After a six hour drive to Popham Beach, ME, our stuff still had a long way to go. Naturally we arrived at dead low tide and we had to lower everything by boat hook, including two cats, off the fixed pier to the Seguin Ferry below. On the other hand, low tide exposed the beach so offloading was easy – with the help of friends.
Our Aldo Leopold bench continues to stand watch over glorious sunsets.
We are bound for Maine to finish the season at Seguin Island Lighthouse and close up the island and buildings for the winter. We will take 2 ferries and a dinghy and hope to keep our stuff (and cats) dry.
The bridge above is the new Champlain Bridge built with a design voted on by it’s users. Isn’t it pretty? It’s not done yet but will be soon.
On a recent trip to Washington, DC I almost became a prisoner of the Metro Station. I enjoyed using the Metro and it took me all over the “District”, Arlington, VA, and Oxon Hill, MD but I never understood the toll system.
The stations were clean and quiet and I got a seat on several trains. The platforms were too dark to read the paper but perhaps that doesn’t matter anymore since most people were reading backlit I-phones and Blackberries. Or maybe it’s just MY eyes.
The curious part to me, however, is the payment. Unlike the NYC subways, you have to swipe your card again to leave the station. I guess it’s more like the thruway where you pay for distance traveled. This was never clearly posted.
On one trip when the swipe machine stole my card, I thought, “No big deal” because it let me enter the station. When it came time to leave, there was no way to open the turnstile. I was chastised by the clerk who let me out. My next trip, I held tightly onto my card, only to find there wasn’t enough money on it to spring me out. I posted bail and finally was released.
Fresh bread
I maintain the habit adopted on Deal Island of baking almost all our bread, english muffins and bagels. I’s a good thing since bread always gets crushed in the backpack and we still have to walk over the bridge. There’s actually very little hands-on time for bread baking and I use a fool proof recipe that for better or worse, tastes like Wonder bread. This is a far cry from my early days of bread baking in the ’80’s when failed loaves could kill the chipmunks that found them tossed outside the house.
It requires about 20 minutes of attention during a day when I’ll be around the house for at 3 hours. Ten minutes to mix it up, 10 minutes to knead, 1 minute to shape the loaves and that’s it. The rest of the time is spent hanging around and waiting for it to rise in the bowl, the pans and then to bake. The secret is to add the flour gradually because it’s much easier to add more flour, if the dough is too sticky, then to add water, if it’s too stiff. I found this bread recipe on the internet, which makes two large loaves and swear by it. I splurged on two bread pans from Williams Sonoma but the old, well-seasoned pans on Deal Island which worked just as well. They just need to be large with square corners.
After the dough has risen in the bowl, you divide it in two and pat each portion into a rectangle. Then roll it up, pinch the ends and put them in the oiled pans to let them rise. That’s it. Nothing beats the smell of fresh baked bread. Bread machines create the same fresh baked smell but the loaves are awkward and small. There’s something magical about working with your hands and yeast to create something so delicious.
Kneaded dough
Doubled in bowl
Shaping the loaf
In the pan before second rise
Oven ready
We awakened to the sound of heavy equipment on our fifth wedding anniversary. Wood is the traditional gift and I revealed to Tim that my gift to him was a new bridge. OK not really wood but close enough. Sadly the bridge has not been delivered yet but all the preliminary work was done yesterday including pouring four cement pilings for its support. With a mere meter wide path remaining down the middle of the bridge approaches, what better time to decide to go canoeing, with the boat 1/2 mile up the road. The wheels worked fine on the trip out and the road crew was very accommodating, even offering to carry the canoe over the bridge. I would have liked to take one of them with me for the portage! But alas they wouldn’t fit in our new little canoe.
Paul Smith's campus
We left from Paul Smith’s College located on the Lower St. Regis Lake. It was a perfect day and a lovely paddle, we took a loop through Spitfire Lake, past Rabbit Island where Dr. Trudeau conducted experiments on the effect of the environment on TB in rabbits, Upper St. Regis Lake, North Bay and then….the carry. It started steeply with lots of roots and the wheels didn’t work as nicely as on our road and I was wishing for the road crew. I wimped out and Tim ended up becoming a canoe head. He had the canoe on his shoulders but he couldn’t see much and his voice sounded like he was in a tin can. But it did the trick. I was sure we were going to drift over the falls at the put-in and back paddled furiously, much to Tim’s amusement. Along the way we heard several loons, lots of yapping little dogs, saw beautiful boathouses and camps, a heron fishing at the falls, oodles of mahogany lake boats and stately Adirondack gaff rigged sloops. They are Idem sailboats designed specifically for the St. Regis Yacht Club in 1899 to race in light winds.
Adirondack sloop
The bridge separating from shore
We spoke with engineers last week about our closed bridge. I thought they told us we may be getting a new bridge. Or we were maybe getting a bridge. But what they were actually talking about was a Mabey Support Bridge as a stopgap measure. It seems like it arrives, prefabricated and is rolled over the new bridge relying on a longer portion of the road as its support. It’s a good thing too because the rain we had the past couple of days is really undermining the support and the adjacent road. Our neighbors walked home last night and luckily missed this new gaping 15 foot deep hole.
Since the High Peaks were closed this weekend, we explored our backyard and the views were beautiful. We walked up to a very large beaver pond behind our house. The dam raised the water level by six feet and the beavers had worked on some enormous trees. Now it explains why I heard a tree fall one day from home.
The view above our house
Beaver dam with pond behind it
Tim dwarfed by an abandoned log
Tree fungi
What would a beaver outing be without some fungi?
Whose stool?
It’s a mystery to me but here’s our third apple!
We had a chance to caretake in our backyard, almost. We spent last weekend as volunteer hosts at Johns Brook Lodge, three and a half miles into the woods. We had a huge tent on a platform, near trees carved with bear scratches. Someone said they scratch trees to mark their maximum height to gauge their prey? or to see who is the biggest bear around? I wanted to get a ladder and make my own marks way up high.
I now have 3 and 2/3 “46’s” under my belt. 46 mountains in the High Peaks region thought, when they were originally selected, to be over 4000 feet high. To make up that 1/3, when I thought the view was just fine from below the summit, I’ll have to hike the whole hill again. So only 43 left to go! The weather was mostly fine, the water, crisp and clear and the food at Johns Brook Lodge, abundant and delicious.
Back at the ranch, I ate half our apple crop!
After a wet start, the summer has been beautiful. I’ve enjoyed a few hikes and bicycle rides, not nearly as many as I should but I’m working on this quilt…and working and even got to crew a couple of days on the Friendship Schooner, Whistling Man, with Tim. He got a big kick telling people I was his mate on and off the boat. I refrained from saying he was always my captain! We had nice wind the first day and dead calm the next. I had to enlist paying customers to help me raise the sails. Kids that came on the boat really only wanted to check out the head.
We spotted this porcupine lumbering in the woods when we went for a hike on a quest to find some beaver dams I had seen earlier in the spring. He wasn’t in a rush and didn’t even flinch when I whistled for Tim who had gone on ahead. He casually climbed this tree and perched there and watched us as we entered the woods.
I had a couple of non-believers when I kept saying I was sure I had seen the dams on the Beaver Flow trail. Wouldn’t you think? It turns out they are near the Beaver Flow trail but not exactly on it. We had to bushwack quite a bit along the flow to find their work after we made a phone call for better directions.
Finally we were rewarded with lots of evidence of beaver work and at least one broken and two functioning dams.
The fungi take over where the beaver left off.
These are the country roads we ride close to home. Luckily this was only uphill in one direction.
I didn’t know dragon flies came in bi-plane varieties
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I am not sure if he had it before, but Tim’s recent fascination with log construction extends to logs cut and used by beavers. We’ve watched The best dam movie, about beavers, and visited his favorite beaver dam on route 73, more than once. It’s right on the road and has defied man’s attempts to stop it, dammit.
In the meantime, fluorescent fungi take a slow approach.
I was under the weather the other day and it was hot out so I sat in our cave-like basement and watched cooking shows. Cooking as a competitive event takes the fun out of it. Except of course when a contestant wanted to sample something he was making in the blender while it was blending. You get the picture.
One show’s final challenge was eggs benedict in 20 minutes. I decided to give it a try since I had made a fresh batch of english muffins. I pulled out my good old Julia Child cookbook and away I went. The canadian bacon turned out perfectly and I lost a few pounds whisking eggs when the temperature was 90 degrees.
Then I decided, Elizabeth Zimmermann is to knitting as Julia Child is to cooking. That’s why I am a fan of both.
Island and North Country Life 