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looking for Gretchen's corpse
Sunday, October 5 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I was up again before the others like yesterday, drinking tea and quizzing ChatGPT about my Meshtastic woes. By now it was clear that the mile-scale inaccuracies in GPS data I was logging was a consequence of some infuriating setting on the Meshtastic node, and I was trying to figure out what it was. I soon gave up on ChatGPT and was instead doing Google searches. Doing this, I learned that Meshtastic nodes that are not part of an encrypted channel have distortions applied to their GPS data as an explicit way to keep the unwary from having their positions broadcast in plaintext. I obviously don't care about this at all, but I had no control over the situation. To get accurate GPS data, I was going to have to encrypt my Meshtastic data, and to do that, the only option seemed to be to install the Meshtastic app on my phone and turn on encryption that way while connected to the devices via Bluetooth. Ideally I would never need a phone to do anything, but if there was another way, it wasn't easy.
But Meshtastic being something of a half-baked clam, using the phone app wasn't exactly easy. I thought I'd installed encryption on one of my nodes and then wanted to apply that same encryption to another node so they could, you know, communicate with each other. But the Meshtastic app has a terrible user interface, and it's hard to figure out where anything is, even with ChatGPT helping. Part of the problem was that Meshtastic has changed a lot since ChatGPT was trained (a year ago maybe). It's buttoned-down its interface, making the exporting of keys a needlessly painful experience for fear of haxors. I was later trying to export the key I'd thought I'd set up using the command-line-interface on the Raspberry Pi, and I just couldn't get anything. At that point ChatGPT told me I had no choice but to use my phone to set keys on other nodes but that I couldn't actually export keys from that phone. This seemed to trap all my Meshtastic gear into a relationship with my specific phone (which is over four years old at this point), and I'd be screwed should my phone ever die. In response to this complaint, ChatGPT seemed to agree this was a problem but "thems the breaks."
But then it turned out I hadn't actually assigned a key to my channel at all and my devices were still communicating in plaintext. It also turned out that I could retrieve the key I'd thought I'd been blocked from accessing. But getting those keys to actually stick was something of a challenge. I had to try multiple times on both nodes I was working with, and it wasn't clear either time what had caused the keys to finally get incorporated into the configuration. After that, I could increase the GPS precision to a level where plotting points on a map would provide useful information.
By this point, everyone was up, and we were all drinking our respective coffees out on the deck (there were no insects, so we didn't need to be in the screened-in porch). At some point Gretchen announced it was getting late and she needed to go down to the lake for awhile. Fern and Joshua had been down there earlier and had both had even gone swimming, though now Fern was doubled over from cramps related to that time of the month. While she was tracking down ibuprofen, Joshua and I talked a little about my job, and he told me about an ex-Google guy who might be interested in my skills. (Such connections are essential, particularly during the ongoing software investment recession.)
Once I had my Meshtastic devices working fairly well, I wanted to test their range again. So I headed down to the dock, where I expected to find Gretchen. What I found instead was pile of clothes on the dock and other casually-left artifacts indicating she'd gone for a swim. But as I looked out across the lake, I couldn't see her. The only creature I could see moving was Throckmorton the loon. Maybe she'd gone around the corner into the outflow bay, though the water there is fairly shallow and it's not a great place to swim. So I decided to set out on the paddleboard to look for her. I was in sort of a rush, and I don't know exactly how it happened, but soon after I got on the board, it scooted out from beneath me and I plunged feet-first into the water, which closed over my head, completely submerging me in the cool October water. Somehow I tore a gash on the inside of my left thumb and the base of my left index finger in the process. I quickly bobbed to the surface and got out, and the shock of the cold wasn't even all that bad. But the newer of my two Nikon CoolPix cameras had been around my neck, and it had been under water too. I immediately extracted the battery and opened it up to drain whatever water was inside it.
I then set out on the paddleboard, going along the rocky island at the entrance to the overflow bay to see if Gretchen was there. She wasn't. So I paddled past Joel's dock to the vicinity of Pyotr's dock, looking for a human swimmer hidden behind some structure. When I didn't see anything like that, I started looking for a floating corpse. Yes, that was where things seemed to be going. But there just wasn't anything. I did, however, see the first duck I'd seen on the lake in months, what looked like a male mallard.
Back at the dock, I was distressed to see a mist of condensation inside the Nikon's lens assembly, meaning water had penetrated the camera deeply. There was still hope the moisture could be driven out, though it was likely that water would leave a residue. But I had more important issues to worry about: was my wife dead? I walked northward along the lakeshore path to look out over the outflow bay from a high angle in case Gretchen's corpse was floating over there, but of course it wasn't there. I began to wonder what my life would be like without Gretchen. I was unlikely to find any sort of replacement at this stage of my life, and how would I do all the things she'd been doing? How would I run the real estate empire? I'd probably just quit my job and do that full time and dial my lifestyle back to the near-nothing it used to be back when I was last a bachelor.
I also walked south of the dock along the shore to look to see if perhaps a corpse had been carried by the wind into the shallows there. It won't surprise you to learn that there was no such thing. Had Gretchen gone back to the cabin naked? There was only one way to find out. So I began hiking back up the hill, a feeling of mild nausea in my stomach.
As I approached the cabin, I heard some clanking around that sounded more assertive than the kind a guest would make. Was that Gretchen? And then I saw her silhouette against the light of the north-facing kitchen window. She was very much alive, and apparently healthy as well. I walked in and told her about my past half hour or more of dread. She said she'd worn other clothes back to the cabin and intended to be going back soon and that was why she'd left things as they were. But now she was also curious about what exactly had been going through my brain as I'd been thinking she might've died. I admitted to thinking logistically, but didn't go into detail, since it seemed like a conversation that, within the context of our relationship, might be a trap. If I said the wrong thing, she might hold it against me forever.
Fern, Joshua, and Gretchen had already had lunch while I was down at the lake, so now Fern and Joshua were packing up to leave. I did a little Meshtastic tinkering and then did the best I could with my drenched camera, dissassembling the LCD display to get the water out of that part (that was fairly easy). But the condensation against the lens seemed to be getting worse if anything.
After Fern and Joshua began their drive back to Boston, Gretchen headed down to the dock and I continued making adjustments to my Meshtastic setup. Eventually I grabbed a beer and headed back to the dock with a Meshtastic node, periodically stopping to send GPS coordinates, which I now knew to be accurate.
It was a stunningly gorgeous afternoon at the dock, and I decided to redeem my paddleboard memories by setting out again, this time without the trauma of a drenched camera and Gretchen's possible death hanging over me. I paddled past Throckmorton to the vicinity of the public dock, gathered some rocks, and then paddled back. Along the way I spooked that duck I'd seen earlier. He was indeed a male mallard. As for Throckmorton, he's never spooked, and even if he is, simply taking off from the water isn't really an option. He requires a lot of runway.
When I returned to the cabin before leaving for the Catskills, I was delighted to find that GPS points had been recorded in my device_log table for points along the entire length of the Mossy Rock Trail all the way to the dock, meaning that even without much tweaking, I already had about as much radio coverage as I needed with stock LoRa technology and no repeaters.
We ended up leaving the cabin a little before 5:00pm and driving home via the Thruway. For most of the drive, we listened to the discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein about Klein's regrettable writings earlier about the hate-filled career of Charlie Kirk after he was assassinated. Gretchen, who had really respected Klein, was finding his arrogance (veiled though it was) off-putting. And she was particularly upset with his dismissive statements about the importance of abortion access as a core Democratic-party value. Klein was even using right-wing language to describe the forced-birthers (that is, "pro-life," which is objectively a lie).
Gretchen drove into Uptown so she could meet our friend Lynn for dinner, and I drove the Bolt back to Hurley.
Back home in Hurley, I resurrected an old device I'd made to both blow and suck air using computer fans in hopes it would speed the removal of water from my drenched camera. I needed to box in the main part of it so the two fans could operate in series, and the easiest material for that was non-corrugated cardboard from the back of a large sketch pad. But that needed time for the glue to dry, so while that was happening, I rigged up the camera so its open battery hatch could be blown into by a ventilation fan that had once kept air circulating for an indoor marijuana growing system I'd built many years ago (back when it was still very illegal). The setup for that growing system (mostly a large cardboard box) is still there taking up a fairly large part of the laboratory, and has been there unused for well over a decade.
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