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utility of a paddleboard
Sunday, July 26 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning Gretchen related to me that at some point in the night when she woke up with me beside her, I stank of alcohol. She said that it formed something of a "miasma." This caused her to worry anew about my drinking, which is fair. The thing is, I didn't feel like I'd drunk that much last night. It could just be that the cheap scotch I'd finished the evening with was particularly pungent. In any case, I didn't wake with a hangover, which suggested I'd been drinking within my self-imposed guard rails.
When I looked at my black cherry stool this morning, I saw that a second Liberty-Bell-style crack had opened up in it, this time in the seat across the central axis from the one that had opened up in the shelf yesterday. I have no idea when the cracking will end, but hopefully the stool will still be usable when this is all over.
[REDACTED]
Gretchen and Charlotte had gone down to the lake, and in the early afternoon I went down there as well. As I set off on an innertube with a Hazy Little Thing IPA, Gretchen put on some googles and dove beneath the floating part of the dock to look for a dog water dish that had disappeared. She couldn't find that, but she did find a lid to a metal box we use to keep small things (food items, writing supplies, and perhaps various lotions) out of the weather on the dock; it had been laying on the bottom for at least a year but showed only modest signs of corrosion.
When I was done with my beer, I set out on the paddleboard to look for the water dish, which had probably floated for a time and been carried to a shoreline. But, since it had fallen in while we were on the Mediterranean, it could've been anywhere. I figured the high angle I was looking from while standing on the paddleboard would allow me to see things I might miss on a kayak. I found the dish right away; it was sunk to the shallow bottom near the shoreline only about a dozen feet south of the dock.
Since I was already on the paddleboard, I decided to use it on another rock salvaging mission, this time to the shallows around the rock islands at the entrance to the outflow bay. I'd seen some good rocks there, and it seemed making the lake deeper there would be doing everyone a service. I was able to load three fairly large rocks on the front of the paddleboard, which was nevertheless still able to keep itself above water. This was much easier than loading rocks into a canoe (the way I used to harvest rocks) since the rocks have to be raised up over the side of the canoe and then gently places on its floor. Then, when unloading, the rock has to be lifted again over the edge of the canoe.
When I floated my rocky cargo to our dock, I initially had trouble offloading the stones, since the brief cantilevering of the rock from the paddleboard (with me as the crane) caused the paddleboard to want to tip sideways. The solution was navigate the end of the paddleboard under the dock between two of the floaters (where it easily fit) and then cantilever the rock over the axis of the paddleboard onto the dock, a process that could only tip the paddleboard along its longest dimension. As for the rocks I collected, I didn't have an immediate use for them, but they will likely be used to improve some of the stone steps on the lower Mossy Rock Trail.
At about 4:00pm, after yet another meeting related to the ending of animal testing, Gretchen was ready to begin our drive back to the Catskills. Since she had work to do on her phone, I did the driving. Initially I assumed she wanted me to drive us home via the Thruway so we'd be able make our dinner day with Z & Greg (the librettist/actor couple from Olive Bridge), but then it turned out that we'd left early enough for me to drive my preferred route (through Middleburgh), so I changed my trajectory as we drove through Johnstown.
Somewhere along the way, we heard a new country music song on the radio that was pretty good but full of country music clichés. This led me to ask if a country music song had ever been written about warm beer. Then Gretchen suggested such a country music song should mention a Hyundai sedan. How about low-cut jeans? Such an anti-country song practically writes itself!
For the first time ever, I actually had trouble finding a place to park in the lot at the end of Old Forge Road, though I managed to squeak into a narrow spot next to a backhoe. Gretchen was, as always, on her phone as I did all this so it was as if her body was there but her brain was in the Matrix and I kind of felt as if I was partially alone. I let the dogs out, and they immediately began frolicking in the adjacent grassy field. (Often there are semi-tame deer in that field, and, had that been the case, I would've had them on leashes if I brought them out at all.) Then Neville wandered over to where cars were coming and going, and just as I was fretting about that, someone had arrived in the parking lot who seemed to know us, but, in this context, my prosopagnosia had me wondering who they were. When the female half gave me a hug, I acted like I wasn't hugging a stranger, but I still couldn't quite place her. Then it all snapped into place: this was Ken and Laura, our neighbors from off Lorenz Road, people whom we hadn's seen since this past winter (partly because they've been off doing things like writing television scripts in Hollywood). It turned out they also were going to dinner at the Garden Café. I was little horrified when it seemed Gretchen was inviting them over to our place "for tea" (my least favorite form of social get-together) after dinner, as I'd been pretty sure dinner with Z & Greg was the extent of the socializing I could handle tonight. But then that social can got kicked down the week for a few days.
Gretchen had reserved us a table in the Garden's outdoor garden. We'd decided the weather was cool enough to leave the dogs in the car down at the end of Old Forge Road, though occasionally we could hear Charlotte erupting into ear-stabbing barks off in the distance. For most of the meal, Z and and Greg seemed interested in hearing all about our recent cruise, so we told them all about it, including the part about Caron the temporarily-mute woman whose voice eventually returned. Had the situation been reversed and we'd been asking Z and Greg about their cruise, I would've had little interest in the things touristy things they'd seen and would only really care about who had been annoying on the boat. At some point I made the claim that all groups in tourist situations like cruises and tour bus excursions have an annoying person, that's more of a role that someone fits into by circumstances, with the implication that the person who is the annoying person in one context might not be in another where a more annoying person steps into the role. "And," I added, "If there's nobody annoying on the bus, the annoying person is probably you." Other topics discussed included Z and Greg's months spent in Madrid for a film shoot in which Z did some acting. They'd spent so long in Madrid that Greg had actually used up his 90 day limit for the year in the Schengen Area. (Z has no such limit, as he has a Solvenian passport.) I asked if there Mexican restaurants in Madrid, and it turned out that there are.
After dinner, Gretchen and I turned the dogs loose in the grassy field again, and this time they were joined by a perky mid-sized dog named Kahlo. Kahlo was a female and probably unspayed given the interest Neville expressed in her external genetalia (which, to Kahlo's delight, he licked). Kahlo's dad seemed like an older Gen-X type who maybe ate a few too many magic mushrooms in his day, though somehow his easy breezy demeanor got me to tell him that were coming home from the Adirondacks, a place where we had a lake to swim in.
Because Gretchen continued to need to do work on her phone, I drove us home from Woodstock. On the way, I passed a mother deer with two mostly-grown (but still speckled fawns). Then it turned out there was a third, who came running across the road in front of me. I just barely hit the brakes in time, sending Neville flying up to the front seat under the effects of his own inertia. At least he avoided putting a spider web in our windshield, as Eleanor did in a similar incident not far away on Dug Hill Road back in November, 2011.
When we got to our house atop Hurley Mountain, the first thing I noticed was the cha-cha-cha-cha of katydids, which always start up at around this time of year. They'd yet to start before we drove the the Adirondacks (where there are no katydids). I, of course, experience a deeply-seated dread whenever I hear katydids, particularly when they just start up. It's a harbinger of fall, a season I associate with back to school and widespread death in the environment, two things that do not make me cheerful no matter how colorful the leaves get.
Gretchen and Charlotte on the dock today. Click to enlarge.
The crack in the shelf of the new stool is bigger and you can see a new crack opening up in the seat too. Click to enlarge.
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