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relationship with a white VW
Saturday, August 8 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I needed to get to my credit union (the Mid-Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union) to get cash to buy the spiral staircase before it closed at 2:00pm today, and that meant I would have to leave the cabin by late morning. This gave me enough time to make a french press of coffee and drink some of it while walking Charlotte down to the lake on the Mossy Rock Trail and then back up to the cabin again off-trail the south of the Backwards Cliffs Gorge, an area that is surprisingly rugged for how little actual relief there is.
I then cleaned up the cabin and drove back to Hurley via the Middleburgh route. As a drive, I feel like I form little relationships with other vehicles, particularly those that travel a long distance with me. Today, for example, there was a white Volkswagen that followed me all the way from the intersection of 162 and 30A in Sloansville all the way down to Route 32 south of Cairo, and it was a fairly good relationship too. The car kept up with me but never tailgaited, which is a needle few drivers thread. I lost that VW briefly in East Durham when Charlotte somehow tunneled into the area between the my seat and the brake and gas pedals and then started getting squirrelly, forcing me to pull over and get her the fuck out of there. But then I caught up with that VW and passed them on Route 23 and our "relationship" resumed for another ten miles. I never got a good view of the driver, though there were at least two people in that car.
I stopped at the branch of the credit union on Hurley Avenue and pulled out $1000 in cash.
Back home atop Hurley Mountain, Gretchen was doing much better after some surprisingly subtle work by both a physical therapist and an osteopath (in separate appointments on Friday). The osteopath, who wasn't covered by our insurance, even gave Gretchen a discount as a token of support for the march to end animal testing that she is organizing (and that might, through stress alone, have contributed to problems that originated with a fall on the Stick Trail a couple months ago).
Later, a guy named Noah who is affiliated with one of the vegan charities Gretchen gives lots of money to, came by to chat and I hung out with them briefly in the living room while we all ate popsicles. My main contribution to the conversation was telling about our recent cruise and saying that Albania is ugly, though not as ugly "as 9W" (Kingston's version of the brand-heavy motor mile).
Later Noah and Gretchen went to the Woodstock library to see Harriet Clark interviewed by V, the woman who wrote the Vagina Monologues. Harriet Clark grew up and made it to middle age before her mother was released for crimes related to murders that happened in relation to the robbing of a Brinks armored car in support of the Weather Underground, back when the radical left really was a menace.
This evening Gretchen cooked the first meal she'd made for both of us in awhile, a curried vegetable & tofu dish with a side of rice that was pretty good. We watched Gretchen's newest Jeopardy! hero Caleb Groen go down to defeat and then watched the penultimate episode of the second season of Dark Winds. It's not a great show, but I will probably watch the whole season anyway.
A shelf fungus along the shoreline of Woodworth Lake in Shane's parcel today. Click to enlarge.
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