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how Gretchen handles bigots
Wednesday, August 26 2026
location: rural Town of Hurley, Ulster County, NY
This morning Charlotte and I walked down the Chamomile Gorge Trail nearly to Dug Hill Road and then came back in the creekbed of the Chamomile itself (as we often do). As I was nearing the connecting trail between Crazy Dave's cottage and the Gulleys Trail, I could hear one of Dave's dogs barking and the sound of the whistle he blows to try to get his dogs to come back when they're instigating an incursion into Charlotte and Neville's territory. Usually that whistle sounds somewhat faint, as Dave is normally a couple hundred feet away when he blows it. But this morning it was unusually loud. Then I looked up the creek bed and saw Dave in the trail blowing on the whistle and expressing exasperation at one or more of his dogs. I usually don't see Dave out on the trails at this time of day, so perhaps he has changed his routine. (Being neurodivergent, he's never seemed to change any of his routines in the nearly 24 years we have observed him.) I ducked down behind rocks and fallen trees so he wouldn't see me and when he disappeared from view, I continued on my way. I didn't really want to have a conversation with him and I knew he didn't want to have a conversation with me, so this was just being polite. Off in the distance I could hear the piercing notes of Charlotte's bark, meaning she was now having some sort of altercation with one or more of Crazy Dave's dogs. But that didn't last; just before she headed off for physical therapy, Gretchen got Charlotte inside with Neville and barricaded the doggy door so neither dog could go outside.
Later Gretchen called me from the road to relate something that had happened at the physical therapy office. One of the guys working there, Anthony, is something of a weirdo who had struck up a conversation with Gretchen about Led Zeppelin after seeing her Lez Zeppelin tee shirt. He'd even given her tablature for "Hey Hey What Can I Do?" This morning Anthony was having a very loud conversation with one of the patients that Gretchen couldn't help overhearing. He was referring to one of the patients who was, as it happened, transgender. That patient was also unpleasant, and when Anthony introduced the detail that the patient was transgender, he added "or a freak." This caused the person to whom Anthony was talking to to break into laughter, because there's nothing funnier than observing that transgender people are actually freaks. At that point Gretchen had heard enough and spoke up about the bigotry she was hearing. Anthony replied that he wasn't talking to her, but Gretchen replied that he had been talking loudly in a public space and there was no way to avoid hearing what he was saying. She also asked how what Anthony was doing was any different from referring to a troublesome Jewish patient as a "kike." Anthony retorted that the patient was unpleasant, so he deserved the epithet "freak." But that ignored what Gretchen had just said. The argument went on this way for a bit, and apparently ended with Gretchen being told what room to go into for her physical therapy. But she was so pissed about Anthony's casual bigotry that she skipped her apartment, chuckling to herself at the picture in her mind of Anthony explaining this to his boss. To give me more context, Gretchen mentioned that she'd seen online reviews of this particular physical therapy business, and they'd mentioned Anthony's "anger issues." Gretchen herself had encountered Anthony's gruffness in a previous visit to the establishment.
I told Gretchen that in calling out Anthony's bigotry, she had done the right thing. If we as a people condemn such speech whenever we hear it, then people won't feel as empowered to speak hatefully about entire classes of people. In response to Gretchen telling me her picturin Anthony explaining to his boss how a client could've come into the establishment but then left before receiving therapy, I said that it would be a hard thing to spin, especially since Anthony is almost certainly "on notice" because of such behavior in previous incidents.
Early this evening after Gretchen returned from her bookstore shift in Woodstock, she played for me an effusively apologetic message left in her voice mailbox by Anthony. This pretty clearly indicated that whatever Anthony had told his boss about the cunt who had departed the facility before receiving physical therapy, the boss had decided that Anthony was the problem, not Gretchen.
A little past noon, Neville was fast asleep on the laboratory beanbag and Charlotte was intermittently barking at Crazy Dave's dogs. I needed to go next door to A's house and install that bathroom radiator, so I figured I could just barricade Neville in the laboratory and quickly do the install.
After walking from our house through the forest, I entered A's yard from the rear. A herself was gone somewhere, but Jamie's rented BMW was there. I knocked on the door and Jamie seemed delighted to see me, even if it was interrupting whatever it was he was doing on his computer at the time. I got the feeling from his demeanor that his girlfriend A had never told him that there was a possibility I'd be coming over. He offered me several refreshments, but the only one of these I accepted was a cup of coffee.
Up in the bathroom, Jamie did his best to help out as I reattched the radiator to the two partial union fittings at the end of PEX lines coming up from below. I easily reconnected one of the radiator's union fittings, but the other refused to connect. Jamie and I struggled with this for a bit until I realized that I was trying to connect the radiator backwards. This shouldn't have mattered at all, but when I flipped the radiator around, I had no trouble tightening the union connectors. I then had Jamie keep an eye on things and be ready to yell at me if anything "weird" happened when I went down to the basement and turned on valves.
Something weird did happen. when I opened all the valves in the hydronic system, Jamie said water appeared to be spraying out of one of the leaks that I thought I had fixed. But where precisely water is coming from in a leak is not something that is always easy to determine. So we swapped places and I had Jamie turn on valves in the basement while I yelled at him through the open window. I soon determined that Jamie was wrong about the source of the leak and that it was actually coming from a union fitting that was too loose. Once I fixed that, the freshly-installed radiator did not leak at all. As I was wrapping things up, Jamie offered to compensate me, apparently unaware that A and I had already negotiated the price and that she would be paying me.
When I left A's house, I walked back home along Dug Hill Road. As I passed Roseanne's house (she's the one woman in the neighborhood we dislike, mainly because of her frequent complaints to authorities about the crimes — real or imagined — perpetrated by our dogs), I saw Roseanne's boyfriend (though I am not certain of his relationship to Roseanne) puttering around the edge of the roadway. I don't know if he recognized me (we rarely see each other, and when we do it's usually becausse I am talking about the reported missdeeds of our dogs), but I said something like "Hey" and he said something like "' afternoon. Charlotte was quiet at the time, but not long after I returned home, I heard her erupt into more barking. Fortunately, she seems to understand that his barking irritates us, and it didn't take much persuasion to get her to stop.
This evening I made one of my potato-carrot-bean-noodle soups. I also cooked up a side of chanterelles for me to add to mine when I ate the soutp. When first tasting the soup, Gretchen seemed to think there was a "burnt" flavor (nothing I could detect) and that the noodles were overcooked.
After eating one bowl of soup (I'd taken 150mg of pseudoephedrine this morning and my appetite was suppressed), I announced that I would be beginning my drive to the cabin. I'd already loaded the car (in this case the gas-gobbling Subaru Forester) and just needed to grab a few last minute things. Normally I don't go to the cabin so early in the week, but my plans were to drive to Rochester to do some maintenance on our rental house there, and if I started my drive from the cabin instead of our house in Hurley, I'd save myself over an hour of continous driving. I would also get to be at the cabin, which is its own reward.
The drive to the cabin began a little before 6:00pm, which meant I would be arriving there after dark. This was compounded by stops I made along the way: a stop for gas in Cairo and a stop at the Cairo Hannaford to pick up road beer, sourdough bread, sliced bread, apple cider, and nuts.
Light had drained out of the sky by the time I was on Woodworth Lake Road, so I used the Forester's headlights to find new stones to gather for the wall along the driveway just inside the entrance to our parcel. One of those rocks was very heavy.
Sunset somewhere on the drive to the cabin, probably a little south of the Mohawk. Click to enlarge.
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