Archive for August 2019
New Chaos
We almost made it through two days of calm respite at the lake before the universe dished out a new dose of chaotic drama. My sense of orderliness is getting plenty of exercise, whether I want it, or not.
The idyllic afternoon in the water slowly eased into a delicious dinner of charcoal-grilled burgers with fresh corn-on-the-cob. Stories and laughter around the table topped off dinner and lasted until a call to join others by the lodge.
It was dark outside. There were a lot of people gathering on the deck next door. A bunch more were sitting around the fire at the lodge. Cyndie had Delilah on a leash. I was carrying my travel guitar in its case and arrived on the deck, having just walked up from the fire pit. The neighbors have a white dog that looks like one of the miniature mix breeds. Cyndie had been told the little dog was inside their cabin.
It all coalesced into a split-second explosion of dog conflict that revealed Gracie wasn’t inside. I turned to witness the fracas and ended up using my guitar case as a lever against Delilah as people scrambled to separate them.
Gracie was surprisingly calm, but inspection revealed she was bleeding from a puncture wound. The decision was made to bandage her up for the night and seek veterinarian advice today.
Cyndie and I are frustrated by Delilah’s quick transformations from calm to aggressive, but this degree of conflict is a new level that has us crushed.
The night was already laced with heaviness by reports of a community member in the last hours of life after years of cancer treatments.
I was on a quest for a break from life’s pressures, but the reality of new challenges occurring every day is helping me to adjust my focus toward the art of nurturing an intentional peacefulness that surfs above the turbulence which circumstances perpetually roil.
This morning I am conjuring extra love for people and animals and sending it to all the world. New love to sooth new chaos.
Peace.
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Storm Damage
By the looks of the driveway alone, up at the lake, it is obvious that there was some heavy rain. There is evidence of a flash flood of runoff that washed gravel away into the woods. Farther along on the property, we discovered that the big eagles’ nest had also succumbed to the deluge. There was debris of sticks and dead fish on the ground at the base of the tree. Looking up, the size of the structure had shrunk considerably.
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Still, the two youngsters remained perched, one on a branch above, and one on what was left of the nest. We occasionally hear them calling out to the adults who are the source of their meals. I would expect the stinky fish that landed below to eventually be picked up and delivered above again. It’s not like they’re past their expiration date or anything.
Getting the fish bodies up off the ground would make it a little easier to walk Delilah that direction. It takes a lot of muscle to steer her clear of trying to roll around in all the stench.
On a whim, I decided to be adventurous and take Delilah for an explore in the woods across the highway from our property. As soon as we made our way beyond the thicket of growth along the berm beside the road and got into the spacious forest beneath the spectacular canopy of the tall trees, I discovered the hazard of my decision.
All that rain seems to have unleashed a ferocious new batch of teeny mosquitos. They were unrelenting in their onslaught. I tried to keep moving to foil their attempts to land, but Delilah –lacking the exposed flesh I presented– didn’t share my urgency. She kept stopping to smell every enticing forest odor and, still on leash, frequently chose a path that had us at odds over which side of tree trunks to be on.
I had to cut our expedition short and set a course straight back to the bright sunlight of the roadway.
Things were much calmer when we got to the beach and I let her soak in the water while I stood on the sand taking a sunbath and listening to loons.
By that point, the storm damage was out of sight and out of mind. Almost the same for the chaos of the preceding week.
I will continue this course of therapy for a couple of days. It seems to be just what a doctor would order for what was ailing me.
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Much Needed
We made it to the lake for a much-needed respite from the nibbling chaos of late. I admit to a certain penchant for bringing order to my world. When there is always more to do in a day than time allows, I find satisfaction in tending to something on the list to a degree it at least gives the appearance of having been addressed.
The previous few days of the day-job have offered up increasingly more demands than my tiny progress has been able to offset. With Cyndie away all week, attention to the home front has been below expectations. Thank goodness we don’t need to be putting up hay this summer.
Cyndie’s flight home was canceled yesterday, on the excuse that a flight attendant called in sick and they didn’t have enough personnel to staff the flight. Really? They found her an alternative by driving her an hour to San Francisco to barely make an 8:00 a.m. departure toward home. Good thing Cyndie was willing to do a little running to make the boarding gate in time.
That solution involved leaving her checked bag to make its way home without her. The airline said they would deliver her suitcase to our doorstep by the end of the day. Too bad she left her jewelry and medicines in that bag and at the last minute decided to allow it to be checked instead of carrying it on as originally planned, because we made a dash for the lake last night before it arrived, bringing Delilah along for the two-and-a-half-hour drive.
Yeah, it all feels a little chaotic to me in retrospect, given the reference of sights and sounds we are enjoying this morning.
This is what I call respite…
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It is the perfect tonic for what is ailing me. I intend to immerse myself in the experience to the fullest.
Aahhhhh. Wake me on Sunday when it is time to head back to the real world.
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Impressive Specimen
Last weekend, while I was up at the lake biking, Cyndie sent me a picture of a spider she was startled by in her garden. I don’t mind at all that I was not home to see it in person. The image alone revealed an impressive specimen of a black and yellow garden spider.
It’s about sixteen times bigger than spiders I’m not bothered by. I glanced toward the garden from the safe distance of my lawn tractor seat as I mowed around the perimeter, but didn’t spot the gargantuan arachnid. Thank goodness.
Despite the possibility of thunderstorms yesterday afternoon, I got out to finish the last of the mowing. Now I am ready to head back up to the lake for the weekend. Cyndie is due to return this afternoon, and as I understand it, the plan is that we will take Delilah with us. Maddie will still stop by to tend to the chickens while we are away.
Speaking of impressive specimens, this beautiful cumulonimbus cloud sprouted overhead just as I was preparing to start mowing.
Based on that beast and several others developing close by, I was prepared for my plan to be foiled soon after I started. Alas, that never happened. They moved off to the east and a fresh dose of dry air flowed in behind them.
The yard looks nicely manicured and gives the impression someone actually lives here. That is, until one approaches the overgrown paddocks in front of the barn.
I guess you could say we have an impressive specimen of tall grass going to seed out there.
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Delilah Nodded
Has it been a while since I boasted about our brilliant Terv? Being a dog, Delilah is rather highly motivated by food. As random as things are around here, we do strive to provide Delilah with as routine a schedule as possible. She is very helpful in reminding us when it is time to eat, should we ever stray from timing she expects.
I used to think it was a function of her impressive ability to tell time. Evidence now points to her reading our activities and recognizing we put out her food after coming in from certain tasks in the morning and afternoon. If we end up coming inside too early in the afternoon, she still assumes our arrival to the house means it’s time for her dinner.
When that happens, we tend to make her wait for the clock to reach the appointed hour.
With Cyndie out of town this week, I put Delilah in the outdoor kennel while I was mowing the lawn yesterday after work. By the time I decided to stop to feed her, it was about 30 minutes past her usual mealtime. When I reached the kennel to retrieve her, she was incredibly excited to see me. I knew why.
I’m pretty sure she knew I knew.
“It’s dinner time!”
She did the classic excitement behavior of running ahead, running back, and running ahead again. Knowing she was too excited to think about peeing, I encouraged her to take a moment to do that before we went inside.
Her response, in the midst of dashing fore and aft, was a head nod to let me know that wouldn’t be necessary. Going inside so I could immediately serve dinner was the only thing on her agenda. With a very obvious nod of her head, she indicated there was no need for what I was asking of her.
While she ate dinner, I stepped back outside and finished as much mowing as time allowed. Before washing up, I took Delilah outside one more time.
The very first thing she did was pee.
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Main Weed
It appears that we are in the peak year for the biennial Queen Anne’s Lace that thrives in our hayfield. Last year had me thinking we had almost eradicated it with frequent mowing. I guess that was just the off-year.
It’s an edible wild food belonging to the carrot family and is second only to beets among root vegetables for sugar content. I think I’ve said this before, that maybe we should be harvesting it as a crop to sell.
The plants are interesting to look at, except when you’ve seen too much of them and would rather not have it growing in your fields.
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Messy round bales of old hay can be interesting to look at, too, unless you’d rather they be stored somewhere else to allow the grass underneath to grow for a second cutting this summer. The fields have been rented out, so I guess they can do what they want.
I’ve got a forest of toppling trees to focus on instead this year. The difference is, I don’t drive through the forest every day, so it is a bit more “out of sight, out of mind” than the fields.
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Like Ships
It’s funny how it can feel like I’m in a relationship with another vehicle on the drive home from the lake when it travels the same speed and direction as I am going. When they finally went straight through a roundabout that I turned south from, I felt as if I should send them off with some acknowledgment of the road miles we shared.
I arrived home yesterday around 11:00 a.m. and watched Cyndie prepare for a trip of her own. She left for a seminar in California, so I am on my own this week. We are like ships passing in the night lately.
Or, like cars on a drive home from the lake.
When she returns home at the end of the week, the plan is for us to head back up to the lake for the weekend. That will make three weeks in a row that I have been up there. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
It’s a treat, for sure, but it does require that I do the lawn mowing after work in the middle of the week and interferes with ever getting back to the lumberjack projects that linger in our woods unfinished. Small concerns, both of them, compared to the glorious beauty we get to enjoy up in the Hayward area.
I have a sense that a day is going to come when I will be facing long hours of labor with a chainsaw this fall. Too bad the hours of daylight get shorter as summer wanes. But, it’s the summer sunshine that is giving us all the more reason to be up on the water while the going is good.
You could say, the lumberjack projects and my attention to them are a little like ships passing in the night.
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Fat Tires
The weather was nice when we set out on a bike ride yesterday around 12:30. That niceness didn’t last. On the plus side, Cyndie’s brother, Ben, offered me a chance to ride his fat bike, so mine didn’t get all muddy.
It was my first time riding on the gigantic tires. The first thing I noticed was that my legs made contact with the frame around the wide back tire while we were cruising down the asphalt on the way to the gravel road that cuts into the woods.
Before I expand on my experience riding the big beast on the “intermediate” level off-road trails, there is a story about the pedals. I ride clipless pedals (the complicated descriptor for pedals that click onto a cleat in my shoe and keep my feet fixed in place while riding). Ben’s bike had standard flat pedals.
Knowing this in advance, I decided I would take the pedals off my road bike before coming up, so I could swap out the ones on Ben’s bike. The problem with that last-minute plan came about when I couldn’t get the pedal on the right side of the bike to budge. It was frozen solidly in place.
Several times, I took a break from futile attempts to loosen the pedal and let some penetrating oil soak in while I made other preparations for departure. Finally, I went inside, showered, and then drove the packed car out of the garage, ready to head out after making one last try on that stubborn pedal. The wrench slipped and my left hand slammed into the teeth of the big chainring. It cut deepest in two specific places on my thumb, filling the nasty gashes with dirty chain grease.
I rushed back to the house to wash out the cuts as best I could tolerate and then had to go find Cyndie for assistance in bandaging it up. Frustrated and angry with myself, I packed up the pedal wrench and drove off, leaving the road bike behind with one pedal on and one pedal off.
I held my wounded left hand up in the air for most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive north.
Yesterday morning, Paul and I decided to simply try swapping the pedals from my off-road bike for the ones on Ben’s bike. Both sets came off with ease. Problem solved. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t wasted one second struggling to take the pedals off my road bike.
My thumb wishes that even more.
So, now I had my clipless pedals on Ben’s fat bike and I was ready to try it out. The frame is taller than I want, but I can straddle the cross tube because it slants down just enough. It took me two tries to get the seat lowered to the right height, and then I was ready to go.
After the opportunity of riding my bike on similar trails the day before, I had a good reference for comparison between the two. The fat bike felt like a truck compared to the nimbleness of my old-style bike.
The shifters are different enough that I needed to think much more consciously about gear changes, rarely with the precise timing preferred. That wasn’t as much a problem as the basic difference of frame geometry and tire size. It felt like the bike took longer to make it around corners. Sure, the big front tire rolled over hazards easier, but it never felt like the back tire did.
Final verdict: I’m not sold. I think it would make a nice bike for riding on packed snow, but for the rough trails through the woods in summer, I prefer the much skinnier tires on my mountain bike.
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Makwa Trail
I’m up at the lake again this weekend, but this time it is for the big golf weekend that Cyndie’s brothers host annually for a collection of close friends who happen to golf. I don’t golf. So, why am I here?
The annual weekend has morphed over the years and began to include some other activities, one of which was biking the Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association (CAMBA) trails through the woods. That suited me well and earned me an invite both this year and last.
Last year was so wet that we chose to stay on the gravel fire lane roads rather than risk the challenging single-track trails, but this year conditions were perfect for hitting the Makwa trail with my birthday and biking buddy, Paul.
Riding this trail involves a mostly non-stop series of split-second decisions about where to point the front tire to traverse or avoid the consistently changing hazards of roots, rocks, and turns. The deciding is only part of it. There is also an unending strain of frequent gear selection, balance control, and a clenched power grip on the handlebars.
It’s a LOT more work than my road bike. I was reminded why I have migrated back toward primarily riding my touring bike on pavement as I have aged. There are a lot more opportunities to relax and coast pleasantly along on smooth asphalt.
Yesterday’s exercise was a nod to my good ol’ days. It made me feel young again, …while simultaneously aging me.
I’m grateful to the universe for the blessing of not being slammed to the ground in the hazardous terrain of the backcountry woods of northwest Wisconsin. I must admit, that result is more a product of luck than ability at this point.
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No Answer
There are some questions for which there is no answer. I heard one in an NPR interview last night. It was a fair question, but the guest didn’t really know how to answer it. Justifiably so. There was no answer. Sometimes it’s not possible to pick either of two choices.
I can live with that.
Driving home in the dark last night, there was a moment when approaching headlights obscured my view enough that I realized I was driving blind for a distance. I didn’t slow down. I just kept going under the impression it would be okay so to do.
Luckily, it was.
I don’t have a plan for what is next. Something tells me I won’t suddenly decide to try being a stand-up comedian. I’m very confident I will continue to live a life of sobriety.
There are questions I don’t have an answer to, but more often than not, I don’t even have the questions.
It’s pretty easy to not have answers when I don’t know what the questions are. I breathe, put one foot in front of the other, and make my way through the days.
I don’t know what comes next. For now, it’s a question I am okay not answering.
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Relative Something 