down for the night, though there were shoppers in there, and such people usually seem to find it charming when there are dogs present.
When we got to Bearsville, Gretchen parked the Bolt (as she likes to do) on the shoulder of Route 212 in front of the Bearsville Cantina. We took a table out on the terrace above the creek. The cantina was unusually crowded today, probably due to an event at the nearby Bearsville Theatre featuring Little Feat. Once we were all there, the two of us men ordered booze (bourbon for Gregg, margarita for me) and then whatever food we would be having. Normally we don't get an appetizer at the Bear Cantina, but the new Impossible nachos on the menu had us wanting to try them. I got my usual Impossible enchiladas, and Gretchen only got Mexican street corn and a bowl of black bean soup. Lynn got the fajitas and Gregg got a shrimp enchilada alongside an Impossible one because he is not vegan (at least not yet). I don't remember much about what we discussed over dinner other than that I expressed great happiness that my recently-visiting brother Don does not live with me. We also talked about books, a subject that especially interests Gretchen and Lynn (they met at the bookstore). In discussing some books, Lynne asked about my book habits, and I admitted to no longer having an attention span long enough to read them. But then Gretchen chimed in to say how well-read I'd seemed when we first met back in 1988, when I'd astounded her by having read John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday.
At some point in the meal, the waiter came out and asked everyone for their attention: whoever had the Chevy Bolt parked out on the road should know that one of their dogs was trying to get out of a window and that a woman was there to keep that from happening. So we ran out, and sure enough one of the back windows was down about half way and a woman was keeping Charlotte from leaping out into traffic. Since the car was off and there was no way for the window to have been rolled down, it must've been that way when we'd walked away from the car. We're going to have to be more careful about this in the future. (I don't know why I hadn't noticed; Gretchen often acts as if my concern about rolling up the windows to better contain the dogs represents unnecessary paranoia, though I think this — and related — paranoia has generally been a positive thing and has probably saved multiple critters over the years.)
Towards the end of our meal, I went out to the car to get the dogs and take them to the semi-fenced parkland along the creek nearby. But when I let the dogs out of the car, they immediately ran into the open door of the Bear Cantina and out onto the terrace to join Gretchen, Gregg, and Lynn.
We had Gregg and Lynn join us as we walked over to the semi-fenced park along the creek, and along the way we kept getting distracted. The first came when Charlotte noticed a young irish setter with a woman drinking a beer outside the Tinker Street Tavern. The two dogs starting playing delightfully, spending much of their time standing on their hind feet. A little after that Lynne considered various hippie sweatshirts with trees stenciled on them. Then as we passed the Bearville Theatre, Neville really wanted to go up the steps; apparently (and I hadn't known this) he is a huge Little Feat fan. He even wanted to go up those steps a second time when we were walking from the creekside park back to the car.
Behind the bookstore in Woodstock, Gretchen took the Chevy Bolt and I drove home in the Forester. Unexpectedly on Route 375, Gretchen busted a left on Pine Street (I later learned she'd seen someone advertising peaches down that way). But then as I got close to home, I realized I still had the Bolt's keys in my pocket. That meant if Gretchen stopped anywhere and turned off the car, she would not be able to start it again. Thankfully, though, for some reason she'd left the car on while getting a basket of peaches and so was able to make it home okay.
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