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freaking downpour followed by a clear blue sky
Sunday, August 23 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I heard a muffled roar as I awoke this morning on the couch in the great room and realized it was raining, something I wasn't expecting. This wasn't ideal, since the newly-installed spiral staircase wasn't fully waterproofed. But it was mostly waterproofed, with just the need for touch-ups in places where the black paint had been scuffed away in its former installation (or perhaps while I was transporting it from northeast Massachusetts). Of more pressing concern was my nice Nikon Coolpix camera, which I'd left overnight out on the deck railing. It was rained on, but it seemed to still be in working order. (I've dropped one of these cameras into the water and even plunged into the lake with one around my neck to a depth of several feet, and I've always been able to get them to recover, so this was relatively modest water exposure.)
I like going outside when it is raining, particularly if it involves interacting with nature. So at some point I went out to continue my jihad against mugwort. I found a particularly hardy (and flowering, something I hadn't seen) patch of mugwort along the edge of the woods almost directly west of the cabin, and I pulled all of it up by the roots. I also looked around and pulled up much smaller, less healthy mugworts scattered through the "yard." I had the dark thought that my desire to eradicate mugwort probably sprang from the same place in my soul that spurred Hitler to want to kill every Jew in Europe. This thought even had me feeling pity for the plants, but not enough to stop what I was doing. Mugwort is a horrible invasive that crowds out all other plants without serving much of a role in the environment. Also, it smells terrible.
When the rain finally seemed to stop, I barricaded Neville in the cabin and took Charlotte and a tall beer for another walk down the Mossy Rock Trail to the lake, which was a bit choppy in the wind and as devoid of humans as it has been every day since I arrived on Thursday. I soon had enough of the lake and continued with Charlotte down the trail to the outflow creek, through the old Boy Scout camp, and then I ventured a little further east and north than I had earlier this weekend trying to find places between my many paths I had yet to see. I found one such place, a short steep-walled gulley a just east of East Bifurcation Creek near East Bifurcation Falls. After crossing that creek westward, I turned back south and began heading back to the cabin just as the skies darkened precipitously, making daytime as murky in the forest as twilight. And then I heard it coming, a powerful downpour. I quickened my pace, but the rain soon caught me. Fortunately, though I was a half mile from the cabin, at the time I was under a thick canopy of trees (some evergreen hemlock and spruce, the rest deciduous) that had recently been blown dry by the wind, so it took awhile for much of that rain to reach me as its first wave of raindrops were soaked up by the foliage. But by the time I reached the clearing in the woods where the trail crosses the outflow creek just below the two outflow beaver dams, rain seemed to be reaching me despite the foliage overhead. By then I had my camera (which had been rained on already once today) tucked under my teeshirt so I could shield it from direct raindrops using my hunched-over body. As I approached the place where the shortcut trail goes up through the cliffs from the outflow creek, a rain-drenched Charlotte, whom I hadn't seen in at least fifteen minutes, came streaking past. She was going to be disappointed when she got to the cabin door and found the doggy door barricaded.
But just as I was arriving at the cabin site, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Within in a minute or two, nearly all the clouds had vanished and the sun shone down on a steaming landscape from a clear blue sky. Charlotte was waiting at the pet door as expected, though the urgency to get inside had vanished. Inside the cabin, Neville seemed perfectly content on the couch.
Once it had air-dried, I turned my attention back to the spiral staircase. I'd realized that the problem with the railing panel being too wide for the space provided was easily solved by drilling a couple holes through the treated-lumber railing it was colliding with and then just having the top and bottom rails of the panel penetrate those holes. I'd even put some asphalt in the holes to keep the chemicals in the treated wood from eating into the steel those bars were made of. First I had to remove some mounting hardware from the rails, and then, once the holes were in place, I had to push the whole stairwell out several inches so that the panel could swing into place and the rails could fit in those holes. As I did all these things, kept being visited by curious yellow jackets, though they didn't seem aggressive. But it had me wondering if perhaps their nest had reached some sort of late-season criticality and perhaps any activity out on these decks was no longer as safe as it used to be.
I then put down some tarps and proceeded to touch up all the missing paint I could find on the entire stairway assembly. Most of the places where the paint was missing were on the handrail, though I found spots here and there on the treads and such where it was missing as well. My painting technique used a small brush and was very sloppy, but the goal here wasn't to do a perfect job, and I fully expect to be painting this stairway for awhile until it has the lumpy look of something painted many times.
Once I was happy that the stairway was reasonably protected from the elements, I decided I had no more reason to be at the cabin and should probably begin my drive back to to Hurley. First, though, I needed to lay down one the folding chair I'd been using down at the dock. As an experiment, I tried to sneak off to the Mossy Rock Trail with Charlotte without Neville following us just by not making much of a commotion. In keeping with the decidedly-lax surveillance regime I've been using with Neville at the cabin, he was sunning himself out on the small deck in front of the front door at the time, and he didn't seem interested as we walked away. Perhaps the drugs we keep him on weaken his motivation to do things like go for hikes. But after collapsing the chair on the dock and cracking open a beer I was carrying, I encountered Neville on the Mossy Rock Trail just as he was about to descend its steepest part. I carried him back uphill to the base of the upper section of stone steps, which I had him climb on his own. That wasn't much exercise for him and gave me a nice break, so I had enough energy to carry him up the steepest part of the step-free slope above that. I then dropped him on a relatively level section of path that is almost continuously paved with stones all the way back to the cabin.
After doing the usual cleanup ritual, I loaded up the dogs and began my drive homeward at around 6:30pm. The sun was pretty low in the sky as I approached Schoharie, and the wild rainstorms off in the distance were creating a spectacular partial rainbow that I was eventually able to photograph.
The newly-erected spiral staircase in the rain this morning. Click to enlarge.
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A mossy stump east of East Bifurcation Creek some distance north of the old Boy Scout camp. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte's leg, a tree (white ash?), lycopods, and some gnarled leaves caused by some sort of insect activity or disease. Click to enlarge.
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I first saw a rainbow as I went down the hill on 30A into Sloansville and tried to snap a photograph, but it didn't really turn out. Click to enlarge.
That rainbow landing somewhere in Schoharie on the drive south today, though I did turn up the saturation to help it stand out. Click to enlarge.
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