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red leaves on the rocky islands
Friday, July 24 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
My first real project today was to make real progress on that black cherry stool I started shortly before the Mediterranean cruise. I'd left it in a state where it was just a big chunk of wood with four fairly spindly legs sticking out of the bottom after I'd cut away the wood between them with a chainsaw. To make the next leap of progress, I had to attack that big chunk, the part that would eventually be the top (seat) of the stool and a single shelf between the legs below it. I'd already done one of the plunge cuts necessary to create what would be a square hole between the seat and the shelf. But I had to do several more before I could remove a fairly large block of wood, leaving behind two surfaces connected by two walls at either end. Then, but making plunge-cut square holes on those walls, the topology of the stool would be complete and I would have two surfaces (the seat and the shelf) connected together by four pillars and then I would have four legs below that. In the past when I've made two previous stools from chunks of local wood, I've been successful with making fairly accurate plunge cuts just by eye. Today, though, some of my plunges went a bit awry and I had to try again. This left some unsightly cuts into surfaces that I had thought would be close to the final surfaces of the stool. But I realized that the shelves had plenty of thickness to them, and it would be fine to just rasp away materal until the errant chainsaw gashes disappeared. Cutting away all the material necessary to do this while leaving a completely flat surface would've been a lot of work, but if instead I cut into, say, the shelf surface in a way that made it into a shallow bowl, I didn't have to remove nearly as much material. To actually do such rasping with a rasp would've been impossible, since a rasp cannot work inside a concave surface. So instead I used the chainsaw, running it while pushing into the wood with the side of the chain-blade, much like I did with a hand-powered circle saw when trying to get a piece of wood to be a certain size while working on a deck. Doing this with a powered blade requires reasonably precise control and is definitely a skill that can be mastered and one that I am still in the early stages of learning. But it allows the saw to act as a high-speed rasp that can actually produce concave surfaces.
After more than an hour of work, I had the overall shape of the stool approximated nicely and I had a huge mass of sawdust where I'd been working out in front of the cabin. I then took it into the house for some light ergonomic testing. I showed it to Gretchen and her only reaction was that it was too rustic for her. I said it still needed sanding and such, but it was clear that it wasn't passing whatever her æsthetic test was. But I know from experience that she doesn't really have an eye for what in-process things will eventually be, so I kept working, mostly doing sanding and rasping with an actual rasp. Eventually I had a nice spindly stool. To get around errant chainsaw damage, I'd had to make a couple of legs very narrow, with a cross-section of only about a half of a square inch. But black cherry wood is strong stuff, and the stool seemed solid despite its delicate appearance.
When I went down to the lake early this afternoon, Gretchen was there reading a book while Charlotte had just returned some adventure in the nearby woods. Gretchen said she'd been swimming, but not for long since the water was kind of cold. I tested it with my foot, and it was not ideal. But I climbed onto an innertube anyway and soon acclimated to the water despite my initial feelings about it. As I drank my beer, I allowed the fairly strong winds blowing from the south to push me towards the outflow bay. It was a little like tubing on a river.
As I approached the rocky islands at the entrance of the outflow bay, I saw something red that caught my attention, but it turned out that it was just a red maple seedling whose leaves had decided to be that color. There is also a bush on the main island that looks like it should bear fruit, and it had spots of red on it too. Because of the line about "purple berries, the Crosby, Stills & Nash song "Wooden Ships" was in my head as I approached the bushes. This was the first time I'd really thought about that song since the arrival of the internet, and I had question in my head that I could answer the moment I got back to the cabin: what was that song about? (My thinking that it must be about nuclear holocaust turned out to be true. But those red spots on the island bushes just turned out to be off-color leaves, not unlike the maple seedling.
The most interesting thing that happened while I was riding the innertube was that a tiny greenish-yellow spider, no bigger than a couple of sesame seeds, had landed on my arm and quickly seemed to have set up a tiny network of gossamer threads connecting to various arm hairs. The spider could quickly travel from one arm hair to another, and I wondered if the little guy thought he was going to settle down among my arm hairs. But then he did something that caused him to launch surprisingly rapidly into the air and disappear. Evidently he'd made a parachute out of silk and ridden it into the sky to go wherever the wind would take him.
This evening, Gretchen added kidney beans and some other things to the greens I'd cooked back on Monday and the Barilla medium shells I'd made on Wednesday.
The stool by the end of the day. Click to enlarge.
Another view of the stool. Click to enlarge.
A bee (possibly a honey bee) on an echinacea that appeared at the end of the bluestone path to the cabin's front door. Click to enlarge.
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