Woodswoman

Every now and then something triggers a series of memories that puts me in a dream state that occupies my mind off and on for days. I ran across some names of people and places I knew for a few summers.

Way back, when I had hair, I worked for an older couple on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. It was the summers of ’70, ‘71, and ’72 and I was a college student making money for school. I was their “boy” in charge of cleaning, chauffeuring, shuttling guests and goods, laundry, maintenance, occasional shopping and cooking, wood splitting, fire making, and dish washing. The “camp” was built in the 1920’s primarily by a man named Earl Covey who was also a local legend. But he is another story. I got room and board and fifty dollars per week cash plus a day off and use of the car on that day. 

From Utica, the last bastion of “civilization” when entering the six million acre park from the southwest, you head up to Old Forge. It’s an artsy, touristy little community not unlike the town I now live near. From there you go on to Eagle Bay, north to Big Moose, and then to the public landing at Twitchell Lake. That is when you start getting all wildernessy. Jump into a boat or canoe and make your way up the lake. The “camp” consisted of the main two story cabin, a small guest cabin that could sleep about six or eight depending on how friendly everyone was. Also, there was a boat house an ice house (mostly used for firewood) and my sleeping cabin. There was no electricity or phone, but we had gas appliances and lights. 

I first remembered seeing her zooming down the lake with her motorboat and 150 pound German shepherd sitting in the bow as a counter balance. She was blonde with pigtails and wore a plaid jacket. “These are my people,” I thought. Unfortunately, she was a very private person and about 18 years my senior. I still thought she was hot. 

 

They said her name was Anne Bowes, but she was divorced and changing her name back to Anne LaBastille. She had been married to a resort owner C.V. “Major” Bowes (not the old time radio personality)on a nearby lake. She was a recent Phd. and radical (at the time) environmentalist. She was considered a bit eccentric, but she was in good company on that lake. 

Her book, Woodswoman, came out in 1976 and I discovered it a couple of years later. To protect her and everyone else’s privacy she called the lake Black Bear Lake. There were plenty of black bears around, but it was really Twitchell Lake. It was the first in a series of Woodswoman books and the first of at least a dozen written by her. 

 

We never did more than exchange pleasantries at the boat landing, but I did have a bit of a crush on her.

Twitchell was seasonally visited by most, but Anne and a man named Bill Carmen were year round residents. They were political opposites and didn’t get along, but I suspect they probably kept an eye on each other when no one else was there. They both loved the forests and lakes of the Adirondacks. It was the common thread amongst everyone that came there. 

 

Anne died in July of 2011, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Her cabin is being moved to the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. I have been to the museum about three times, but not for over forty years now. It was an amazing place with beautiful exhibits and I am sure they will do a fine job of interpreting Anne’s life. There was much more to her life, but this was the part I knew about. If you enter her name in a search engine you can find out much more.

 

Frozen assets

As I sit, freezing my ass off, I wonder what the world has become when you can't make fun of something or someone. There would be no comedians and there would be no Mad magazine just to name a couple of things. Since when is satire punishable by death?

Emily Litella would have said something like, " What's all this I hear about making fun of profit?"

Is an insult or social faux pas murder worthy?
"Brraaapp!"
"Sir, I take exception to your farting before my wife!"
"Sorry, I didn't know it was her turn."

People have made fun of me and my beliefs all my life and I hope I have done the same to them. Worst case was a little embarrassment or an occasional, "Oh yeah?!" or even, "I'm sorry."

I had an extensive rant that pretty much goes along with much of what has already been said by so many who can say it better.





I could go on and on and I did, but so many others have done so already and I am not adding anything new, so I want to show you something.

There is some beauty on the drive to work, but I usually can't stop because I don't want to be late. So on a Saturday morning (yesterday, in fact) with the temperature hovering around zero (-17C) I decided to figuratively stop and smell the flowers. Of course the flowers have frozen to death, but there is the stark beauty of the lake shore and the moodiness of the big lake. Click on the pics for a larger version.

The morning light and clouds change constantly.

Here is another "ghost ship" from the previous week. Shipping season ends on the 15th of January and starts up again in about 8 to 10 weeks so if I see any ships in that time they really ARE ghost ships. The lake will have either some or a lot of ice on it by then and the icebreakers will be out to help open things up, especially near the harbors.

Meanwhile I'll just try and stay thawed.

Second Chances

We all seem to need them at sometime. I can only speak for myself, but I think they come in many forms.

When I was a little kid (with hair on top of my head) I would occasionally screw up by forgetting to do something the way I was told it was supposed to be done. Usually this was pretty trivial stuff. If I realized my mistake my stepmother would often give me a second chance to not screw up. Usually I caught on, but not always. Sometimes I needed more than just a second chance. Sometimes a third or fourth was necessary, but I was usually pushing my luck at that point.

This is my younger brother and I with our grandmother. My hair was short, but covered the whole top of my head.

 

Then came the teenage years. I still had hair, but it was showing up in more places.

At this time of my life I didn't need many second chances because I was usually right the first time. Or so I thought. I really didn't need many second chances with the girls because I rarely had a first chance. I was actually pretty shy. In my own mind I was pretty cool and my big chance to get away from home was coming as I was almost done with high school.

Here I am with my brother and his cat. I'm cool, but the cat has me beat.

Then came college. I didn't start out so great and they gave me a second chance after the first semester. I didn't want to go to Southeast Asia dressed like everyone else, so I took them up on their generous offer.

I didn't date much, being shy and all (And poor. You can't show a girl a good time with a quarter in your pocket), but there were a couple of second chances I maybe should have taken.

After college I moved to Minneapolis and tried to make it. I hated my job, my dog got run over, and I couldn't afford to keep my piece of shit car running, so I went running home for a bit. My parents were usually gone so I found a job, took care of their house, worked nearly every day for nine months, and took a second chance at Minneapolis. It took about 2 years to get back there after I left Delaware because of a detour to Iowa, but that's another story. This time I made it after all. Just like Mary Tyler Moore, who helped inspire me at the time, I made it back to Minnesota where I lived with my goofy, yet capable, friends.
 

All these years later as an over ripe adult, I have gotten quite a few second chances from the Cooker. I'm not sure I deserved all of them, but I'm not one to second guess a second chance. No sir, not me! I will always take a second chance opportunity nearly every time I get one. As time becomes THE precious commodity that won't give me a second chance I have to be alert.

So after my last post my friendly neighborhood Northern Hawk Owl came back to give me a second chance at getting a good look. I put on a longer lens and got to take a few more shots. They came out much better.

 Second chances always give me a chance to improve. Do they work for you?
 

Dreams

Poetry, painting, music, writing can all talk about dreams or be inspired by them. Humans have looked for meaning in them as well as glimpses of the future. Physiologically they are just electrical and chemical actions going on in our brains. Are they controlled by the subconscious ramblings of our minds or just random electrochemical operations firing off whatever and whenever they want?

Beats me! I'm no genius! Sometimes they are pure entertainment and other times I try to figure out if there was a trigger that caused a certain subject, scene, or event to occur in the dream.

One of the most fun things that happens is I get to see old friends. One of my very best friends died in the summer of 1995 of a congenital heart condition. Every now and then he comes for a visit and sometimes we play music or just hang out or go exploring something. Last time he was helping me pick out an area in my huge concrete basement for a music room. At the far end of the basement (it must have been a couple of hundred feet long) was a restaurant and bar run by some other friends. I guess I didn't think much of it other than the convenience factor.

Sometimes my father comes to visit. He died back in 2006, but still hangs around in my thoughts and dreams. It's comforting in a way, now that I'm an orphan.

Of all the songs about dreams I think this is one of my very favorites.

  
Sometimes dreams come on the wings of an owl (Northern Hawk Owl) and depart just as quickly and in a haze. I remember what it felt like, but the details are gone.

It might be fun to see how other people dream or what scenes play out in their heads, but my own are curious enough. What would Sigmund Freud think?

Songs stuck in my head

You may or may not know that I am a rock and roller at heart. Although my father played classics and some Big Band music when I was a kid. I also played trombone for about 6 years. I probably would still be playing trombone if the band director hadn't been such a douche. I had started guitar a bit before I gave up on trombone and have been playing ever since. Up until a few years ago I played with a large band performing mostly international folk dance music. We had about three people who were callers and taught folk dances. It was a lot of fun, but once in a while I would break into "Smoke on the Water" or "Wild Horses" with one or two of the other musicians. Reactions were mixed.  

I have listened to many genres and have appreciated many. Everything from bluegrass to blues and jazz, even polka. So it might surprise you, but it doesn't surprise me that most of the morning I had the Frankie Yankovic singing and playing "Who Stole the Kishka" rolling around in my head as I did other things. Sometimes it comes out of my mouth, but I have learned to control that to some degree because of the reactions I sometimes get.

(thank you Wikipedia)

This afternoon while setting up the barn to put the horses in (cold night ahead) another tune got stuck. This time it was Tony Bennett doing "I left My Heart in San Francisco".  I have no idea where this stuff comes from. Maybe there's a leaky file in the song memory part of my brain.




(thanks again Wikipedia. Yes, I contribute)

There was nearly a week last fall that I couldn't shake Captain Beyond out of my head and had to buy the album again after not having owned it for about 40 years. I don't know how all this different stuff fits in that file in my brain, but it must take up a lot of room.



It really rocks!

Then the question is, "Does this happen to everybody or is it just me?" I'm not sure I want to know the answer. The strange thing is that the music is so eclectic. Sometimes it's part of the Peer Gynt Suite, Carmen, Debussy, Gershwin, The Beatles, Cream, Lester Flatt, The Roches, Béla Fleck,  Joni Mitchell, J.S. Bach, and the Liszt keeps going.

I don't call this stuff up knowingly, but something must trigger it. A word, sight, smell, or another sound, I just don't know. It might be a concern to some, but for me it's just free entertainment that comes and goes as it pleases. It's usually a good thing so why question it?

Pooped!

Everyone’s writing seems to have picked up in quality and/or quantity. The autumn leaves me exhausted and partially brain dead. 

First it starts out as an inkling to get prepared for winter. After a few weeks of lollygagging and just casually getting things in order we’ll get a couple of days of really crappy weather which then slaps me in the face to get my attention. This is a predictable pattern that repeats yearly and yet causes me the same amount of stress as if it were a completely new phenomenon.

On the farm everything has to be put away, organized, mowed, repaired, prepared, examined for wear and tear, cleaned, replaced, and inspected. Winterizing the water troughs, making sure the heater in the tack room works and nothing has been piled on it, fixing fences (I guess that is ongoing), moving piles of manure or gravel to get them out of the way of any potential snow removal, and putting heated water buckets in the stalls are just a part of it.  

The day job has been busy, but the overtime is like getting a temporary raise. October was our busiest month (by far) since 2006, but we did it with three or four less people (there are only seven of us now) and it took its toll on everyone’s mental stability. Yes, even mine! Hard to believe, isn't it?

Most of the pictures I have been taking have been of odds and ends I have been trying to sell on eBay to make up some of my “fun money” that went away when my car needed an unexpected tow. Well, not totally unexpected as it is nineteen years old.

So, I’m tired of keeping my nose to the grindstone because all I seem to get is a bloody nose. That season seems to be coming to an end and winter sets in.  

And so I'll leave you with this because this is only temporary and I am already regaining my strength.

Here is Lili von Schtupp, the Teutonic Tit-willow in her famous rendition of  "I'm Tired".  

See? Isn't that better? It's a fwiggin shame!

2014 National Erection

So, what’s all this I hear about a national erection?

 I hear that many of the male politicians are having one and probably some of the females. As with most erections, it’s all in their heads. They get themselves worked up into a frenzy for at least a few months preceding said erection until they can no longer hold back. They tell their lovers, the public (or is that pubic?) anything they want to hear so that they can get the most from their erection. Half-truths and outright lies are just about the only things that come out of their mouths until, at long last, the erection is over. Those who win their attempt bask in the afterglow and puff up like the cock of the walk and those who lose their erection usually walk away downtrodden and unsatisfied with their performance. Their public is usually left disappointed and wanting. Some may later come back and try again, but their public may have other ideas.

What?!? Election? I thought you said erection.

Oh.