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hillbilly refrigerator
Saturday, August 1 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I took a recreational 120mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning. Since my heart palpitations are probably not a medical problem and since my use of pseudoephedrine didn't raise my doctor's eyebrows, I figure I can take it according the schedule I've worked out over the years.
It's good to have a few obsessive low-investment chores to do wherever you live, and at the cabin in the summer time, one of those is the manual elimination of mugwort, an invasive perennial that likes to form monocultures. Since its aromatic-heavy vegetation repels most herbivores, once it establishes itself, it tends to crowd out everything else. It has done that in the unmowever part of our yard in Hurley as well as a large patch of open land at the abandoned bluestone mine. At the cabin, there are a number of patches of it, and my main goal is to eliminate what I can of it from the front (south) yard, especially near the front door. My technique is to simply snip off each stalk with a pair of brush shears. It's a lot of work, but I can do it whenever I'm feeling inspired and only work for as long as I want to. I've been attacking it for years at the cabin, and it now seems less common that it once was south of the cabin. What has arrived to replace it is mostly goldenrod, a plant I encourage even though it likes to grow nearly eight feet high. Recently I've also taken to snipping off the many willow and poplar seedlings doing their best to form a forest in the front yard. Obviously, with a solar-powered cabin, you can't allow a forest to establish itself south of your panels. In all such cases, I leave the roots in place, since I'm still a little concerned about the possibility of erosion and want to keep anything weaving the soil together in place.
After I'd had my coffee and eaten something for breakfast, I took Charlotte on walk westward on the Lake Edward Trail. But right away I heard a single discharge of a gun from the "redneck camp" belonging to one of the parcels the Lake Edward Trail crosses. You're never that far behind that camp when you're on the first third of that trail, so I decided to head northward before I'd even made it to the bottom of the first slope. I eventually found my way all the way around to our parcel, where I noticed the new beaver dam just below the bifurcation in the outflow creek still wasn't producing much of a pond, even with all the runoff flowing through. The plants that had started growing in the soil on the dam were now tall and were doing great with so much well-oxygenated water at their roots.
As I continued around the base of the hill to first the dams in the outflow creek and then over to the dock, I noticed the beaver dams had been greatly damaged and water was easily rushing over their tops. At first I assumed this was flood damage, but then I saw that most of the material missing from the dams lay on either side of them. Indeed, poles from these dams that had once clearly been part of them had been removed from them months ago and flung randomly into the bushes, with many of them ending up in our trails, where it made walking a little more of a trip hazard. Back then, I'd thought the beavers had done this for some reason. But now it was clear that beavers hadn't done it. At this point I was suspecting a different mammal, an invasive primate that had arrived on wooden boats from Europe. Humans and beavers have been in conflict since the dawn of time, and it's unclear what exactly about the beaver dams had caused a human to want to take action, but evidently it was felt by someone that Woodworth Lake had risen too high. With the exception of docks, nobody on the lake has any structures that would suffer from the lake being much higher than it is, but perhaps that's all this was about. Whoever did the dam destruction did it not just on the edge of the homeowner's association property (that is, at the upper most dam) but they'd also destroyed part of the dam that is well within our parcel, below a small pond that backs up to the base of the higher dam. That lower dam doesn't have any real effect on lake level, but whoever did the dam destruction might not know basics about how water moves and pools. They also didn't consider that anyone might have trails they were blocking by flinging sticks. In any case, it hardly matters, since the lake is pretty much the same lake even if its level goes down an entire foot. But I would like to use a trail cam to catch whomever is fucking the dams.
[REDACTED]
Another thing I did was to replace a burned-out relay that had been controlling an outlet on the west wall of the basement. The bad relay was a cheap 10amp model made by Miderton and was rated at 10amps. Diving the current between its two poles, I was using it to switch 15amps, which should've worked just fine. But after a little over two years, it heated up enough to make a bad smell and then stopped working. When I removed the bad relay today, it was so melted that the relay had welded itself to its socket. This was the second Miderton relay I have lost like this, though the first one had failed after only a couple weeks of use. I replaced today's bad relay with a beefier 20amp relay that has been very reliable, and the swap only took about ten minutes of work.
Later I carried five beers in a cooler down to the lake (along with another gallon of water for the deck water jar) and proceeded to make a spring-powered beer refrigerator. There's a temporary stream that often trickles cold spring water throughout the summer, and I figured if I could make a little hole for the cold spring water to accumulate in and built a little box using flat rocks, I'd have the perfect place for stashing beers indefinitely. I proceeded to make a nice little stone box using an existing rectangular boulder that I left in place. I removed to roots and soil northeast of that until I had at least four inches at the bottom to collect water. I then added flat rocks around this hole, producing a refrigerator capable of holding more than a six pack (though the beers this beer snob drinks often only come in four-packs). The refrigerator making project, like the relay replacement, surprised by how little time it took to complete. Most of it was done in less than ten minutes, though it helped that I'd stockpiled some useful rock shapes near the dock.
I then sat on an innertube to drink one of the beers. Meanwhile, there was a lot of activity at the public dock. A few people were just paddling around near it in watercraft, never really venturing very far (are they worried about the Loch Ness Monster?). But eventually a trip of kayaks started coming my direction and continued past me to the outflow bay. (We waved at each other when we came within a certain distance of one another, as is the custom.) Unlike most people traveling any distance from the public dock, they were just exploring and were not fishing. And one of them was a little boy who kept asking the kind of whiney questions little kids ask.
When I finished my beer, I set out on the paddleboard to the outflow creek, where I dragged the paddleboard ashore and then went off to look for that flat rock I'd found last evening. I wasn't able to find it, but I found a number of similar rocks, though the fastest way to carry them back to the paddleboard was to walk through a flooded patch of sawgrass in the meadow below the lower of the two semi-destroyed beaver dams. (They're still high enough to divert water to this area, which had once not been marshy at all.) Once I'd gathered a good number of flat rocks, I put the paddleboard back in the lake, loaded up the rocks, and paddled them back to the dock. But before doing anything with them, I went out a second time on the paddleboard and gathered a number of larger, more irregular rocks from the shoreline where a cape in our parcel juts into the lake near the entrance to the outflow bay.
Once I'd moved all these rocks back to shore, I used a couple of the flat rocks to further improve my new hillbilly refrigerator. (There really should be a bro-country song written about it!)
Back at the cabin, I ate a fairly large bud of old moldy cannabis that has been gathering dust for years down in the basement. It's rare for me to consume cannabis these days, and when I do, eventually I want to listen to music. (For the last few times I've done this, now many months apart, I've liked listening to the Editors.)
The derelict beaver dam below the bifurcation. Click to enlarge.
These roots look like a hand. Click to enlarge.
Water gushing over the two damaged beaver dams (and the stone walkway below the lower one). Click to enlarge.
Note the melted spot on the socket of the failed relay I removed today. Click to enlarge.
The sky above the lake today. Click to enlarge.
The hillbilly refrierator, seen here with two cans of Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing (not a hillbilly beer!). Click to enlarge.
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