Playing Outside

Gettin' Salty

2009-08-11T09:43:00.003-04:00

Scarborough River spreads out in a broad, shallow bay behind Pine Point. It makes a great launching site with access to sheltered waters and the open water of Saco Bay.
The prudent mariner prepares for any reasonable contingency. It makes you look like a geek beside the happy-go-lucky casual boaters in a bathing suit and perhaps a PFD. I try to pack quickly and dwindle to a speck on the horizon before my preparations invite comment.

The sky looked strange. The forecast told us to watch for possible thunderstorms. This paddling venue gives us a good view of the sky. Clouds built and dissipated without reaching a critical point. The breeze seemed stiff when we started, but faded. We skirted the shore toward the channel at the river mouth. The wind carried the smell of salt air, diesel fumes and faint whiffs of marijuana.

We crossed the channel as the last of the flood tide swirled over rocks on the far shore. Large fish we could not identify leaped clear of the water as they fed on smaller fish they had corralled in the channel current. Terns circled above the choppy water.

Laurie always doubts her skills and worries more than necessary. Then she performs any explained maneuver perfectly well. We planned our channel crossing to account for the current, wind and boat traffic. The channel is not a busy one, but the boats that use it are piloted by either commercial harvesters of fish and lobster or the typical oblivious doofus who has just spent hours churning his children on inner tubes in endless loops behind a powerful motor boat. The working watermen should not have to accommodate recreational paddlers, and the doofuses can't be relied on to notice us.

We paddled along the beach headed out toward Prout's Neck. Sails were going up on 420-class dinghies beside a float. A large powerboat trailing tubes loaded with children swept in from farther out in the bay and started to do laps around the area we were trying to cross. We aimed close to the beach, hoping the boat driver would avoid the land, even if we remained invisible.

Hugging the shore we also cut behind the junior program sailors in the 420s, and others in Optimist dinghies closer to the yacht club itself. The 420 float is actually many yards out into the anchorage, not connected to shore. The Opti float is also separate. It may ground at low tide on the pleasant sand of the bay floor.

The sailing instructors in their launches seemed no warmer toward kayakers than most other power boaters seem to be. Our course very briefly cut between them and their shore base, but that had seemed better to me than cutting between them and their charges in the dinghies. We pulled through quickly.

Just beyond the yacht club we crossed one more small indented cove before suddenly facing a more distinct swell. The warning sound of white water over rocks announced that we had reached more exposed coastline. Laurie said she did not want to go further out. She waited in the last cove while I took a look at what lay beyond.

The swell was barely more than a foot high, with a small wind-chop on top of it. I never dropped into a trough deep enough to block my view. Even so, the waves made a dangerous break over the barely submerged rocks at this particular corner. I went outside that before curving eastward to look down toward more dramatic rocks on the outer shore of the neck. After a few minutes holding position on the restless waves I turned back to rejoin Laurie.

Tubing Boat One had been joined by Tubing Boat Two. The junior program sailors had moved to their racing areas. We cut through the anchorage on a more direct course now that we would not interfere with them. That still left the tubing boats. They cycled on an irregular oval at varying intervals. We watched them for several minutes before making our dash toward the beach. They shifted closer to shore as we approached it, but that was probably coincidental. Their course was dumbbell-shaped, so it veered away from us as we moved further from its end.

Saco Bay shores are made of soft, white sand. We landed on the beach for a bite to eat and a bit of wading in the chilly water.

While we sat on shore, we watched a seagull walk up and investigate the untended belongings of some beachgoers who had walked away. We would have prevented any vandalism or larceny. The first gull, who was later joined by a second, peered into tote bags and pecked at shiny sunglasses, but found nothing to take and left nothing but webbed footprints.

We launched again at slack tide, to cross the channel for a cruise along the teeming shore of the extended environs of Old Orchard Beach. Human beings make an amazing amount of noise, playing at the sea side. From a hundred yards or more off shore it becomes a wordless chatter and screeching. A crowd of mammals lies on the sand. Some run up and down along the beach. Others leap and lumber into the breaking waves. One observes feeding, the preambles to mating, some play, some aggression, competition for territory and interaction with other species. Shore birds wheel above the noisy herd, hoping to swoop down on undefended food.

We paddled smoothly outside the zone of bobbing heads and reaching arms, beyond the sound of intelligible words and meaningful eye contact. It was a great way to cruise the beach.

Before the ebb could set in too strongly, we turned back toward the channel. We would not have to cross it, but people fishing from the jetty cast lines far out into the channel. We would not test their patience or risk their sense of humor by ripping along right under their noses. I eyeballed the lineup to spot the best arm and set a course just outside his longest cast.

Back inside, we aimed for our launching beach. We easily overcame the faint pressure of the early ebb tide.

I always have trouble ending a boat trip. Even if I'm tired, hungry and ready to rest, the difference between afloat and ashore lures me to stay afloat a little longer. We paddled a little beyond the beach and boat ramp to look at some grass flats.

It's fun to float

The day was full of classic shorescapes and water scenes. Artistic compositions invite the eye every minute in any direction.

After we took the boats out and put on some dry shorts we found a great little seafood shack on a side street. The fact that all the cars in the parking lot had local plates tipped us off that it was the good stuff. We had a couple of lobster rolls, fries and some iced tea. A very friendly black jumping spider kept climbing my leg until I gave it a lift on a plastic spoon to the table top. Jumping spiders always remind me of cats. This one was fairly large, with iridescent blue eyes and a red marking on the top of its abdomen (not a red hourglass underneath)

Our next objectives were corn and tomatoes, and soft-serve ice cream. The veggies were for supper and the ice cream was, well, ice cream. As it happened, we did not get tomatoes, but we got some excellent corn, which we roasted and ate along with Swiss chard and kale chopped and cooked with garlic and ginger for our supper when we got home.

Paddle and Swim at P-Lake

2009-07-27T17:21:00.004-04:00

Aunt and nephew go over some basic strokes after launching from the narrow beach right next to Route 153. We're probably in Maine here.

Squilly in the Loon.

Forward stroke.

Where to now?

Squilly tries the big boat. It is better. Now what do we do?

Squilly under attack!

Squilly under water!

When the morning grayness finally broke, before the clouds could build for the afternoon thunderstorms, we went to Province Lake for a little paddling and splashing. Access is very easy, with the road right by the beach. The lake basin has a big sky view, so the weather would not be able to sneak up on us.

Severe storms have hit parts of the state, but not our neighborhood this time. Things looked like they were getting exciting a few minutes after we got home, but never developed further than a couple of sharp rumbles and some turbulent clouds. Little micro power outages keep disrupting the electronics momentarily. Strange weather.

Squilly leaves late tomorrow afternoon after a week here. We're lucky he likes just kicking back here. I can't imagine how it would be to occupy someone who needed constant entertainment.

A second week would probably drive him around the bend.

Conservation Commission Hosts "Fish Fry"

2008-07-14T17:46:00.004-04:00

photos by Laurie Meeder

Volunteers from the Effingham Conservation Commission assisted biologists from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and environmental scientist Rick Van de Poll in electroshock fish sampling today on the Pine River and Wilkinson Brook. The sampling is part of the Wildlife Action Plan study in Effingham, which is the state's first.

The team entered the river downstream from a beaver dam on Long Point in the Lost Valley development and worked up against the current. Fish and Game personnel operated three battery-powered units and directed the netting.

The shock briefly stuns fish and other aquatic creatures which the netters can scoop up and place in buckets. It causes far fewer fatalities than other sampling methods and yields a vastly larger number of specimens according to Van de Poll. He and the other ECC volunteers were surprised, however, that the ones gathered today did not float as visibly as he had observed them to do in previous samplings. That and the silt made the netting challenging.

The river bottom contour changed radically in places. The bottom varied between sand and mud, with boulders and water-logged tree trunks. A knee-deep section could give way to a hole several feet deep. But the day was warm, and so was the river. The only danger was the electricity, but no one got shocked in any of their dunkings. The shockers responded instantly to any outcry or large splash.

Species included brook trout, pickerel, yellow perch, fallfish, white sucker and a couple of crayfish.

Naturally I netted the primo crustacean for the day. Anyone surprised?

After lunch, which did not include seafood, the team moved on to Wilkinson Brook, a much narrower stream. I managed to forget my camera when I nipped home on the lunch break to pick up some other things I'd wished I had, like binoculars (still looking for that heron rookery), so I have no pictures of that jungle slog. For a small stream it had some surprisingly deep holes. We also missed capturing a brook trout large enough to laugh off our puny voltage. We did gather a number of burbot, more perch, a catfish and more brookies.

Eagle Hunt Delayed by Sparrow

2008-07-07T11:03:00.002-04:00

The Anti-Eagle

I was pretty wiped out after work on the Fourth of July and had to take care of a few things, so I ran out of time for the eagle hunt. I'm hoping to get to it today.

Work on a holiday weekend is hectic enough. My duties grew more complex when the patriarch of the shop called me over while we were all out front watching Wolfeboro's parade.

"There's a baby bird here that fell out of the nest, and these kids are all upset and can't enjoy the parade. Can't you do something about it?" he said.

I suppose he imagined I would take it out back and club it with a tire iron to "put it out of its misery." You'd be miserable, too, if you'd fallen out of your safe nursery into a scary, noisy world full of huge creatures, indifferent at best, hostile at worst. One young thug had been winging rocks at the bird.

What I saw was a viable nestling, if only I could get it back to its parents or into a suitably quiet environment. I scooped it up and carried it into the shop. We lock up during the parade, so I had more than an hour to work this problem in peace.

I looked for succulent bugs I could squish in imitation of regurgitated food, but all I saw was ants. I've never seen a bird chow down on ants. Rather than waste a lot of time on it, I moved on to rehydrating the little bugger. He (she?) would take drips from a paper towel. Then I went on line to look for a rehabilitator. I'd dealt with a woman in Madison a couple of years ago with a young squirrel. I hoped I might find someone closer, but I had to start somewhere.

One phone call at a time, to Madison, then Meredith, I was able to arrange foster care and get instructions to help keep the bird alive. Every ten minutes I dripped diluted sports drink onto its beak until closing time. Then my associate in the workshop, who had overslept and had to drive instead of bike, kindly transported it to a rendezvous with the rehabilitator.

In the early stages of this process, when I still cradled the bird in my right hand, I saw bird lice swarming up my arm. I was pretty sure I interdicted all of them before they invaded my armpit and moved on to hairier pastures. Once I had the bird in a nest cup to await transport I executed the straggling lice with a bike spoke heated over a butane lighter as they crawled up the tissue paper away from the nestling. But when I got home, Laurie suggested a thorough shower and immediate laundering of all my garments. Probably a better idea than going paddling in my buggy shirt. Then it was 5 p.m. and I'd really had enough. Figure a minimum of two hours start to finish for the most cursory trip to Province Lake...not worth it. I still had to work full hours on Saturday.

My associate reported that the he passed the bird, still cheeping, to its next custodian. So it made it that far.

Herons and Eagles

2008-07-01T14:17:00.005-04:00

As the designated crazy who paddles and hikes inconvenient areas, I get the call to look for things where other people probably won't. This week it's herons and eagles nesting along the jungle shores of two minor rivers.

Following reports of adult heron pairs on Pine River, I was asked to check downstream from the Elm Street bridge for signs of a rookery.

Pine River meanders so tightly that you can often look onto the next bend from the one you're rounding, unless the vegetation is too thick or the water level drops you too far below bank height. It cuts through glacial till, undermining the trees that grow along it. Nearly every bank-side tree can look forward to falling in eventually. Some fall along the course. Most fall across. It's surprising anyone can paddle through at all. There have been years in which it didn't seem worth the trouble.

Nature never stands still. The logjams cook down. Floods add or remove debris. On many of the more permanent ones, different water levels offer different options for crossing. At high water, float over a low spot. At low low water, limbo underneath. At varying mid levels the climb over may be harder or easier depending on what odd projections and additional logs might be exposed.

Yesterday the river was up at a high medium level, following several days of afternoon downpours. The swirling current was a dark reddish brown. The flecks stayed below the surface, so it didn't look like coffee with cream, but more like onion soup. Cold onion soup.

I hit the first log jam right where I expected it. It's been there for enough years that I thought it might have rotted down enough to let me pass easily. Instead I had to hop out of Scruffy, the kayak that loves to go sideways, onto a fat log that turned out not to be as buoyant as its bulk might suggest. I didn't go in, because I move very carefully, but it complicated my crossing.

One of the owners of my local Java haunt came by, walking her chocolate lab along the bank. She and her husband own a house formerly owned by other friends of mine, which includes a fair amount of unbuildable shore frontage. She said she thought it got worse downstream. As unwelcome as this news was, it still fell within normal variation on the Pine. I was doing this for Science. If Rick, the naturalist, could stick to a compass course through a chest-deep, basically uncharted bog, I could crawl through a few logjams.

A long stretch went by with no major obstacles. I'd reached the shore frontage of the shooting preserve on river right. I hadn't looked at it in years, since we aimless explorers were posted out. Early on they had bulldozed the bank to make what appeared to be a canoe launch, but that has grown back in. Only the signs forbidding entry, peeling from every other tree, reminded me of what had been a fine place to wander and watch the post-glacial terrain evolve.

A side channel invited entry but contained no nest sites. Then I came to the second stopper.

This picture is taken from the bank after I had hauled the boat out on that tree trunk.

A couple of boat lengths dragging through the grass and I was underway again.

Below that jam I passed a lagoon to the left. Someone's building a magnificent dwelling overlooking it, so I doubted herons would find it attractive.

Herons like tall pines, I was told. I figured since they're large and stork-like, they might have similar tastes, so I looked at all tall trees. I found nothing.

The forest opens out into flood plain with isolated hardwoods, many dead from the ice storm of 1998 and various flooding episodes. There are tons of birds. I saw one adult great blue heron, wood ducks, some other crested water bird, a kingfisher, a selection of woodpeckers, warblers, redwing blackbirds, cedar waxwings, phoebes, grackles and more.

When I reached an area I knew could be surveyed from roads on shore, I headed back upstream. Traveling two directions gave me another angle from which to tell there were no nests. I was briefly tempted to push on down to the public boat launch at Route 25 and call for a pickup, but I was less than halfway there. And I believe that you should get yourself out of whatever you get yourself into.

Paddling upstream into obstacles is easier in some ways than coming down on them with the flow. You don't get pushed into things. On the other hand, you have to pull for every inch. The crossings were a bit trickier, but somewhat familiar.

With arms and shoulders sore from the sudden surge of paddling, I pulled my way back to the launching site. We paddled the lower Pine on Sunday and ended up racing thunderstorms home.

The eagles may have to wait. These jungle cruises have a way of eating up time, even if you don't cover much ground. I have chores to do to get ready for next week.

Looking for bobcats

2008-05-13T14:47:00.010-04:00

The center of Effingham is a mountain range unbroken by roads. Lacking waterfront, commerce or industry, the town's land has gone back largely to forest over the years. With little to attract disruptive development, the town's more or less functional ecosystems may end up being its best fortune.

The trick with environmental protection is to find the selfish human angle that accidentally brings along losing propositions like aesthetics or wildlife. As humans figure out that most of their drinking water comes from underground, they give more scrutiny to what goes on top of that ground. A natural environment produces better results than a built-up one. Even if you only drink beer and never bathe, clean water makes better beer.

The shriveling artificial lakes in the American west show that reservoirs don't hold water as well as aquifers do. And aquifers show the trickle-down theory in action. A lot of precipitation falls over a wide area and soaks down into the various layers that hold it for later use. To preserve recharge areas, a lot of land needs to be left alone. What luck. We happen to have a lot of land being left alone already.

This area and adjacent sections of Maine are already getting attention from groups like The Nature Conservancy because of the large tracts of restored forest and areas relatively uncut by roads, allowing not only for geological and hydrological function, but wildlife habitat and corridors as well. So interested towns and regional groups are taking stock of what is here and what could be here to set priorities for areas to protect.

The official surveyors need permission to enter someone's land and look around, so not every parcel gets examined in detail by an educated eye. The scientists depend on traipsing wanderers who cross unmarked property boundaries on an innocent bushwhack and might see and photograph sites and sights of interest.

Last Sunday, Mrs Umm and I headed out to a place she'd never been, on the advice of a naturalist that it looked like a promising area for bobcat denning sites. The naturalist is conducting an inventory of habitat types in town, but doesn't have clearance for this particular spot.

The search area was more than a mile from home and required about 1,000 feet of climbing to go up and over the peak behind us and start up the one beyond it. The slope is not very steep on average, but there's no trail. The leaves and black flies are both coming out in the sudden burst typical of northern New England. We should have gone two weeks ago, but weather and schedules did not cooperate.

The naturalist had told us to look for old porcupine dens that a bobcat would take over. We found several on our way up the long slope of the home mountain, complete with their scat.

One of the dens

Other scat was probably owl pellets. It was hard to tell, because they had dried to crumbly whiteness.

From the summit of our home mountain there was no clear line down into the col. That side was logged in the 1990s, allowing just enough time for it to grow back into sapling hell. The areas that weren't logged are still choked with undergrowth. We picked our way through the least tangled sections, trying to stay on course.

We found this rock wall in the middle of nowhere.

At the bottom of the col we intersected an abandoned ATV trail. An old logging road comes up from the paved road about a mile down on the other side of the ridge from our house. This trail continued that line over the col and disappeared down into young growth on the other side. It didn't help us much. We left it soon to head over toward the steep, rocky, overgrown face of the nameless peak where the naturalist thought we might find the cats.

With the new leaves and voracious bugs, we couldn't see very far or hold still to listen very long. Nothing in view looked like any kind of den. We'll have to go back when the leaves are off to get a better look.

It was a beautiful day for a hike, anyway. And on the way back down on our side of the mountain we saw two porcupines in a tree. One was climbing hurriedly up from the ground while the other one waited, looking very casual on a high branch.

The woods are full of wildlife this year. We had a lot of deer during the winter, and heard coyotes. Now we see a lot of turkeys, squirrels and assorted small birds, and have strong evidence of at least one bear.

Ignoring the Window (left over from late winter)

2007-03-23T14:11:00.000-04:00

I have become like the many who spend their time shut up inside, staring into the infinite window of a computer screen because the view out the real window has so little to offer.

Here at this particular job, I can look at the near view of invasive species planted as shrubbery or raise my gaze to the house-raped hillsides, once the province of unbroken woods.

Expensive, impractical houses on the heights have become the new waterfront. Some of these erstwhile castle builders try to justify their foolish grab for prominent placement by saying that people lived up there a hundred years ago, so it's an established use.

Yes, people lived up there. And by choice they moved down again. And that was when people accepted a lower standard of comfort. If the horses or oxen could haul the wagon up the muddy ruts on twenty-percent grade, the road was passable. If heavy rains washed it out, the road would be laboriously rebuilt with pick and shovel. No one had to have broadband internet, perfect climate control or on-demand access to high speed roadways, regardless of the season.

Egotistical development of this sort has not yet managed to destroy the town where I live, though it has begun. Not even a good recession will save us this time, because the kind of person who wants to live up where everyone can see them has plenty of money. A recession will just bring their costs down. It will help them.

The Gathering Storm (Unposted in March)

2007-03-19T10:44:00.001-04:00

The storm wind rakes the trees already. The heavy snow will not arrive for hours, but the trees sway as the surging gusts rush over them. Standing in the woodshed I remembered how this weather used to excite me.

I came here to get away from civilization, but it has followed me. To help guide what I cannot stop, I have had to spend more time with it. Gradually the old connection grows brittle, my own woods unfamiliar as I do not visit them. Mice move into the boats, mildew gathers on the backpacks, tents and climbing gear.

The weather now just goes on outside windows. It's something to drive through, not play in or spend much time observing

The Sensual Sailor

2007-02-13T16:52:00.000-05:00

Years crept by as I lived inland. Then one day I drove to the coast. Long before I saw the water, I smelled it.

Lakes, even Great Lakes, can't equal the bewitching fertility of the sea. The wind carries the scent of life miles inland. I homed on it as if seeking the waters of my birth.

The water had been an arena of fear. When first I floated on it in a small boat, I felt my helplessness. Terror gripped me and jerked me in its claws faster than any rational thought could overtake it. I had wanted to be there, but visceral panic overwhelmed me, followed by shame and a sense of failure.

Just so you know where I came from. For some reason, I felt the water's deadly potential as if I'd experienced it before. At age six or seven, I had no thoughts of reincarnation. I just knew I had no control, strapped into a bulky kapok life jacket that felt like it would drag me to the bottom, stuffed down beside the daggerboard trunk of an eight-foot pram.

Later, larger, though still small, alone in the same boat, I stared into the green depths as the bottom dropped out of sight in Camden Harbor, and felt again that I was tempting the forces of nature to punish my impudence for daring to stick a spar and sail up into the fretful wind that swirled beneath steely clouds on what was supposed to be a summer day.

Still, something kept me coming back.

With so much clutter in my mind, I had difficulty absorbing the subtleties of racing. Junior programs were built around racing. Victory at sea was the goal.

I raced. I grew. I learned how to operate the boat, and some of the strategy and tactics. But mostly I relaxed in my growing confidence and absorbed the sensations of sailing and observed the environment as an object of technical interest and a work of art. Our finish placings suffered accordingly.

While many race days stand out, so do the other experiences, seeing Portuguese men-o-war floating in Biscayne Bay and catching glimpses of wild dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, or surfing across the sand bar into Dunedin Pass while all the other boats wended their way around a serpentine channel in careful single file. Indeed, from a lifetime on the water I have countless memories, and few of them are of glorious victory. They are of glorious existence.

Racing got me out there in conditions I might not have tackled. It was a bit like having a job. My skipper wanted to be in the event and I wanted to help him be there. I wouldn't mind a good performance, either. But there were so many distractions in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and various estuarine waters. We also sailed in lakes.

I love the lift and drive when we capture a puff of wind and hike out over the rail. I love the more violent acceleration downwind on a reach, catching waves that throw the boat ahead. Are we winning? I don't know. But we're moving right along.

One day, in strong winds, we rounded our leeward mark, which was also the starting line pin, just as the whole fleet of Flying Dutchmen got the gun. We came up to the wind and had to throw an instant tack as the surging flotilla leaped toward us all together on starboard tack.

Another day, not racing, I saw a Star coming out of Annapolis. We were well out toward the open bay. The Star was on starboard tack. We held course until we were right under the Star's bow and tacked at the perfect time, but the bigger boat's large and powerful rig overrode us like we weren't even there. I was laughing like a maniac the whole time, because I knew it was probably hopeless. The Star crew was laughing too, because they knew I was joking just for trying it.

All the stories would make a book. I could find enough gripping excitement to scare at least the inexperienced reader. And sometimes it's just nice to remember a good day on the water.

Territory

2006-12-15T14:28:00.000-05:00

Idly Googling on a deadly slow day at the shop, I punched in Dolly Sods, then Roaring Plains, two places in which I began my backpacking education.

The Sods was little known when two Sods regulars initiated a couple of us to its mysteries. Most DC area hikers only seemed to go as far as Shenandoah National Park, or perhaps the George Washington National Forest.

Preparing for our first trip, a field trip from the bike shop in Alexandria where we more or less worked, Art and Scotty primed us with tales of a weird landscape, scoured by the wind as the bones of deer and free-range sheep bleached in the weather. We would be far more likely to see animals than people, they assured us. They had been going there since high school, and only saw the people they brought with them on any particular trip.

They were as surprised as we were when we found quite a few people out there on a harsh October weekend. Maybe it was Columbus Day Weekend. I didn't pay much attention to the holidays back then. I only knew that I had a couple of days off and we were going to have an adventure.

By bushwhacking, as was Art and Scotty's habit, we managed to go most of two days without seeing anyone but each other. The landscape certainly lived up to their description. The spruce trees were all flagged by the incessant wind, so they had branches only on their leeward side. Sandstone formations jutted up from the hillsides. We bounced over sphagnum bogs like kids jumping on a giant bed. No water showed. Only the springy mat of thick moss revealed that we weren't on solid ground.

As years passed, I learned more about the disciplines of hiking and met more people who explored the lesser-known areas. One of them, a guy named Jack, pushed into the plateau next to Dolly Sods, an area called Roaring Plains, and discovered many hideaways only an intrepid bushwhacker would find.

By the beginning of the late 1980s, ATVs had arrived out there. The locals laid tire tracks on a lot of what had been pristine and peaceful knolls from which to survey the rumpled mountainscape in quiet contemplation. At the same time, the small numbers of the intrepid grew and grew. It appears from the internet results that this may have generated some efforts to preserve the peaceful beauty against the onslaught of vehicle ruts. The cost, of course, is that none of it is a secret anymore. You don't have to look at a topographic map and deduce for yourself what you may find. You can look at a website and know for sure. I recognized some vistas, now named, with trails, that we found for ourselves with map and compass. There are names, personal and commercial, associated with the things we used to do out there just to do them.

When you visit a place often, or if you live there for a while, you develop a sense of territory. So it was with Roaring Plains, where I spent much of one whole day adding rocks to obstacle walls someone else had started, to try to fence out the ATVs. My companions urged me to give it up and just keep hiking, but I couldn't surrender without a statement. Ultimately, though, I left, and gave the field to them.

Twinges of territoriality return as I look at the pictures on the web. But the only way to hold claim to your territory is to be on it. If you're always on it, no one else can be. The need to possess it or be known for its discovery destroys what made it good in the first place.

But I was there. I peed on a bunch of trees. It's the natural way to claim.

Hunting the Wild Culvert

2006-10-02T09:02:00.000-04:00

Here is our quarry: the wily, elusive culvert.

Road builders release these innocuous-seeming metal or concrete tubes into the wild, letting them nest underneath the roads and highways and, like a neglectful reptile mother, wander off, leaving them to fend for themselves. Later, natural-sciences students go in search of them to see if they are really doing what they were meant to.

Someone must have known where they were originally, but now the most effective way to inventory them and assess their efficiency is to drive very slowly along the road, scanning the undergrowth for any hint that a culvert might lurk down there and then wade through the poison ivy to measure and describe it.

The plucky UNH crew crawls right through the large enough ones. It's not so bad on a warm September day, but the study runs into November.

Just Before

2006-08-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

We're headed upstream in this picture with Laurie in the lead. Right around this bend I tried to slip under a leaning tree. Laurie had gone around the end of it. I took a few good digs with the paddle and then held it lengthwise to shoot under the tree. My boat didn't carry far enough, so my left paddle blade caught on the tree as I drifted backwards. The paddle pivoted downwards and got wedged beside the boat. The inexorable current then tipped the boat up and over before I could figure out how to stop it.

The boat was still somewhat wedged, so I had to come out of it to right it. The little FRS radio in my pocket was whining, so I yanked the batteries out of it. Laurie retrieved a couple of escaped items heading downstream.

This is why I shelled out a few hundred for a waterproof digital camera. Stupid things can happen.

Field Testing the Olympus Stylus 720SW

2006-08-14T17:55:00.000-04:00

I took this picture immediately after wading out of the water. I had to sponge the water droplets off the glass over the lens, but the camera worked perfectly. I believe the plant is Lobelia Cardinalis.

Morning on the River

2006-06-12T17:14:00.000-04:00

Pine River is bank-full and cold after all the rain we've had. I was down there this morning to test the water for the Green Mountain Conservation Group.

It was strange to see the sun.

The mosquitoes had been hellish as I walked through the woods to get to the river, but they weren't too bad when I got there. Flat swarms of them swirled just over the water's surface, intent on their own business. Dipping down into this motion in parabolic dives were mayflies. The two patterns blended like a dance.

The water is dark brown, but not really silty. The samples I tested for turbidity produced lower numbers than I think I've ever seen.

When I was young I would look down small rivers as we drove across their bridges in the family car on our way somewhere else. I always wondered what I might find along those mysterious, neglected streams. Every time I've followed one I've found something cool.

It's nice to be taking care of a river now.

Holy Quack!

2006-05-07T19:34:00.000-04:00

We just spotted a pair of wood ducks perching in a tree behind the garage. They may be house-hunting in the mixed pine forest. According to some quick internet research, they may nest up to two kilometers from the water. We're closer than that and I've seen woodies on the river many times. Some people put out duck boxes for them.

Add that to the list of oddball species that call Scavengewood home. We have forest hummingbirds and wood ducks who don't prefer waterfront.

We won't count the wood ducks as residents until we see them move in.

Frog Finding

2006-05-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

On a sunny bike tour around the neighborhood, Laurie and I went down Huntress Bridge Road, a straight mile of dirt across a tamarack swamp. It was too nice a day to hurry.

We stopped to look into the water filling the wetland after the rain last week. Levels are low compared to years when winter's snow was deep, but somehow it manages to flow. The small rains we've received do bring the streams up a little.

At first the little ponds looked sterile. We saw a few water bugs dancing on the surface, but nothing more. Then Laurie, the Frog Finder, began to spot them. There seemed to be a frog or two every few inches. As we walked further, to a wider bit of water, we saw egg masses down near the bottom. It looked like a fairly good day in the frog world.

Playing Outside, Boston Style

2006-05-01T15:42:00.000-04:00

This weekend I took a rare Saturday off to go to a concert by the Boston Philharmonic. While in the city, Laurie and I went with our host, Ken, and our friend Genevieve, to a couple of the recreational green spaces in the area.

On Saturday afternoon we went to the path along the Charles River in Watertown for a short stroll. The big story this time of year is birds. Whatever species still have winter habitats anywhere are returning for the spring breeding season here in the northern US. Ken's pretty good with the avian fauna, even identifying them by ear when they can't be seen. Of course none of the rest of us knew enough to call him on any of it. But we did see a nice selection of specimens.

Right by the Watertown Dam we saw a black-backed gull and a herring gull. Nearby we saw a cormorant. Then, as we walked upstream, we saw two beautiful wood ducks. The urban woodies are a lot less shy around humans than the ones we see along the rivers in our part of New Hampshire.

Take a moment for whatever plays on words you can't keep your mind from pursuing.

Along came the inevitable couple of mallards to see what we might be giving away. Further along, at a little boardwalk spur to overlook the bank, some Welfare Geese came up, also hoping for charity. These are the variant of Canadian goose that no longer migrates. There really is something sad about that. Not deeply sad, just disappointing. Come on! Migrate! Your tundra home is calling.

Nope. Not today.

Other species included a goldfinch, yellow-rumped warblers, a grackle, red-winged blackbirds and a stunning northern oriole, looking very freshly painted. There are hardly any leaves out yet, to hide the bright plumage of the males.

The next day Ken took us to Forest Hills Cemetery to see the Great Horned Owl owlets. In the photo he showed us, they looked like little teddy bears with piercing, burning eyes and savage beaks. Cute! Fuzzy! Egad!

When we got to the cemetery, which is also maintained as a public green space, the young owls were no longer in the nest. They're about six or seven weeks old at this point, so they've "branched," as Ken put it. Unable to fly properly, they've hopped out onto the branches and actually manage to go from tree to tree with ungainly, flapping leaps. We searched the area, but did not see them. Laurie pointed out the owl pellets on a flat memorial slab in front of us. For a while that and the empty nest seemed like all we would see.

We did see a titmouse, a mourning dove, another red-winged blackbird and another warbler of some sort before we gave up and started to leave.

On the way out of the cemetery we saw a small group staring into the upper branches of a large tree. One man had a camera on a tripod with one of those lenses only really serious people bother to buy and carry around. The kind that mount to the tripod themselves, with the camera hanging off the end like a vestigial organ. We'd located the owls. Or, more correctly, we'd located the people who had located the owls.

We joined the craning crowd, talking in hushed tones. Two sandy-gray owlets, juvenile in plumage and configuration, but not in size, clung incongruously to tiny twigs in the crown of a tree just unfurling yellow-green leaves. The breeze swayed the crown of the tree, so the owls bobbed and swayed, occasionally putting out a wing to stabilize themselves. They stared solemnly, appraisingly down at us as we looked up at them.

Cool as it is to sight something rare in nature, there's only so long you can spend invading the privacy of a creature whose only interest in you is whether you will try to eat it after it has determined that it is too small to eat you. We soaked up as much owl ambiance as we could, before heading off to find some much-needed lunch.

More Uplifting, Still with Lightning

2006-02-23T11:33:00.000-05:00

Lightning is a serious danger to outdoor adventurers. In the mountains or on the water, the exposure can be terrifying.

One summer day I headed up the Huntington Ravine Trail on Mount Washington, with my friend Stuart. We both like trails that go right into the interesting terrain without a lot of slogging to get there. Since the Huntiongton Ravine Trail is rated as one of the most difficult in the White Mountains, it certainly qualifies.

I had been up the headwall of that ravine several times in the winter, but never in the summer. I had been across the cone of Mount Washington a number of times in winter and warmer weather, so I had a good mental picture of the topography.

The forecast that day called for possible showers and thundershowers. If the weather looked too bad we could turn back from the ravine floor. One problem with the Presidential Range is that the steepest part is in the middle of the climb, so weather can sneak up on the other side of the ridge and suddenly burst over on you. You learn to watch the clouds all the time and listen for any hint of wind or thunder.

We proceeded across the ravine floor and up the talus slope, hiking steadily, but stopping to enjoy the scenery. We saw a glider drop its tow above us and begin to soar freely. It did not linger long. That was hint number one.

The clouds darkened and began to swirl more turbulently as they surged over the ridge above us. Hint number two. It was more than a hint. We had to move toward shelter.

One might instinctively head downward to escape a storm, but there was no real shelter back that way. The trees are short, once you finally reach them. You would actually be pretty exposed until you went quite a way down. No, strange as it seemed, what passed for safety lay slightly up and over to our left, at the base of the cliff. A high arching overhang would keep the worst of the rain off us, while the mass of the cliff would give us the best chance that ground currents from a strike above would dissipate or divert before reaching us. Under this overhang, a smaller rock thrust up to give us a place to perch, so that we would be less vulnerable to ground currents from strikes at or slightly below our level. We hurried over to this refuge, where we squatted on the smaller rock below the big roof and watched the storm come down.

We'd seen a couple of other hikers out on the talus slope, but too far away for us to shout to them. I hoped these others had seen which way we headed, but they never joined us.

The storm passed fairly quickly. Lightning did strike a couple of times on the pinnacle above and the ravine floor below our overhang. Then it all passed and the sun came back out.

We emerged from the overhang and scrambled the rest of the way to where the trail starts up the headwall itself. The clouds continued to disperse, so we eyed the route above. Meanwhile, the other hikers joined us. They were cousins, Meg and Julie. Meg was an economist. Julie was a physical therapist. They were very wet, having followed the instinctive urge to beat feet downwards and found no shelter as the downpour trampled over them. But no one had gotten electrocuted, so we were all game to try the ascent.

The climbing does require a little technique and the use of hands and feet for some moves. It gave us all something to think about as we scrambled up it. At no point are you really dangling above a drop. It's just a fun scramble, where you measure your progress in feet of elevation rather than miles of trail. All the while, the views across the valley toward the Wildcat Ridge just get better and better.

We topped out on the Alpine Garden and congratulated each other. Not only had we made the climb, the weather had given us a break. It hadn't dropped another storm on us when we were stuck in the middle of the steep bit. We hiked on over to Lion Head and scrambled back down to hook up with the Tuckerman Ravine Trail back down to Pinkham. Good conversation made the Tucks Trail less of a boring slog than usual.

Stu, you gotta come back. We have many more wicked steep trails to try.

Memorable Night (Adult content: foul language, intoxication)

2006-02-16T14:55:00.000-05:00

Thunder and lightning reminds me of my first trip to Mt. Chocorua.

Chocorua had always enticed me. Its naked granite spine looks like a spire from some angles and a broad, humpbacked ridge from others. We would drive past it to make our annual winter expeditions to the higher, more publicized peaks. It was high on my list of places to check out once I lived here and could explore more thoroughly.

I had just moved to New Hampshire to work for a new outdoor magazine. As a sort of journalist, I got to meet officials in tourism, Fish and Game and the Forest Service who could give me some background information on things I might encounter out in the field. I also knew current and former Appalachian Mountain Club employees and other mountain folk who could provide further insights.

I was renting a cottage at an inn operated by a friend. In return for a very preferential rate, I had to move out every weekend, so he could rent the space for full price. I was obligated to go backpacking.

Having some experience with huts in public places, I didn't count on being able to stay in one on a mountain as popular as Chocorua. I might not even want to stay there if the place had been abused. Huts can get pretty nasty. So I had a tent, just in case.

It was a hot July day. I hiked up the Hammond Trail. It's a long approach on a ridge east of the peak. The parking is a little obscure and the trail a little long, so most people go a different way.

The terrain reminded me of the Dolly Sods and Roaring Plains area of West Virginia, but with a critical difference. Those areas are said to resemble New England, because their high elevation puts them in a colder climate zone than the rest of their region. But now I was IN New England. Through the forest I caught glimpses of a treeless granite mass rising up above the ridge. I hiked faster.

From the east, especially up on the ridge, Chocorua looks a bit like Devil's Tower. Its squat bulk looms up with a blunt top. Seams in the granite are not as regular as those of Devil's Tower, but we're talking similar, not identical. It's evocative. I would see later just what powerful images of primordial force it could evoke.

For now I just watched distant thunderheads rise and dissipate. A spell of humid weather had brought strong showers to the area day after day.

No one was at the Jim Liberty Cabin when I got there. This was 1987, and I was a trusting soul in the mountains, so I felt safe leaving some gear in the cabin to claim a bunk while I went on up the rocky slopes to the summit. I had seen no water source near the hut, so I hoped to find enough in rain pools on the rocky summit area.

I did find water. I figured if I boiled it and then slammed it with water purification tablets I would be okay. It would be a tepid, tasteless brew, but good enough for Ramen. I didn't care whether my outdoor experience was a culinary experience.

When I returned to the hut a tent had appeared on the flat, green bit of lawn right next to the building. I'd eyeballed that spot, level and green as a billiard table, but chosen the hut instead, despite the faint scent of urine and rancid grease that hung about it. Huts in warm weather always have a bit of a whiff to them.

The trash was another matter. It was everywhere. I started to gather the litter and stuff it into a big garbage bag I'd brought. The rustling brought someone out of the tent. A man emerged, followed by a woman. Their names were Ken and Barbara. I'm not kidding. They may have given me false names, though I wouldn't know why, but the names they gave me were Barbara and Ken.

That made them easy to remember. Barbie and Ken. They didn't look like the famous California couple with plastic hair and no genitalia, but the names gave me something to work with. No, they just looked like your typical Boston-area AMC yuppies of the mid 1980s. Ken confided that Barbie had never done this before. She soon retired to the tent, which she closed behind her. Ken and I continued to clean the hut and surrounding area, gathering cans, bottles, wrappers, and the first of many pairs of discarded jockey shorts I would find along the trails that summer.

I don't get the bit with the jockey shorts. I'm just reporting the phenomenon. Ditching them at a hut makes some kind of sense, but I would also find them in the middle of nowhere, on trails both popular and obscure. Not to be too indelicate, but there was never an obvious reason to have thrown them away. Not that I looked too closely, but while tweezering them up with a couple of tree branches, preparatory to cremation, I would get some sense of their condition whether I wanted it or not.

Yes, cremation. Ken and I made a fire in the stone ring in front of the hut and burned whatever would burn, including the abandoned skivvies. The rubber in the waist band put forth a choking black smoke, but only briefly, as it were.

After collecting the trash, Ken and I started on our respective supper preparations. It was early, but I hadn't had lunch, and I wanted to boil and treat that water before it festered too much.

Interesting note: water with iodine in it makes your noodles turn blue. This didn't bother me because in college we used to dye our spaghetti just for a joke. It also cut down on people asking for seconds.

Ken convinced Barbie to go up to the summit to watch the setting sun. How sweet. I followed on a bit later to find Ken standing next to the summit block while Barbie clung to it on all fours. I don't know if she had known beforehand that she was so bothered by height and exposure, but it was news to Ken. Not surprisingly, they soon headed down.

The afternoon's crowds had dispersed. I lingered to enjoy the peace as a moist breeze stroked the summit.

When I reached the east end of the summit ridge on my way down, I looked at the tiny hut below me and counted figures in the yard. Even if Barbie and Ken had gotten back already, there were too many. My trust wavered. My stuff was down there. I rock-hopped down to join the party.

Party. An apt term. The new arrivals were three lads from Hudson. They had lots of protein, copious alcohol and large knives. They carried their gear in large frame packs. They wore work boots on their feet.

Barbie was securely zipped back into her tent.

Using the remains of the trash fire, the Hudson boys soon stoked up a roaring blaze to cook their hot dogs and steaks. They had no use for the bags of ice they'd carried to keep the meat cool on the hike up. Ken and I pounced on those and guzzled sweet, sweet ice water. If only I'd had the sense to stick to what was really good.

While the Hudsonians ate, I rambled into the woods in the dusk. When I returned, a new member had joined the group. It was a Mountain Man, with a tidy rucksack, lightweight, efficient gear and a charming Labrador retriever named Toby.

First the Hudsonians finished their beer. Then they started sharing the higher-octane stuff. Ken stayed in the circle, even though Barbie had long ago gone into her fabric fortress. Old Ken must have thought it was a soundproof booth, or else he had a good idea the relationship was doomed.

"Chicks, man," he began, and the manly chorus chimed in. "Yeah, chicks, go figure..." Why wouldn't a woman want to come out and party with six intoxicated guys, only one of which she knew, and didn't know well? You have only my word for it that I didn't join the mildly misogynistic, and cerainly misunderstanding, rant. They weren't ready for sensitivity training.

It was a manly, profane group. I report this as an anthropologist, so forgive the crude language. I noticed a linguistic peculiarity.

We were telling adventure stories. About every third word was the F word. The F word. Fuckin' right. I took my turns as they came up, telling my stories without excessive profanity. You'd think I had not spoken at all. The others would continue to cackle and banter. I could then clear my throat, say "Fuckin A," and launch into the exact same story, rememebring to say "fuck" or "fuckin'" every few words, and enjoy their chorus of approval.

"Fuck yeah!"

"Fuckin' awesome. Wicked."

Meanwhile the bottle passed and the next bottle passed, and the stars wheeled overhead, only they probably didn't wheel as much as they appeared to wheel when we all staggered to our feet to toddle out past the fire pit and look up at the sky.

The Mountain Man leaned in and muttered to me, "This would be a fuckin' awesome night to bivvy up on top."

I agreed, in proper dialect.

By the time our rubber legs gave out and our leaden eyelids fell, no one was going up that mountain to bivvy up on top. But when I hit my bunk a new problem arose. The spins. I knew what must inevitably follow, but now I had a dilemma I had ever even contemplated.

I'd been an environmentally conscious hiker and explorer for a number of years. I knew where to pee and where to poo, and how to conceal the results of each. But I had never ever seen an environmental impact statement on drunk vomit.

Should I dig a hole? The stuff is acidic. It's not like your garden variety poo. But urine's acidic, and we just let that fly. Ahh, but urine doesn't have chunks. Hmmmmm. Food of a sort. Might attract vermin. The way the trail runs by the hut, I could plant my load in a place that looked out of the way, only to have the bouquet blossom in the following day's hot sun and...

I don't like blowing chow anyway. I'll come up with any excuse and try any sort of meditation to keep it from happening.

One thing was certain: I couldn't in good conscience do it in the hut. There was a good chance I would hit someone, and it would be just plain crude in any case. Out I went into the fresh air.

A dreamlike interval passed. I can't say how long I paced in the garden, breathing shallowly, conducting an endless monologue that probably made me sound like a demented killer to Barbie.

"Keep it together, man. Don't give in. Be strong. It'll make a mess, and everyone will know it was you. Breathe. Breathe." Something like that.

Eventually I got it under control. I lay down in my bunk for another unmeasured interval. Then a low rumble roused me. It rose and fell. The predawn silver was overlit by brief bluer flashes. I got up, as did a couple of the other inebriates. We stumbled out into the clearing and looked back toward the mountain.

A dark cloud boiled up around the peak. Flashes of lightning rapidly intensified, at first just outlining the tower's sides in quick silhouettes, then striking out as distinct, vivid bolts, onto the summit and then down the precipice above us, bearing down on the hut. We scampered back inside just as the cloud blotted out the clearing, the discharges slammed the earth and rain and hail crashed down on the hut roof as if a dump truck full of gravel had emptied its load.

I glanced out the side window at Barbie andKen's tent on that curiously flat lawn. The lawn was now an instant pond. The rain and hail were beating the cheap single-wall tent flat on top of its occupants, while the water rose beneath them. I could see their bodies humping around as they tried to figure out quickly what to carry out and how to find the exit from their collapsed shelter.

They did manage to squeeze out. They crawled up onto the hut steps like shipwreck survivors. Their hair was plastered flat down the sides of their faces. We all stared out at the savagery of the storm. When it passed, the hut dwellers settled down for another brief nap, but Barbie and Ken loaded their wet belongings and were out of there by 6:30 without breakfast.

The Mountain Man and I were the first ones up when we all finally did get up. The sky was washed clean. A fresh breeze swept the ridge. We went up to the summit to rest against the rocks and watch two ravens play in the ridge lift. One at a time, the Hudson lads drifted up to perch and stare out over the panorama with us.

If we had not gotten grievously intoxicated the night before, the Mountain Man and I would probably have gone up to the open rocks to bivvy. We would have been there when the storm rampaged across. There's no quick way down, at least not a survivable one. We could very well have been barbecued monkeys. So who can say how bad an idea our bad behavior was? Of course it was bad. But we left the hut cleaner than we found it (thanks in part to my own incredible self control, breathe shallowly and keep moving) and we all walked away.

I really wonder what happened to Ken and Barbie.

*********************************

According to my sources cited earlier, the cross-section in and around the hut that night was almost a perfect representation of typical outdoor recreationists at the time. There would be a local (the Mountain Man), a recent transplant, a couple of Massachusetts residents and a roughly equal or slightly larger number of people from urban New Hampshire. It pleased me in some weird way to see statistics come to life like that.

Back in Time

2006-02-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

One evening I was sitting on the porch of my house, waiting with a friend for a thunderstorm to pass, so he could go out to his car and head home.

The storm was a strong one, but we weren't quite ready when a broad bolt of bright-white voltage slammed down on an oak tree at another house about 50 yards away.

A big strike that close throws out a shock wave that's beyond sound. My appreciative "yee haaa" degenerated into something like a primate scream. That's not a throaty, aggressive primal scream. It's the noise made by an alarmed monkey. I put a lot into the "yee" and had very little left for the "ha." More like "hehhhhhh..."

The tree lit up like a light bulb filament as it shattered with the force of the blast.

Remembering that, I know how this guy felt when he got the luck shot of the century during a storm in Australia. He referred to "finding himself two meters in the air." Yep. It's like you have no control over your own body. You understand for a moment what an effect it would have had on people who had never been taught the scientific explanations behind anything. It's like a field trip to distant prehistoric times.

Inevitably...

2006-01-25T11:17:00.000-05:00

The other 1980s white powder addiction

2006-01-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

Another 1980s Product

2006-01-25T11:13:00.000-05:00

2006-01-25T11:12:00.000-05:00

Out Back

2006-01-17T14:31:00.000-05:00

Whose woods these are I think I know. It never mattered to me, though. The trees grew tall and no one cared, 'til loggers came and none were spared.

Sorry, Bob.

I used to wander around the mountainside out back, rarely encountering the tracks of any human but myself. I nursed no fantasy that I owned the place. I simply enjoyed the appearance that no one did, that it simply lived its natural existence indifferent to humanity.

Logging points out most clearly that someone does own this land. The trees are someone's property to hack down and cart away for monetary profit. The loggers could be followed by developers or the land could be left alone again for twenty or thirty years until its owner wants to harvest the trees again. I have no say in the matter.

The logging appears to have changed water runoff patterns. The streams on my property are running more strongly than I have ever seen before. Unfortunately, this was also the wettest autumn on record, so I can't be sure how much of the flow is just more water, and how much might have been held back by the departed trees.

Clearings, especially clearings with skidder trails, attract motorized vermin, snow machines and all-terrain vehicles. It hasn't happened yet, but it could at any time. Motorized recreation becomes more and more popular. It seems strange as gasoline grows more and more expensive, and the end of the petroleum era looms on the horizon, but so many human choices make so little sense that I don't try to analyze it. It's more like an illness I hope does not strike, because there is no vaccine, and the cures are mostly drastic.

I felt safe when trees covered it all. Only in deer hunting season would anyone else be interested in walking around out there. There were no spectacular views. No beautiful waterfalls. No caves, no cliffs, no impressive summits. But now there's open space, where the banzai morons might churn the soil, rip the silence and foul the atmosphere with smoky stench. I don't know that they will. I just can no longer be so sure they won't. I know they live around here. I hear them. And I know they drive around as if it were their divine right.

When I find a clearing, I tend to skirt around the edge of it, staying in cover. It's funny to see my visiting urban and suburban friends just stomp right out into it. I'll go with them, because there isn't any good reason to stay concealed, but I'd be more comfortable on the edge, at least until I've checked it out thoroughly. I'll let someone see me after I've seen them.

In New Hampshire the tradition has been that land was open for use unless posted. The user accepted personal responsibility for saftey and agreed to be courteous. Don't tamper with equipment, pull down sap lines, build permanent structures or make temporary alterations without permission. But I always feel better if I've been as invisible as possible. I'll leave no trace at all except in winter, when I leave ski tracks.

On public land I move less cautiously. I don't mind wearing a bright jacket when I'm headed to a winter summit in the National Forest or some other area where the rules are clearly defined. That's America's back yard, where we all can play. If we lost all other open space we would see how much we had depended on people just having land and leaving it alone.

2006-01-11T15:17:00.000-05:00

Uses of the Ice Axe

2006-01-11T15:11:00.000-05:00

Uses of the Ice Axe part 2

2006-01-11T14:45:00.000-05:00

Home, sweet home. Caleb and I found a really nice place to camp on our attempt to ski through Carrigain Notch after the 1998 ice storm. This was the morning of the second day.

2006-01-11T14:39:00.000-05:00

Steve the New Zealander leads out on the second pitch of Standard Route on Frankenstein.

Knocking Off a Classic

2006-01-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

This could almost be called Knocked Off a Classic, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

I met a New Zealander named Steve Gunn one November afternoon on the Middle Sister, the next peak over from Chocorua. He was going to be living and working in the Boston area for a year or two, and wanted to make some connections up here in New Hampshire for hiking and climbing. Looking at his weatherbeaten rucksack with the New Zealand flag patch on it, I figured him for some steely-eyed alpinist. I planned to introduce him to the guiding crowd in North Conway, where he would find companions for the hardest, most spectacular routes the area has to offer. But he turned out to be merely human after all, so we ended up doing a lot of routes together.

We started ice season that year with a pleasant unroped jaunt up Central Gully on the headwall of Huntington Ravine. We even proceeded to the summit and enjoyed a sobering grope through the windy whiteout on our way down, when we wandered off the Lion Head Trail on the upper reaches of the rockpile. No worries, though, we just tacked back and forth on our way down, on a general compass heading for the top of Tuckerman Ravine and found the cairns again. Everybody stay calm, nobody gets hurt.

After fun ascents of Standard Route on Frankenstein, Hitchcock Gully on Mount Willard, Willey's Slide and others, we chose to finish up with Pinnacle Gully on a beautiful March Saturday.

Everyone likes to do Pinnacle Gully on a beautiful March Saturday. And most of them were in line ahead of us.

By this point in the season we had our routines established. Steve wanted to lead the first pitch. I would lead past him to the next belay stance.

NEice.com says the route is 500 feet and uses fixed belays in the rock along the left wall. I swear I don't remember swinging leads more than once, making the part we did on rope just over 300 feet. We also used only one set of fixed anchors, from which I belayed Steve as he led the first pitch.

What I do remember is an unwieldy group of about five climbers with huge packs, who got onto the route ahead of us, and a freewheeling group of solo climbers dashing up it ropeless.

The large group had put a couple of climbers on the face, but time was a-wasting. Steve decided to start up anyway, winging over to the right to head up a fairly steep bulge. I hunkered in the partial shelter of jutting rocks as chunks of ice rained down from the slashing tools of the climbers above.

Steve made quick work of the first rope length. I disassembled the belay and scampered across the line of fire to get into the passing lane. Then I sprinted up to Steve, where we traded some hardware back and forth so I could head up the next pitch.

One of the soloists came by with a cheery greeting. He was climbing very cleanly, with a minimum of fallout.

I headed on up as the gully narrowed, then widened again. I hung a left onto a broad area at the top of the pitch, where I could set a comfortable belay. In typical ice climbing fashion, I had chilled as I belayed, then heated up steamily on the actual climb.

I signaled that the belay was ready. Steve was out of sight, so I was fishing for him, sensing through the rope when he needed slack taken up. It seemed to be taking a long time. Then I heard a loud shout. When I called down, I got no answer, but the rope continued to slacken, indicating he was climbing, though not so much as to indicate that he was no longer on the end of it.

When Steve arrived, he told me that one of the heavily loaded climbers had dropped his enormous pack on one of the soloists. The unroped soloist had stayed on the face as the pack hurtled by him, hitting the talus slope and blowing apart as it tumbled and slid hundreds of feet below the bottom of the climb. The slow group had to downclimb from the route and then climb down further to retrieve the exploded pack and its scattered contents.

Just another day on a popular classic.

Assembling an Adventure

2005-12-19T22:16:00.000-05:00

Early in the winter of 1996-97, impatient for the back-country snow to get deep, my friend Caleb and I set out to hike up the Wildcat Ridge Trail, across Pinkham Notch from the Presidentials, so we could ski down the manufactured snow of Wildcat Ski Area. For a lift-served area, Wildcat is pretty cool. It's not wicked developed, and it offers great views of the dramatic ridge on the opposite side of the notch.

Wildcat Ridge Trail is my favorite kind of trail. It doesn't waste your time slogging around on the approach. You go straight to the base of the ridge and then straight up the end of it. We wore our double boots and had the whole kit of winter mountaineering paraphernalia in case we needed it. In our packs we carried our Telemark boots. On a second trip I might just hike up in the ski boots, but this was our first survey of the route. It was nice to have the closer-fitting, stiff-soled boot for the steep or exposed bits.

It was sort of an anticlimax to pop out at the top of a ski lift after such a great rugged approach. Groomed snow seemed downright boring. But at least we got out for the day and we got to slide down, not slog.

We ran into a Tele clinic up there. I think it was Dick Hall's NATO (North American Telemark Organization). They're a fun bunch. A guy who looked a lot like Dick himself gave an approving grin when he saw us come trudging out of the woods all sugared with white from pushing our way through the snow-laden spruces.

We made our one run down and found a connecting trail that let us ski right back to Pinkham. Can't beat that for convenience.

2005-12-19T22:11:00.000-05:00

There's a pretty good dropoff below this snowy ledge. Above that the route goes up a short gully to open slopes above.

2005-12-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

Mixed climbing in this sort of couloir kind of thingie. If we're going to work absurdly hard for one run of turns it should at least be interesting.

2005-12-19T22:03:00.000-05:00

Above the "couloir" we found good footing on rock and windpacked snow.

2005-12-19T21:59:00.000-05:00

After all that work at least you get good views. Clouds squat on the Prezzies.

2005-12-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

Nice exposure high on the ridge.

A Modest Proposal

2005-12-13T14:55:00.000-05:00

How about "Get Real Magazine," in which people look ordinary, think 5.7 rock is plenty hard enough, paddle Class I-III, ride less than 200 miles most weeks and never get to fly to Borneo or Chile?

I guess that would be pretty boring to read. It's fun to live, though.

Another Learning Experience in the Ravine

2005-12-13T14:17:00.000-05:00

Random dredging in the journal turns up this one from April 1992:

Wayne and I got a late start because he had a dentist appointment, so we didn't leave his house until about 10:45. At Pinkham, the sun was shining and the snow was starting to soften.

Wayne forgot his climbing skins, so we hiked the Tuckerman Ravine Trail instead of skinning up the Sherburne. Running off at the mouth the way we do, it wasn't too tedious.

We stopped for lunch about two thirds of the way up at a sunny bridge. Old ski tracks ran down the river beneath it. We poked the snow. It seemed to be softening even that high up the mountain. With hopes intact, we continued up to Hojos (Hermit Lake caretaker cabin).

Three other pinheads lounged in the sun. We scanned the snowy heights. Wayne raved about the amount of snow.

The sun gleamed off of crust. Only Hillman's Highway showed many ski tracks. We could see isolated tracks from traverses and explorations around the Little Headwall, but the cold weather had prevented avalanches from stabilizing the upper slopes.

After boot and clothing adjustments and a quick visit to The Incredibly Stinky Outhouse, we started hiking up Hillman's with Wayne well ahead.

The snow was like concrete. The tracks of past skiers were frozen solid, waiting to trap anyone who could not jump out of their grasp. But first we had to climb up if we were going to ski down.

The higher I climbed up, the less I wanted to ski down. The wind howled up the slope behind us. A continuous avalanche of mostly pea-sized ice pellets pelted down on us.

Some alpine skiers had been on the Highway since before we arrived, and now began their last run down. Their metal ski edges rasped over the solid ice of the trail.

Wayne said he didn't want to go any higher about 300 feet above the point where I'd already left my balls behind. He perched beside the broad expanse of trail. I joined him.

With friendly greetings, the alpiners scraped by, jump-turning down to where the trail entered the trees. The windswept, icy ravine walls towered above us. The wind buffetted us as clouds surged across the headwall and blocked the sun. I looked down and felt only fear.

I got my right ski on. I'd had to remove my pack to get the skis off it. Perched on the slope with almost no purchase on the porcelain, I wondered if I would be able to get my left ski and my pack on before I fell down the hill. I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew. I wondered if it would chew me.

Teetering on my skis, I hoisted my pack and settled it on my hips and shoulders, adjusting the various straps and buckles as the wind punched at me. Satisfied my pack was snug, I bent to pick up my poles and felt the suspenders pop off the back of my trousers and shoot up inside the back of my jacket to make an uncomfortable lump.

I wasn't about to doff my pack, so now I was about to try to ski the most extreme terrain I had ever faced, with the crotch of my wind pants sagging halfway to my knees. This would at least insure a close lateral stance, as the textbooks advise.

I began to traverse to the left, sank down, planted my poles and launched.

Boom. I landed it, traversed, sank down, launched, landed, sank down, traversed, launched and fell. I wasn't going fast, so I didn't slide far, only smashed my right hip and elbow. I rose again, cleared my head and launched. I managed three or four turns between crashes and did a lot of plain sideslipping. Wayne watched, cheering and critiquing my efforts. I could barely hear him with the wind.

As a developing student skier, regardless of my advanced age, I figured my first objective was to come out on my own feet, not a Stokes litter. That I achieved. And a handful of years later I was jumping merrily down the upper reaches of Raymond Cataract and getting happily lost in the woods in search of glades no one else knows. And few people still do. So keep practicing. Eventually it falls into place. Or you get yourself killed. Either way, problem solved. The fascination no longer rules your every waking minute and lucid dream.

It Feels Good Because it is Good

2005-08-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

The best thing most of us could do for the environment is to die. So that leads us to the second best thing.

How does one consume less, pollute less and take up less space and still have a good time?
Maybe you have to redefine a good time. But you can still have fun.

You can do a lot by eliminating motors as much as possible. You can do a lot without a motor.
Sailboats can move pretty fast when the wind is right. Whitewater kayaks use natural forces to propel them through a challenging environment.

You can even skydive without using motors. Just BASE jump, using tall objects to gain your elevation.

Motorized recreation attracts people because it makes speed convenient and it makes it seem safe. But how safe is it, really?

It’s fun to drive like an asshole. I’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve had a driver’s license. But a sense of responsibility keeps me from doing it as much as I used to, and I never really went as far as I could. I still understand the compulsion.

If you push the margins of safety in motor vehicles, you might as well go into other dangerous activities and try to eliminate the motor. Jump off a cliff. Sail in a gale. Challenge yourself. Try to surf the wakes of really big ships with your kayak.

Human-powered recreation leads to physical fitness. Motorized recreation leads to physical deterioration.

If you’re not a thrill-seeker, you put even less pressure on your fun and games to stimulate adrenaline. You can walk, hike, swim, sail, paddle, row or cycle just for the pleasure and sense of accomplishment, and the feeling of vitality that always comes from physical activity.

Hummingbirds, for some reason

2005-08-08T19:12:00.001-04:00

One spring day in 1990, I noticed a hummingbird investigating the brightly-colored outdoor thermometer on the back of my house. Always a fan of the little sugar hawks, I broke out a couple of little feeders from storage. I'd hung them outside of other places I'd lived, and considered myself lucky if I'd get to see one or two a season.

Living in the piney woods, I was surprised to see a hummingbird at all. Imagine my astonishment when I soon had several at a time, day after day, all summer. Apparently, they like to nest in the shelter of the evergreens. Now my gardening wife has planted many flowers, but the breeding population showed up without any incentive I could see. They certainly seem to enjoy the feeders, if enjoy is the right word for the twittering dogfights that make up their day.

The first one, usually a male, shows up on May 12th each year as if by appointment. It may not be exactly the 12th in a given year, but it usually is. Days will pass with just the single bird, and then another. By the end of May the whole crowd has arrived. The buzzing and twittering joins the calls of phoebes and other nesting songbirds busy with the rites of spring.

They're insane. They battle constantly. Then, suddenly, peace will break out and two or more will land and sip amicably. The truce will last for minutes before everyone launches again.

They eat during the battles as well. Usually, a dominant bird will defend the feeder against all comers. You can actually hear them slam into each other. One day I came out the door to find one squirming on the ground. I thought the cat might have made a lucky pounce, but then I heard the other bird. It had simply knocked the loser out of the sky. The one on the ground gathered its wits and charged back into the air.

We just put a seed feeder out on the other side of a double hook in one of the flower beds. Chickadees and nuthatches look huge after watching hummingbirds for a couple of months.

2005-08-08T19:12:00.000-04:00

This file photo from about ten years ago shows pretty good attendance at the feeder array I had at the time. It's nearly impossible to get a shot of the full action. Last week at breakfast time a cloud of at least half a dozen swirled around the one big feeder hanging outside the kitchen window.
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2005-08-08T19:09:00.000-04:00

Breakfast companions on a rainy morning.
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2005-08-08T18:54:00.000-04:00

I was using my outdoor office this afternoon, when a hummingbird flew in from my left. It hovered in front of me for many seconds, quite a long time in hummingbird time, looking up and down, back and forth, scrutinizing the details of my setup. Apparently satisfied, it leveled off and flew away to a nearby feeder. This is a file photo from last year. I'm sweltering in a blue tee shirt today. Hazy, hot and humid, as cicadas zizz in the tropical trees.
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This Afternoon at Sebago

2005-07-25T17:51:00.000-04:00

In a rare escape, Laurie and I managed to slip away to Sebago Lake on July 12. Finding the park entrance was a bit of a treasure hunt, but we got there eventually.

Laurie did not grow up in small boats, the way I did, so she does not have a well-tuned sense of her ability and of the actual danger posed by weather conditions. She's a good boater, but doesn't have the context to know it and appreciate it. So I didn't say anything when I saw the flags blowing out straight. So much of danger is a matter of perception. Too much of the wrong kind of fear actually creates danger. Better to poke out and see, rather than influence the mood by playing it up or down.

"It wasn't choppy on the map," she said as we emerged from the aptly named Crooked River. But she calmed considerably when I pointed out that if she dumped she could easily walk to shore. The sand bar shelved out for many yards. The bigger waves had tripped and stumbled on the outer margin of these shallows, so we rode only the half-size remnants. They were steep, but small.

We ventured along the shore, with no particular destination. When a cove opened to our left, we turned to surf into it. A couple in a canoe was entering it from the opposite direction. I would not really have wanted to be in an open boat with no flotation in the larger waves further out in the lake, but I didn't see where they started, so I don't know how long they dealt with it.

As regulars on Winnipesaukee, we were amazed to find that the white beach at the back of the cove was part of the park, so we could land and have lunch. What's the matter? Not enough rich people in Maine to buy and fence off the shoreline? Let's enjoy it.

After lunch and a bit of shore exploration, where Laurie enjoyed childhood memories of a family trip to Sebago Lake in the mid 1960s, we set out again to go a little further down the exposed shoreline. We didn't have a ton of time to play that day, but we wanted to get a little more wave time.

Beyond the lunch cove the waves were bigger than we'd seen so far. The water was deeper and they'd run the length of the lake.

After we rounded the next point, we curved around behind a small island, nearly a peninsula. Waves broke over the teeth of rocks in the shallows that nearly connected it to the mainland, so we went around the end. Then we came in behind it to play in the wind-generated current pouring through over the rocks.

After a few minutes in shelter, we emerged to head back to the river. Enroute, Laurie suddenly diverted shoreward.

"I'm going to swim!" she called, indicating the floats of a swim beach. Everyone had left it as the afternoon waned. I rode in behind her to a wet landing on the beach. Waves swept the length of the boat as soon as it stopped at the sand. We had to hop out and drag our boats up fast, to avoid getting a cockpit full of water.

After splashing around the swim beach for a while we boarded again. Laurie challenged herself by getting aboard out in the water. She did it without any unscheduled additional swimming.

Wind and waves came from the most troublesome angle on the last leg. The short, the steep and the ugly kept trying to make our rudderless boats yaw. I've learned that you can ride the oscillation and maintain your average heading more efficiently than rigidly trying to stop every deviation. It doesn't seem to be something that can be taught, only discovered for oneself.

The waves going into the river acted like conflicting wind and tide. The river didn't seem to have much current, but it was enough, with the wind and the shallows, to make some weird stuff.

Once inside, we were able to outdistance a motor boat admirably observing headway speed. We coasted to a peaceful finish. Nice afternoon.

2005-07-25T17:50:00.000-04:00

Just after launching at Sebago Lake State Park in Maine. The Aqua Pac camera bag already got wet, and steamed up inside until I could dry it out at our lunch stop. But the lake was rough, so I knew I needed to protect the camera.
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2005-07-25T17:48:00.000-04:00

On the beach at the lunch cove.
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2005-07-25T17:46:00.001-04:00

Laurie heads out of the lunch cove.
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2005-07-25T17:46:00.000-04:00

Ready to go.
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2005-07-25T17:45:00.000-04:00

Let's get into it.
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2005-07-25T17:44:00.000-04:00

Notice how high her bow has been tossed. I only got this much because my boat was also riding over a wave.
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2005-07-25T17:35:00.000-04:00

You're a little, tiny guy, standing on the deck of this ship...
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2005-07-25T17:34:00.000-04:00

This Afternoon at Sea.
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2005-07-25T17:32:00.000-04:00

Forward stroke, figure 1.
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2005-07-25T17:31:00.000-04:00

Forward stroke, figure 2.
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2005-07-25T17:30:00.000-04:00

Lee rail under as we surf down to duck behind a small island.
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2005-07-25T17:29:00.000-04:00

Laurie takes a quiet moment before we emerge from the shelter of a small island to begin our trip back down along the lee shore to where we started. The waves we're about to enter at this point have run the length of Sebago Lake.
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2005-07-25T17:27:00.000-04:00

Bow tossed upward as we emerge from shelter. That oncoming wave face looks kind of serious from this angle.
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2005-07-25T17:25:00.000-04:00

I was hoping I'd get this one: bow buried in the back of a wave, with Laurie just beyond it.
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2005-07-25T17:23:00.000-04:00

There she is, obscured by the droplets on the front of the waterproof camera bag. Aqua Pac is cool!
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2005-07-25T17:22:00.000-04:00

Camera tucked in the deck lines makes the waves look nice and huge.
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2005-07-25T17:20:00.000-04:00

Lively wave action on the return journey.
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2005-07-25T17:18:00.000-04:00

This is the last shot that really framed anything. I tried for that perfect shot of silhouetted kayaker on a path of sun sparkles after we got around the point, but my aim was off.
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Another Pointless Excursion

2005-06-14T17:17:00.000-04:00

It was September 1997. After several years on a trailer in my father’s side yard, the Snipe class dinghy we had sailed together now lived in my garage. I had painstakingly worked out how to manipulate 225 pounds of hull by myself, so I could turn her over to refinish the bottom and turn her back over again.

Somehow, twelve years had sneaked by since I had sailed any boat, let alone this one. I’d lived inland, using a kayak on small waters. In that time my first marriage had run its course. Now I was alone, a middle aged guy with an elderly dog and a cat who thought she owned the place.

The middle of life gives a good view of both ends, perhaps too good a view. Some people get really crazy. Since I felt life was short and not to be wasted from the time I was ten, I had an advantage over people who had given it less thought. Every moment is precious. You can fill every minute with great achievement, which gives the impression the time has not been wasted, but what if you never gave yourself time to think? That’s when you slam into the wall at age 40 or 47 or 53 and find yourself sitting in the crumpled body of your sleek, powerful life, wondering what happened since your twenties.

I’d never been good at sailboat racing. I enjoyed the ride too much. But now I held the tiller and the main sheet – and the jib sheet, too, for that matter. My style would no longer inconvenience anyone else. No one human, anyway.

Winter Harbor on Lake Winnipesaukee does not offer an ideal launching site. All the ramps on this lake are built with motorboats in mind. They don’t need a place to rig. They don’t care if they’re on a lee shore. But with summer over, the Winter Harbor ramp was deserted. Traffic on Route 109 was light. The trailer parking is not half a mile away, so trailer handling was about as easy as it gets for the lone boater.

A stronger wind would have bashed up the boat while I was finishing rigging. The water was too shallow for me to ship the rudder until everything else was ready and I could hold the boat across the end of the short pier by the ramp.

Because I hadn’t done anything that day with my dog Lee, I had brought him with me to the lake. Now I had to get him aboard. He wanted to get near me, but couldn’t make the drop from the high pier. I encouraged him to swim out from shore and then hoisted him aboard, standing beside the boat in waist-deep water.

He was a bit disoriented in the boat. Once aboard, he stood dripping on the floorboards, on shaky legs, obviously wondering why he had wanted to be there. By then, however, we were underway.

The breeze was southerly, five to eight miles per hour, maybe ten. It was enough to heel the boat with me sitting to weather in the stronger puffs, but in the average wind I had to sit inboard, even prejudiced to leeward.

We headed out toward the mouth of Winter Harbor on a long port-tack reach that varied from close hauled to having the wind abeam. A couple or three motor boats buzzed around the fringes of the bay. Then an old classic wooden one began to overtake me. I heard a woman’s voice say, with some excitement, “that’s a Snipe!”

The woodie, “Clair de Loon,” came close enough to hail, more or less. I could hear them better than they could hear me. The woman, who did not give her name, had sailed Snipes years ago. She said her sail number had been 2677. She’d been looking for a wooden Snipe, but had to settle for a 23000 glass boat she’d purchased down at Buzzards Bay.

Because of the engine noise the conversation gave way to smiling and waving. Cordially, we parted.

Lee, while he did not become enthusiastic, did stoically stand in the cockpit for the outward passage. I had no clear plan, just a vague idea to get out to the open lake and see what we might find.

The boat had taken on a great deal of water. This was not surprising, since she’d been dry for years. I didn’t discover until later that the centerboard trunk was severely delaminated and slightly sprung. Unfortunately, only twice in the whole voyage did we hit a speed that made the suction bailers work. I kept having to burrow down in the bilges with a sponge. That made me less attentive to the constant wind shifts, so then I would have to focus on sailing for a while.

I also noticed things I hadn’t adjusted properly, or suddenly remembered to operate one control or another, like jib cloth, mast benders or jib halyard tension.

My emotions flashed up and down. This was not a triumphant culmination or a total joy. I thought about my father and our disappointing career in racing. I experienced now, alone with the boat and responsible for everything, how it must have been for him, trying to keep the boat in good repair and the control systems up to date, trying to remember all the gear and get it together before trips with so little involvement from me.

I enjoyed the trips, but I always hovered before one, wondering if I was ready physically, mentally, emotionally and in equipment. I did not embrace and merge with the world of sailboat racing. I knew a few names, but had no heroes. To a non-sailor I looked like a total disciple, but I knew the difference. If I had a hero at all it was my own father, who could get a boat into and out of anywhere, and got my vote as most likely to come safely through any situation we might encounter. Beyond that I didn’t care much who was whom. I would seldom go out with anyone else.

Not that service in the fo’c’sle of 11900 was a constant flow of fatherly wisdom and reassurance. Sometimes it felt a bit like the Eighteenth Century and I’d been snatched off a British street and come to my senses far offshore, with a raging hangover and a nasty bosun standing over me. But it can’t have been too easy for him, either. A complex man with many conflicting ambitions, he made the best he could of the brew he got by mixing them.

I should have guessed the boat would be saturated with the emotions that had soaked into her over the years of father and son racing. No surprise, either, that these should call forth many reflections on the years that had passed since, the many failures and few successes, the debatable achievement of 41 thoughtful years.

11900 is herself but a year younger than I am. She was 11 when we got her as a used boat, just as the class was about to undergo rule changes that would put her at a disadvantage for most of her remaining competitive years. As a vehicle for reclaiming my father’s considerable past glory she would present a challenge that would be exacerbated by his choice to use family members to crew.

None of this formed into words as I sailed out to the lake. I enjoyed the breeze, which just touched the top end of my ability to keep the boat upright with the full rig, but mostly blew much more softly. The sky was full of cumulus clouds, as a front seemed to try to pass. The sun settled toward the western horizon.

I felt more aware of the factors that shape a breeze than I had even been. I looked at the clouds, the land, and saw a map on the water before me. I’d wondered how great a time I could have with this poor, dried-out boat I’d resuscitated, and my own stale skills. But here I was, despite 40 gallons of water in the bilges and a dog who clearly wished he was somewhere else, slipping along through the fluky evening breeze, having a transformational experience.

Motorboats passed at a polite distance out on the open broads. The breeze had its most uninterrupted sweep there, too. I actually got to hike out a few times. Intoxicated by wind, wave and my interaction with them, I steered up close-hauled and even tacked a couple of times, edging toward Wolfeboro Bay.

Lee spoke up with a piteous howl. “That’s enough,” he seemed to say. “Take me home!”

In my terror-stricken early childhood I always howled much louder, much sooner.

He was right on one count. We had to head back to get to the launching ramp by dark. I had brought no lights and the breeze was getting fitful.

I bore off, pulled the centerboard up to three notches and tweaked what things I could to improve reaching. I’d left the whisker pole at home, because I figured it would be too much trouble singlehanding, but now I was broad reaching in light air and it would have been perfect. Fortunately, the wind shifted and the need passed.

I aimed to miss the wind shadow of Wolfeboro Neck, but the wind was dying even as I headed for the sheltered bight that leads to the inner lobe of Winter Harbor. The whole area turned into a wind shadow. What breeze there was came from a different direction each time and died out before I’d trimmed the sails to it.

I began to paddle. To keep going straight, I lashed the tiller a bit to starboard to compensate for my paddle strokes to port. As we gathered way, the apparent wind would back the jib. After twenty to forty paddle strokes I would stop, trim to the apparent wind and the boat would coast slowly to a near halt, the sails falling limp, fluttering indecisively.

The sun was sinking and so was the boat. I was getting chilly, since I was mostly wet. Darkness fell as the water in the bilges rose. I sponged some water at intervals, but didn’t really seem to gain.

A quarter moon hung in the sky behind me. Stars circled above the mast tip. A breeze whispered in. It was light but steady. I secured from paddling, unlashed the tiller and set about stalking it.

I sat to leeward with Lee’s head jammed into me, because he was cuddling for comfort. I watched the luff of main and jib. The breeze was still so light that mosquitoes and gnats could reach me from shore.

The boat undeniably moved smoothly and steadily through the deep dusk. This was artistic and satisfying. Loons I’d seen earlier called now. Bats flitted past me, snapping up the insects. I could hear the bats’ chirping navigational calls as they avoided my vessel, ghosting in the moonlight.

All the rigamarole of getting there had been worth it for that delicate close reach in the dark. I remembered night sailing in 420s with my younger brother and my friend Jim. I felt melancholy for the companions lost, but exhilarated by the artistry itself. Our launching point loomed suddenly near. What we had been so desperate to reach, and still wanted and needed to reach, was here, now, to end the magic flight on silent breeze.

I needed three tacks to gain the pier. Would a better sailor have done it in two? No matter. They were good tacks. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. We nestled beside the pier and I lifted my long-suffering canine back onto solid ground.

Taken by the Waves

2005-05-31T13:28:00.000-04:00

During my college years in Florida I was an addicted body surfer.

One summer day at New Smyrna Beach, we arrived from Orlando to find the biggest conditons I'd seen yet. The tide was fairly high and the white-crested surf piled up on itself as the waves rumbled ashore. It wasn't storm surf by any means, but it looked more powerful than the usual sea-breeze break of two- or three-footers we usually played out there on the bar.

Once we parked I hopped out, tossed down my towel, stripped to my shorts and sprinted down the sand.

Even the shore break felt powerful, but the good stuff was further out, where the bar break was building. Those waves always gave long, smooth rides and dumped into deeper water, so the landings were soft.

This day, I felt different forces in the water. It seemed darker and bluer, with whiter foam and stronger winds. The breakers curled up quickly, rearing over me. The tide was higher than it had looked. The bigger waves started to break in deeper water. I was neck deep in the troughs and the current sucked me along.

That's when I noticed the tiny, dancing figure of the life guard. I'd never really noticed the lifeguards on this beach before. I didn't bother them. They didn't bother me. But now I heard a thin little whistle fighting through the rumble of waves and the beating of the wind gusts over the breaking crests. The tiny figure on the tall chair waved urgently, imperatively, gathering me shoreward with his arm. Snap! Snap! It looked like the opposite of throwing a ball.

The current had me. I was on my way to Daytona. Worse than that, I was pissing off the lifeguard. Not good.

Not even a strong swimmer fights a current like that. You need endurance and patience, not explosive power. I lay over in a leisurely side-stroke and angled gently toward shore. The current would let me sidle out if I just took my time.

Once out of the main flow I caught a shore-bound breaker and rode in to a belly-landing on the beach. I walked about a quarter-mile back to the car.

It seemed like a good day to stay dry and work on the old tan. But I was glad I'd at least given the waves a try. It was a good little trip.

2005-05-24T20:44:00.000-04:00

This is more or less actually how it went down that April day in 1988 beside New Hampshire's Swift River.
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2005-05-24T20:41:00.000-04:00

Your brain goes funny when you're cooped up in a gear store all day. This seemed like the next big thing in packs to me.
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2005-05-24T20:38:00.000-04:00

This line appears in some climbing route descriptions. How weird is the move, anyway?
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2005-05-24T20:37:00.000-04:00

Climbers may have a sense of humor, but they don't seem to have MY sense of humor. No one really thought this was funny. I still do.
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2005-05-24T20:35:00.000-04:00

This is for a friend of mine who used to say the route "spit him out" if he failed on it.
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2005-05-24T20:33:00.000-04:00

Be sure all belay stances have the proper labeling.
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2005-05-24T20:31:00.000-04:00

Sketch for Varmint Mountain Works logo, circa 1986
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2005-05-24T20:29:00.000-04:00

Selections from the Varmint Mountain Works catalog. I think Patagonia actually made this stuff eventually.
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Rotation

2005-05-17T20:14:00.000-04:00

Labor Day Weekend in 1987, I was up on Mount Adams, in New Hampshire's Presidential Range, planning to bivouac above treeline, because I'd heard there might be northern lights.

Labor Day Weekend. I wouldn't have had a chance at a spot in one of the huts anyway. But I felt comfortable both in gear and conscience, planning to sleep out up high. I would nestle my sleeping bag in a cleft on the rocks, not on sensitive vegetation. I wouldn't put up a colorful tent and try to make myself at home. I'd brought a small stove, but only to make hot drinks, not an elaborate meal. I was there to get into the place, not reshape it.

My journal for the day notes, "5:30 p.m. -- Awesome! Sundogs! Prismatic flashes at 12, 9 , 3 o'clock around the sun. A ring of light connects them."

The display grew more and more elaborate. My journal entry degrades quickly into awestruck profanity. I will omit that.

"There are now three rings of rainbow in sections with an inverted one above 12 o'clock. This is why I come to places like this! Spotlights of pure white light beam out from 9 and 3.

"The sun's brightness fluctuates as it sinks through cloud layers of different density. It is all cirrus, but some is thicker. The beams aim off like searchlights. The outer rainbow brightens and pales, too.

"Sundogs are an arctic phenomenon. I wonder if this is a good omen for another arctic phenomenon I'd like to see.

"The sun seems to be standing still. There is over an hour of daylight left. People are leaving, although there are quite a few up on Adams. Down here on Sam, I have my own private mountain."

The sundogs sank with the sun. The upper rainbows faded away. Adams looked deserted.

"Soon I'll be left alone with the wild, high night," I wrote.

The right-hand dog sent its beam miles to the west.

"Among all the gray rocks are sudden white ones, white as the bags from a bakery. This simile intensifies, the more hungry the viewer becomes. Below me stands a cairn made entirely of these white stones."

I regretted slightly my choice to forego much in the way of food.

The ridges purpled with the coming darkness. The hazy sky softened all shadows. It was so cool, I felt selfish being alone in it.

"The moon will be up not long after sunset, if it isn't hiding out up there in the cirrostratus already. Sunset is shaping up to be about a 4.5. No more dogs.

"6:55 p.m. --All that remains of the sun is an orange glow between gray and mauve clouds. Not a warming sight, but at least it isn't a stormy yellow.

"I feel like howling a wolf-howl. I may treat the huts within earshot to a banshee wail."

I didn't do that. My natural urge to hide overcame the surge of feral exultation.

Then, when I thought the show was completely over, the sun dropped below the clouds and hung there, an orange disk. I could look almost directly at it as it moved toward the horizon. And I saw the horizon was below me. Even as I absorbed that, I saw, clearly saw, that the disk of the sun was not dropping, it was receding.

We all know the Earth turns and the sun stays in place. But how often do you really get a look at the motion as rotation?

As the cliche goes, I felt the Earth move. I felt it roll away from me, like I was beginning a long, slow back flip. As soon as the sun had set I swiveled around to face east and wait for it to come around again. It was like a huge, cool ride.

Paddling Winni

2005-05-17T19:49:00.000-04:00

New Hampshire's freshwater paddling season is barely underway, but the time before and after the height of summer is the easiest time to paddle freely on lakes like Winnipesaukee, ringed as they are with private property.

The time before July 4 and after Labor Day is Local Summer, when the locals can enjoy the area with the least conflict with the paying guests whose outdoor habits can be annoying at best, and hazardous at worst.

It's the time for commando expeditions, camping cold and dark on shorefront not technically your own. Shhh. Don't tell anyone. It takes minimum impact methods to new heights.

Particularly in the early season, seemingly unoccupied islands and shorefront may host nesting birds, so the commando paddler must watch carefully.

I don't recommend night paddling during the height of summer. Summer homes are more likely to be occupied. And the drunks in absurd powerboats have enough trouble missing each other, let alone low, dark, silent craft propelled by lunatics and peabrains who actually like to exert themselves to get around.

I've paddled at night in peak season. Stick to the fringes, behind or under stationary objects that will intercept the misguided missile. Just remember that on more than one occasion a hurtling drunk has rammed 20-odd feet of powerboat completely out of the water onto an island he happened to overlook.

In daylight the situation is marginally better. Avoid exposure as much as possible. Get exposed crossings out of the way quickly. If you have a big flotilla, keep it together, but choose an efficient course and encourage people to hold to it, at the best maintainable speed.

It's a little different from wrangling traffic on a bicycle. Vessels can close in on each other from widely varying angles, without the channeling of the street and the familiar guidance of traffic signals and rules. Some idiot with the bow up may not ever see you asserting your rights down there, even in daylight.

I take advantage of the small vessel's ability to exploit small spaces. I play with the conditions, like surf around the end of Tuftonboro Neck on windy days, where I can duck into shelter to escape a passing speedboat or take a breather from the waves. Island hop. Work the shoreline. Save the big crossings for the quieter time of year.

Wind, Waves and Moonlight

2005-05-17T19:26:00.000-04:00

The sun had set, but its red fire was still strong as Jim and I paddled out beyond Sewall Point and got a view down the broads of Lake Winnipesaukee on an evening at the end of September 1998. We watched the color spread across the western sky and subside. The waves lost their pink tops and shaded down through slate to darker blues.

Sunset did not bring calm that night. We met increasing winds. The waves subtly mounted. We speared into them and leaped over as we fought the wind. Both wind and wave grew stronger with every headland we passed.

We intended to paddle down to the end of Wolfeboro Neck and back, just a short, leisurely evening jaunt. The water was quite warm, with summer barely over, but we knew the air would cool quickly with darkness. We wore polypro shirts and paddling jackets.

All that bouncing around over warm, rushing water started to get to me, so I indicated a need to step ashore for a moment.

Darkness had solidly fallen, but a half moon was spreading a very usable light. We sought a dark spot on the coast of Wolfeboro Neck, where we could land in stealth. No need to attract attention.

The wind and waves kept us focused on safe piloting, but Jim knew a sheltered beach tucked into a tiny cove. A house high above it showed one small, lighted window, but the landing place was too good to pass up. In commando-like silence we paddled delicately to the beach and disembarked. We pulled our boats above the reach of the waves.

With buoyant spirits and empty ballast tanks, we set off again on the moon-silvered water. We could see the gusts of wind as black patches rushing down at us. The waves mounted swiftly.

Wolfeboro Neck bends gently back, exposing the rocky shoreline gradually more and more to the prevailing winds that sweep most strongly up the Broads. We stopped dead when faced with the unbroken power of the waves marching the length of the lake. The tallest easily blocked our sight. We were able to hold our place, paddling just to hold ourselves head on to the big rollers, feeling the gusts. We could see the big sets teamed up with the strongest winds. It did not look like a place to play in the dark on a chilly night, even with the water warmer than the air.

When we turned, we felt the power of the waves at once. We both took off surfing with no conscious effort to catch a wave. The crests frothed with white.

Even at full speed on a big wave I could feel the power of the wind behind me. It did not disappear the way it does on a sailboat.

I got one glimpse of Jim’s long boat, silhouetted against silver moon sparkles, shooting down the face of a big, curling wave at twice his best paddling speed. The slender hull leaped forward, free of the drag of displacement and immersion, thrown forward like a spear against the shining black and silver background. Then a crest flung me forward and I had to chop and yank with my own paddle to keep my boat from broaching.

This was my first season with the Alto, and I was very pleased with its handling. I wasn’t about to take conditions lightly, since they were quite hazardous in the darkness, but I felt confident the boat could take it, if I piloted her correctly.

Jim seemed content to head back in the general direction of Wolfeboro Bay, catching great wave rides, but I tried to stay a little closer to the shore, to gain the gradually increasing shelter it afforded. That seemed prudent. The final blast of wind, from which we had retreated, had been strong enough to provoke genuine respect.

My plan almost showed a serious flaw when I found myself thrashing in a flurry of foam where the big combers reared up and crashed on some shallowing water at the first little point we approached on our retreat. The waves were big enough to break on what would not seem to be a shoal on a calm summer day.

I could dimly make out a breakwater. I thrashed for sea room, taking a couple of breakers across the waist. The water, fortunately not too chilly, sluiced through my cheesy spray skirt and left me sitting in a puddle. I made a mental note to buy a better skirt the next day.
Meanwhile, I had more serious concerns, as the waves seemed determined to put me on shore. I clawed my way out toward Jim.

We continued along the neck, unable to hear each other. I kept an eye on him. He kept an eye on me. We gave each other room to maneuver. We surfed.

Past Edmund’s Cove and Tip’s Cove, the lake had settled, so we could paddle closer and talk to each other. We saw a big point ahead.

“Is that it?” one of us asked. Together we realized it was not Sewall Point and Wolfeboro Bay, but Jockey Cove, which is large and cuts deeply enough that in the past it was a portage point for canoes to cross to Winter Harbor without facing the tumult we had met on the outside passage. Carry Beach, on Winter Harbor, is named for it.

We had let our guards down a bit when suddenly we found ourselves in a bizarre, confused sea with a shrieking wind funneling out of the cove. Because Wolfeboro Neck is fairly high, and the Carry Beach isthmus is barely above lake level, with more high land inland, it took the wind that lashed the length of Winter Harbor, shoved it through the venturi of Carry Beach and spit it out Jockey Cove with its very own steep, assertive wave pattern meeting the lake-long march of waves on which we rode, at a slightly quartering angle with a fierce wind to match.

It was nothing you could surf. To surf it would mean riding out into the big stuff that still rolled down the lake. Where the wave trains met and crossed, they tossed up crests at random, shredded into spindrift by the crosswind.

I set my boat across this mess and stroked for all I was worth, almost entirely on the windward side. I was ahead of Jim, so I couldn’t see him, but I couldn’t worry about that until I’d gotten out of the trap and could look around carefully.

Spray blew right across my boat. The wind was harder than anything we’d met since we poked our noses out around Umbrella Point and had decided to turn back.

As soon as I got beyond the mouth of Jockey Cove, the relatively gentle remnants of the prevailing wind returned the water to the coherent pattern we’d been riding. I spotted Jim. We worked toward each other.

We surfed around Sewall Point, really just surging on the foot-high chop. We could spare a glance then, at little lighted airplanes off to the east, and one small dot that looked like it was probably in orbit. We also saw one good shooting star.

Even though my seat was squishy and clammy from my adventure in the breakers, I was happy to drift there in the shelter of Sewall Point and look at the sky and the shore, and talk about subjects lofty and low. After a while, the chill got to us both and we headed for home.

For rough weather or night maneuvers, paddlers need to know their abilities are pretty close and that they can handle the worst that might happen on that occasion. Obviously you can’t prepare for something like a heart attack or a seizure, but a party of two had better be confident that under most circumstances one won’t have to rescue the other. That way, if things get a little hairy, like they did at Jockey Cove, each paddler can deal with conditions. If paddlers are roughly equal, both will feel like continuing or backing off at about the same time.

Night paddling is risky. With two it is riskier than with three or four. With one it’s not much riskier than with two, except that your death might not be witnessed. So I can’t suggest anybody go out and do it. But we did see some really cool stuff on this and many other night voyages. Make sure your gear is solid, your skills are up and your will is current. And if you don’t feel like taking a risk, don’t. It doesn’t need to be done.

2005-05-17T18:53:00.000-04:00

Motorized recreation in a nutshell.
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2005-05-17T18:51:00.000-04:00

This one really ticked off the statewide ATV club for some reason.
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2005-05-17T18:46:00.000-04:00

Low impact...
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2005-05-17T18:44:00.000-04:00

Quiet...
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2005-03-28T18:52:00.000-05:00

Paddling along the wall of Fort Gorges, Portland Harbor, Dec.4, 2001. Photo by Blair Folts, with my camera.
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2005-03-28T18:47:00.000-05:00

Sunset over Portland, ME, Dec. 4, 2001. It had been a summer day on the verge of winter, with highs in the 50s that felt like 70s. As Blair and I paddled toward our landing, the pinkness grew and grew, until we were completely enveloped in it, "like paddling through liquid pink," as Blair said. This photo barely hints at the all-encompassing color. Hand-held at 1/15 sec from a bobbing kayak.
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2005-03-22T20:48:00.000-05:00

This shot of two Altos shows added deck lines on the one in the foreground, stock deck layout on the other boat. Mine, with deck lines, also has seat back cut down.
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2005-03-22T20:39:00.000-05:00

Wilderness Systems Alto. 15'8"x22.5". Nice lookin' pool toy.
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The Neighborhood Wilderness

2005-03-10T15:28:00.000-05:00

Back in the early 1960s I lived in Annapolis the first time around, and played with kids who happened to live up and down the length of Weems Creek.

I lived, with my family, in an old neighborhood called Rogers Heights. It consisted of a single dirt road that ran parallel to Rowe Boulevard, between the Lutheran Church on Farragut Road and a turnaround in front of the house where the Rogers heirs lived.

I don't rememebr exactly how many houses there were, but two or three were very similar wooden, two-story dwellings with wraparound porches. Built into the slope, they had walk-in basements at the back. Ours had two, the lower of which was a very spooky hole.

Behind the houses, a trickling stream full of orange water made its way along the bottom of the shallow vale toward Weems Creek. In the patch of woods on the other side of the stream, a gang of larger boys was supposed to carry on its savage rites. They did shoot me with a bb gun once. I felt a stinging flick at my chin and pulled away a drop of blood when I put my hand up to see what had happened.

I never saw the boys themselves. We would cross the stream to go down to the big creek, past the gang's tree fort, with their name or slogan drippily painted in red on an old cloth diaper. One of the neighborhood kids said they called themselves the Woman Haters, but he could have gotten that from television.

Our trail let us out under the high bridge over Weems Creek. We could climb up the orange dirt slope under the bridge to hear the cars and trucks rumble over us. We considered climbing out on the huge girders of the bridge structure itself, and may even have done so, but never all the way across.

On the creek bank we could go either way. The shore was not almost completely armored with bulkheads then. Expensive boats did not hang from electric hoists on burly piers. It was the old relationship of human and waterfront. Docks occasionally got damaged by ice, because the creeks still froze for some part of the winter. A fringe of sand ran around the entire shore. Fallen trees lay across it. This was our lawful path, between high and low water.

We could not always stay in the intertidal zone, but the bluffs along the creek rose up along most of the shore, so we could hike higher without being seen from the houses up on top.

There were occasional boathouses and more elaborate docks, but in most places the house was still out of sight atop the bluff.

Little patches of salt marsh filled any area where a stream entered through a V in the bluffs. We might have to bushwhack inland to pass one of these, or we might find solid enough footing to let us hold the shoreline and hop the stream where it entered.

A neighborhood called Admiral Heights was growing steadily around the headwaters of Weems Creek. When we played up there we could go into Spooky Forest, where the pines were close and dark. Every year there was less of Spooky Forest, as dirt roads stabbed into it, and dark trees gave way to churned, brown earth, then a hole, then a foundation, then a house, a family, fences, forbidden entry. Maybe a new playmate would come out of it, to explore the vanishing woods and the swampy shore. Maybe not.

Even in the late '60s, when my family returned, the shore had not changed too much. I could still wade through the shallows on a summer day, finding the occasional horseshoe crab. I could traverse the bluffs, above the swamps, but below the line of sight, traveling the disregarded slope.

There is an age of presumed innocence. Once a boy is older than that, real innocence is harder to establish. Big kids look like they're skulking, even if they're just exploring. The best I could do was try not to be seen. I was pretty good at that.

Adults develop all sorts of motives for things. I still go exploring in the same spirit I did back then. But I understand why people aren't comfortable when they see an adult apparently wandering aimlessly in their neighborhood or carefully observing something they can't quite discern.

As an adult in the Weems Creek basin, I took to the water itself. Paddling a kayak, I was obviously doing something, and something boring to boot. I wasn't about to do rolling demonstrations or other eye-catching antics. I could flit along in the dusk, or surf the chop and boat wakes on a pleasant afternoon, getting a little exercise, seeing the neighborhood.

Imagine having enough money to buy a big powerboat. Now imagine how much money you'd have left if you bought a kayak instead. You might be able to afford to work less.

Neighborhood wildernesses like Spooky Forest used to be an essential part of growing up. Obviously some people grew up near real wilderness and others grew up in cities, but I lived in a lot of different places, and we always found as near to a natural place as we could, in the small towns I generally inhabited. It was not a park, with rules and rangers. It was just nature, one on one. We did some damage, building trails and forts, but our small powers kept us from altering anything permanently. It took big bucks and big bulldozers to do that. Someone would put a dollar value on the place, someone else would agree to pay it and then it would be ruined, as far as we small savages were concerned.

I'm bigger now.

NNN and STI

2005-03-02T12:27:00.000-05:00

are living proof that evil will not voluntarily leave this world.

2005-02-16T14:28:00.000-05:00

Ralph shreds up an Undisclosed Location.
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2005-02-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

It IS still winter.
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2005-02-16T14:21:00.000-05:00

Maine's pretty crappy, too.
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2005-02-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

New Hampshire sucks. And I'm such underachieving scum. Get a job.
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2005-02-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

Caleb's Chatham, Easter 2004.
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2005-02-16T14:10:00.000-05:00

Caleb's Elaho at the start of our Trans-Winni paddle in May 2003.
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2005-02-16T14:04:00.000-05:00

Easter paddle 2004. Thoughts turn toward the water. Laurie's Alto in foreground.
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2005-02-08T17:43:00.000-05:00

No single picture captures Lee, but this comes close: covered with mud, about to launch himself down a trail. He could also solo 5.7.
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The Dog

2005-02-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

I used to have a dog. A yellow labrador.

My ex-wife was a dog person. I didn't have a dog, so she issued me one. His name was Lee.

Lee was 18 months old when he came to live with us. He had spent the previous 12 months being ignored on a dog run. He had two conflicting desires: social contact and freedom to run.

Mostly, he wanted to run.

His luck was in. He was moving to rural New Hampshire, where dogs can live free or die. Sure, there are leash laws in towns, and a dog that runs deer is liable to be shot, but apart from those few limitations a dog can enjoy a pretty unfettered life on the hiking trails, in the untracked forest or in and out of the waterways.

Since we hiked and adventured together for 11 years, his story is too long for one quick tale.

Dogs provide a great excuse to play outside. We need excuses to play outside as adults. Perhaps the dog constitutes a lame excuse, but his needs mattered to my wife. It wasn't like I was trying to sneak off with my human buddies. The dog had to go hiking or kayaking. It was a matter of his mental and physical health. So my mental and physical health got to ride along for free.

Dogs can be inconvenient. I certainly see a lot more wildlife now that I no longer travel with a predator. He wasn't an active predator, but the wildlife didn't know that. But I really do miss the excuse to go ramble around the woods and the river. His enjoyment added to mine. Few humans can match that candid joy in simply exploring. We keep worrying about whether we have a good reason to be there.

Why? Because it's there?

2005-02-02T14:19:00.000-05:00

Why do we go mountain climbing, rapid-running, back-country skiing, open-water paddling, sailing small boats on big water and all such foolishness?

Because it's safer than driving.

2005-01-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

Steer 255 degrees to get to work.
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Adventure Commuting

2005-01-26T13:59:00.000-05:00

Human-powered commuting won’t work for everyone, but I’ve been able to make it work for me. Maybe it would work for you.

The notion started simply enough. I started using a bike to get around in college. After college I could continue my student economy by riding the bike instead of buying a car. A car is a voracious beast.

When I moved to the country I thought my bike commuting days had ended, but things worked out. I ride farther than I ever did, but it’s quite manageable. The round-trip ranges from just shy of 30 miles to almost 35 depending on the route I take home. The more roundabout route is quieter, with much less traffic, though a much steeper hill.

Every May, the League of American Bicyclists observes Bike Month, with National Bike to Work Day on the second or third Friday of the month. A friend at work pointed out that the local canoe race follows it on Saturday, so he declared that Paddle to Work Day.

The lake on which the race starts lies along my regular commuting route. I just never thought about it, because it is largely screened by trees, and I would still have to drive about 10 miles to get to the point nearest my house. But as a lark I decided to paddle to work on that Saturday.

The first Paddle to Work Day dawned gray and raw. Mixed rain and snow showers fell from low clouds. I had immersion clothing and all the proper safety equipment as well as my usual items for a day of work. I even had a helmet and shorter, larger-bladed paddle for the section of the race course down a small rapid. I’d never paddled my touring boat in that kind of current.

The wind was northeasterly, so I didn’t notice it until I had gone a mile or so down the lake. I realized I was surfing a lot. Lake Wentworth is not huge, and it’s fairly shallow, so the waves don’t get very tall, but they had vertical faces and breaking whitecaps.

No racers would be on the lake for another five hours. I had it all to myself. My route was also much longer than the race, because I wanted to drive as little as possible.

The pushy chop and strong wind demanded attention. I rode down the last wave face into the calmer water at the beginning of the channel between Wentworth and Crescent Lake. The mix of precipitation shifted between rain, sleet and snow. Nice day.

Crescent Lake, formerly known as Crooked Pond, bends around with several coves, at the end of one of which lies the dam at the head of the Smith River. I’d done the race once, but it had been a few years. I couldn’t remember which cove to take. Fortunately I only had to take one blind alley to put the chart into perspective.

There are two portages, one at the top of the river and the other at the bottom, where the river ends in the old mill pond for the excelsior mill. Racers portage from the pond, over the rail trail and down a long, grassy slope to reach Back Bay, a part of Lake Winnepesaukee.

The upper portage is short, across a private home’s beach and down to the bank of the river below the dam that holds back Crescent Lake. Water shot out from under the dam through the spillway, making a series of standing waves in the narrow channel. My boat, just short of 16 feet, probably wouldn’t have fit crosswise in the river at that point.

I put on the helmet and broke out the other paddle, but the rapid presented no challenges. The old Wilderness Systems Alto behaved wonderfully, as always. It has proven to be an extraordinarily versatile boat which Wilderness Systems has unfortunately seen fit to drop from the line.

Portaging downhill wasn’t too bad. I finished the voyage with a short cruise down Back Bay to some public docks near where I work. The lake level was high, so I could easily pull the kayak out on the pier to deploy the wheel set I had stowed in the aft compartment.

Some refrigeration compressors in the basement of the shop where I work provide a great place to dry wet clothes and gear. All day I could go downstairs to visit my boat, gleaming under the fluorescent lights, waiting for the voyage home.

The voyage home illustrated the difference between paddle pace and pedal pace. Biking to work takes just over twice as long as driving. Paddling speed is very close to walking speed. A paddle commute takes almost twice as long as a bike commute. So it becomes much more of a luxury.

That northeast gale was a headwind on the way home. The waves I’d surfed now pounded me. The highest of them almost obscured my view, but the wavelength is so short on Wentworth that I would be climbing the next wave before I was finished with the last. If I stopped paddling for a moment I would be driven back, maybe broached and rolled by the waves.

Wentworth’s shallows generate some weird waves, too. Over a couple of shoals the waves would come from slight angles, alternating sides of the bow. Further out, I aimed for the dimly-seen bulk of Triggs Island, beyond which lay my objective. The wind seemed to swirl around it, like turbulence off a speeding 18-wheeler on the highway. Even when I was a mile or more from it, I could feel the gusts coming from either side.

Even in the long daylight of mid-May, dusk was deepening as I reached the shore by Ryefield Marsh.

It’s a different world when you get out of your car. Just biking is adventure enough. Cut the tie to car culture for just a day, or even a week. What do you really need for the day? How will you load and carry it? Challenge your ingenuity.

The daily form of the paddle commute adds a nice walk, because I don’t try to paddle beyond Crescent Lake. A friend is kind enough to give me landing privileges at his cottage, and I walk across town from there.

I have gone to work on snowshoes, and considered how to do it on skis. Take a look at your own daily route, to see what might lie nearby, overlooked in the rush of routine. It really breaks up the monotony.

Isolation

2004-12-15T16:10:00.000-05:00

It may seem hard to get away from the crowd when you try to play outside in populated settings, but isolation is relative.

I used to climb at Carderock. It’s hard to imagine a more crowded setting. Rope hangs beside rope and climbers queue up at the base of almost every route. Rappellers hurl themselves down between climbers, sometimes face first. But by hiking the river bank, climbing ropeless and alone on the most obscure outcrops I could find, a kind of solitude was available. And on busier routes gravity provided the isolation.

With no belayer, with no one there who even knew my name, I might as well have been a speck on the immensity of Half Dome. The only difference was that I wouldn’t make as big a splat mark on the ground and the squeegee patrol would arrive sooner. As far as the rock was concerned, it was a personal, one-on-one relationship. When you’re climbing, you have to focus only on that. You couldn’t be more alone.

The water provides a similar solitude. You may see other vessels from a kayak or small sailboat, but little boats make even medium-sized water feel big. And I don’t like to bother other mariners with my problems, so if something does go awry I’ll probably try to cope with it myself until it’s too late. I just have this notion that if I’m out there for idiot fun I shouldn’t trouble the professionals who earn their living on boats and ships. A DNR (Do Not Rescue) attitude serves to keep me cautious and sane.

I failed to note the author’s name, but I read about a ski writer who went out with Telemark ski legend Steve Barnett. The writer noted that Barnett didn’t pull any bold moves, because he was used to soloing. A soloist can’t risk injury the way a rockstar hero with a film crew can. No one wants to get hurt, obviously, but the traveler alone has no safety margin except what he creates through prudence.

Of course it’s imprudent to be there at all. That’s another whole topic.

As a solo boater I face a higher level of risk at all times, so I will choose my conditions carefully. I don’t do white water, so my hazards stem mostly from the weather: wind and wave.

Soloing might not be my first choice, but going alone is better than never going. My father, bless his heart, chose a small sailing dinghy designed for two people. He always needed a crew, and he wouldn’t go if it meant leaving his family behind. His personal sailing ambition was less important than sharing it with one of us. Unfortunately for him, his bright, curious children had a wide range of interests, and the most nautically talented wanted to skipper his own boat. I filled the breach, but was not lavishly talented in the racing department. And eventually I moved on. That left him beached. For the most part I have avoided getting boxed in that way. But the price has been soloing and the risks it entails.

There have been some great rides. On a foray in the Snipe, around Casco Bay in Maine, I had installed a roller furler on the jib to reduce sail, but I didn’t have my reefable main yet. The sea breeze picked up while I was outside the row of larger islands, out in Hussey Sound. I bore off to reach Whitehead Passage on a beam reach. Crossing the path of the waves at a shallow angle, hiking out for all I was worth, I would alternately sense a low wall of water coming up behind me and be lifted suddenly by it to fly forward, four or five feet above the trough, counting wave height and the boat herself, heeled over.

I was a mile from shore, barely a speck to the nearest boat. It was do or die on a beautiful summer afternoon. Focus. Concentrate. The forces of nature are impersonal. That’s why I like them so much. They never cheat. They don’t have to. They’re powerful enough to destroy any human. You don’t beat forces like that. You negotiate them. And sometimes even that is not enough. You either break even or you lose. What you win is the experience you take away with you.

Once in Whitehead Passage I had to break out the jib so the boat would drive against the ebb current pouring out the gap between rocky islands. I was sheltered from the steady wind, but strong downdrafts would suddenly swat the water as turbulence made its way over the island to windward of me. The changes of wind velocity and direction kept me switching rapidly from leaned in to hiked out, working the sheets to keep her sailing against the tide. It was great one-on-one.

On a smaller boat, designed for single-handing, it would have been a little more casual. But I was trying to manage a fairly large rig for one medium-sized guy.

Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. That’s your cue to start chewing harder.

Every so often someone has to saw off his own arm to get out of a solo jam. I really don’t know if I could do that. On the plus side, most of my current activities don’t carry a high risk of that kind of entrapment.

Much closer to shore, paddling on the Severn River in Maryland, isolation was as easy as paddling from one shore to the other. I was in a borrowed whitewater boat, not a good tracker for fast paddling. So I made a series of sprints beneath the big Route 50 bridge, from one bridge pier to the next. At each stop I would scan for motor boat traffic before making the next hop. I figured some throttle-monkey might not see me out in the open, but they’d probably try to avoid something as large as the bridge. Nothing is guaranteed, of course.

Solitude also awaited in the shallow ends of the many branches of the Chesapeake’s tidal creeks. Go where other people think it’s boring, or where they just don’t fit.

Just by going slower, by a different mode, one can be alone. Biking to work along the highway I am exempt from most of the stress of driving because no one tailgates me and no one goes too slowly in front of me. Skiing cross-country I can separate myself by my pace, staying in the long gaps between other trail users and then passing quickly when I do catch up to someone. Faster skiers do the same thing to me.

If you figure out how to work all the angles, it’s like a parallel universe.

Being in the business

2004-12-10T16:34:00.000-05:00

The down side to being in the gear business is that I have to spend a lot of time studying the new gear. I have to try it out if I can. I certainly need to develop an opinion, because someone is bound to ask. To complicate matters, sometimes change really does represent improvement. I stress sometimes.

These may sound like crocodile tears, but gear is just what gets you outside. It needs to be well designed, well built and preferably affordable, but once I own a piece of it I tend to use it without thinking much about it. If it calls attention to itself by breaking or failing to live up to my needs I will look for alternatives. If not I'll happily play outside with it for years.

Customers require answers for two basic reasons. Either they need to acquire gear just to be able to do the activity in question or they're gear weenies who just want to acquire gear gear gear. Among the gear weenies there are also those who just want to talk about gear.

When someone starts to talk to me about gear, I don't know which category they're in. And they might change categories as time goes by. I can't afford to brush anyone off. A perennial pest may get less of my time than a known buyer or a stranger, but I can't assume that someone is always just wasting time.

I frequently forget to delve into catalogs, magazines and websites. I'd prefer not to read about someone else's boss trip to someplace exotic and distant, or the latest, greatest must-have pack filler or rack ornament. I would rather be out using what I have. But I'm in the business. Someone will call my attention to it sooner or later.

Nightyakking

2004-12-09T15:40:00.000-05:00

Kayaking started out as a nocturnal activity for me. Someone had a kayak at a sailing club party after Thursday night dinghy races. I was 14, so I wasn’t drunk, like most of the adults.

When they decided to hold time trial races around the speed buoy and the can buoy off the club basins, I posted a respectable time. I also had a lot less trouble straying upright than they did.
After the wet grown-ups retired back to the cooler and keg, I asked if I could take the kayak out again. The owner said I could.

It was Annapolis harbor, a June evening, back when the Naval Academy held graduation exercises that late and called it June Week instead of Commissioning Week. The sun had set, so I paddled very carefully across the channel, knowing I was completely invisible. I must have seen “Cockleshell Heroes” on the late show, because I felt that kayaks were in their element in the dark

It was also the height of the Vietnam War. Warships often visited for the graduation week. An old diesel sub was tied up at the corner of the seawall, armed guards on deck. As I paddled along the seawall, someone offered me five bucks to go bang on the submarine. I counted the men with M-16s on deck and declined the offer.

Midshipmen were making out with their girlfriends in the darkness on the shoreline stone work. One of them winged a bottle at me when he saw me coasting silently past, a few yards away.

After a circuit of the harbor I came alongside a lighted buoy, tied the boat to it and climbed up to sit on top of it. I was careful not to obstruct the light. I doubted if that subtle detail would make a difference to the marine police, but I knew I looked young enough to get away with pleading ignorance. Meanwhile, I wasn’t so ignorant as to endanger people by interfering with the buoy’s designed function.

Darkness cloaked me. No one chased me from my perch. Too soon I had to return to the sailing club.

That experience linked the stealthy kayak to the night for me. I did not sit in one again until 14 years later, having done all my boating in sailing or rowing dinghies in the interim.

The boat I borrowed was black. Dusk and darkness beckoned from the tidal creeks of Annapolis, where I had once again fetched up.

Not that I had anything against paddling in daylight, but I had to work. Much of the year, darkness was falling or had fallen by the time I got out.

At off hours, in off seasons, peace reclaims the waterways. I saw lots of wildlife above and below the surface. Deer sheltered in small scraps of undevelopable land cut off by highways laid out before rampant development made land so valuable. Accidental wilderness was left behind. Fish dimpled the water’s surface or churned up jets of mud as they raced out from under me, paddling through the shallows. Turtles plopped off logs.

In the years since, my daylight forays now outnumber my nocturnal missions. But I still like the stealthy slide of a sleek kayak gliding through the darkness, alone or in the company of other commandos.