Visiting Tovah in Florence, MA

Hello from Florence. We're visiting our Grand - daughter, Tovah. Having a great weekend. We visited a small farm at the Vocational High School where their was a Holstein sharing Grandma's name - Happy!

Garden Harvest - First Frost - Maybe

As we were working on getting the garden prepared for the first frost of the season, we discovered that the mice had started to harvest one patch of our carrots before us. Naomi decided to beat them to the rest of the harvest and so she stands with a bucket of carrots and the garden fork in her hand.

We picked squash and mulched the vines. We ate the last of the sweet corn for lunch. All the savors of the summer foods - tomatoes, cucumbers, etc., take on a bittersweet emotional tone as the season advances. This first frost is always a marker. The smells change from seedy and flowery to musty and mouldy as the bacteria and fungi begin to dominate in the life processes.

The garden has been abundant this year. You can see it is also rather wild and rank. We sometimes long for the precise orderly gardens one sees in the magazines, but it doesn't seem to be in our nature. We are always trying to cram more into life than there is room for.

The web of fencing you see most clearly against the sky is 8 feet high and extends 4 feet underground - protection from the deer and the woodchucks. Behind Naomi and to the right (click on the photo to enlarge) are a couple of ceramic sculptures done by one of our daughters when she was in college. In the background on the right is Moose Mountain. Like it's companion, Owl Pate, it is about 2500 feet and about 1600 feet above the garden on the valley floor. The air drainage from those two mountains and the others in our neighborhood gives us some of the coldest temperatures in the region on those quiet clear nights of fall and winter.
PS: Wouldn't you know, it didn't freeze!

PPS: First Frost occurred sometime while we were away on the weekend of Sept.19-20-21.

Raven Nest

This picture of Owl Pate Mountain was taken as I was standing just above a Raven's nest that sits on a rock ledge on our property.

I have often heard the Ravens from our house as they squawk in their raspy gravelly croak, like old movie sound tracks of prehistoric reptiles. Today, as I was taking this picture, the pair appeared in strong voice. I had the time and decided to explore a little and see if I could find where they were nesting. A little clambering about on my part produced a narrow view of one corner of their nest planted on a ledge with a protective overhanging crag. One of the birds was standing on its edge.

Ravens are more numerous now than they were 35 years ago when I first came to the Adirondacks, but they still are a wondrous bird - big black scavengers and hopefully 'forever more'.

Fish Story

Last Sunday, 9-7-08, Naomi and I and friends of ours - another couple and their young boy - were canoeing on Johnson Pond in the Hammond Pond Wild Forest. It was a bright clear beautiful early fall day. The boy was in a junior sized kayak and having a lot of fun scooting around the older couples. We took a close look at some of the Pitcher Plants, Sundew, and Bladderwort. Telling the story of these three carnivorous plants is always a fun part of anyone's introduction to Adirondack wetlands. The young man expressed some exception to the 'disgusting' digesting insects in the bulb of the pitcher plant.

The resident loon couple, which we were hoping to see and hear, were absent. Probably they were either on their way to the ocean for the season or visiting some other pond looking for something to eat.

We proceeded to canoe down the narrowing channel of the pond that leads to the outlet. There are several very nice beaver lodges on the shoreline with channels approching them from the open water. These provided great challenges in manueverability for a young man in a kayak.

As Naomi and I approached the second of the lodges, and were a little distant from the others in the party, there was a great splash and commotion next to our canoe. Water splashed on Naomi's face. My immediate thought was that a beaver had taken umbrage at our appoach to her lodge and was trying to intimidate us with the old 'splash of the tail' trick. Instantly, however, there was the heavy thumping of a very large nothern pike thrashing around the bottom of our canoe. I couldn't say I actually saw it throw itself into the boat, but there it was. Quite intimidating with it's gaping jaws and sheer size. Our friends and their son came over to see and share the excitement. The event made the trip truly memorable. I took my pocketknife and severed the spine just behind the head and took the offering home for a treat of fresh fish. The fish measured 35 inches and had numerous bloody marks from leeches.

New Beginnings

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the morning on the phone attending, by speaker phone, a meeting of the Executive Committee of the RCPA during which we updated our new Executive Director on issues facing the Adirondack Park. One thing that was reviewed was the Press Release announcing our hiring of the new ED. Michael Washburn has a Ph D. in Forestry from Univ. of Penn.

One of the main focuses of the RCPA is the Unit Management Planning process. This is a good thing and something very related to helping protect the HPWF. It is interesting to me to note that so much of what I do almost everyday is related to the place where I live.

In that spirit, I spent much of the afternoon reading about Tu B'Shvat which is the Jewish new year of the trees. It is an environmental holiday, as are many of the Jewish holidays which are rooted in the yearly agricultural cycles of the middle eastern Mediterranean climate. This particular holiday also uses the tree as a spiritual metaphor for human beings and of spiritual guidance. In Jewish tradition, the tree is a symbol of the Torah the ultimate guide for life.

In Israel, the holiday is a kind of Jewish Arbor Day during which school children go out into the fields and plant trees.

The day is seen as the day that the new year's life force begins again deep in the roots of the tree. It is also the time of the first budding of trees in the Mediterranean wet season after the first winter rains. So, it is a kind of rebirth of the land.

Even in our climate in the Adirondacks, this season is a time when one can begin to prune the trees because they have entered the lowest point of activity before the new growth begins in the Spring. The Sap has dropped about as far into the roots as it is going to go, before it begins to flow again.

It is a good time for a new beginning for the RCPA with a new executive director.

Today, I spent time running around Northampton looking for a way to hang my maps in our room so that I can study the geology of the area around the HPWF.

At the dinner table, Bekah, Naomi, Mitch, and I reminisced about certain business establishments along Route 74 and along the Hogback Road (officially known as North Road). We all had a good chuckle, but later I realized that these stories about these businesses are part of the HPWF story. So, I will give a brief summary.

• First, the business along Hogback is a 'Tea House'. This is a little Tea Garden and Pastry place open by reservation only. I understand, from talking to the owner, a friend of mine, that this is a common kind of enterprise that people travel to as part of a vacation trip. There evidently are these kinds of places all over the country just waiting for people to call ahead to visit on their travels. Kind of like vineyards with wine tasting shops, rural craft shows, country Bed and Breakfasts. I don't think this person is making a go of it. She is very nice and very talented, has great tea and pastries, i just don't think this is the right location. Our area just doesn't have the right atmospherics for such a place. Roads lined with off kilter trailers, barns and abandoned homes with the roofs caving in, five cars parked in the mud tracks in front of the trailers with only one sometimes in working condition, etc. Nearest other business is A-B-C distributors with most of its business traffic between 10pm and 2am and with periodic police raids.
• Second, the business in Paradox, near the intersection of Letsonville Road and Rt. 74 is Dad's Place. This business is a tragically funny. I don't even know how to tell the story without being condescending. First, it was a little restaurant. To tell you something about it, your first have to know that the sign out front of the restaurant had the word restaurant spelled incorrectly on both sides of the sign and each spelling was diferent from the other. Restaraunt and Resterant. Naomi and I were very excited about a new business opening in the area and eagerly went to try it out. Naomi ordered fried chicken and when she put her fork into the chicken, it erupted like Mt. Vesuvius spurting oil all down her front. This did not really deter our interest and we continued to patronize the place until I ordered a glass of Orange Juice one day and after drinking it even though it tasted a little funny, I noticed the ring of caked on Tomato Juice around the bottom of the glass. This was a little too much for us. When the business failed shortly thereafter the family turned it into a small grocery. One day we ran out of paper towels, or something, at home and ran down to the store to make a purchase. The young woman informed us that they were sold out of paper towels. A quick perusal of the store revealed that they probably average less than one of most essentials. Needless to say, this business also failed. The hard part of this was that the family was enterprising and eager to do well. The father, who was the namesake of the place(Dad's Place), was dying of cancer and the family was trying to hold things together. Just not very successfully.
• The last business we discussed was the Campground along the Schroon River at the bridge across the river on Rt. 74 in Severance. For many years this operated as a pretty regular campground along a pretty, if somewhat exposed, stretch of a beautiful river. It recently changed hands. I don't personally know the owners, but they seem to be running a little subsistence farming operation at their house along side the campground. They have a number of antique tractors and farm machinery. They have numerous chickens, more or less penned in, and some sheep. The chickens and sheep make quite a mess of most things. It really looks like a fairly unkempt farmstead in the finest Adirondack tradition. There is a sign out front advertising farm fresh eggs. At the end of the season each summer the sign announces a drag queen show. This caused quite a stir in the Severance community at first. There was a competing sign across the road spewing out anti gay hate speech. The local papers were full of stories and letters to the editor on one side or the other. The local substation of the State Troopers is nearby and after a couple of months a stop was put to the hate signs. The drag queen shows continue.

New Year's Day

A day of new resolution.

As part of my thoughts for the new year I've been thinking of using my blog as a type of journal of experiences and thoughts regarding the Hammond Pond Wild Forest that borders my home place in Paradox, NY.

Today, Naomi and I started a new experiment, moving into a room in our 'middle daughter' and her husband's home in Florence, Mass. This will be just for a couple of winter months and to allow us to live with a little breath of civilization, and to acquaint us with our newest granddaughter - Tovah who is just over one year old.

Part of my plan for the next couple of months is to learn about the geology of the Hammond Pond Wild Forest area where we live. I have a couple of geologic maps from the NYS Education Department which I have brought with me to hang on the wall for study.

Life is most fun when I have some 'projects'.

Naomi and I have made a nice cozy room for ourselves.