Category: Travel

Summmmmmmer time.

8/27/2020

Each year, I find myself taking photos that I hope will catch the visual essence of the sweetness of the season.

This year, of course, I've snapped any number of pictures of the farm, but really, summertime in the North Country?

It's about cottage life, boat-rides, and the Water (whichever body of water, it's always capitalized: The Lake, The River, The Beach).

For over a hundred years, my family has spent weekends or weeks or the whole season on the granite shores of the St. Lawrence River.

The scent of old life-preservers and clean seaweed.

Sleeping porches. The "whap" of a screen door pulled shut by a long spring.

Pine needles. Lichen.The lapping of water under the wooden dock.

And the inexorable march of Labor Day...

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The Would-Be Farm: Jonquils or Daffodils?

6/14/2020

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It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."

In the world, I rarely call these flowers anything but daffodils.

Be that as it may, my sweet mother-in-law calls them jonquils, and when she proposed a big honking field of them at the Would-Be Farm, I said heck yeah!

Pat is a wonderful gardener, and even in her early 80s, she can out-shop, out-weed, and out-sew me pretty much any day of the week. So when she said she wanted Jeff and me to be reminded of her each spring at the Would-Be Farm, I enlisted her actual aid.

Long story short, we ordered something like 200 bulbs from Holland last fall. Thank you John Scheepers. We hopped a plane (back in the days when people did that kind of thing without thinking about it much) once the package arrived in the North Country.

We made a girl's weekend of it, staying at my sister's civilized house, eating yummy meals, and playing dominoes at the end of the day.

And we flew South, happy but full of anticipation and the usual worries: Would squirrels eat the bulbs? Would the plants freeze to death? Would deer eat the bulbs? Would an early thaw fool the plants?

Springtime is brutal on hopes. When bright flowers do indeed rise from the cold clay -- oh glory.

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What I Miss Most Today

5/27/2020

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Okay, so everything has changed.

More or less.

Less in some states.

But for many people, especially those with a healthy respect for both the science of infectious disease and the preservation of our elders, this summer seems like the start of a not-so-brave new world.

So here's what I am missing.

In photo format, because nobody wants to hear that tone of voice.

With vintage photos, because it does seem like a long time ago since we went out dancing, or hung out without a care with multiple generations of the family ––or not-family –– or planned a trip, or hugged people, or shared aprés-sailing stories...

But all this aside, please be sensible and gentle with one another. We're all trying our best –– even when it's not that great, it's likely all the effort we can manage.

That is all. For now.

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Art Safari in the Big City

3/12/2020

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For those hoping for an overview of the 2020 Everglades Challenge...that story is still coming. The team is safe, which is the main thing, and engaged in their next adventure. I hope to post a report early next week.

Meanwhile, something completely different from that...

My sister Sarah, an actual working artist, invented a thing we do called "Art Safari." I've written about it before.

We grab our cameras and drive or walk around some downtown or another.

It's all rather silly. We look at stuff through the viewfinder and laugh a lot.

Still, the physical act of focusing encourages a metaphoric focusing on what's right in front of us.

It's an exercise in seeing rather than just looking. A useful practice for a writer as well as an artist.

There's stuff to see if you just keep your eyes open.

We spent a long weekend in Manhattan recently –– summary: a bunch of us were were going to Italy to celebrate Sarah's birthday. Along comes Covid19, and poof! Manhattan it is!

The gang took taxis and subways, saw shows and shoes, walked Times Square and wandered museums. It kind of felt like every activity was going to be retold with the preface, "Back before the Pandemic, you could..."

Anyhow, wandering at will through the chic-chiciest of boroughs, especially wandering with artistic types like my companions, made me look twice or three times.

A few highlights of what caught my eye...

Frankenbarricade?

Elmo say "Please don't collide with delivery bike!"

No, please don't wake!

I looked.

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Everglades Challenge: On Line

3/3/2020

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Not unexpectedly, Twobeers has his hands full with plumbing and physics: the core elements of any last-minute boating design challenge.

One asks oneself: How many pounds of foot pressure is required to move a gallon of water up a pipe of diameter x?

What is the likelihood of the West Marine store producing a promised y-valve?

How long does it take to drive from Davis Islands to St. Petersburg and back during the tourist-enhanced afternoon rush?

These are not particularly difficult questions, but add the element of time tick-tock-tick-tocking to the starting line only four days hence...

Times like this, nobody knows how tempted I am to rush up to my favorite skipper and exclaim, "No man, the BLUE wire! The BLUE wire!"

Of course, he's the hero. A single drop of perspiration may slide down his face as he hesitates with the wire-snips, but he manfully clips the red one and saves the world regardless.

But be that as it may.

Here's a link to the Watertribe Challenger Tracking site (or just click on the picture!).

The event starts Saturday morning at dawn. Charlie "Gaajii" Clifton will be official shoreside support, chasing the team by land as they sprint down the state.

We keep our fingers crossed...

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Volcano, Iguana, Finch

2/17/2020

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According to Henry Nicholls in The Galápagos: A Natural History, part of Charles Darwin's inspiration for his Theory of Evolution came out of bad accounting.

Back in the 1800's, standard operating procedure for a naturalist was to capture and kill any number of small creatures. Pack 'em in salt, pickle 'em, pile 'em into boxes to ship home. All in the interest of scientific study.

So young Darwin, circling the globe as the resident naturalist aboard The Beagle, harvested hundreds of animal specimens and squirreled away crate after crate of fossils and plants.

But there were so many. As it happened, he neglected to properly label some carcasses from the Galapagos.

No doubt he'd never expected there to be much difference between, say, a dark little finch from Floreana and that other one from nearby Isabela.

Poor guy: back home in chilly England, unpacking box after box of corpses and he discovered the awful truth: his sparrows weren't labeled very well.

Or maybe not.

The story varies.

In any case, Galápagos mockingbirds are also distinctively different from mockingbirds on the mainland. And they are different from one Galápagos island to another.

Which leads, step by painful step, to Darwin's theory of evolution and the eventual publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Phew.

Sidebar drama: Interestingly enough, as a Christian, Darwin was troubled by the implications of what he discovered. However, when a naturalist pal of his, Alfred Wallace, came up with a parallel theory, Darwin's misgivings subsided enough for Darwin to polish up his own manuscript and send it to a publisher. It became an overnight sensation.

While we were doing our own exploration in the Galápagos (zero collection of specimens, thousands of photos, great guides, and a tidy ship thanks to AdventureLife), we stumbled across a little mockingbird family drama on Floreana.

I've got a theory or two (as usual) about this scene. It might be a long-held rivalry between the matriarchs who were born sisters but grew to their own greatest rivals. It might be a fresh incursion between an upstart gang and the Boomer family they rejected.

Or maybe it's a daily show staged to entrance the tourists –– 14:00-15:20 beached walrus pups, 15:20-15:40 mockingbird display, 15:40-whenever tortoise crossing.

References
lwww.aboutdarwin.com/voyage/voyage03.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2006.tb01113.x/full

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Where We Live...

11/5/2019

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I moved to Florida after a quarter century of blizzards and farm animals and bumblebees. Ah, never will I forget my first enormous cockroach –– when it flew at my head. The size of a Medjool date with wings and a heft like a badminton shuttlecock.

And fireants and that steep steep learning curve about the volume of living creatures armed to the tropical teeth with venom! Never even mind the gators, crocs, and invasive serpents. Black ice? No, black widow. Rabid skunk? No, rabid drivers, smouldering muck fires, New Year's Eve gunplay.

Anyhow, the charms outweigh the hazards most of the time. For instance, the lowly gecko –– also a transplanted resident –– with her suction cup fingers and translucent belly, who appears on my bathroom sink to remind me of the old proverb:

A cat may look at a king.

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The Way-Back Machine: A Natural Bridge

10/21/2019

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I recently re-discovered this tale I wrote in the early 2000's. This adventure pre-dates the Would-Be Farm (though I was dreaming about it back then!) and some of the principals are no longer with us, but here it is, a retread road-trip...

I'd been helping my sister Sarah fix up her first place up North –– after a long break away from the North Country –– when we decided to spend a day away from the project.

I was in the market for some land, imagining (perhaps foolishly) that I could purchase a chunk of attractive brush with some water feature that would keep Mr. Linton and me happily occupied for the next few decades of summertime vacation.

Turns out, of course, that there are many chunks of brush, some attractive, a few with water features, but almost none in my small price-range offered by anyone actually willing to close a deal.

Anyway, it gave me a nifty excuse for pottering around the back roads of rural Northern New York State.

A classmate from high school was a real-estate agent, and although she was out of town on vacation that week, she had provided me with a stack of property listings to look at. On our day off, my sister and I set a goal of checking out a couple of those places (disappointing: peaceful retreats are rarely located within ear-shot of Fort Drum’s gunnery range).

After the unproductive real estate perambulations, our thoughts turned to something more rewarding. For years, we had heard about the reputed natural bridge over Perch River outside of the village of Dexter.

Even though we’d lived in the area for years, and I had ridden my horse all over that particular corner of creation as a young dandelion, this geographical wonder was unknown to us.

Sarah and I had talked about taking the kayaks up the Perch River, but she'd wracked her arm in a nasty boating accident involving a cleat, a big wake, and her elbow (yarg) earlier in the summer.

We looked at the big gazetteer map of New York, and lo and behold “natural bridge” was right THERE in small print, where the thin thread of Perch River took a stitch underground.

So that's where we headed.

I was driving down Middle Road. My sister was navigating and she said, "Hey, turn here."

A mailbox marked the turn, and I said, "Sis, come on, this is someone’s driveway."

Implacable, she repeated, "Turn in."

The driveway was long and twisty and really private. A few yards farther along, a deer stand loomed over a field. I said, "Sis, they hunt."

She said, "Keep going."

With no place to turn around –– and I didn’t like to back up around the curved driveway –– I kept going.

A few yards later, a big carved black bear held a “Welcome Friends” sign.

My sister pointed and said, "But look, they are friendly!"

"Yeah, but it’s someone’s driveway, sis...This could go very badly."

She said, "Look, there’s a spot. Park the car. Don’t be a candy-ass."

I did as she directed, since she is the older sister.

And we got out of the car with our water bottles and our hiking boots and all we heard was birdsong, wind in the treetops, and the whine of a distant chainsaw.

We consulted the map and oriented ourselves toward the river. We were preparing to trespass.

She’s like, "Okay, here’s our story: We are here looking for a friend from high school, and have gotten turned around somehow."

The sound of the chainsaw drew suddenly much closer. I though, gosh, maybe I should have availed myself of the facilities when we stopped at the library in Dexter.

Then a voice: "Helloooo!"

We stopped in our guilty tracks.

A kindly looking woman with a suspicious expression on her face came down the driveway.

"Hi," we all said.

"How can I help you?" she said.

Without even exchanging a look, my sister and I dropped the lie.

We explained that we grew up around here, and we heard that there is a natural bridge over the Perch River somewhere nearby, and we were really hoping to find it.

The woman said, "Why yes, there is. Do you have a half an hour or so?"

Next thing you know, the woman has collected her husband, who pilots a zippy ATV down the driveway to pick us up and they are taking us on a tour all over the 400 acres their son and his wife purchased a few years back.

There’s Perch river. There’s the bridge -- a smidge underwhelming, but aha! ––there’s the river emerging again from the other side of the natural bridge. There’s an old stone fence. Maybe the fence butts up to the Hall’s farm ––The Hall’s farm that was probably our Riggs family farm a hundred years ago. Maybe one of our great-great uncles stacked those very stones.

I mention the Pflugheber’s place, where my mom and I and the horse and the dog lived for a time.

Why, the husband knows Ed Pflugheber! The husband retired from the Watertown Daily Times.

Why then he must know my cousin Scott Smith, who works at the Times.

Indeed he does. He knows Toots Carbone, too, my buddy Care's Dad, our next-door neighbor on the Point.

We talk about the St. Lawrence River, and my sister points to her tee-shirt, which features a snap from our family history: Herbie Ward and Daddo with a string of fish on the dock at Fisher’s Landing.

Well, wouldn't you know the husband knows Herbie Ward.

Small world!

As it happens, the husband is connected to parents of classmates of ours.

And their daughter-in-law? Turns out she is my vacationing real-estate agent/high-school classmate. We trespassed on her land.

Hours later, our unexpected hosts raid my real-estate agent’s fridge for beer and my sister gets them to take pictures of the two of us in the ATV, playing with my real-estate agent's dog, and lounging on the porch with our purloined beers.

Those photos of us having our disreputable way with other people's porches, off-road recreational vehicle, and beer might possibly have been taken on an early cell phone that was unable to resist water when it went swimming.

But maybe one of those images will resurface, possibly on the tee-shirt of one of the great-grand nephews or nieces, who will point to it while trespassing and say, "Perhaps you know these two characters? Our aunts?"

And here's hoping it will parlay into a free pass, a tour, an anecdote.

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Transpac –– Oh! Ho! Ho! It's Magic.

7/29/2019

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Oh, Oh...Never believe it's not so. This is truly not one of the better tunes to have playing on repeat in the gooey jukebox between a person's ears, but alas.

Plus, since Pilot included two former Bay City Rollers, this song is extra Velcro®ish.

Wait, seriously, how can I resist posting a YouTube of those classic Bay City Rollers tunes?

I can't...but later in the post. It will be a special treat and possible ear-worm infestation.

But back to this particular song.

Pilot's soaring and incessant declaration ("Oh! Ho! Ho! It's magic!") played in counterpoint to the couple of weeks of prep and racing of the 2019 Transpacific ocean Race –– the Transpac. Because of course, my favorite skipper sailed this 2250-mile-long offshore race aboard the famous Bill-Lee-designed Merlin*.

*Quick word about Merlin: this is the Merlin that set the course record in 1977.

It's the Merlin after which the Merlin Trophy is named.

The current owner is named Chip Merlin –– you can recognize him by his enormous white grin in every picture of him on the boat.

He acquired the boat about a year and a half ago...I think if there's a famous boat with your name on it, you might just have to get it.

The boat could hardly have been better prepared for the trip from Long Beach, California to Honolulu, Hawaii: the crew included two fire-fighters among her experienced and talented team; new sails; higher degrees in engineering, MacGyvering, and meterology; a redesigned physical plant and dozens of Pacific passages under her keel; extra duct tape and A & D ointment; and the latest in safety gear and information technology

And yet.

It's not a safe world and we all need some good luck to get us along. Sailors especially.

So while playing brave little toaster on shore, I wasn't about to ignore the encouraging messages of a magical world.

Just because it's magical thinking doesn't mean it's not true, right? Like the song says. Oh! Ho! Ho!

In a mere 8 days, Merlin's race was run.

Several Transpac boats retired because of technical difficulties. One of the catamarans ran into a mysterious nighttime something and tore a hole in her bow. Another boat actually sank (the sailors were rescued by their competitors, naturally, because, well –– sailors). Nobody, thank goodness, was lost at sea.

Merlin finished a quite respectable third; their stories range from the sublime (rainbows around the moon) to the ridiculous (anything to do with using the head, also, two people beaned by flying fish). They shredded some sail and lost their electronics for a bit, but it worked out safely in the end.

Here's the link to the Transpac YC's amazing images of Merlin.

And a brace of BCR for your listening enjoyment:

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Transpac––Modern Technology

7/14/2019

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When Spawn takes to the water and swims to Key Largo, I –– and some others we know –– feverishly tap the "refresh" button again and again to track the boat's progress.

After a couple of days of this kind of behavior, shore-crew feels as worn-out and raspy as the boys look at the end of the Everglades Challenge.

But that's only a couple of hundred miles ("only"! Listen to me, cool as a cucumber! Ha ha ha.) while the Transpac race runs for a couple of thousand miles. So with the 68-foot Merlin setting sail this afternoon...

Interested parties need to pace themselves. Seven days, ten days? Jeesh. That's a lot of click-click-clicking. That's potentially a lot of sleep-deprived calendar days –– even days set near Hollywood or Waikiki.

But I am happy to say there's a super-cool tracking site that shows all the boats in the several fleets.
Okay, super-cool –– but with a 4-hour delay, and the updates seem to come only every hour or so. So perhaps medium-cool.

Anyway. It allows those of us watching the race to follow the track and to guess at the weather. Plus, the class leaders get a little crown over their name. Which is nice.

Here's the link.