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unexplained quartzite
Saturday, September 5 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I'd actually planned to take a 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine yesterday but then realized the cabin only contained two 30mg pills. So the plan then changed to taking the pseudoephedrine today after first buying more of it in Johnstown. I had stacked up other reasons to drive to Johnstown as well: I'd forgotten to bring the rigging supplies necessary to install the windmill I wanted to install, so the plan was to buy such supplies at the Ace Nobel hardware store. Also, we were running low on dog food, so I'd try to buy whatever was lowest on the food chain at Benson's Pet Center, where I'd once bought a bag of overpriced dog food made from the corpses of dead crickets. The dogs always like riding around in the car, and the morning was still cool, so I brought them as well.
My first stop was Benson's, which is a fairly big pet store with two whole aisles of dog food. I didn't didn't feel like talking to anyone, so I looked over all the foods trying (ideally) to find a vegetarian dog food. Lacking that, I might've settled for crickets again, but I couldn't find that either (and it was likely that they don't carry it any more). So after nearly a half hour of looking, I settled on something that contained fish. (There was no way I was buying anything with turkey, bison, kangaroo, rabbit, venison, beef, or chicken, all of which were available options.) I paid for it in cash (money A had given me for my recent plumbing work) so that it wouldn't show up as an item in a list of credit card purchases.
Next, after waiting a little too long in line behind a woman with a baby whose medicaid wasn't quite working for her, I bought my box of pseudoephedrine from the very fat woman staffing the pharmacy counter at the Johnstown Walgreens. To get a jump on my recreational pseudoephedrine experience, I took the five pills right there in the parking lot.
Then it was off to Noble Ace Hardware, where I bought three fairly affordable turnbuckles and 100 feet of wire rope that cost about $130. (That's a lot.) Also, fifty feet of 14 gauge single-conductor wire came to $30, leading to a check-out price of something like $220, money I could've avoided spending had I just brought my bag of rigging supplies.
On the way back to the cabin, I stopped at the Price Chopper mostly to get six pints of Ben & Jerry vegan icecream. (That's something that pretty much has to be bought locally or else it melts somewhere on the road.) I was drinking kratom tea as I was doing all these things, and it was making me feel mildly euphoric and pro-social enough that spending money didn't feel as painful as it normally would.
When I took Charlotte down to the lake this afternoon, I was having a nice pseudoephedrine buzz. She quickly got wrapped up in whatever she was doing, so I fetch the paddleboard so I could do some resource transportation while sipping from a Mountain Ale. Before setting out, I noticed even more activity over at the new dock. Things were so were so redneck there now that hostile-faced boys sat with fishing poles and someone had put up an American flag (though it might've just been a towel featuring a patriotic pattern).
As I paddled over to the north side of the largest cape in our parcel (where the outflow bay departs the main body of the lake.), I saw a kingfisher fly up from the top of one of the tall boulder islands in the rocky archipelago at the entrance to the bay. But then his place was taken by some sort of small shore bird (a plover?) who then flew low over the ouflow bay both to the beaver dam at its western end and then back. (This was the first shore bird I'd ever seen at this lake.)
At that cape I just mentioned, I found an unusual concentration of large rocks that appeared to be comprised almost entirely of quartzite. I gathered up some pieces small enough to carry and put them on the paddleboard. But some boulders of it were as big as cars. Interestingly, though, this rock looked to have come from somewhere else (perhaps a layer overhead), as none bedrock exposed in the lakeside cliffs contained visible chunks of quartzite. I didn't have any immediate use for this quartite, so I used some of it to add to a cairn whose foundation is a boulder on the lake floor near the dock.
After I put away the paddleboard, Charlotte and I walked to the outflow creek and I decided to explore that creek's north bank west of the causeway we normally use to cross it. I'd really looked at what happens there and as always when I study something more closely, I found things of interest. I was particularly struck by a patch of ground that seemed to be paved (almost) with hand-sized cobblestones. These all stuck out of the ground at different angles, so it wasn't a great surface to walk on barefoot. But it was interesting and very unlike what one normally sees in these woods, where such rock tend to be scarce or covered beneath deep layers of soil rich in organic matter. It was almost as if the Boy Scouts (whose campground is nearby) had constructed something on this site. Perhaps they had paved it and frost-heave had subsequently jumbled the rock.
I then got into the creek and decided to test whether I could convince beavers to build a new dam. Using rocks, I dammed up the creek at the top of a set of rapids, backing up the creek's water nearly all the way to the causeway (80 or so feet upstream). Beavers may hear the gurgling of water at my new dam and then begin to add sticks, something they did to a dam I'd built just upstream from the causeway.
This evening I got started assembling my windmill, carrying all of it up to the deck it will sit on and using pipe wrenches to attach the necessary flanges to the ends of the ten foot black iron pipe that will hold the windmill aloft. I also used tar to seal the tops of a number of deck posts to keep water from entering the grain from above. I'd removed all the wooden pieces form the steel plates comprising the spiral staircase's steps, and the holes for the screws that used to secure those pieces were irritating me. So I filled them all in with black tar. It's not a strong material, but it dries resonably tough and can be further strengthened just by painting over it. Yes, structural paint is a thing!
Woodowrth Lake today. Click to enlarge.
Things are looking even more redneck at the new dock. Click to enlarge.
Rock payload on my paddleboard. You can see a few pieces of quartzite and a piece rotten wooden bark that caught my fancy. Click to enlarge.
Purplestem aster on the north bank of the outflow creek. Click to enlarge.
The dam I made today. Click to enlarge.
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