|
|
|
long walk to that ugly pond
Thursday, May 21 2026
This morning our neighbor A and her boyfriend Jamie came over with her dog Henry to join us on a fairly long walk to the south in the forest. I hadn't seen Jamie in awhile, so, unusually, I joined them on the walk. Jamie had brought his big fancy camera, and of course I brought what counts as my fancy camera, a used Nikon featuring a superzoom lens. Neville sometimes comes on such walks because he loves A so much, but he bailed early. Gretchen quickly we should walk to the waterfall (which is in the forest south of the farm at the end of the Farm Road where a small creek plunges over the edge of the plateau). On the way there, though, we passed through a mesic grove of sugar maples in a cove that was being severely impacted by inchworm-style caterpillars of the kind that have been wreaking havoc for at least three straight summers. The caterpillars had destroyed so much of the canopy that the forest floor was covered with a thin layer of green leaves that they'd partially eaten. This gave off an unusual freshly-mulched smell that one normally doesn't encounter in a forest. As for the caterpillars, they were so numerous and hungry that they were also eating ferns, something one rarely sees. Part of the problem was that there were few or none of those big black caterpillar hunters in this part of the forest, perhaps because it hadn't been attacked by caterpillars last year. A was particularly upset about the caterpillars and was obsessive about killing them, though the magnitude of the problem meant her efforts provided little benefit. There were small white pine saplings in places that were covered with hundreds of caterpillars and had few if any needles left.
There were fewer caterpillars at the waterfall (41.92357N, 74.11433W), which Jamie had apparently never seen before. He made an attempt to cross a chasm adjacent to a fallen tree, something I'd quickly chickened out of, and when he was obviously worrying A, he abandoned the risky stunt. Jamie strikes me as impulsive in a way that suggests ADHD, and he's frenetic energy can be a little hard to take.
After admiring the falls for the requisite amount of time, we continued south on an old logging rode towards a manmade pond that Gretchen occasionally visits (41.91681N, 74.11772W).
Along the way, A's ruthlessness with caterpillars was reminding Jamie of Genghis Kahn. He told us how the ruthless rule of the first Mongol emperor left a visible carbon layer throughout much of Asia after he butchered the farmers and their farms revered back to nature. Jamie then proceeded to enlighten us with details of how Genghis had his body buried after his death. The people who carried him to his burial site were all killed by a team of assassins. And then the assassins all killed each other, making it so the location of Genghis Khan's grave will forever be a mystery.
As we neared pond, Charlotte alerted us to a macrabre sight: a disembodied chicken head (with most of the neck and grey-and-white neck feathers) lying in the path. This suggested there must've been chickens nearby, though we were in the middle of a unsettled block of forest (the nearest house being 2000 feet away off Lapla Road).
The unnamed pond, on an unnamed creek, is not the most pleasant body of water for humans. Its entire shoreline is a marshy ring featuring lots of cattails and provide ideal habitat for numerous nesting pairs of redwing blackbirds. The water itself, though, is clear, as Jamie demonstrated when he filmed under its surface using his presumably waterproof smart phone. There's a half-floating dock in the pond, which provides a non-swamp option for people wanting to swim. (It was too cold for that today; temperatures were in the 50s and we were all wearing jackets or hoodies.) I hadn't visited this pond in years and it didn't look like the landowner had been there in some time either. (In the past we've seen a camper parked near the pond and there's even an electrical box containing a connection to the electrical grid via buried cables — something that couldn't've been cheap.)
Eventually we began the long walk back home. Somewhere early in the walk, Jamie was talking about ideas for non-penetrating arrowheads, perhaps printed with a 3D printer. I suggested they could be made into the shape of little fits but be made of some sort of pliable material cast in soft rubber. Or, Jamie suggested, they could be rubbery coatings slipped over more balls made of more rigid material. The idea of having arrows end in a fist had him thinking they might have a market among people with kinky sexual interest. Then we brainstormed the name of the company that would sell such things, and we eventually settled on "Mister Fister."
It was well into the day by the time we returned to our respective houses. I'd only had a rice cake for breakfast, so I made myself two small burritos filled with that curry I'd made yesterday.
I proceeded to spend most of the rest of the day building out the new websocket-mode instant command functionality in my ESP8266 Remote Control firmware and the new socket-only backend. I'd gotten pretty close to making this all work yesterday but then was a little discouraged by the complexity of registering a device and a frontend to talk to it on a backend. So I cheated and just described the full nature of what I wanted to ChatGPT (especially that it was to use no software frameworks) and it dutifully spit out some very useful code, both for the backend socket script and for the Javascript frontend, and it was easy for me to tweak it to get it working almost exactly the way I wanted it to. This is the kind of coding that ChatGPT excels at: there's a limited domain that is easily described, it's a technology that is new to me, and ChatGPT has lots of training examples to draw from. Before long, I had a nice zero-latency way to communicate with distant ESP8266s. Now all I had left to do was some mopping up and building in some security (so not just anyone can access my websocket backend and start telling my ESP8266s what to do).
At some point this evening, I took a break from that sort of work to process more of the pile of rotten wood on the side of the driveway. I also added more stones to the wall along the side of the Woodshed Path.
The creek in the gorge down below the falls. That fallen tree that Jamie and I abandoned trying to cross on is in the lower right. Click to enlarge.
A photo of me, Gretchen, and Charlotte with our backs to the cliff adjacent to the falls. This was taken by Jamie, who is a professional. Click to enlarge.
Henry the dog, A, and Jamie at the falls. Click to enlarge.
That pond. There is the end of turkey feather I'd found near the top. Click to enlarge.
A male redwing blackbird. Click to enlarge.
Bristly oxtongue at the pond. Click to enlarge.
A small nest for a small bird (not a redwing blackbird) found on the ground. It is lined with hairs from some sort of mammal. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte atop a sedgy knoll not far north of the pond. She appears to have a leaf of sedge in her mouth. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260521 feedback
previous | next |
