I wish I could write more about some of the cases I encounter working as a JAG. There are usually some pretty entertaining tid-bits. But I can't. So I won't. I do have a little legal saga of my own going on though.
Yesterday morning, I was on my way to work, and had made it almost all the way. I was probably about 100 yeards from the gate. The last part of the drive involves merging from one road onto another one, that is pretty busy. The guy in front of me starts to go. I assume he will complete the act and merge. I was wrong. He hits the brakes. I cannot react quite fast enough and I end up hitting him. No joke, I was probably doing 2 mph.
It was pretty routine, there was almost no damage to either vehicle. No dents, no scrapes. There was a bit of white stuff showing on his bumper, but that was it. We exchanged information, realized that we both worked on base and had the same insurer. I considered the matter to be just an annoyance.
About 4 hours later, this guy, who is a civilian that works on base gives me a call letting me know that he apparently suffered whiplash and had to get an MRI and a CAT Scan done. He further provided that his boss was recommending that he get a police report to document the event. Alarm bells immediately started going off. When we exchanged information, he was totally fine. He was moving his head around just fine like a damned horned owl. But now, a few hours later, when our cars had gently kissed at a speed similar to that of a glacier, he had gotten whiplash. If this guy could get whiplash from this impact he could die of blood loss from a papercut.
I agreed to meet him at the police station after work. We met in the parking lot and he is now wearing a neckbrace and has someone else driving him. We walk into the police station together and one of the sergeants on duty asks what is going on. He explains that there was a car accident this morning and that we wanted to file a police report. Interesting that he used the word "we" there. I had no desire to file a police report. The officer takes a look at him and asks why we didn't call the police at the time. I explain that it should be clear once he sees the vehicles.
So we head out to the parking lot. In the rain. The officer takes one look and asks where the damage is. He points to his bumper, but because of the rain, there is even less to see. The officer wipes the bumper with his hand and now there is almost nothing. The officer explains that we did the right thing exchanging information and there would have been no point in calling the police. Still, this guy insists that he needs a report for his work. The officer explains that he cannot simply issue a report for the hell of it and there needs to be at least $500 worth of damage for him to issue a report.
At this point, it is raining even harder, but this guy won't drop the issue. Instead of just walking away, the officer then launches into a spiel about how insurance works and that he does not recommend making a claim because it is likely that our insurers will raise our rates and drop us. I found this kind of interesting because he just decided to give us this little speech and I am pretty sure he was in no way qualified to give this advice. However, I just nod along because it is always good to let someone think their unsolicited incorrect advice is very valuable. Also, I wanted to get out of the rain. Once he finished with Auto Insurance 101, the officer bid us adieu and we went out separate ways.
I did call my insurer to let them know about this. One, because I don't like scammers in general. Two, because we are covered by the same insurer I don't want my insurance to have to pay out anything unnecessary. So this morning one of the insurance adjustors calls me to do a recorded interview about what happened. It was all uneventful until the end when he asks me "Are the Questions and Answers you provided true and accurate in the recording" I didn't intend to be difficult, but I told him that I hadn't had a chance to review the recording so I couldn't state whether it was accurate or not. He then rephrased and asked me in the Questions and Answers were accurate and true. I then told him that I couldn't comment on whether the questions were true or not because I didn't write them. Further, I didn't believe that there was such a thing as true or false question. I then started to go on a tangent that a question isn't really something that is accurate or not. I told him that I thought the questions were straightforward and not ambiguous. I wasn't trying to annoy the guy, but I probably did. Finally, he just asked, "is everything you said true?" Of course, I had to answer, "you mean in the recording?" and finally we were done.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Perspective
I've only met my wife's dad, Hung, a couple of times. He is quiet, friendly and generous. From outward appearances, you would never guess the hell that he has been through.
He had grown up relatively prosperous in North Vietnam. Unfortunately all that changed with the Vietnam war. He was the oldest of 8 children. His sister was killed by the communist bombs while attending a New Years party in North Vietnam in 1965. It was the death of his sister and a desire to protect his country that motivated him to abandon his university life. Not content to merely join, he volunteered for the Ranger branch where he was sure to see real action. Although he was the first in his family to join, he was not the last. His younger brothers served as Artillery Officers, helicopter pilots, platoon leaders.
Those who have done extraordinary things, almost universally, tend to down play their actions. The way Hung tells it, he was a company commander, and he fought in the war. The truth is, he fought in the bloodiest and costliest battles. He was wounded, he fought on. He lived in the jungle, caught malaria and fought on. He was able to get brief respites from the battles and would see his wife and children from time to time. He couldn't have known at the time how long it would be before he saw them again.
When Saigon fell, his brother, the helicopter pilot was able to rescue Hung's family, including my wife. My wife doesn't remember all the details. What she does remember is incredible. She was only about 8 years old at the time, but remembers running for the helicopter. Because of the gunfire, the helicopter had to make several attempts. On one attempt, she and her brother had managed to grab the skids, but only the skids and they were hanging on with their upper bodies. She looked down, her mother and younger sisters had not made it to the helicopter. So they let go. Eventually, they all made it onto the helicopter, to the USS Midway, and ultimately to the United States as refugees.
Hung's journey would be much longer. While his family was starting a new life in the U.S., he would spend the next nine years as a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese called them reeducation camps, but that was a name only. Nine years, working in mine fields, clearing jungles, digging wells, building barracks. They were given almost no clothing and nowhere near enough food. Those who complained, were beaten, sometimes to death. The hunger was so extreme that whatever they could catch, they would eat raw. It was his desire to reunite with his family that fueled him.
After nine years - he was finally released. More than anything, he wanted to come to America. There was no helicopter to take him to a US Navy ship though. He had to slip out under the cover of darkness in a crude homemade boat. With only a simple map and compass, the boat made its way 800 miles over the open ocean to a Malaysian oil rig. Still the journey was not over.
He would spend the next several years moving from one refugee camp to another first in Malaysia and then the Philippines. He did not complain. He taught other refugees English. He taught the children Vietnamese.
Finally, 11 years later, he made it to the U.S.A. and got to see his children again. When he had last seen them they were so young, one hadn't even been born yet. Now they were teenagers and young adults. Even though so much time had passed and he had missed so much, he focused only on the good things.
When I saw him at one of my wife's cousin's weddings, I had read his story. He had created a photo album of his incredible journey. He didn't want to forget the past, but he certainly did not want to relive it either. So we talked about the happier things in life and not about the torture and despair he had experienced. At the wedding, he was smiling, and so happy to see his children again.
I don't know if he celebrates Memorial Day. He should. He is the type of person that epitomizes what this day is about.
He had grown up relatively prosperous in North Vietnam. Unfortunately all that changed with the Vietnam war. He was the oldest of 8 children. His sister was killed by the communist bombs while attending a New Years party in North Vietnam in 1965. It was the death of his sister and a desire to protect his country that motivated him to abandon his university life. Not content to merely join, he volunteered for the Ranger branch where he was sure to see real action. Although he was the first in his family to join, he was not the last. His younger brothers served as Artillery Officers, helicopter pilots, platoon leaders.
Those who have done extraordinary things, almost universally, tend to down play their actions. The way Hung tells it, he was a company commander, and he fought in the war. The truth is, he fought in the bloodiest and costliest battles. He was wounded, he fought on. He lived in the jungle, caught malaria and fought on. He was able to get brief respites from the battles and would see his wife and children from time to time. He couldn't have known at the time how long it would be before he saw them again.
When Saigon fell, his brother, the helicopter pilot was able to rescue Hung's family, including my wife. My wife doesn't remember all the details. What she does remember is incredible. She was only about 8 years old at the time, but remembers running for the helicopter. Because of the gunfire, the helicopter had to make several attempts. On one attempt, she and her brother had managed to grab the skids, but only the skids and they were hanging on with their upper bodies. She looked down, her mother and younger sisters had not made it to the helicopter. So they let go. Eventually, they all made it onto the helicopter, to the USS Midway, and ultimately to the United States as refugees.
Hung's journey would be much longer. While his family was starting a new life in the U.S., he would spend the next nine years as a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese called them reeducation camps, but that was a name only. Nine years, working in mine fields, clearing jungles, digging wells, building barracks. They were given almost no clothing and nowhere near enough food. Those who complained, were beaten, sometimes to death. The hunger was so extreme that whatever they could catch, they would eat raw. It was his desire to reunite with his family that fueled him.
After nine years - he was finally released. More than anything, he wanted to come to America. There was no helicopter to take him to a US Navy ship though. He had to slip out under the cover of darkness in a crude homemade boat. With only a simple map and compass, the boat made its way 800 miles over the open ocean to a Malaysian oil rig. Still the journey was not over.
He would spend the next several years moving from one refugee camp to another first in Malaysia and then the Philippines. He did not complain. He taught other refugees English. He taught the children Vietnamese.
Finally, 11 years later, he made it to the U.S.A. and got to see his children again. When he had last seen them they were so young, one hadn't even been born yet. Now they were teenagers and young adults. Even though so much time had passed and he had missed so much, he focused only on the good things.
When I saw him at one of my wife's cousin's weddings, I had read his story. He had created a photo album of his incredible journey. He didn't want to forget the past, but he certainly did not want to relive it either. So we talked about the happier things in life and not about the torture and despair he had experienced. At the wedding, he was smiling, and so happy to see his children again.
I don't know if he celebrates Memorial Day. He should. He is the type of person that epitomizes what this day is about.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Treks - Blue Mountain to Forked
I think of all the treks we did, this was the one I did the most. I don't know why so many troops signed up for this one, but for whatever reason, they did.
Unlike the load, who got to start off his career with a backpacking trip, I started off with this little gem. I am being too harsh, it is actually extremely beautiful and I greatly enjoyed it the first few times. In the end, I think I may have done it close to 10 times though.
The start is in the town of Blue Mountain. Blue Mountain is home to the adirondack museum. If you ever get the chance to visit, I highly recommend it. It is a great museum in its own right. Coupled with the beautiful location, it is a great way to pass an afternoon or even an entire day.
It would be cool if the first part of the trek began at the museum, but it doesn't. Like most canoe treks, it begins at a boat launch. Anytime you get a group of people together doing something new, it is wonderfully inefficient. It seems to take an eternity to get the canoe trailer unloaded and everyon in their canoes. When I first started guiding, I would pick the smallest person as my partner so as to keep the pace comfortable. If there happened to be an odd number of participants, one canoe would have 3 people. Most of the time, the 3 person canoe was the fastest or close to it. As time went on, I preferred to canoe by myself. All this meant was that there would be a 3 person canoe with an even number of participants.
Blue Mountain Lake is a very forgiving lake to learn how to canoe on. It is not particularly big, so there is little wind. The first day is extremely pleasant. If I remember correctly you pass from Blue Mountain Lake to Eagle Lake to Utowana and then into the Marion River. Blue Mountain-Eagle and Utowana are all connected, so there is no carrying involved. Generally, it takes only a few hours to reach the Marion River where the first carry of the week happens.
It is a pleasant enough carry, probably just over 1/2 mile or so. Interestingly, there used to be a narrow gauge railway here, just 1/2 mile long, that would transport the fat cats of wall street in the 1920s or so when the Adirondacks was a premier destination. They even employed people to walk along the train to ensure that the embers from the steam locomotive did not inadvertently cause a forest fire. All that is gone now, but it is fun that you are following the old railroad tracks - even if the tracks aren't there. You then follow along the Marion river, which I always called the Maid Marion River, until you reach Raquette Lake. The campsite for the first day is just inside the Lake, still quite close to the river. Here is where the trek falls apart a bit though.
Raquette Lake is huge, there is something like 125 miles of shoreline. Ken Smith envisioned that scouts would enjoy exploring every knook and cranny that this 125 miles offered. I am sure Ken Smith would, and did, do this. The problem was, the campsite for the next day was probably only 4 miles away from the campsite the previous night. Most groups had no interest, at all, in exploring even 100 yards of Lake that they didn't need to. I made the mistake once of not telling the scouts that our campsite was only 4 miles away and leading a trip around the lake in no particular direction. The scouts were furious when they discovered that I had "tricked" them and made them paddle further than needed. They would much rather break camp at 8 am and arrive at the next campsite around 10 am and screw around for the rest of the day. We would do some practice canoe strokes and perhaps even go out with empty canoes and see who could swamp the other person's canoe. But, bottom line, the 2nd day was a very easy day.
The third day involved an excursion to climb West Mountain. To get there, you had to paddle 6-7 miles directly across the lake. On a calm day, this was easy. There were very few calm days. Most of the time you were fighting the wind on either the trip there or the trip back. Occasionally, you got lucky and got to fight the wind both ways. Canoeing against the wind is tough. Even though canoes are not particularly big, there is enough surface area where a good breeze can really push you around. On a calm day, you paddle along and may even talk with your canoe partner or other boats that are nearby. When you stop to rest, you may drift a bit, but you largely stay in the same general location. All bets are off with a good breeze. Even if you wanted to talk, you can't because the wind carries off your voice. Moreover, you are paddling like hell just to make forward progress. In addition to fighting for forward progress you are fighting the wind as it trys to turn your canoe like a weathervane.
Once you reach the trail head for West Mountain, you walk through some swampy bits before you actually start climbing. The black flies in this area are tough. When one of them gets you, it doesn't feel like a sting, it feels more like they have scooped a bit of your flesh up and eaten it. They love biting you on the head too. It gets so maddening that the first instant you feel like one is on your head you nearly brain yourself hitting it with enough force to kill a small bird. You then repeat this process over and over and over. Other than that, it is a good hike. The views are good and it is always fun to get a break from canoeing.
After the climb, you return to the campsite from day 2. It is nice not to have to break camp or set up camp that day.
Day 4 involves leaving the Raquette Lake and heading to Forked Lake. Interestingly you pronounce the "ed" in "Forked" so it is two syllables. There is a carry between the two lakes, again pretty short and easy. Forked Lake is pretty small, so it is not a long day's paddle. There is a nice little diversion that you can take to a good swimming hole.
I have talked about Ken Smith's fondness for very short last days. Nowhere is this more evident than in the last day of this trek. You can easily see the takeout from the campsite the last night, it is probably about 1/4 to 1/2 mile away. In fact, you can see well enough that I would often know that before we even started, that Sarge had once again beaten me to the takeout. So the last "day" was really the last 1/2 hour. I frequently reached the takeout at 8 am or so and would often be back at camp by 10:30 or 11:00.
This was a great beginner trek. During the 90 miler, we paddled more than the entire 5 day trip in the first day. It would have been more fun if we could have had access to a pontoon boat on the 2nd and 3rd day in Raquette Lake. Raquette Lake is for the most part pretty built up and there are some absolutely beautiful lake front places. There isn't that much appeal in checking them out though when canoeing.
I don't have much to add here as the Voyageur has quite well covered it. I'll echo that the ADK Museum is a must not an option in my view. It is simply gorgeous and wonderfully informative. It really adds to the experience of any trip of trek to the 'Daks.
The hike along the old narrow gauge railway is pretty cool. When you reach the end, it's a short paddle to the campsite which is on a point before you enter Racquette Lake proper. The 2nd day you are supposed to canoe the short 4 miles North to your campsite. One year I had a troop from Ken Smith' hometown who insisted on following his itinerary to the 't.' So we canoed south to an inlet called Golden Beach in an area called South Bay. It was a windy overcast day. And when I say beach, I mean a shore line with a little more sand than most forested shorelines. We battled winds to get there, huddled in all our clothes and windbreakers to stay warm for a miserable hour and then went on our way.
West Mtn. - awesome. Nice clearing near the top where there was an old fire tower.
The carry to Forked Lake goes across a road with a pay phone - remember them? Every summer for about 5 or 6 in a row, I would call my Mom at work to say hi from the middle of the "wildneress" on this phone. At least two of my summers, I had a group on this trek that passed this phone on July 20, my Dad's birthday. So we would call him up and sing happy birthday.
I don't have any horrible stories about this particular trek; however one time I was on the trek at the same time the Weebs was with another group. His group was doing a really cool trek Blue Mtn. to Tupper, which combined most of Blue Mtn. to Forked, with Long Lake to Tupper, via a crazy carry from the NE shore of Racquette into Long Lake. Anyway, on the 2nd night it was pretty early and my group was winding down, so I hopped into my canoe and paddled over to the island where Webelo's group was camping. It was a beautiful, starlit, warm, calm night and I thought it might be fun to shoot the breeze with a friend while paddling around Racquette. While my group was milling around a campfire, talking and laughing, his site was dead. So being ignorant of any possible issues, I called out his name until I heard a response, "What!?" from inside a tent. I told him it was me and he basically said to go away. I found out later he was already having a tough time with his group and hating the trek and he was sharing a tent with a particularly annoying father, whom he didn't want to annoy further. So my late night paddle around the river
Unlike the load, who got to start off his career with a backpacking trip, I started off with this little gem. I am being too harsh, it is actually extremely beautiful and I greatly enjoyed it the first few times. In the end, I think I may have done it close to 10 times though.
The start is in the town of Blue Mountain. Blue Mountain is home to the adirondack museum. If you ever get the chance to visit, I highly recommend it. It is a great museum in its own right. Coupled with the beautiful location, it is a great way to pass an afternoon or even an entire day.
It would be cool if the first part of the trek began at the museum, but it doesn't. Like most canoe treks, it begins at a boat launch. Anytime you get a group of people together doing something new, it is wonderfully inefficient. It seems to take an eternity to get the canoe trailer unloaded and everyon in their canoes. When I first started guiding, I would pick the smallest person as my partner so as to keep the pace comfortable. If there happened to be an odd number of participants, one canoe would have 3 people. Most of the time, the 3 person canoe was the fastest or close to it. As time went on, I preferred to canoe by myself. All this meant was that there would be a 3 person canoe with an even number of participants.
Blue Mountain Lake is a very forgiving lake to learn how to canoe on. It is not particularly big, so there is little wind. The first day is extremely pleasant. If I remember correctly you pass from Blue Mountain Lake to Eagle Lake to Utowana and then into the Marion River. Blue Mountain-Eagle and Utowana are all connected, so there is no carrying involved. Generally, it takes only a few hours to reach the Marion River where the first carry of the week happens.
It is a pleasant enough carry, probably just over 1/2 mile or so. Interestingly, there used to be a narrow gauge railway here, just 1/2 mile long, that would transport the fat cats of wall street in the 1920s or so when the Adirondacks was a premier destination. They even employed people to walk along the train to ensure that the embers from the steam locomotive did not inadvertently cause a forest fire. All that is gone now, but it is fun that you are following the old railroad tracks - even if the tracks aren't there. You then follow along the Marion river, which I always called the Maid Marion River, until you reach Raquette Lake. The campsite for the first day is just inside the Lake, still quite close to the river. Here is where the trek falls apart a bit though.
Raquette Lake is huge, there is something like 125 miles of shoreline. Ken Smith envisioned that scouts would enjoy exploring every knook and cranny that this 125 miles offered. I am sure Ken Smith would, and did, do this. The problem was, the campsite for the next day was probably only 4 miles away from the campsite the previous night. Most groups had no interest, at all, in exploring even 100 yards of Lake that they didn't need to. I made the mistake once of not telling the scouts that our campsite was only 4 miles away and leading a trip around the lake in no particular direction. The scouts were furious when they discovered that I had "tricked" them and made them paddle further than needed. They would much rather break camp at 8 am and arrive at the next campsite around 10 am and screw around for the rest of the day. We would do some practice canoe strokes and perhaps even go out with empty canoes and see who could swamp the other person's canoe. But, bottom line, the 2nd day was a very easy day.
The third day involved an excursion to climb West Mountain. To get there, you had to paddle 6-7 miles directly across the lake. On a calm day, this was easy. There were very few calm days. Most of the time you were fighting the wind on either the trip there or the trip back. Occasionally, you got lucky and got to fight the wind both ways. Canoeing against the wind is tough. Even though canoes are not particularly big, there is enough surface area where a good breeze can really push you around. On a calm day, you paddle along and may even talk with your canoe partner or other boats that are nearby. When you stop to rest, you may drift a bit, but you largely stay in the same general location. All bets are off with a good breeze. Even if you wanted to talk, you can't because the wind carries off your voice. Moreover, you are paddling like hell just to make forward progress. In addition to fighting for forward progress you are fighting the wind as it trys to turn your canoe like a weathervane.
Once you reach the trail head for West Mountain, you walk through some swampy bits before you actually start climbing. The black flies in this area are tough. When one of them gets you, it doesn't feel like a sting, it feels more like they have scooped a bit of your flesh up and eaten it. They love biting you on the head too. It gets so maddening that the first instant you feel like one is on your head you nearly brain yourself hitting it with enough force to kill a small bird. You then repeat this process over and over and over. Other than that, it is a good hike. The views are good and it is always fun to get a break from canoeing.
After the climb, you return to the campsite from day 2. It is nice not to have to break camp or set up camp that day.
Day 4 involves leaving the Raquette Lake and heading to Forked Lake. Interestingly you pronounce the "ed" in "Forked" so it is two syllables. There is a carry between the two lakes, again pretty short and easy. Forked Lake is pretty small, so it is not a long day's paddle. There is a nice little diversion that you can take to a good swimming hole.
I have talked about Ken Smith's fondness for very short last days. Nowhere is this more evident than in the last day of this trek. You can easily see the takeout from the campsite the last night, it is probably about 1/4 to 1/2 mile away. In fact, you can see well enough that I would often know that before we even started, that Sarge had once again beaten me to the takeout. So the last "day" was really the last 1/2 hour. I frequently reached the takeout at 8 am or so and would often be back at camp by 10:30 or 11:00.
This was a great beginner trek. During the 90 miler, we paddled more than the entire 5 day trip in the first day. It would have been more fun if we could have had access to a pontoon boat on the 2nd and 3rd day in Raquette Lake. Raquette Lake is for the most part pretty built up and there are some absolutely beautiful lake front places. There isn't that much appeal in checking them out though when canoeing.
I don't have much to add here as the Voyageur has quite well covered it. I'll echo that the ADK Museum is a must not an option in my view. It is simply gorgeous and wonderfully informative. It really adds to the experience of any trip of trek to the 'Daks.
The hike along the old narrow gauge railway is pretty cool. When you reach the end, it's a short paddle to the campsite which is on a point before you enter Racquette Lake proper. The 2nd day you are supposed to canoe the short 4 miles North to your campsite. One year I had a troop from Ken Smith' hometown who insisted on following his itinerary to the 't.' So we canoed south to an inlet called Golden Beach in an area called South Bay. It was a windy overcast day. And when I say beach, I mean a shore line with a little more sand than most forested shorelines. We battled winds to get there, huddled in all our clothes and windbreakers to stay warm for a miserable hour and then went on our way.
West Mtn. - awesome. Nice clearing near the top where there was an old fire tower.
The carry to Forked Lake goes across a road with a pay phone - remember them? Every summer for about 5 or 6 in a row, I would call my Mom at work to say hi from the middle of the "wildneress" on this phone. At least two of my summers, I had a group on this trek that passed this phone on July 20, my Dad's birthday. So we would call him up and sing happy birthday.
I don't have any horrible stories about this particular trek; however one time I was on the trek at the same time the Weebs was with another group. His group was doing a really cool trek Blue Mtn. to Tupper, which combined most of Blue Mtn. to Forked, with Long Lake to Tupper, via a crazy carry from the NE shore of Racquette into Long Lake. Anyway, on the 2nd night it was pretty early and my group was winding down, so I hopped into my canoe and paddled over to the island where Webelo's group was camping. It was a beautiful, starlit, warm, calm night and I thought it might be fun to shoot the breeze with a friend while paddling around Racquette. While my group was milling around a campfire, talking and laughing, his site was dead. So being ignorant of any possible issues, I called out his name until I heard a response, "What!?" from inside a tent. I told him it was me and he basically said to go away. I found out later he was already having a tough time with his group and hating the trek and he was sharing a tent with a particularly annoying father, whom he didn't want to annoy further. So my late night paddle around the river
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Impressionable
I was and am a big fan of the comedy sketch show kids in the hall. They did a lot of absurd sketches that appealed to my sense of humor. One of my favorites was about a blue collar dock worker that gets counseled about his use of the word "ascertain". Apparently he was using it at least two to three hundred times a day. It is absurd, but that is what made it funny. Anyway, at the conclusion of the sketch, his boss tells him that he is glad they were able to "delineate" the problem. Of course, he then fixated on the word delineate.
For whatever reason, I decided that I would incorporate that word into my lexicon one summer and tried to use delineate as often as possible, with little regard for whether it actually fit into the context. Many times I subsituted the word "delineate" for the word "solve". So, often, when presented with a task, my response was that we would delineate it, and after finishing the task I would declare it delineated. The thing was, no-one, with perhaps the exception of the load called me on it. Maybe they just thought I was mildly retarded or didn't know what the word meant themselves.
When used correctly, it was often purely by coincidence. There are a number of times where the word delineate is appropriate. For whatever reason, a lot of times those types of situations do not present themselves at a boy scout camp.
The other, among many, weird quirks I had was that I had been listening to the song "The Freshman" by the Verve Pipe a lot. It was a pretty popular song, and the chorus featured a line "I can't be held responsible, she was touching her face." I dropped the "she was touching he face" part, but really enjoyed telling people either that "I couldn't be held responsible", or a variation that "they can't be held responsible". This one, I did get called on a few times. For instance, I would often claim that I couldn't be held responsible for things that no one would expect to hold me responsible for. For instance, if there was particularly bad weather and someone made a passing remark about it, my immediate response was to say something like "I can't be held responsible, but we will delineate the issue." Conversely, I would declare that I couldn't be held responsible for things that I absolutely could.
Interestingly, people still continued to talk to me. I think they sort of viewed like an old man entering the early stages of dementia.
However, there was one occasion where it did not fly over too well. I think it was the summer of 1997 or perhaps 1998, but we had a reservation director who was a bit of an odd guy. The reservation director was the top dog, basically everyone answered to one of three camp directors and the camp directors answered to the reservation director. I don't think Ranger Bob answered to anyone, but that was OK because he was Ranger Bob.
Most people sort of worked there way up to the Camp Director job, but not always. Sometimes someone would show up for only one summer and be the Camp Director. We had a few guys who held the reservation director job for several years running, but occasionally there was a gap. And indeed, during this summer there was a gap and there was a guy named Vince who was the reservation director.
Now unlike a couple of my very close friends, Weebs and the Load, I never worked as Summit Director. I will let Load comment on his summer as a camp director, (and perhaps his few weeks of directing a whole other camp) but I think it is a pretty thankless job. Reservation director, I imagine, is even worse. You are responsible for the entire reservation and you have a pretty immature ever changing work force that really wants to have a lot of fun. But, we have had some great reservation directors, the Hammer and T.H. T.H. incidentally was the person that hired me for my very first summer way back in 1992 as a Counselor in Training.
Vince was not a very good reservation director. He had a habit of focusing on minute details and losing the big picture. I wish i could remember this part of the story better, but it is hazy. Anyway, Vince was up at Summit telling us that we had to change the way we did something. It was a stupid suggestion because he really didn't understand the way Summit worked. Anyway, he was very serious. After he finished talking, I of course relied on my old standby and said to him "You can't be held responsible." Everyone who was in on the joke sort of chuckled. Vince was not in on the joke and naturally took my words at face value. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he could and would "be held responsible".
I know this story doesn't have much of a point. Perhaps it was another part of what I really loved about camp. I have never been in a workplace since, and likely very few exist, where it is largely permissible to simply talk in gibberish and non-sequitars.
Also, since this doesn't really warrant a post of its own, I'll throw out this other bizzare tradition that took off at camp. When we were not out on trek, we ate most of our meals in the dining hall at Camp Buckskin. It was nice not to have to cook, but it was very crowded and loud. The standing rule is that staff members were supposed to mix with the various scout troops and one or two staff members would sit with 8 or so scouts. Summit played by a different set of rules though, we almost exclusively formed our own table of all staff members. Then, because of our antics, we were often banished to the porch outside the dining hall. The funny thing was that the porch was by far the nicest place to eat. You were outside, dining alfresco, you didn't have to participate in the bizzare songs and chants that would crop up during the meals. So it was the best kind of banishment.
I think it started innocently enough with someone grabbing a cookie off someone else's tray and eating it. The sort of thing that would get you shanked at prison, but was just a good laugh. But of course it progressed. It got to the point where you would just walk up to someone, grab a hamburger or a piece of pizza off their tray and take a bite and calmly put it back on their tray. The Weebs took it even further. On at least one occasion, he went up to the reservation director, the Hammer, took a bite of I think his french toast and put it back on the tray. Hammer wasn't sitting at our table and noone dared Weebs to do it. He just decided that he would walk up to the Hammer's table, reach down, take a bite, and move on. Hammer, unlike Vince, didn't sweat the small stuff. He didn't say anything. I think he simply cut around the bit where the Weebs had taken a bite and continued with his meal.
For whatever reason, I decided that I would incorporate that word into my lexicon one summer and tried to use delineate as often as possible, with little regard for whether it actually fit into the context. Many times I subsituted the word "delineate" for the word "solve". So, often, when presented with a task, my response was that we would delineate it, and after finishing the task I would declare it delineated. The thing was, no-one, with perhaps the exception of the load called me on it. Maybe they just thought I was mildly retarded or didn't know what the word meant themselves.
When used correctly, it was often purely by coincidence. There are a number of times where the word delineate is appropriate. For whatever reason, a lot of times those types of situations do not present themselves at a boy scout camp.
The other, among many, weird quirks I had was that I had been listening to the song "The Freshman" by the Verve Pipe a lot. It was a pretty popular song, and the chorus featured a line "I can't be held responsible, she was touching her face." I dropped the "she was touching he face" part, but really enjoyed telling people either that "I couldn't be held responsible", or a variation that "they can't be held responsible". This one, I did get called on a few times. For instance, I would often claim that I couldn't be held responsible for things that no one would expect to hold me responsible for. For instance, if there was particularly bad weather and someone made a passing remark about it, my immediate response was to say something like "I can't be held responsible, but we will delineate the issue." Conversely, I would declare that I couldn't be held responsible for things that I absolutely could.
Interestingly, people still continued to talk to me. I think they sort of viewed like an old man entering the early stages of dementia.
However, there was one occasion where it did not fly over too well. I think it was the summer of 1997 or perhaps 1998, but we had a reservation director who was a bit of an odd guy. The reservation director was the top dog, basically everyone answered to one of three camp directors and the camp directors answered to the reservation director. I don't think Ranger Bob answered to anyone, but that was OK because he was Ranger Bob.
Most people sort of worked there way up to the Camp Director job, but not always. Sometimes someone would show up for only one summer and be the Camp Director. We had a few guys who held the reservation director job for several years running, but occasionally there was a gap. And indeed, during this summer there was a gap and there was a guy named Vince who was the reservation director.
Now unlike a couple of my very close friends, Weebs and the Load, I never worked as Summit Director. I will let Load comment on his summer as a camp director, (and perhaps his few weeks of directing a whole other camp) but I think it is a pretty thankless job. Reservation director, I imagine, is even worse. You are responsible for the entire reservation and you have a pretty immature ever changing work force that really wants to have a lot of fun. But, we have had some great reservation directors, the Hammer and T.H. T.H. incidentally was the person that hired me for my very first summer way back in 1992 as a Counselor in Training.
Vince was not a very good reservation director. He had a habit of focusing on minute details and losing the big picture. I wish i could remember this part of the story better, but it is hazy. Anyway, Vince was up at Summit telling us that we had to change the way we did something. It was a stupid suggestion because he really didn't understand the way Summit worked. Anyway, he was very serious. After he finished talking, I of course relied on my old standby and said to him "You can't be held responsible." Everyone who was in on the joke sort of chuckled. Vince was not in on the joke and naturally took my words at face value. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he could and would "be held responsible".
I know this story doesn't have much of a point. Perhaps it was another part of what I really loved about camp. I have never been in a workplace since, and likely very few exist, where it is largely permissible to simply talk in gibberish and non-sequitars.
Also, since this doesn't really warrant a post of its own, I'll throw out this other bizzare tradition that took off at camp. When we were not out on trek, we ate most of our meals in the dining hall at Camp Buckskin. It was nice not to have to cook, but it was very crowded and loud. The standing rule is that staff members were supposed to mix with the various scout troops and one or two staff members would sit with 8 or so scouts. Summit played by a different set of rules though, we almost exclusively formed our own table of all staff members. Then, because of our antics, we were often banished to the porch outside the dining hall. The funny thing was that the porch was by far the nicest place to eat. You were outside, dining alfresco, you didn't have to participate in the bizzare songs and chants that would crop up during the meals. So it was the best kind of banishment.
I think it started innocently enough with someone grabbing a cookie off someone else's tray and eating it. The sort of thing that would get you shanked at prison, but was just a good laugh. But of course it progressed. It got to the point where you would just walk up to someone, grab a hamburger or a piece of pizza off their tray and take a bite and calmly put it back on their tray. The Weebs took it even further. On at least one occasion, he went up to the reservation director, the Hammer, took a bite of I think his french toast and put it back on the tray. Hammer wasn't sitting at our table and noone dared Weebs to do it. He just decided that he would walk up to the Hammer's table, reach down, take a bite, and move on. Hammer, unlike Vince, didn't sweat the small stuff. He didn't say anything. I think he simply cut around the bit where the Weebs had taken a bite and continued with his meal.
John ____________ Mill
There is a chain of convenience stores that exists only in the upper parts of NYS and apparently parts of Vermont called Stewarts.
It is like a 7-11, but better. In addition to serving the typical convenience store fare, they have an ice cream section. A real ice cream station where someone scoops the ice cream for you. Also, you can get shakes, bannana splits and the like. The reason it is better than 7-11, is that the quality is universally better. If you get a hot dog from 7-11 it will typically have a stale bun, the toppings station will look like a bunch of 3 year olds ransacked it etc. If you get a hot dog from Stewarts, the bun will be fresh, the topping station will be immaculate and you will get a kind smile from the person behind the counter. Also, unlike a 7-11, you can have a seat in Stewarts and enjoy your tasty treats. Even though it is not a particularly big chain, they produce a bunch of their own brands. They have their own soda, cakes, ice cream etc. For a little while they sold soda in 1.5 liter glass bottles. To encourage recycling, they gave you 25 cents back for each bottle. One guy I worked with swore that if you bought enough you simply had to make money. I tried to explain to him that each bottle cost something like $1.25, and you only got a quarter back for each bottle. He tried to convince me that I was missing the big picture. He went on that if you are talking hundreds of thousands of bottles you could get a ton of money back. Not the brightest guy in the world.
Load here. Okay, ice cream, store brand root-beer, cheap cheap beer, chewing tobacco, porn, camping knick-knacks, deli style sandwiches, gas and malteds. Want to change your chocolate milkshake (which was already yummy and cheap) into a malted? 50 cents extra and you get the thickest, sweetest, maltiest shake ever. Simply sublime.
The Stewart's near camp got a lot of activity. It was the closest gas station, unless you count the camp gas pump, and also sold beer. Additionally they had a very old school ATM. I have never seen another like it, but you put in your necessary information and then it spits out a receipt that you take to the counter and then the cashier gives you your money. It was more of an electronic middleman than a bona fide ATM. However, you still had to pay a fee to use it.
Over the course of a summer you would likely visit Stewarts a half dozen times or so. One particular trip I remember quite well.
The load was driving. The load, more than anyone else I know, really supported the 4-6 cylinder late 80s american car market. I think at the time he had a Buick Regal. It was an interesting vehicle. It burned about a quart of oil every other fill-up, so essentially it was a 2-stroke engine. The trunk was enormous, but the cylinder that holds it open had gone bad so the load had a trusty ski pole that he used to keep it open. At some point, I think the heat went, but that was not a problem in the summer. Being the generous man that he was/is, the load was always up for a good trip to Stewarts and would lend his car. On this particular trip, we had 6 or 7 people in the car. It was pretty good and loaded (pun) down.
Very early into the journey it became apparent that the muffler was loose and dragging along the road. The Weebs and someone else did a bang-up job patching it back together with only twine and baling wire. It was particularly impressive because the muffler was quite hot at this time too. We made it to Stewart's, probably a 12 mile drive, without any further incident. Once at Stewart's we all partook in some yummy treats. I am not sure if we headed back to camp after that or went somewhere else. While at Stewarts, the load had availed himself to their sampling of pornography. Specifically, Penthouse Letters. This is a collection of erotic letters sent in by the public. Each one starts out with some mundane fact pattern and quickly morphs into a tale worthy of Caligula. A young lady that had accompanied us, far from being offended, was actually very excited about this reading material. She proceeded to read various tales aloud to us on the ride home. Somewhat bizzare, but memorable nonetheless! I think we had to interrupt it to make another muffler repair though. All in all, another solid visit to Stewarts!
I remember the muffler issue and the porn recital as two separate incidents! Funny how memory plays. I do recall one year arriving up at Stewarts late on a Friday night in early June. I went in, bought some beer and snacks, got in the car, turned around in the parking lot and drove over one of those asphalt bumps at the edge of the parking lot that are sometimes used in place of concrete stops or metal barriers. My car had bottomed out. Had to call Ranger Bob. He came, he pulled me out with his truck. I was mortified. Good times!
It is like a 7-11, but better. In addition to serving the typical convenience store fare, they have an ice cream section. A real ice cream station where someone scoops the ice cream for you. Also, you can get shakes, bannana splits and the like. The reason it is better than 7-11, is that the quality is universally better. If you get a hot dog from 7-11 it will typically have a stale bun, the toppings station will look like a bunch of 3 year olds ransacked it etc. If you get a hot dog from Stewarts, the bun will be fresh, the topping station will be immaculate and you will get a kind smile from the person behind the counter. Also, unlike a 7-11, you can have a seat in Stewarts and enjoy your tasty treats. Even though it is not a particularly big chain, they produce a bunch of their own brands. They have their own soda, cakes, ice cream etc. For a little while they sold soda in 1.5 liter glass bottles. To encourage recycling, they gave you 25 cents back for each bottle. One guy I worked with swore that if you bought enough you simply had to make money. I tried to explain to him that each bottle cost something like $1.25, and you only got a quarter back for each bottle. He tried to convince me that I was missing the big picture. He went on that if you are talking hundreds of thousands of bottles you could get a ton of money back. Not the brightest guy in the world.
Load here. Okay, ice cream, store brand root-beer, cheap cheap beer, chewing tobacco, porn, camping knick-knacks, deli style sandwiches, gas and malteds. Want to change your chocolate milkshake (which was already yummy and cheap) into a malted? 50 cents extra and you get the thickest, sweetest, maltiest shake ever. Simply sublime.
The Stewart's near camp got a lot of activity. It was the closest gas station, unless you count the camp gas pump, and also sold beer. Additionally they had a very old school ATM. I have never seen another like it, but you put in your necessary information and then it spits out a receipt that you take to the counter and then the cashier gives you your money. It was more of an electronic middleman than a bona fide ATM. However, you still had to pay a fee to use it.
Over the course of a summer you would likely visit Stewarts a half dozen times or so. One particular trip I remember quite well.
The load was driving. The load, more than anyone else I know, really supported the 4-6 cylinder late 80s american car market. I think at the time he had a Buick Regal. It was an interesting vehicle. It burned about a quart of oil every other fill-up, so essentially it was a 2-stroke engine. The trunk was enormous, but the cylinder that holds it open had gone bad so the load had a trusty ski pole that he used to keep it open. At some point, I think the heat went, but that was not a problem in the summer. Being the generous man that he was/is, the load was always up for a good trip to Stewarts and would lend his car. On this particular trip, we had 6 or 7 people in the car. It was pretty good and loaded (pun) down.
Very early into the journey it became apparent that the muffler was loose and dragging along the road. The Weebs and someone else did a bang-up job patching it back together with only twine and baling wire. It was particularly impressive because the muffler was quite hot at this time too. We made it to Stewart's, probably a 12 mile drive, without any further incident. Once at Stewart's we all partook in some yummy treats. I am not sure if we headed back to camp after that or went somewhere else. While at Stewarts, the load had availed himself to their sampling of pornography. Specifically, Penthouse Letters. This is a collection of erotic letters sent in by the public. Each one starts out with some mundane fact pattern and quickly morphs into a tale worthy of Caligula. A young lady that had accompanied us, far from being offended, was actually very excited about this reading material. She proceeded to read various tales aloud to us on the ride home. Somewhat bizzare, but memorable nonetheless! I think we had to interrupt it to make another muffler repair though. All in all, another solid visit to Stewarts!
I remember the muffler issue and the porn recital as two separate incidents! Funny how memory plays. I do recall one year arriving up at Stewarts late on a Friday night in early June. I went in, bought some beer and snacks, got in the car, turned around in the parking lot and drove over one of those asphalt bumps at the edge of the parking lot that are sometimes used in place of concrete stops or metal barriers. My car had bottomed out. Had to call Ranger Bob. He came, he pulled me out with his truck. I was mortified. Good times!
Treks - NLP Northern Section
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| The authors of this blog have two master's degrees, a law degree, and teaching certificates in Social Studies and Robotics - yet this picture will remain sideway cuz I can't figure it out - Load. |
I chose this trek to be my first write up as it was the first trek I did and my absolute favorite.
My first year ('93) I couldn't head out my first two weeks because I didn't have the lifeguard certification and we were light on treks anyway, so Toph took the first two out, while BJ and I hung out with the Summit Staff. This is where the "Summit doesn't work" phrase/put-down came from. There were more of us on Summit staff than we had groups signed up for our COPE course, our rock climbing or our zip-line. So we all had time off during the day - we weren't shy about advertising this to the other staff. Of course this situation didn't last, but the rep did. :)
My first trek was troop 28 Croton-on-Hudson, and that is as rich a town as it sounds. There were five people, Bill Ayers and his son Little Bill (just turned 13 at the time), a 16 year old, and another father and son.
Our camp does two (actually three, but one's just an extension) trips on the NLP. The Northville-Lake Placid trail is a trail that was actually used when the railroad only went as far as Northville and people wanted to get to Lake Placid. At least that's what they guidebook says. As such it avoids high points like mountains and sticks close to water sources most of the way which makes it quite popular. The drop-off for this trek is almost at the northern most point, just shy of Lake Placid proper. If you're ever in this neck of the woods, the drop-off is really close to the Olympic training facility where you can luge or bobsled and right around the corner is John Brown's farm which is a very cool place to visit if you're into history and your wife is not with you begging to leave before you're done. :)
That first day we got dropped off and started hiking, up, not a lot of up, but some hills and upward movement. The other father and his son were having trouble, lots of it. After a mile or two there lots of references to old hockey injuries and the such. This happens, often, but it was my first trek and there were no injuries so other than soldier on, I didn't know what to do. We made it past Wanika Falls, which is a really pretty place and on to Moose Pond lean-to. Bill was a ridiculously avid fisherman and he tried to fish Moose Pond, but unfortunately, like a lot of smaller ADK lakes/ponds, it was dead. The other interesting thing that happened is the hockey injury family decided to turn back. I had no idea what to do, as my training had only stressed to keep the group together, but I was a day into my first trek ever and 3/5 of my group wanted to leave. So I gave them some food, first aid supplies and a quarter (that's how you made phone calls back then) and sent them backwards. Luckily the other trek from my camp was also doing NLP so there were Scouts and a guide camped at Wanika Falls - who I found out later were kinda pissed at having two extra people show up that night. Can't really blame them, but didn't have much choice. The rest of the trip was really cool.
We moved quickly covering quite a bit of mileage. I think that second night we went to Duck Hole Pond Lean-To, which is a beautiful place. A nice bridge over a dammed pond, a swimming area, a family of snakes living under a bridge, a pretty clearing, it was a great place and since we had come so far the first night we arrived here early. Lots of swimming and relaxing in the sun that day!
Next was my favorite day on any trek. Most of the trek this day is a hike along the Cold River. Which is aptly named. Around lunch time, you pass Miller's Falls, which was cool because that is my name. Miller's Falls is an amazing swimming hole. There are rocks to jump off, pools to swim in, and small little rushing water falls to try and swim against or climb over. There are so many ways to break safety rules at this one spot. One summer, when I was here with a trek group there was a group from a nearby college on an orientation trip. This meant lots of 18-24 year old females in swim suits. We lingered a bit longer even though we had finished lunch.
You usually end that third night at Shattuck Clearing which is a nice clearing with a close by sandy beach on the Cold River. We stopped here on my first trek as well. What's great about this day though is at about lunch time you pass by Noah John Rondeau's hermitage. He was one of those characters who's taken on mythical proportions in Adirondack lore, but if you read his biography, it seems like he was quite the character. He lived along the Cold river, in a hut he had built. Living off the land, trapping, hunting, fishing. Playing his violin with deers gathered around. Writing an un-deciphered (undecipherable?) code in his journal - some people think it might have been gibberish with no actual code. He toured the states later in his life as a curiosity in a show touting the Adirondacks, and they even built a replica of his hermitage in that show. It's always a good place for lunch time and stories.
From Shattuck Clearing you head towards Long Lake and hike down its eastern shore. This is a boring day as it's a usually muddy trail without a lot of scenery. But you do get to swim in Long Lake and there's an number of campsites to choose from.
The next day is a very short hike to the end of Long Lake where route 28N crosses it and then it's a short drive to ice cream and then home.
I've had some memorable trips on the northern section of the NLP, but that first one was the best. Bill and his bought me a copy of the NLP guidebook and signed it as a thank you gift. That was my first trek and though we often got tips on most (75%) after that, I hadn't been expecting anything at all. Later, during the off-season, I met Bill in NYC and he took me out for a very expensive sushi dinner where we took out Adirondack maps and planned the trek his troop would do the next summer. He showed up a day early with his boat that next summer and took me water skiing with his son and his son's friend on Brant Lake. Things like that made for memorable times.
One less than memorable time involved a troop from Rye, NY. They had signed up for the 50 miler, which was basically the above trip with 14 miles tacked on. Not that difficult if you add a few miles each day and actually hike a long length that last day as opposed to just a few miles to the pick up.
Now I'm in my 40s and not in the shape I once was, so I'm sympathetic to the fathers who signed up to go on these treks. But if you're a totally out of shape smoker with no backpacking experience, don't sign up for the 50 miler! And this particular group was full of rude and obnoxious scouts who had a really awful problem with outspoken homophobia.
It was as early as the second morning when I heard the two fathers talking in their tents about how they didn't think they were going to make it. I thought that was entirely too early to give up so I started something that became a ritual for me later on. I got everybody up and we hiked 4 miles quickly in the rain and then stopped for breakfast. It was still only about 9 am and we had gotten a good jump on the day's mileage. Though this worked in all other cases, on this particular trip it had little effect. The group continued to complain and spout their racist homophobic lame jokes. The heavy smoker kept falling behind and by the third day started in on the "I'm never gonna make it, when is this day going to end?!" routine. I was getting fed up.
By the fourth day we were camped on Long Lake, but towards the north end, which means we would have a looooong last day. The group was fed up and not having it and I was done with them. This is literally the only group in 8 years of guiding that I couldn't stand. So that afternoon I hiked to the end of the regular 36 mile trek, hitch-hiked to Stewarts, made a phone call to camp, asked for the regular pick up the next morning instead of the 50 miler pick up and bought some soda and chips. So by Thurs. I had finished the trek. Then I hiked back to our camp and as I passed some of the Scouts with the bag of chips one of them said, "Great, give me some." My answer was a curt, "Fuck you." Then I walked away and ate the chips in a lean-to.
Rock on!
Monday, May 19, 2014
Like a Gentleman
There was always something being built at camp. Most of it, relatively simple wooden structures. One initiative that Camp took on was to put a lean-to in every site. The idea was that you could store the cots there in the winter and during the summer the adult leaders had a slightly nicer structure to sleep in.
I participated in a few of these lean-to builds, some more successful than others. One that I thought was going to be very successful was with a guy we'll call Mike, because that is his name. Mike was an adult volunteer. He was also a contractor, so I thought I would learn a lot from him. It was me, Mike and the Weebs.
This was one of those gray rainy days in the adirondacks. It didn't rain the whole day, but it rained more often than it didn't and the sun never came out. Even when it wasn't raining it felt damp. It was probably upper 60s or lower 70s, but it felt colder with the moisture and the rain.
We were working in one of the campsites with a lot of tree cover. So on top of the rain, it was also pretty dark in that site, even in the middle of the day. Nevertheless, Weebs and I had high hopes. However, we found out that we were not going to start building right away. First, Mike wanted us to rig a tarp and then make a makeshift floor out of plywood. He told us that we were going to "Work like gentlemen", a phrase I have stolen and use quite often to this day. We were not going to be treated like gentlemen though. We didn't have a ladder and even in the best of conditions, rigging a tarp can be tricky. While there are a lot of trees, they are almost never in the exact position that you need them. There are either too many in a given location or too few. Weebs and I persevered and got the tarp up. It wasn't beautiful, but it was a good effort. Mike disagreed, told us that it looked like shit and that he thought we were just goofing off.
At this point in my life, I was pretty rash in my decision making. I decided that Mike was an asshole and that there was nothing he could do to change my mind. I also vowed to employ a passive aggressive style of communication. For instance, anytime he would ask me to do something, I would pretend not to hear him. That, or he would ask for a hammer and I would hand him something totally different, like a sandwich!
It only got crazier as the day went on. At one point he started singing this song that was literally just a bunch of profanity woven together. Not creatively. It was like "Tourrette's - The Musical". Maybe he was trying to show us that he could cut loose, but it was just pathetic. Like a guy who is way too excited to be at his high school reunion and wants to relive the glory days.
At one point, we finished some sort of milestone, something like getting all the walls up. I remarked that we were making good progress. I was being genuine at the time, no sarcasm. He then launched into a tirade about me being a "yes man". He must have said it 3 or 4 times. I don't know what set him off, but I certainly wasn't being a yes man. In fact, I hadn't even been asked a question or said the word "yes". Regardless, we soldiered on.
I think the highlight - or lowlight of the entire event was when we went down for dinner. For whatever reason, he skipped dinner but asked us to bring some coffee up. We had a small generator on site to run the compressor that powered the air tools. I showed up with a coffee pot, plugged it in and brewed him a whole damn pot of coffee!
I participated in a few of these lean-to builds, some more successful than others. One that I thought was going to be very successful was with a guy we'll call Mike, because that is his name. Mike was an adult volunteer. He was also a contractor, so I thought I would learn a lot from him. It was me, Mike and the Weebs.
This was one of those gray rainy days in the adirondacks. It didn't rain the whole day, but it rained more often than it didn't and the sun never came out. Even when it wasn't raining it felt damp. It was probably upper 60s or lower 70s, but it felt colder with the moisture and the rain.
We were working in one of the campsites with a lot of tree cover. So on top of the rain, it was also pretty dark in that site, even in the middle of the day. Nevertheless, Weebs and I had high hopes. However, we found out that we were not going to start building right away. First, Mike wanted us to rig a tarp and then make a makeshift floor out of plywood. He told us that we were going to "Work like gentlemen", a phrase I have stolen and use quite often to this day. We were not going to be treated like gentlemen though. We didn't have a ladder and even in the best of conditions, rigging a tarp can be tricky. While there are a lot of trees, they are almost never in the exact position that you need them. There are either too many in a given location or too few. Weebs and I persevered and got the tarp up. It wasn't beautiful, but it was a good effort. Mike disagreed, told us that it looked like shit and that he thought we were just goofing off.
At this point in my life, I was pretty rash in my decision making. I decided that Mike was an asshole and that there was nothing he could do to change my mind. I also vowed to employ a passive aggressive style of communication. For instance, anytime he would ask me to do something, I would pretend not to hear him. That, or he would ask for a hammer and I would hand him something totally different, like a sandwich!
It only got crazier as the day went on. At one point he started singing this song that was literally just a bunch of profanity woven together. Not creatively. It was like "Tourrette's - The Musical". Maybe he was trying to show us that he could cut loose, but it was just pathetic. Like a guy who is way too excited to be at his high school reunion and wants to relive the glory days.
At one point, we finished some sort of milestone, something like getting all the walls up. I remarked that we were making good progress. I was being genuine at the time, no sarcasm. He then launched into a tirade about me being a "yes man". He must have said it 3 or 4 times. I don't know what set him off, but I certainly wasn't being a yes man. In fact, I hadn't even been asked a question or said the word "yes". Regardless, we soldiered on.
I think the highlight - or lowlight of the entire event was when we went down for dinner. For whatever reason, he skipped dinner but asked us to bring some coffee up. We had a small generator on site to run the compressor that powered the air tools. I showed up with a coffee pot, plugged it in and brewed him a whole damn pot of coffee!
Watership Down
A lot of climbers will tell you that rappelling is there least favorite part of climbing. Personally, I prefer the British term "Abseiling" because it conjures up images of doing endless crunches on a sailboat. But I digress. The rationale for not enjoying rapelling is that it is supposedly one of the more dangerous parts of climbing, and you only do it because it is the only way off the rock.
Personally, I think it is awesome. Once you get used to it you find that you can control your speed pretty effortlessly. Generally, you use a device that you pass the rope through. You then vary the angle that the rope passes through the device. This changing of the angle changes the amount of friction. You learn quickly that you can easily stop yourself with one hand. When rappelling off most cliffs, particularly if they are less than vertical, you sort of walk straight down the rock. It is more exciting if you can rappell of something overhanging where you are not actually touching anything and just rappelling into space.
****Another Aside****
In addition to rappelling, another way to come down something steep is for someone to belay you. If you are top roping, the most knowlegeable person, who is almost always K.W., sets up an anchor at the top of the climb. You climb from the bottom and then when you reach the anchor at the top, the person belaying you lets you down gradually. The belayer is responsible for controlling the speed. After climbing with the same person for awhile, you get used to what is a comfortable speed for belaying... or at least you think you do.
The first time a group of us went ice-climbing was in New Hampshire. Generally, you try to find waterfalls that have frozen and you climb up them using crampons and ice axes. It is way different than rock climbing because of a number of factors. 1. It is very cold, for obvious reasons. 2. If you belay from the bottom, you are constantly dodging chuncks of ice that the climber knocks out with his axe or crampons. Otherwise, the belaying is largely the same. I was belaying K.W. and when he finished I lowered him down. I used the same pace that I would use if he was rock climbing. Unbeknownst to me, this is way too fast when you have sharp pointy things on your feet and sharp pointy things in both hands. K.W. didn't say anything at the time. He chose to show me. Once I did the climb, he belayed me down at about the same pace. It was terrifying, but fun. It was just fast enough that I was comfortably out of control with my crampons dancing off the ice and my axes flying about. We both slowed down our belay pace after that.
****Aside Over****
Back to rappelling. With the proper device, it is loads of fun, and really quite safe. It puts some stress on the ropes, but provided that your anchor is good it should go well. I only tried rappelling without a device once. This I would not recommend. My Dad and I decided to do some climbing in the local area near where we lived called Pound Ridge. We had the rope and the harnesses, but no belay device (almost all belay devices can double as a rappell device). I had no formal instruction in climbing at this point, and my Dad had just a little. He did have a Ph.D. in material science and a good understanding of physics though. So we did body belaying and body rappelling. The idea is that you wrap the rope around your body in such a way as to create the necessary friction to slow you down. For belaying it is not too bad, particularly if the climber doesn't fall. However, for rappelling it is basically an exercise in trying to minimize pain. On one hand, you want to go fast, because it hurts. The problem is that the faster you go, the more friction you generate. That friction is dissipated in the form of rope burns all over your body. I have no inclination to try body rappelling again.
There were a few of us at camp who enjoyed a good rappell, and there was a great place to do it. One of the old surviving strucures at camp was a derelict water tower. I don't think it had been in use for several decades, and it was strictly off limits. We interpreted that to mean it was off limits during daylight hours. At least a few times a summer, we would get a group together to do some night rappells. You climbed up this old metal ladder, and then squeezed through a small hole to get to a platform that ran the circumference of the tower. There were large metal bands that went around the sphere that was used for holding water. I don't know what the purpose of these bands were, perhaps to lend strength to the structure when it was filled with water. They were almost certainly past their useful life. We dutifully used them as anchors. I figured that since K.W. had unofficially signed off on this, it had to be somewhat safe. Whether it was or not, I have no idea. Once you tied in, you would climb over the platform and rappell into empty space. Because the platform jutted out from the tower, you did not hit the ladder that you had climbed up. You just disappeared into the murky night. There would be headlamps at the top and bottom, but in the middle it was just you and the night. Really, quite amazing.
No one was ever injured. We even took some precautions because we often had new people with us. Perhaps this wasn't the best place for instruction, but we loved sharing our joy of rappelling. (In fact, the load and I almost got in a bit of trouble with the campus police when we set up a rappelling demonstration at his sister's college and rappelled out of a dorm room window!) Additionally, the load and I went to the same university (at different times) and he clued me in on some good rappell spots, also highly illegal. One involved a catwalk in our sports stadium. The other was a stair well in one of the 10 story lecture halls. The stair well went up in a big square, so there was empty space in the middle. While fun, it wasn't the same, because you didn't have the core group of people. Plus, getting caught doing this would likely land you in some real trouble.
We would station a person at the bottom of the tower who could give something called a fireman's belay. The way it worked was that if the person at the base held the rope, the person rappelling would be unable to move. So even if someone completely freaked out and let go of the rope completely, they would simply hang in space. It was a double edged sword though. You see, if a person is having a great time rappelling down, you can cause a nice awkward jerk and stop the person dead in their tracks, simply by grabbing the rope. Additionally, they are powerless to do anything about it, as long as you hold that rope at the base, they aren't going anywhere. It is quite easy to lower someone inch by inch by inch. We reserved that kind of tom foolery only for certain individuals.
Quack!
Those rappelling adventures stand out in my mind, because it was good old fashioned fun. Regardless of how many times you have done it, it is still quite an adventure. I hope that tradition is still alive and well up at camp.
Personally, I think it is awesome. Once you get used to it you find that you can control your speed pretty effortlessly. Generally, you use a device that you pass the rope through. You then vary the angle that the rope passes through the device. This changing of the angle changes the amount of friction. You learn quickly that you can easily stop yourself with one hand. When rappelling off most cliffs, particularly if they are less than vertical, you sort of walk straight down the rock. It is more exciting if you can rappell of something overhanging where you are not actually touching anything and just rappelling into space.
****Another Aside****
In addition to rappelling, another way to come down something steep is for someone to belay you. If you are top roping, the most knowlegeable person, who is almost always K.W., sets up an anchor at the top of the climb. You climb from the bottom and then when you reach the anchor at the top, the person belaying you lets you down gradually. The belayer is responsible for controlling the speed. After climbing with the same person for awhile, you get used to what is a comfortable speed for belaying... or at least you think you do.
The first time a group of us went ice-climbing was in New Hampshire. Generally, you try to find waterfalls that have frozen and you climb up them using crampons and ice axes. It is way different than rock climbing because of a number of factors. 1. It is very cold, for obvious reasons. 2. If you belay from the bottom, you are constantly dodging chuncks of ice that the climber knocks out with his axe or crampons. Otherwise, the belaying is largely the same. I was belaying K.W. and when he finished I lowered him down. I used the same pace that I would use if he was rock climbing. Unbeknownst to me, this is way too fast when you have sharp pointy things on your feet and sharp pointy things in both hands. K.W. didn't say anything at the time. He chose to show me. Once I did the climb, he belayed me down at about the same pace. It was terrifying, but fun. It was just fast enough that I was comfortably out of control with my crampons dancing off the ice and my axes flying about. We both slowed down our belay pace after that.
****Aside Over****
Back to rappelling. With the proper device, it is loads of fun, and really quite safe. It puts some stress on the ropes, but provided that your anchor is good it should go well. I only tried rappelling without a device once. This I would not recommend. My Dad and I decided to do some climbing in the local area near where we lived called Pound Ridge. We had the rope and the harnesses, but no belay device (almost all belay devices can double as a rappell device). I had no formal instruction in climbing at this point, and my Dad had just a little. He did have a Ph.D. in material science and a good understanding of physics though. So we did body belaying and body rappelling. The idea is that you wrap the rope around your body in such a way as to create the necessary friction to slow you down. For belaying it is not too bad, particularly if the climber doesn't fall. However, for rappelling it is basically an exercise in trying to minimize pain. On one hand, you want to go fast, because it hurts. The problem is that the faster you go, the more friction you generate. That friction is dissipated in the form of rope burns all over your body. I have no inclination to try body rappelling again.
There were a few of us at camp who enjoyed a good rappell, and there was a great place to do it. One of the old surviving strucures at camp was a derelict water tower. I don't think it had been in use for several decades, and it was strictly off limits. We interpreted that to mean it was off limits during daylight hours. At least a few times a summer, we would get a group together to do some night rappells. You climbed up this old metal ladder, and then squeezed through a small hole to get to a platform that ran the circumference of the tower. There were large metal bands that went around the sphere that was used for holding water. I don't know what the purpose of these bands were, perhaps to lend strength to the structure when it was filled with water. They were almost certainly past their useful life. We dutifully used them as anchors. I figured that since K.W. had unofficially signed off on this, it had to be somewhat safe. Whether it was or not, I have no idea. Once you tied in, you would climb over the platform and rappell into empty space. Because the platform jutted out from the tower, you did not hit the ladder that you had climbed up. You just disappeared into the murky night. There would be headlamps at the top and bottom, but in the middle it was just you and the night. Really, quite amazing.
No one was ever injured. We even took some precautions because we often had new people with us. Perhaps this wasn't the best place for instruction, but we loved sharing our joy of rappelling. (In fact, the load and I almost got in a bit of trouble with the campus police when we set up a rappelling demonstration at his sister's college and rappelled out of a dorm room window!) Additionally, the load and I went to the same university (at different times) and he clued me in on some good rappell spots, also highly illegal. One involved a catwalk in our sports stadium. The other was a stair well in one of the 10 story lecture halls. The stair well went up in a big square, so there was empty space in the middle. While fun, it wasn't the same, because you didn't have the core group of people. Plus, getting caught doing this would likely land you in some real trouble.
We would station a person at the bottom of the tower who could give something called a fireman's belay. The way it worked was that if the person at the base held the rope, the person rappelling would be unable to move. So even if someone completely freaked out and let go of the rope completely, they would simply hang in space. It was a double edged sword though. You see, if a person is having a great time rappelling down, you can cause a nice awkward jerk and stop the person dead in their tracks, simply by grabbing the rope. Additionally, they are powerless to do anything about it, as long as you hold that rope at the base, they aren't going anywhere. It is quite easy to lower someone inch by inch by inch. We reserved that kind of tom foolery only for certain individuals.
Quack!
Those rappelling adventures stand out in my mind, because it was good old fashioned fun. Regardless of how many times you have done it, it is still quite an adventure. I hope that tradition is still alive and well up at camp.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Forks in the Road
The very first merit badge I ever did, was horsemanship. Growing up, I was very interested in animals in general, but particularly horses. In fact, I used to tell people that I planned to be a veterinarian. Turns out I am a veteran, but not a veterinarian.
About a 1/4 down the road from where I grew up was a good sized stable. They probably had 30 or 40 horses there. I am not sure exactly how I ended up "working" there, but I just started showing up and helping out with things. I was never on the payroll, I was probably too young for that. But, I assisted the regular workers with mucking out the stalls, replacing the bedding, feeding the horses, taking them out to pasture etc. In return, I would get some free riding lessons here and there. I would have done it without the lessons though. Barns are fun places to visit. The combination of the animal smells, the straw and the hay, is very comforting. There is usually a lot going on too, tractors moving big loads, horses being either tacked up or finishing up a ride, definitely better than TV. So I would go to this barn almost every weekend and do whatever was needed.
One particular event still stands out in my mind. I was bringing a brown mare, named Lucy, into the barn from the paddocks. This was pretty easy stuff, you went out with the halter and a lead line (a long piece of rope or webbing), put the halter on the horse, and led it to the barn. It was kind of like walking an exceptionally large dog. The thing about horses is that they spook very easily. It is as if they have no idea that they are as big and as strong as they are, and will easily scare. To me, that is one thing that has always impressed me with the horses used for police work, because they have been so well trained that they have gotten over their usual instinct to bolt at any loud noise or strange movement. Because it was winter, there were patches of ice and snow on the ground on the way from the paddock to the barn.
All of a sudden, I slipped on a piece of ice and went down. As I was laying on the ground, probably about 4-5 feet from Lucy's hooves, she reared up and turned to run. For whatever reason, I did not let go of the lead line. It wasn't my horse and I figured if it escaped I would have some answering to do. So Lucy dragged me along behind her. I can still see and feel the bits of snow and ice that she kicked up hit me in the face. After about 50 feet or so, I couldn't hold on anymore, and I let go of the rope. Almost immediately, Lucy slowed down from a gallop to a fast trot and then a walk. She probably only went a few hundred feet more, before she turned around and looked at me. I got up, noticed that my knuckles were bleeding because they had bore the brunt of being dragged, but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. I slowly walked up to Lucy, grabbed the line, and we walked without incident back to the barn.
So the first year I worked at camp, I wanted to work at our stables. Camp would have 10 or so horses for the season and the staff members were responsible for the care and upkeep and leading trail rides. Even though I requested it for the first and second summer, I never got the gig. Probably turned out for the best. I still helped out there on many occasions. There was a true cowboy who started working there part time. He did not have time to work there the entire summer, and had a family to support so he couldn't quit his main job. But, he had actually grown up around horses, worked ranches, the whole deal.
When I first met Jason, I thought he was in his mid 30s. He just seemed way too serious and mature to not be. Turns out he was only 24. He probably hadn't gotten carded since he was 13! He was all business at first, but it was fun to work with him because he knew exactly what he was doing at all times. He had this great rig set up for pulling fences tight, he built it himself in a couple of hours, it would have taken me half a lifetime to build it. He was also a very patient teacher, it turns out there is a very specific way to attach the fence to the fence posts. It is not the easiest way, but it lasts much longer. He also helped me out of a pretty good jam.
I was driving one of the nicer trucks at camp, in fact it was the Camp Ranger's truck. It was a nice Ford F-250, full 4 wheel drive, snowplow attachment, the works. However, being relatively unskilled in 4 wheel drive, I did not know that you had to lock the hubs to to engage the 4 wheel drive. So, of course, I got the truck stuck. I was technically doing work, not goofing around, but I was a dumbass to not properly engage the 4 wheel drive. I attempted to get it unstuck, but just succeeded in digging it deeper and deeper into the mud, until it was buried up to the Axels.
Jason, knew what to do, he got this John Deere tractor and we hooked up a chain, but the tractor did not have enough juice, even with me giving it full power in reverse, so it looked like we were out of luck. But, Jason knew something I did not know. Apparently, a single John Deere key will start all manner of equipment. Ranger Bob's son was in the logging trade, and every so often would park some mammoth piece of equipment at the camp. No-one messed with this stuff because it was pretty imposing. The wheels alone on these machines were more than 6 foot in diameter. Jason explained to me that he had seen one of these machines just up the road and thought that the John Deere key would work. I was skeptical, but I also really wanted the truck to be unstuck. So he ambled up the road to check it out. Sure enough, I heard this enormous diesel engine start and Jason comes trucking down in this huge wood skidder.
It looked something like this.
He was driving it super calm, cigarrete dangling out of the corner of his mouth - true Marlboro Man style. He hooked that beast up to the truck and told me not to worry, I could just put it in neutral. Just as he began to tug, he snapped the two chain. That is a ton of power, this was a thick chain and he just snapped it. Fortunately, he had a fix for this too, and we simply doubled the amount of chain between the skidder and the truck. And just like that, it was unstuck. I don't think he even needed to give it any gas. Since this machine could pull enormous trees, pulling a rather small truck was no big deal. Ever the teacher, Jason then instructed me on how to properly lock the hubs of a 4wd vehicle.
When we first started working together, I learned that if he disapproved of something, his go to phrase was "Not in my barn." This could range from the literal like not tying up a horse correctly "Not in my Barn" to the far more esoteric or political. For instance if you asked him if he supported the current policies of the white house, he was very likely to respond "Not in my barn." Naturally, I liked this phrase and took up using it all the time. At first, I think it annoyed him, like if someone asked me if I wanted a drink of milk and I would respond "Not in my barn." But, eventually, he came around and even started to overuse his own phrase. Plus, we really enjoyed shouting it. Nothing confuses a person more than asking a simple innocent question and you shout back, perhaps in unison, "NOT IN MY BARN!" It was a shame he could only come up on a few weekends, but I always enjoyed working with him because of his work ethic, sense of humor and skills.
About a 1/4 down the road from where I grew up was a good sized stable. They probably had 30 or 40 horses there. I am not sure exactly how I ended up "working" there, but I just started showing up and helping out with things. I was never on the payroll, I was probably too young for that. But, I assisted the regular workers with mucking out the stalls, replacing the bedding, feeding the horses, taking them out to pasture etc. In return, I would get some free riding lessons here and there. I would have done it without the lessons though. Barns are fun places to visit. The combination of the animal smells, the straw and the hay, is very comforting. There is usually a lot going on too, tractors moving big loads, horses being either tacked up or finishing up a ride, definitely better than TV. So I would go to this barn almost every weekend and do whatever was needed.
One particular event still stands out in my mind. I was bringing a brown mare, named Lucy, into the barn from the paddocks. This was pretty easy stuff, you went out with the halter and a lead line (a long piece of rope or webbing), put the halter on the horse, and led it to the barn. It was kind of like walking an exceptionally large dog. The thing about horses is that they spook very easily. It is as if they have no idea that they are as big and as strong as they are, and will easily scare. To me, that is one thing that has always impressed me with the horses used for police work, because they have been so well trained that they have gotten over their usual instinct to bolt at any loud noise or strange movement. Because it was winter, there were patches of ice and snow on the ground on the way from the paddock to the barn.
All of a sudden, I slipped on a piece of ice and went down. As I was laying on the ground, probably about 4-5 feet from Lucy's hooves, she reared up and turned to run. For whatever reason, I did not let go of the lead line. It wasn't my horse and I figured if it escaped I would have some answering to do. So Lucy dragged me along behind her. I can still see and feel the bits of snow and ice that she kicked up hit me in the face. After about 50 feet or so, I couldn't hold on anymore, and I let go of the rope. Almost immediately, Lucy slowed down from a gallop to a fast trot and then a walk. She probably only went a few hundred feet more, before she turned around and looked at me. I got up, noticed that my knuckles were bleeding because they had bore the brunt of being dragged, but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. I slowly walked up to Lucy, grabbed the line, and we walked without incident back to the barn.
So the first year I worked at camp, I wanted to work at our stables. Camp would have 10 or so horses for the season and the staff members were responsible for the care and upkeep and leading trail rides. Even though I requested it for the first and second summer, I never got the gig. Probably turned out for the best. I still helped out there on many occasions. There was a true cowboy who started working there part time. He did not have time to work there the entire summer, and had a family to support so he couldn't quit his main job. But, he had actually grown up around horses, worked ranches, the whole deal.
When I first met Jason, I thought he was in his mid 30s. He just seemed way too serious and mature to not be. Turns out he was only 24. He probably hadn't gotten carded since he was 13! He was all business at first, but it was fun to work with him because he knew exactly what he was doing at all times. He had this great rig set up for pulling fences tight, he built it himself in a couple of hours, it would have taken me half a lifetime to build it. He was also a very patient teacher, it turns out there is a very specific way to attach the fence to the fence posts. It is not the easiest way, but it lasts much longer. He also helped me out of a pretty good jam.
I was driving one of the nicer trucks at camp, in fact it was the Camp Ranger's truck. It was a nice Ford F-250, full 4 wheel drive, snowplow attachment, the works. However, being relatively unskilled in 4 wheel drive, I did not know that you had to lock the hubs to to engage the 4 wheel drive. So, of course, I got the truck stuck. I was technically doing work, not goofing around, but I was a dumbass to not properly engage the 4 wheel drive. I attempted to get it unstuck, but just succeeded in digging it deeper and deeper into the mud, until it was buried up to the Axels.
Jason, knew what to do, he got this John Deere tractor and we hooked up a chain, but the tractor did not have enough juice, even with me giving it full power in reverse, so it looked like we were out of luck. But, Jason knew something I did not know. Apparently, a single John Deere key will start all manner of equipment. Ranger Bob's son was in the logging trade, and every so often would park some mammoth piece of equipment at the camp. No-one messed with this stuff because it was pretty imposing. The wheels alone on these machines were more than 6 foot in diameter. Jason explained to me that he had seen one of these machines just up the road and thought that the John Deere key would work. I was skeptical, but I also really wanted the truck to be unstuck. So he ambled up the road to check it out. Sure enough, I heard this enormous diesel engine start and Jason comes trucking down in this huge wood skidder.
It looked something like this.
He was driving it super calm, cigarrete dangling out of the corner of his mouth - true Marlboro Man style. He hooked that beast up to the truck and told me not to worry, I could just put it in neutral. Just as he began to tug, he snapped the two chain. That is a ton of power, this was a thick chain and he just snapped it. Fortunately, he had a fix for this too, and we simply doubled the amount of chain between the skidder and the truck. And just like that, it was unstuck. I don't think he even needed to give it any gas. Since this machine could pull enormous trees, pulling a rather small truck was no big deal. Ever the teacher, Jason then instructed me on how to properly lock the hubs of a 4wd vehicle.
When we first started working together, I learned that if he disapproved of something, his go to phrase was "Not in my barn." This could range from the literal like not tying up a horse correctly "Not in my Barn" to the far more esoteric or political. For instance if you asked him if he supported the current policies of the white house, he was very likely to respond "Not in my barn." Naturally, I liked this phrase and took up using it all the time. At first, I think it annoyed him, like if someone asked me if I wanted a drink of milk and I would respond "Not in my barn." But, eventually, he came around and even started to overuse his own phrase. Plus, we really enjoyed shouting it. Nothing confuses a person more than asking a simple innocent question and you shout back, perhaps in unison, "NOT IN MY BARN!" It was a shame he could only come up on a few weekends, but I always enjoyed working with him because of his work ethic, sense of humor and skills.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Talking Treks - Part 1 - Long Lake to Tupper
Loader and I decided that we would do a series of joint posts about the various treks that we took. While there are no end to the trip combinations in the Daks, there was only a finite number of trips that scouts could choose to do from our camp. Most had been pioneered by the great Ken Smith. He had them pretty well planned out with sample itineraries and daily mileages. I picked Long Lake to Tupper to write up first because it was the very first trek I ever did as a camper.
 |
| Very Poorly drawn route. This was actually the best attempt out of 3 or 4! Contrary to the red line, your would actually canoe up Long Lake, and not carry the canoes along the shore line for 10+ miles.
The most memorable trip I had on Long Lake was covered here. Overall, this is a solid trek. Many groups opt to shorten it and get picked up on the Raquette river, but if you do the whole thing, it is a decent 45 miles or so, on some pretty good sized bodies of water.
Long Lake is a pretty popular place in the Daks. There is usually quite a bit of other traffic on the lake, to include float planes. Even though this next story probably should have been in the previous post, I just remembered it as I was typing, so it goes here.
After the Weebs and I had left the woods during our little trip to the high peaks, we ended up going into Long Lake and taking a ride on a float plane. Instead of going on the usual brief hop, we elected to go on a longer flight and just pay by the hour. It turned out to be a great decision. First, our pilot was quite a character. At this point I had my pilot's license, but I had only flown a little over a hundred hours. This guy had likely flown thousands of hours. He also had this super dry sense of humor. Before we got on the plane he asked us if we were feeling OK and then he responded that he felt pretty dizzy. I wish I could remember some of the other great one-liners he had, they were all great and flawlessly delivered. He flew us over Long Lake and then over into Old Forge, where he was negotiating some deal with another float plane operator. Weebs and I had a great time hanging out at this other float plane base, there is always lots of fun stuff that accompanies big toys. Plus, there was a very friendly Golden Retriever that was doing its best to demolish a piece of wood panelling. He was really into it, just tearing into it, but taking frequent breaks to play with us.
After the little trip to the other float plane base he showed us some of the fun stuff you can do with a float plane. First, we landed in a small pond, way too small to take off going straight. So, he showed us that you could crank around the lake in a big fast turn and get airborne that way. It really was awesome, sort of like doing doughnuts, but in an airplane rather than a car. We were both pinned to the outside of the curve and one float came out of the water before the other one did. He showed us other different sorts of takeoffs and landings, each one quite exciting and just a bit scary. Through it all, he was the picture of calm. Even as we were doing 60+ mph in a tight curve around this small pond with trees flashing by in the windows, he was sitting back calmly in his seat, one hand on the yoke. If I had to guess, his pulse was probably a solid 50-60 beats per minute while Weebs and I were probably both in triple digits!
All good things have to come to an end though, when we landed it was to settle up. This is when he delivered perhaps his best line, "It's only free, if we don't make it back!"
-----
Anyway, back to the main point. Long Lake is extremely beautiful. I think much of the shoreline is owned by the State, so there are not a lot of houses on the Lake, just lots of wild land. Even though it is a big lake, it is quite sheltered, so there is not a lot of wind. Perhaps the roughest part of a canoe trek is paddling into a big wind. It is exciting at first, because there are usually some good sized waves, but it is just really tiring. You try not to take breaks either, because you will lose the little progress you had made.
If it's windy, Long Lake is a cruel introduction to canoeing. There are really no places to take a break and you are canoeing the whole length of the lake. Any breaks you take you tend to drift southward back the way you came. It's baptism by fire, but that's not always a bad thing. I recall less state land (or more private housing) than the Voyageur, but perhaps that's just because I used to dream about owning one of the sprawling estates that dotted the shore here and there. And there was time to dream. Most beginner canoeists will zig-zag. Until you learn to steer by using the J-stroke and not using the paddle in the stern as a rudder this is par for the course. Some scouts and adults never learn on a whole trek even though we demonstrate and stress it often.
On a nice sunny day, with little wind, taking breaks is one of the highlights of the trek! It is inevitable that any group of paddlers will go at slightly different speeds, so we would get pretty spread out on the big lakes. Particularly in the beginning, when most people are getting used to paddling. There is a great deal of zig zagging and yelling going on. Most of the yelling involves the paddler in the front yelling at the paddler in the back to steer properly. Similarly, the paddler in the back always retorts back that the person in the front is not paddling hard enough. Naturally, I preferred to paddle my canoe solo. My general plan of attack involved paddling for 50 minutes and resting for 10. This made for a good pace.
The pull out for the first day is at the end of Long Lake, just before you enter the Raquette river. The first night is usually the toughest because scouts have to figure out how to set up tents, how the stoves work, purifying water etc. It only gets easier after that though. The first night is tough too, because you are operating on a bit of a sleep deficit.
I recall one year finding a few fresh water mussels at the campground the first night. So the next year we went looking for them. My trek group must have spent a good two hours searching the shallow water for a mussel bed and must have thought I was having them on after a while. We pretty much gave up. Later that evening I was demonstrating how to gunwale jump and I fell in - and landed in a bed of hundreds of mussels. We gathered as much as we could, put a pot on the stove, filled it with water, covered it with foil which we poked holes into. An makeshift steamer! Once the water boiled we would steam about ten mussels at a time and on another stove we were melting butter and of course we had hot sauce because I always brought hot sauce to cover up the taste of most evening meals. We ate like Kings that night on fresh seafood with melted butter and hot sauce. Quite good. Stupidly we threw our empty and unopened shells into the water leaving an olfactory beacon for bears. Another trek that summer had had their food supply attacked by bears at the same campsite. Though the Quackers had floated his food out from shore in canoes, the lake will always bring it back in. So his group woke up to the sound of bears pulling canoes out of the water and having a feast. I understand the temptation as there is precious little in the way of a good tree for bear bag hanging, but hang one we def. did, with no problems.
The second and third day are both on the Raquette River. This is some very pleasant paddling. The river is typically 20 to 40 feet across at any given location, and there is a gentle current that you are paddling with, not against. Here, when you take a break you still gently glide along closer to your destination.
Midway through the second day, you reach the falls and a mandatory carry. This is a pretty tough carry, it is a mile and half long over some pretty tough terrain with some hills tossed in for good measure. My preferred method was to carry my pack and the canoe. Although it added to the overall weight, you could balance the canoe on the top of your pack and it was far more pleasant than carrying the canoe without the pack. Without the pack, you rested the thwart, a metal cross piece on the top of your shoulders. To make it a bit more pleasant, you would try to lash a life jacket in place to add a bit of padding. After about 5 or 6 steps, the life jacket would often come loose or shift position and the thwart would bite into your shoulders. When carrying a canoe with two people, you have very little visibility. You get to see what the inside of a canoe looks like, and the ground beneath your feet, but that is it. At first, the person in front will try to helpfully call out when an obstacle is coming, but after the first 5 minutes, both participants are pretty pissed off and it becomes a stumbling march in silence. Every so often the silence is pierced by one scout telling the other scout that he needs to take a rest. This is accompanied by both scouts doing their best to throw the canoe to the ground without injuring themselves, but almost no concern to the other scout. Taking breaks just makes the whole thing take longer though.
Finally, you reach the other end. It is very pleasant with a sandy beach and the last of the rapids makes a good swimming hole. However, before the scouts can swim, they have to walk the mile and half back to pick up their paddles and backpacks. So, it ends up being a 4.5 mile trip altogether. Not surprisingly, this kills a good part of the day. Our groups would usually eat lunch and goof off for a bit at the end of the carry. The rest of the day consisted of a bit more paddling and then making camp.
The Ranger house at the end of this carry is amazing. Another place I dreamed about someday living.
The third day involves paddling the rest of the river and then entering into Tupper Lake. Tupper Lake is much wider than Long Lake and usually has some pretty good wind and waves. It is a bit of a shock after the easy pleasant paddling on the river, but still quite nice. At this point, the group is generally performing pretty well and understands what needs to be done each night. On the first two nights, particularly the first, it is mainly me performing all the tasks. As the trek goes on, the scouts learn to do everything and just need a bit of supervision.
I can't believe you forgot to mention the Oxbow. Many a beer have been consumed by us while making stupid oxbow jokes. The Wxbow is a place where the Racquette river turns into Simon Pond. If you don't make the turn you end up in the Oxbow - a series of twists and turns and intersecting channels that reached mythical proportions. Of course nobody got stuck in it because there's a huge floating buoy with a sign which reads, "Don't enter the Oxbow" or something to that effect. Nobody I know ever went the wrong way. As you exit the Racquette you have to cross Simon Pond on your way to Tupper Lake. The wind could be mega fierce here. I always hated this part. (Most Voyageurs hated most canoe trips and would rather have done a 90/10 ratio of backpacking to canoeing, though most Summers the reverse ended up being true.) Really, the trek should have ended that night as the next day was all too quick to get to the pick up point at the South end of Tupper.
The fourth day is spent paddling down to the end of the lake, near the pick-up. Ken Smith designed every single one of the treks to have a very short last day. So short, that you could easily finish the trek on the fourth day just by paddling or hiking an extra hour or two. One of my favorite drivers was a guy we called Sarge. He was in his 60s or 70s, but still quite spry and still had a very keen mind. We called him Sarge, because he would often hang out with us younger guys, and make sure we didn't get into too much trouble, like a good sergeant! Plus, it was a cool nickname.
Most of the time, the same driver that dropped you off on the first day would pick you up on the last day. If Sarge was my driver, I would always tell him to pick me up at around 10. This was a lie. We both knew it. It didn't matter what time I told Sarge, we both knew the real deal. It was a race to see who could get to the pickup first. So even if I told Sarge to pick me up at 10 and reached the takeout at 7:30, Sarge would be there, and would have been there for awhile. Sarge probably picked me up more often than any other driver, and I never once beat him to the pickup spot. What was great is that it was never discussed. Even after the 20th time of telling Sarge to pick me up a 10, he would nod and say "see you then" with total sincerity.
One of the great things about being picked up early is at the very bottom of Tupper Lake, there is a small road (421) that veers west away from Route 30. If you take this road a couple hundred feet, there is a great little swimming hole with a rock slide where a river feeds into Tupper. A great way to end the trip!
The ride back to camp is usually a couple of hours and everyone is very quiet. Most of the group either naps or watches the scenery go by.
I'll try to mix it up and talk about a backpacking trip next. However, we did far more canoeing treks than backpacking treks, so there will be more posts about canoeing than backpacking. |
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
A Bunch of Fragments
Most summers that I worked at camp I grew a beard. One, I was just getting to the age where I could grow a beard; Two, it sort of fitted the job description; and Three, most of the time you wouldn't get carded if you had a full blown Paul Bunyan esque beard going on.
I have talked about Lake George a few times before, in general, it is a touristy town, but I still have some very fond memories. One of those memories involves a place I can only remember as the "Pitcher Place". It was a little pizzeria in Lake George and served pretty good food. One evening, the Load, the Weebs (full story on that name perhaps forthcoming with his permission), C. Coady, a buxom kitchen lass and a few others were at this place. We started out with a pizza and perhaps a few other dishes. I then ordered a pitcher of beer, almost just to see if it would work; true to form, the beard did not let me down. The pitcher came with 2 or 3 glasses, enough for those who actually were 21 and those who may have had the facial hair of a hobo. However, the pitcher went very quickly. There is nothing to stop someone from emptying a soda glass and refilling it with beer. More pitchers were ordered and I think the waitstaff were onto our little trick. But, business was good and we were behaving ourselves. It was a great night because the place was relatively empty and we had some great chats. Usually when we went to the local bar, it was packed and you really couldn't have a conversation. This was more like a tavern. Also, the bar we frequented the most, had absolutely no beers on tap. It was only because of its location that it did so well. A valuable part of the drinking experience is drinking draft beers from pitchers. We stayed for hours, perhaps until closing time. One of my favorite places in the Adirondacks. At least that is how I remembered it.
More than 15 years later, the Weebs and I happened to visit this place again. At this point, neither one of us had worked at camp for several years. Also, I was now cleanly shaved and it was the Weebs who sported a beard. However, his beard was well kempt and fitting a professional where mine had simply been an exercise in not shaving at all. We had planned a weekend hiking around in the Adirondacks, mainly hitting Mt. Marcy and a few other peaks.
We didn't have the load with us. The load is exceptionally good at planning activities and putting the needed logistics in place. The Weebs and I, not so much. We made it a point to harrass the Load via phone every 30 minutes or so with pointless updates as to what milepost we had passed, but nothing useful. So we ended up in the Daks with our packs, but no supplies. We didn't make it up until quite late the first day, so we decided that we would stay at camp since it was further south and hopefully free.
There was a bit of trepidation though. Camp was in full session with scouts and staff members. The Weebs had received a less than warm welcome when he had visited the camp a couple of summers before. Nevertheless, I thought we might try something that we had never tried before ... respect. So, we drove onto camp and immediately reported to the Central Office and announced ourselves as visitors and asked if we could speak to the Hammer, the director. Curiously, camp actually had official wristbands, sort of like you get when visiting a museum or a bar, to denote that you were a visitor. The young lady that received us got this box down from a high shelf, remarking that she didn't think she had ever issued one before. The thing is, this box was enormous. There were thousands and thousands of wrist bands in there, yet ours were the first two that had been handed out in recent memory.
We chatted for a bit, realized that we knew hardly anyone that still worked there. Eventually the Hammer rolled up. He could not have been more welcoming. We explained our plans and asked if we could sleep in the Howie Hut (the tenament I had occupied before when collecting all the old soda cans) and he graciously allowed it. What's more, he invited us to the staff bbq. The Weebs and I discussed this unexpectedly warm welcome and finally understood some things that had eluded me earlier. First, this was Hammer's full time job. Although the camp was only open for the summer he worked for the Boy Scouts full time. Second, he was responsible for everything that happened on the property. In years past, we would have probably have just rolled up and done whatever we felt like. Understandably, this was not the right course of action.
The BBQ was pretty good, although it did reinforce the idea that we were definitely the old men there. The only person I recognized was good old Maggie. During my last years at camp, Maggie had been a CIT, probably about 15 or 16. She had memorized Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky and would recite it at campfires. She had become a bit of a free spirit, travelling around the world. Anyway we got to talking with her and agreed that we would prep for our hike by travelling down to Lake George for a few bowls of loud mouth soup.
I can't remember exactly what we talked about during the 40 min ride, I wish I had, because a lot of it was absolutely hilarious. Maggie told us stories about studying in NY and missing a lot of classes. She didn't intend to cut classes, she would dutifully set off from her apartment to the college. However, if it was a particularly nice day or if there was a sidewalk performer or an exhibit that caught her eye, she tended to miss classes. This tended to happen a lot. Also, Maggie had been working at camp for quite a bit while we were gone, so she was able to fill us in on some history. We did not end up at the pizza place that night, we visited a bunch of other places.
The next morning, we had a lot to do. I am not sure about the exact sequence of events. I know that we phoned the load a lot to give useless status reports. Even though it was in totally the wrong direction and we still hadn't picked up and supplies, I was able to convince the Weebs that we should have lunch at the pizza place. It wasn't exactly how I remembered it. It hadn't changed, it's just that my fond memories had painted it to be far better than reality. The pizza was good, not great. The tables were kind of sticky. In short, everything you would expect a touristy pizza place to be. Still, it was fun to be back. Some of those same memories came back.
We then had close to an hour and a half drive to the trailhead. Still, we had no supplies. At least if we had the load he would have at least planned the menus so all we would need is to run in and pick up the supplies. But, since it was the Weebs and me, we wandered around this supermarket like a couple of idiots. Picking up 20 pound sides of beef and joking about how funny it would be to pack something like this. In the end, we got the usual trail food, also some not so usual food like big cans of stew. But, we figured we would eat it the first night and it was not too far to carry.
Turns out we reached the trailhead at around 4 or so. Really late. We only hiked 2-3 miles that first evening to a pretty popular campsite. It looked like a woman's college outing club had claimed the lean-to. It was clear that they meant business. They had that lean to impeccably organized. Sort of like a display at a camping store. Everything was set out neatly, they had color coded stuff sacks, the works. So Weebs and I roll up and ask if it is cool if we pitch our tent in the clearing a few hundred yards off. We could not have gotten a colder reception. They avoided us like the plague. So I don't feel too bad about what happened next.
First, we had to open the cans of stew. Naturally, we had not packed a can opener. So I used Nature's can opener, a big rock. After wailing on it like a gorilla, I finally got it to the point where we could get at the contents. I happened to do my cave man routine in an area where the girls could plainly see me. I am sure they had no end of can openers, but offered no assistance.
After the Weebs and I had eaten, got the tent set up and generally set up for the evening, we realized that we had no way to hang our food. Since this was a very popular area, the bear activity was pretty high. So we did the only thing that we could. I went up to an 8 foot tall spruce. I was able to pull the top of it down, hook our plastic shopping bag full of food on it and once I released it our food was about 6 feet off the ground. A squirrel could have easily got it, much less a bear.
Sure enough, in the middle of the night, the Weebs woke me up to let me know there was a bear outside and it had been making a lot of racket and had even put its nose against the tent. I had missed most of this, not sure how I slept through it all. Of course, my first reaction was to think that the Weebs was just messing with me. But, he was absolutely serious.
The next morning, our bag was in tatters. The bear was actually quite picky. For instance, it ate most of the pepperoni stick we had bought and a good bit of the cheese. We had also bought a pack of 6 tortillas, the bear evidently did not like it. There was an enormous bite mark through the entire package, but it looked like very little had been consumed. Regardless, we would press on. We still had quite a bit of food and only planned to be in the Daks for a couple more days.
Unfortunately, the Weebs developed a bit of a problem with his knee. Apparently the knee cap was rubbing against some bone causing him quite a bit of pain. He pushed on, but by the time we reached the summit of Marcy, he was hurting. What's worse, going downhill was a lot more painful than going up. We phoned the load at the summit for a status update. So we ended up limping out that night. Funny thing was, Weebs was wearing sandals for while carrying his 40 lb pack. Probably not the wisest choice. At some point on the way down, this very fit older gentleman came up to me and told me "I cautioned your friend back there on his choice of footwear." Of course he was right. He was also very prim and proper, so it only seemed right that he would be so formal! It was a long day hiking out. I think we spent the last day just cruising around Lake Placid and phoning the load. We stayed at the Econo Lodge in Lake Placid, which had very good rates and even a pool and a hot tub. The Weebs and I may or may not have ended up two guys just chilling in a hot tub, Dumb and Dumber style. All in all, a great trip.
I have talked about Lake George a few times before, in general, it is a touristy town, but I still have some very fond memories. One of those memories involves a place I can only remember as the "Pitcher Place". It was a little pizzeria in Lake George and served pretty good food. One evening, the Load, the Weebs (full story on that name perhaps forthcoming with his permission), C. Coady, a buxom kitchen lass and a few others were at this place. We started out with a pizza and perhaps a few other dishes. I then ordered a pitcher of beer, almost just to see if it would work; true to form, the beard did not let me down. The pitcher came with 2 or 3 glasses, enough for those who actually were 21 and those who may have had the facial hair of a hobo. However, the pitcher went very quickly. There is nothing to stop someone from emptying a soda glass and refilling it with beer. More pitchers were ordered and I think the waitstaff were onto our little trick. But, business was good and we were behaving ourselves. It was a great night because the place was relatively empty and we had some great chats. Usually when we went to the local bar, it was packed and you really couldn't have a conversation. This was more like a tavern. Also, the bar we frequented the most, had absolutely no beers on tap. It was only because of its location that it did so well. A valuable part of the drinking experience is drinking draft beers from pitchers. We stayed for hours, perhaps until closing time. One of my favorite places in the Adirondacks. At least that is how I remembered it.
More than 15 years later, the Weebs and I happened to visit this place again. At this point, neither one of us had worked at camp for several years. Also, I was now cleanly shaved and it was the Weebs who sported a beard. However, his beard was well kempt and fitting a professional where mine had simply been an exercise in not shaving at all. We had planned a weekend hiking around in the Adirondacks, mainly hitting Mt. Marcy and a few other peaks.
We didn't have the load with us. The load is exceptionally good at planning activities and putting the needed logistics in place. The Weebs and I, not so much. We made it a point to harrass the Load via phone every 30 minutes or so with pointless updates as to what milepost we had passed, but nothing useful. So we ended up in the Daks with our packs, but no supplies. We didn't make it up until quite late the first day, so we decided that we would stay at camp since it was further south and hopefully free.
There was a bit of trepidation though. Camp was in full session with scouts and staff members. The Weebs had received a less than warm welcome when he had visited the camp a couple of summers before. Nevertheless, I thought we might try something that we had never tried before ... respect. So, we drove onto camp and immediately reported to the Central Office and announced ourselves as visitors and asked if we could speak to the Hammer, the director. Curiously, camp actually had official wristbands, sort of like you get when visiting a museum or a bar, to denote that you were a visitor. The young lady that received us got this box down from a high shelf, remarking that she didn't think she had ever issued one before. The thing is, this box was enormous. There were thousands and thousands of wrist bands in there, yet ours were the first two that had been handed out in recent memory.
We chatted for a bit, realized that we knew hardly anyone that still worked there. Eventually the Hammer rolled up. He could not have been more welcoming. We explained our plans and asked if we could sleep in the Howie Hut (the tenament I had occupied before when collecting all the old soda cans) and he graciously allowed it. What's more, he invited us to the staff bbq. The Weebs and I discussed this unexpectedly warm welcome and finally understood some things that had eluded me earlier. First, this was Hammer's full time job. Although the camp was only open for the summer he worked for the Boy Scouts full time. Second, he was responsible for everything that happened on the property. In years past, we would have probably have just rolled up and done whatever we felt like. Understandably, this was not the right course of action.
The BBQ was pretty good, although it did reinforce the idea that we were definitely the old men there. The only person I recognized was good old Maggie. During my last years at camp, Maggie had been a CIT, probably about 15 or 16. She had memorized Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky and would recite it at campfires. She had become a bit of a free spirit, travelling around the world. Anyway we got to talking with her and agreed that we would prep for our hike by travelling down to Lake George for a few bowls of loud mouth soup.
I can't remember exactly what we talked about during the 40 min ride, I wish I had, because a lot of it was absolutely hilarious. Maggie told us stories about studying in NY and missing a lot of classes. She didn't intend to cut classes, she would dutifully set off from her apartment to the college. However, if it was a particularly nice day or if there was a sidewalk performer or an exhibit that caught her eye, she tended to miss classes. This tended to happen a lot. Also, Maggie had been working at camp for quite a bit while we were gone, so she was able to fill us in on some history. We did not end up at the pizza place that night, we visited a bunch of other places.
The next morning, we had a lot to do. I am not sure about the exact sequence of events. I know that we phoned the load a lot to give useless status reports. Even though it was in totally the wrong direction and we still hadn't picked up and supplies, I was able to convince the Weebs that we should have lunch at the pizza place. It wasn't exactly how I remembered it. It hadn't changed, it's just that my fond memories had painted it to be far better than reality. The pizza was good, not great. The tables were kind of sticky. In short, everything you would expect a touristy pizza place to be. Still, it was fun to be back. Some of those same memories came back.
We then had close to an hour and a half drive to the trailhead. Still, we had no supplies. At least if we had the load he would have at least planned the menus so all we would need is to run in and pick up the supplies. But, since it was the Weebs and me, we wandered around this supermarket like a couple of idiots. Picking up 20 pound sides of beef and joking about how funny it would be to pack something like this. In the end, we got the usual trail food, also some not so usual food like big cans of stew. But, we figured we would eat it the first night and it was not too far to carry.
Turns out we reached the trailhead at around 4 or so. Really late. We only hiked 2-3 miles that first evening to a pretty popular campsite. It looked like a woman's college outing club had claimed the lean-to. It was clear that they meant business. They had that lean to impeccably organized. Sort of like a display at a camping store. Everything was set out neatly, they had color coded stuff sacks, the works. So Weebs and I roll up and ask if it is cool if we pitch our tent in the clearing a few hundred yards off. We could not have gotten a colder reception. They avoided us like the plague. So I don't feel too bad about what happened next.
First, we had to open the cans of stew. Naturally, we had not packed a can opener. So I used Nature's can opener, a big rock. After wailing on it like a gorilla, I finally got it to the point where we could get at the contents. I happened to do my cave man routine in an area where the girls could plainly see me. I am sure they had no end of can openers, but offered no assistance.
After the Weebs and I had eaten, got the tent set up and generally set up for the evening, we realized that we had no way to hang our food. Since this was a very popular area, the bear activity was pretty high. So we did the only thing that we could. I went up to an 8 foot tall spruce. I was able to pull the top of it down, hook our plastic shopping bag full of food on it and once I released it our food was about 6 feet off the ground. A squirrel could have easily got it, much less a bear.
Sure enough, in the middle of the night, the Weebs woke me up to let me know there was a bear outside and it had been making a lot of racket and had even put its nose against the tent. I had missed most of this, not sure how I slept through it all. Of course, my first reaction was to think that the Weebs was just messing with me. But, he was absolutely serious.
The next morning, our bag was in tatters. The bear was actually quite picky. For instance, it ate most of the pepperoni stick we had bought and a good bit of the cheese. We had also bought a pack of 6 tortillas, the bear evidently did not like it. There was an enormous bite mark through the entire package, but it looked like very little had been consumed. Regardless, we would press on. We still had quite a bit of food and only planned to be in the Daks for a couple more days.
Unfortunately, the Weebs developed a bit of a problem with his knee. Apparently the knee cap was rubbing against some bone causing him quite a bit of pain. He pushed on, but by the time we reached the summit of Marcy, he was hurting. What's worse, going downhill was a lot more painful than going up. We phoned the load at the summit for a status update. So we ended up limping out that night. Funny thing was, Weebs was wearing sandals for while carrying his 40 lb pack. Probably not the wisest choice. At some point on the way down, this very fit older gentleman came up to me and told me "I cautioned your friend back there on his choice of footwear." Of course he was right. He was also very prim and proper, so it only seemed right that he would be so formal! It was a long day hiking out. I think we spent the last day just cruising around Lake Placid and phoning the load. We stayed at the Econo Lodge in Lake Placid, which had very good rates and even a pool and a hot tub. The Weebs and I may or may not have ended up two guys just chilling in a hot tub, Dumb and Dumber style. All in all, a great trip.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Voaygeur Part III: Being Preppy (Wherein the long name referencing the Denver Omlette gets explained and dismissed finally)
In previous posts we discussed camp school and the follow up remedial training. This post focuses on the Sunday afternoon before a group leaves.
Sundays start off with a brunch, a ton of coffee consumed out of 4 fl oz cups and waiting for your trek group to arrive. Once the group arrives, there are quick introductions, a brief discussion about the planned route and plans to meet later for pack inspection. As it turns out, at least for me, Sundays were always extremely busy. I could have done a lot of the work on Saturday, but I viewed that as my Summit Sabbath, and made sure that I did not do any work or anything morally correct on that day.
Load purpling it up here and there on this post. Sundays always stared out well. Especially my last year (2000 when I came back full time, not freelance). There was no breakfast, just brunch and dinner that day. Brunch commenced around 10:30 or 11:00, yet the Voyageur and I would usually arrive at the dining hall at breakfast time (7:30) and begin to drink that aforementioned coffee. There really is nothing better than having a few free hours to caffeinate your body while bullshitting with a friend on a beautiful summer Adirondack morning in front of a gorgeous wood structure (the new dining hall). I looked forward to those times.
In addition to meeting the group and making sure they were ready for the trip, you had to pack your own gear and make sure all the group gear was ready to go. Packing your own gear was pretty easy, because my pack was typically 85% ready to go at any time. Most of the gear just stayed in there from week to week, the clothing might get changed out, but really the only thing that certainly got changed out was the socks. That is one area you don't want to take lightly, you really do need fresh socks each day.
You always hoped for early arriving groups (post-brunch though) so you could go through your paces with them, do pack check, discuss this and that, distribute gear, and still have time to chill in the late afternoon.
Our groups usually ranged in size from 8-12. Over the course of 5 days, this is a lot of food to consume. Fortunately, there is an entire line of backpacking food. The food is freeze dried, meaning that there is little to no moisture content. The food is comparatively light and does not require refrigeration. Something is lost in the freeze drying process however, that something is taste. But it gets the job done. Generally, the dinners were the best of the worst, the lunches in the middle of the pack and the breakfasts were really really bad. For whatever reason, freeze drying eggs doesn't work. It go to the point that we would typically pack two freeze dried breakfasts for the group (one denver omelette and one eggs and baco bits) and the other breakfasts were instant oatmeal. I think we universally agreed that the Denver Omlette was the worst. Perhaps it was the lofty title that made you think of a diner where you would get a lovely fluffy omlette, perhaps some plump juicy sausages and a glass of orange juice. In the field it was a slightly runny mess with flecks of green pepper floating in the eggy soup. We started wising up at the end and just packing oatmeal for all 4 breakfasts. It was cheaper, tastier and required almost no clean-up. The Denver Omlette is the meal I took w/the Voyageur when we hiked up Stevens for the (very) abridged training when it turned out he was going to fill in to take a trek out. It's also the meal that we threw out after having tasted a bite each.
The lunches typically consisted of some sort of bread that never went bad, but was never really good either, either a cheese spread or peanut butter and jelly and some sort of energy bar. I imagine it was similar to what they ate during the Korean war, in fact some of the adult leaders who were vets remarked that it was indeed similar. All in all, the dinners were not too bad. They were usually hearty enough that people did not go to bed hungry and actually tasted ok. My favorite was the nicknames for the meals, only one sticks in my mind because of the totally juvenile nature, and that is "Happy Cow" for Beef Stroganoff.
Two comments here. When I began, in '93, the lunches were pre-packaged deals that contained Mountain Bread. This was the stalest, driest cracker you could imagine, along with two packs of squeeze jelly and peanut butter. These were definitely reminiscent of military MRE's. Lunch was the first to go, we would end up taking a bag of bagels, peanut butter in a jar, GORP, granola bars, apples and oranges, etc. Quick, yummy, saved money, filling, etc. Oh, and pepporoni! After a few days of heavy hiking, nothing beat sticking a large slice of pepperoni into a jar of peanut butter and chowing down. Later we got rid of breakfasts in favor of fortified oatmeal. That's oatmeal with anything added you could think of.
I always made the "Happy Cow" joke about Beef Stroganoff until an adult leader I was taking out commented that "Happy Bull" was more accurate in this instance.
Each one of the freeze dried meals was packaged to serve 4. It worked best if you had a group of 6 or 10, because a meal for 8 served 6 very well, and a meal for 12 similarly worked well for 10 people. Typically, I would round up. People get cranky enough in the woods away from toilets, showers and general creature comforts, you don't want to add in hunger. We would also give each participant a bag of trail mix (M&Ms, peanuts and raisins) that was to be used as they saw fit. Interestingly, many scouts chose to break out this bag of treats on the drive to the trek start, about an hour after they had breakfast.
Packing all this food was relatively simple. As mentioned before, we had an old dining hall at our disposal. The walk in refrigerators were still there, but inoperable. That didn't matter though because the food didn't need to stay cold. My approach was pretty haphazard. I generally grabbed as many bags of each food as I thought we might need, supplemented with some extra oatmeal and trail mix and called it good. The load, who is a bit more of a purist, put more thought into it and even carried a spice kit with him.
After packing the food, you needed to get the rest of the group gear, namely the cooking gear, stoves and fuel. The cooking gear was relatively straight forward. All the meals could be prepared in a big pot and or a frying pan and the scouts were responsible for bringing their own plate and cup. You needed a big spoon and a spatula, and then you were all set.
We used stoves like the one below:
These were really efficient machines, when working correctly. Probably the most useful thing I learned at camp school was how to repair one of these in the field. You poured liquid fuel in the tank. There was a pump on the other side of the stove:
In order to get the stove started you would pressurize the tank with the pump and light her up. At first, a mixture of liquid and gaseous fuel would come out, creating a nice dangerous flame. Eventually, the heat from the flame would convert all the liquid fuel to vapor and the stove would run smoothly. The problem was that the stoves were pretty finicky and over time some would work better than others. Rather than figure out ahead of time which ones were working well, my approach was to grab 3 or 4, with the idea that at least one, and hopefully two would work well. These stoves didn't use much fuel, but you never wanted to run out. Generally, I would estimate what the worst case scenario would be for fuel usage, double it, and then grab an extra couple of bottles of fuel to be safe. I never ran out of fuel. In fact, I often came back with enough to do an entire follow on trip. (A bit of an aside here, at the end of the year, we had to get rid of all the fuel that remained in the stoves or in the expedition fuel bottles. I don't know exactly what the approved method was - my method, which I greatly enjoyed - was to build an enormous bonfire and pour the fuel onto it. I think the hair on my hands and my eyebrows have finally recovered from the constant singing!)
Then you had to get the incidentals, like a shovel for burying your poop, something called polar pure that we used to treat the water. This was an interesting product. You can use Iodine to treat water so it is safe to drink. Polar pure was a product that contained pellets of iodine under a net.
Sundays start off with a brunch, a ton of coffee consumed out of 4 fl oz cups and waiting for your trek group to arrive. Once the group arrives, there are quick introductions, a brief discussion about the planned route and plans to meet later for pack inspection. As it turns out, at least for me, Sundays were always extremely busy. I could have done a lot of the work on Saturday, but I viewed that as my Summit Sabbath, and made sure that I did not do any work or anything morally correct on that day.
Load purpling it up here and there on this post. Sundays always stared out well. Especially my last year (2000 when I came back full time, not freelance). There was no breakfast, just brunch and dinner that day. Brunch commenced around 10:30 or 11:00, yet the Voyageur and I would usually arrive at the dining hall at breakfast time (7:30) and begin to drink that aforementioned coffee. There really is nothing better than having a few free hours to caffeinate your body while bullshitting with a friend on a beautiful summer Adirondack morning in front of a gorgeous wood structure (the new dining hall). I looked forward to those times.
In addition to meeting the group and making sure they were ready for the trip, you had to pack your own gear and make sure all the group gear was ready to go. Packing your own gear was pretty easy, because my pack was typically 85% ready to go at any time. Most of the gear just stayed in there from week to week, the clothing might get changed out, but really the only thing that certainly got changed out was the socks. That is one area you don't want to take lightly, you really do need fresh socks each day.
You always hoped for early arriving groups (post-brunch though) so you could go through your paces with them, do pack check, discuss this and that, distribute gear, and still have time to chill in the late afternoon.
Our groups usually ranged in size from 8-12. Over the course of 5 days, this is a lot of food to consume. Fortunately, there is an entire line of backpacking food. The food is freeze dried, meaning that there is little to no moisture content. The food is comparatively light and does not require refrigeration. Something is lost in the freeze drying process however, that something is taste. But it gets the job done. Generally, the dinners were the best of the worst, the lunches in the middle of the pack and the breakfasts were really really bad. For whatever reason, freeze drying eggs doesn't work. It go to the point that we would typically pack two freeze dried breakfasts for the group (one denver omelette and one eggs and baco bits) and the other breakfasts were instant oatmeal. I think we universally agreed that the Denver Omlette was the worst. Perhaps it was the lofty title that made you think of a diner where you would get a lovely fluffy omlette, perhaps some plump juicy sausages and a glass of orange juice. In the field it was a slightly runny mess with flecks of green pepper floating in the eggy soup. We started wising up at the end and just packing oatmeal for all 4 breakfasts. It was cheaper, tastier and required almost no clean-up. The Denver Omlette is the meal I took w/the Voyageur when we hiked up Stevens for the (very) abridged training when it turned out he was going to fill in to take a trek out. It's also the meal that we threw out after having tasted a bite each.
The lunches typically consisted of some sort of bread that never went bad, but was never really good either, either a cheese spread or peanut butter and jelly and some sort of energy bar. I imagine it was similar to what they ate during the Korean war, in fact some of the adult leaders who were vets remarked that it was indeed similar. All in all, the dinners were not too bad. They were usually hearty enough that people did not go to bed hungry and actually tasted ok. My favorite was the nicknames for the meals, only one sticks in my mind because of the totally juvenile nature, and that is "Happy Cow" for Beef Stroganoff.
Two comments here. When I began, in '93, the lunches were pre-packaged deals that contained Mountain Bread. This was the stalest, driest cracker you could imagine, along with two packs of squeeze jelly and peanut butter. These were definitely reminiscent of military MRE's. Lunch was the first to go, we would end up taking a bag of bagels, peanut butter in a jar, GORP, granola bars, apples and oranges, etc. Quick, yummy, saved money, filling, etc. Oh, and pepporoni! After a few days of heavy hiking, nothing beat sticking a large slice of pepperoni into a jar of peanut butter and chowing down. Later we got rid of breakfasts in favor of fortified oatmeal. That's oatmeal with anything added you could think of.
I always made the "Happy Cow" joke about Beef Stroganoff until an adult leader I was taking out commented that "Happy Bull" was more accurate in this instance.
Each one of the freeze dried meals was packaged to serve 4. It worked best if you had a group of 6 or 10, because a meal for 8 served 6 very well, and a meal for 12 similarly worked well for 10 people. Typically, I would round up. People get cranky enough in the woods away from toilets, showers and general creature comforts, you don't want to add in hunger. We would also give each participant a bag of trail mix (M&Ms, peanuts and raisins) that was to be used as they saw fit. Interestingly, many scouts chose to break out this bag of treats on the drive to the trek start, about an hour after they had breakfast.
Packing all this food was relatively simple. As mentioned before, we had an old dining hall at our disposal. The walk in refrigerators were still there, but inoperable. That didn't matter though because the food didn't need to stay cold. My approach was pretty haphazard. I generally grabbed as many bags of each food as I thought we might need, supplemented with some extra oatmeal and trail mix and called it good. The load, who is a bit more of a purist, put more thought into it and even carried a spice kit with him.
After packing the food, you needed to get the rest of the group gear, namely the cooking gear, stoves and fuel. The cooking gear was relatively straight forward. All the meals could be prepared in a big pot and or a frying pan and the scouts were responsible for bringing their own plate and cup. You needed a big spoon and a spatula, and then you were all set.
We used stoves like the one below:
These were really efficient machines, when working correctly. Probably the most useful thing I learned at camp school was how to repair one of these in the field. You poured liquid fuel in the tank. There was a pump on the other side of the stove:
 |
| You can see the pump on the right side of fuel tank. |
Then you had to get the incidentals, like a shovel for burying your poop, something called polar pure that we used to treat the water. This was an interesting product. You can use Iodine to treat water so it is safe to drink. Polar pure was a product that contained pellets of iodine under a net.
You could put water directly from a stream into the bottle and then it would form a solution that you could use to treat water. It was really quite ingenious, the bottle weighed a few ounces and you could treat many many gallons. The other option is to pump water through a filter, which works OK if there is just one person, but would take forever with a group. Granted, you knew it was working because the water had a lovely brown tinge and iodine bouquet, but it beats getting sick. You are supposed to fill the bottle up and then there is a scale on the side with a film that changes color. The color is supposed to indicate how many capfuls of solution you should use to treat a quart of water. Our bottles were quite old though, they still contained plenty of iodine, but the scale was impossible to read. Once again, my motto was to over compensate. It seemed to work.
I became a polar pure convert. It was much more efficient than straight pills, and I've always ended up clogging filters, even on my own. For fun, you could drink a bit of the stuff straight, though from a medical and sanity standpoint I don't recommend this.
All of this took quite a bit of time, particularly when you were new. It was not at all uncommon to stay up until 2-3 am getting ready. It made for a long first day, when you started at 5. But, there is plenty of time to catch up on sleep during the week and get ready to do it all over again.
The Voyageur and I have very different recalls on this - or perhaps we did things quite differently. It's a peculiar quirk of my character that as much as I broke rules of camp often concerning fermented hops and amorous adventures with the ladies, I actually was quite rule and regulation bound otherwise - at least during my first few years.
Part of what we had to do with our trek groups was medical check, swim check, and pack check.
We usually met in a gazebo for first aid check. The guide, nowhere near qualified as a doctor, would look over the first aid forms of all participants and ask questions. Somehow we were supposed to suss out some debilitating issue that would prevent a week of canoeing that the participant themselves were unaware of. "Oh, it says here you suffer from a severe fresh-water allergy? Do you think that will be a problem canoeing?" I can't recall a time when I learned anything useful during medical check except to affirm that everyone had a health form signed by a doctor. After medical check was swim check.
Now my first year I walked the groups down to the Bucksin waterfront and did a full swim check at a regulation waterfront, Boy Scout style (remember I actually followed regulations?). I quickly wised up. 100 yards from the gazebo was the Zip-Line pond. We would wander down there, I would have the group fly down the zip line into that god awful freezing water. If they struggled swimming out, I would mark them as someone to watch whenever we went swimming on trek or if they fell in canoeing; if they were fine, they were fine; and if they refused to go in, then I wouldn't allow them to swim on a hiking trek and they weren't allowed on a canoe trek.
Finally was pack check. Voyageur recalls this as a time to make sure everyone had what they needed. He skipped this eventually, because there was no way to get something left at home a four hour car ride away and he would end up carrying spare everything anyway. I used pack check as a way to take the crap out of their packs they didn't need. Ten t-shirts for a 5-day 4-night trek? Gone. A hatchet? Gone. I had troops argue that they might need to cut wood crossing their path while canoeing. Step out and carry it over. Or they might need it to make a fire. Nope, any wood that can't be snapped is too big in my book. Nintendo Game Boy? Gone. Deoderant? Don't need it, gone. It attracts bears, your girlfriend won't be with you, etc.
What you have to understand is a lot of 12 year old boys are still packed for by their mothers who only think of comfort and not of the carry part. They don't realize that in addition to what was packed at home, the following would be added: full water bottles, share of food, share of cook gear, share of fuel, half a tent, etc. So I whittled down.
Finally it was time for dinner. We used to march down to the dining hall and eat the food they were serving. This was tedious because though the food was ok (on a sliding scale) there were tons of announcements for new troops arriving that week that didn't concern us. So we started having barbecues at Summit on Sun. nights and these became major affairs and attracted all adult volunteers and any staff member that could sneak away from the dining hall. Our food kicked ass. After that it was off to bed. Originally we had trek groups stay in two sites at Summit (names? I'm drawing a blank! They were named after geographical landmarks in the 'Daks; I want to say Saranac and Colden, but I'm not sure). This was a waste as it took a loooooong time to set up the platforms and canvas tents at the beginning of Summer and they were only used Sun. night and Fri. night. So instead we sent troops up to the sites with their backpacking tents and they learned on the fly how to set them up. In stormy times they slept in TAC. Not sure what they do now that it's burned down.
And then any reasonable person would go to bed and get some sleep. I would go party or hang out. Lots of fun things to do at a scout reservation. Go for a midnight stroll or swim, hike up Mt. Stevens, pull a prank, drink beer, play darts, hit the bar, hit the climbing wall, play chess, carry a canoe somewhere pointless - often it was a combination of all of these. We would get back to our cabins between 12-2 am, wake up at 5, pack (which was quick as there was very little unpacking from the previous week) meet our trek group at 6, quick breakfast and off we go. That's when the real work and fun began....
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