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a multiheaded sunflower
Saturday, May 30 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
The inflamed gum around the remains of my right upper wisdom tooth wasn't as distractingly uncomfortable today and my heart palpitations had gone away too, making me feel a lot better as I went about my day. Late this morning, after I'd my coffee and toast and played a little Spelling Bee (and Gretchen had had her tea and ate some cereal with fruit in it), we took the dogs for a walk. At the time, it was cloudy and temperatures were still down in the 40s (cold enough for Gretchen to have made a fire in the woodstove), so I put a raincoat over my long-sleeved flannel shirt and teeshirt. I also put on rubber boots and advised Gretchen to do the same. I then led us on a walk initially west on the Lake Edward Trail, though at the bottom of the hill, we turned northward, walking along wetlands and rock formations that were familiar to me but that Gretchen had never seen. One of rock structures looks superficially human-made, though it's completely natural. We also noted that many of the beech trees in those damp lowlands are afflicted by some condition that makes their normally-smooth bark into an array of bumps or, in some cases, the cracked appearance of dried mud. This condition is less evident on our parcel, at least in the swath between our cabin and the lake (where beech is a major forest component; they don't call it a beech-maple forest for nothing).
Eventually our path took us onto our parcel and then to the new beaver pond at the top of West Bifurcation Creek. The pond was still for some reason in its mostly-drained state, with the stick-and-mud dam towering about eighteen inches above the current pond level. I'd begun to suspect that the beavers consciously drain the pond from time to time, perhaps by removing some sort of plug in the dam. The evidence for this is wild swings in its level that have little to do with recent precipitation.
By the time we got to our dock, the sun had come out and it was a gorgeous (if still a bit cool) spring day. We sat on the dock discussing various things, including my theory that my compulsions (such as my desire to build stone walls and do other things that interest me) are probably indistinguishable from what we call "instincts" in other animals. Why do beavers like to build dams? It's probably a compulsion, much like my wall building. Obviously, to have such a compulsion aids the beaver and helps them spread as a species. It's doubtful my wall-building compulsion aids humanity, at least directly. But it might be evidence of a compulsion that really is beneficical to humans and it might manifest, in some situations, as wall building. This caused Gretchen to wonder about all the people who have similar compulsions but end up living in cities, or having to spend all their time working at a dead-end job to pay bills. I wondered how such compulsions might express themselves among the incarcerated.
The weather got so nice that Gretchen returned to the dock later in the day, thinking she might even go for her first swim of the season. But the breeze was too cold and then the sun got behind the trees and she gave up on it. Meanwhile, I was out salvaging more boulders I could get loose from along the driveway to further build up that wall I'd worked on yesterday. I found so many such boulders that I placed them along the driveway and came by later with the Bolt to pick them up.
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At some point I realized I didn't have the half-inch carriage bolts I needed. But the Bolt was nearly at full charge, so I decided to take a drive down to civilization, something I've done increasingly rarely. I found everything I needed at the Ace Nobel hardware store in Johnstown, including a weird HeadLOK "SpiderDrive" bit necessary to drive a bunch of structural lag screws I'd bought over the years (and then not been able to use). While I was in town, I also visited the PriceChopper (a supermarket I pretty much stopped visiting once I started driving to Adirondacks via the Middleburgh route) to get things like lemons, bananas, and, most importantly, ice cream (which is usually difficult to transport on the two-hour drive to the Adirondacks). My last stop on my drive back to the cabin was at Parker's Flowers, where I got some much-needed potting and garden soil. I also picked up their healthiest-looking basil plant and a gorgeous already-blooming multi-headed dwarf sunflower. (None of the sunflower seeds I've planted this year have survived past initial dicotyledons.)
As I approached the cabin on Woodworth Lake Road, I found a good number of nice carryable boulders to pile into the Bolt and then add to my nascent stone wall.
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A beech tree with a bark disease at the bottom of the slope just northwest of the cabin. Click to enlarge.
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