hiking – Spotty West Goes East

July 24, 2026

The Search for a Fall—Franklin Lake, Sequoia National Park

7/15/26

This is the third night I’m unable to sleep. Random pains pop up and recede with a self-massage or simply by ignoring them. There is a pinch in my shoulder. My arthritic big toe on my left foot sings an aria that quiets to a hum. I toss and turn. Left side. Right side. Back. This goes on all night. I’m cold, then sticky and hot. Then I’m cold and hot at the same time like my body has different weather zones.

I unzip the sleeping bag then later zip it back—do the same with the tent fly. I put more clothes in the stuff sack I’m using for a pillow and then take some out.

The one constant other than no sleep is a distant roar of a waterfall somewhere at the east end of Franklin Lake. I can’t see it from my eagle’s perch on a granite shelf high above, but the concave bowl of mountains behind it seem to be acting like a parabolic reflector beaming the white noise directly into my camp hundreds of yards away. For some reason, this white noise is not helping me fall asleep.

In any case, I’m determined to hike over there tomorrow and find where the fall is.

Morning (finally)

I have FOMO about all these mountain flowers. My phone has died and I can’t take pictures. I want to record them all and I’ve started by taking notes on a few. I’m playing flower scientist.

#1 A water-loving sunflower with lush leaves at the base in thick clumps of swords. The flower sits atop a long, straight stem arising from the leaves. It has a golden or brown ball with yellow petals on the underside. I would call these flowers Bear in a Tutu if I were to name them. They seem to take over around sources of water.

#2 A lavender to white flower-ball about the size of an aggie on a long, slender green stem. Where they are prevalent over bare soil their shadows appear as polka dots on the earth.

More FOMO if my pen dries out. There is beauty everywhere. I can’t record it all. I have to go slow. I have a waterfall to find.

10 a.m. — What appear to be soap bubbles go for 75 yards along the south shore of Franklin Lake. Could it be dish washing from the five campers that came in last night or something natural in the environment? Getting a handful I feel and smell nothing as I mash them between my fingers.

I’ve gone another 50 yards past them to filter water for this trek. The white noise is slightly louder here. At my camp the falls sound like someone filling up a bathtub down the hall. Trout are jumping everywhere. They are easy to see in the clear water—rainbows with three sets of pink fins along the bottom: anal, pelvic and pectoral. The fingerlings stay in the shallow streams coming into the lake or the few places where there is rocky cover on the edge. Most of the adults I see are six to eight inches long.

I set aside four different bottle caps as I prepare to use my squeeze filter to refill my bottle. Two caps are for the dirty and clean end of the filter, one cap for the collection bag and one for my bottle.

I could have saved myself some strain if I’d known that the trail follows Franklin Creek leaves all the way from where we started three days ago. I could have filtered water as I came up, never carrying more than my half liter bottle. Instead I carried a liter and a half. That’s 3.3 pounds.

Then there are the two creamy cheese pouches for my mac and cheese dinner obligation. That added another pound. If there was ever a time for the powder version…

I could go on about the ways I could have made my forty pound pack lighter but I wouldn’t be on this excellent adventure now if my body had let me continue up the trail instead of saying, “We stay at Franklin Lake.” I would have continued on with the other guys who left yesterday. I wouldn’t be searching for this waterfall if my hips—a part of my body I wasn’t sure I even had—had not screamed at me to stop every six steps the whole way up this mountain.

**One of several canyons the Franklin Trail passes through going up to the lake (10,488 ft.). We started at the Mineral King Ranger station at 7,600 ft.**

Filtering my water is becoming a ritual I very much enjoy. It reminds me of my 1994 motorcycle trip from SF to Anchorage. I stopped every hundred miles to oil my chain. I would put a single drop of oil on each link. It was like counting Buddha beads.

I was never so good at maintaining that chain in daily life. It seems with solitude and time routines take on a special joy.

At the moment there is not a cloud in the sky. The temperature feels like 65. This is the first day without clouds but the temperature is holding steady at this high altitude.

I’m now almost directly across from the source of white noise at the end of the lake where it begins to bend. Still the source is not apparent. My ears direct me towards a jagged dark line etched into the green, shrubby cinquefoil bush. I hold up my finger to gauge its width and it fills up less than half my vertical finger.I imagine the dark line is made by shadow hiding a deep waterfall.

If I pay attention I can just see the slightest movement—a quarter inch patch of pulsing white on the side of the dark crack. At this distance the water is a chameleon against the white boulder it falls next to.

I’d really like to see a rattlesnake, but according to the park rangers it’s more likely down in Rattlesnake Canyon where the guys have gone. I hiked with my friend up to Franklin Pass yesterday and it was easy to keep up only carrying a daypack. At 11,800 feet that’s the highest altitude I’ve ever been on land. After parting ways, I still had energy to explore the upper Franklin Lake before returning to camp.

Lower Franklin was dammed in 1905 by the Whitney Power Company. A ranger at the Mineral King station said it was already a lake. I suppose the authorities just wanted to have a more consistent flow. It’s now controlled by Southern California Edison along with two other lakes that together generate power in aptly named, Three Rivers, CA.

Unused rectangular blocks of granite still sit where they were shaped after being blasted from the mountain a few hundred feet from the dam. The dam is made of these blocks stacked twenty feet high with a row of buttresses similarly made and filled with rock between them.

**Near Franklin Pass all three Franklin Lakes come into view. From left to right: upper, middle and lower. The dam can be seen on the far right side.**

The lake end opposite the dam where I am now has a huge coliseum feel with a two hundred foot granite wall in the center and boulders, steps and shelves on either side with rivers of green bush—audience members leaving their seats to come down to the water’s edge.

**Northwest facing view of Franklin Lake. Florence Peak (12,438 ft.) on the left and Tulare Peak (11, 654) on the right.**

Middle Franklin Lake, unviewable from here, sits atop the granite wall and is the source of the falling water. Patches of snow are still holding to the mountain up there.

I’m hoping that once I’ve found the falls the lady of the lake will release the power of sleep on me tonight since white noise has tended to bestow that favor in the past.

This excursion started out as a beach stroll that quickly became a parkour course. There is no trail around the lake. The bushes are the biggest impediment and I have to go up and down the boulders to find paths around them. The soles of my boots have excellent gripping power on the sandpaper-like granite.

On my own land I might whack the vegetation with my machete to make a trail but this land is my land only in the sense of the song. I try not to step on moss or grass if I can find a stone.

On my infrequent trips into the wild I used to scoff at people using walking sticks like the ones I’m now employing. They are invaluable. I use them as handholds to pull me up and stops to help me step down. If a rattler sees one before me perhaps they’ll let me know.

There are times when I need to take these poles into one hand to lean into a boulder or grab an edge. Still the poles are more handy than not.

If hiking sticks need a better advocate than myself I only ask you to look at many of the photos and sketches of John Muir, perhaps the most widely known explorer of these mountains. A pole was very much his friend.

**Ten-foot high chainsaw carving of John Muir in Lemon Cove, a small community in the San Joaquin Valley near the western entrance to the Sequoia National Park. Carved by artist R.L. Blair, 1989.**

Back down on the shore I find two gentle falls coming into the lake on this southeast side. They are making noise but not enough to make it up to my camp.

On the second fall a trout enjoys lounging in the rapids that seem to be going backwards where the stream meets the lake. I’m baffled. Could the small sunken timber just shy of bridging two boulders here be enough to create a dam that the water is bouncing off? Ah no! It is a western breeze creating waves coming toward me across the lake. Where the waves meet the rapids it creates this backward moving river phenomenon.

My daypack is the “brain” taken off my backpack—a hand me down from my friend. It’s a removable zippered bag on the top of the pack that can be used as a large fanny pack. I have a journal in it and I’m stopping often when I think I have something to say. It’s making the going slow but pleasurable. I’ve figured out how to loosen the buckle to slide the bag around to my front and retrieve my journal without taking it off. Would I have thought of this if I’d never seen anyone do it? Perhaps. Still, we tend to remember things we’ve seen.

For instance, hiking with my friend he flips his walking sticks to his backside, places them under his pack and then lifts it to give his shoulders some temporary relief. It’s a nice trick that I learn to copy.

The sloping granite slab I’ve plopped down on to write has fissures where plants grow. The central one is almost entirely filled with marmot scat. The slightly tapered cylinders laid all over have rolled to the indentation with the help of gravity, and the drying effect of wind and sun. The volume goes to show that marmots don’t just shit where campers leave a few stray tortilla crumbs. Obviously there are things in the wild they eat. It makes me rethink their reputation as thieves and opportunists.

From here I’m starting to get a better picture of the noisy falls. The black line is more hidden at this angle, but at the bottom I see white rivulets rolling over a black bar that I’m guessing is the same white granite made dark by water. I had thought the color was a deep shadow but it looks instead like wet rock.

I’ve come to another falling creek a third of the way around the end and as much as I’d like to go down and see where it meets the water it is locked off with brush. The only clear way around is to go up. When I get to the mid-point it looks like I’ll be able to head down to refill my bottle again.

I might have skipped bringing it and just used the gravity hose the filter comes with, but having a bottle is less awkward and doesn’t require me to squeeze the collection bag as I suck on the hose.

I’ve got a granola bar and a chicken stick to eat for a snack. If I’d thought this outing would be so long I’d’ve brought lunch. Truth is I’m not too hungry. The packets of tunafish, chicken and other rations stopped being appealing after a few days.

The biggest reason to eat this food now is to make my pack lighter on the way out. I’d be happy if I could use up all my white gas too.

It took me seven hours to get up to Franklin Lake with the backpack. Seven miles in seven hours and some of those miles took two.

Maybe I didn’t pack the bag the right way. I didn’t have the bear canister high enough in the pack. Also, I didn’t remember I had a chest strap until we were already at camp and my friend pointed it out. That would have helped minimize any wobbling. Mostly it’s just the fact that I’m not in backpacking shape. Age doesn’t help but my friend is four years older and he is “crushing it”. (He’s tried to encourage me with those words but I told him I felt more crushed than crushing.)

I’ve come to a fourth stream now buried under the rocks. I can’t see it. The sound comes and goes as I make my way down a playground of boulders. My intended route was to stay high but my curiosity has me following the sound to see if the hidden stream comes into daylight before the lake. I see a possible path of boulders close to shore that may get me to the spot I want to go. Maybe I can achieve both goals.

I’m thinking more about these big rocks now that I’m navigating them. I’ve come across a few loose, two-head-size ones that I caused to roll and some large flat ones that see-sawed when I stepped on and off again.

It all leads me to the thought that one of the larger prize-winning-hog-size stones could be delicately balanced on a precipice that my 170 pounds might dislodge and pin me under with a broken arm or leg. I’m probably safe with the bull and elephant-size boulders, but none of these got here by anything other than violent tumbling and they all have their own clock and ambition downward.

The subterranean stream I’ve been hearing appears in a rock window fifty feet from shore but the path I thought might get to the bottom isn’t viable so I start climbing back to my original route.

In the aquamarine waters next to the shoreline is the ultimate future for many of these boulders. There a deceptive one foot strip of fine gravel looks like a good, firm place to step but it turns out the mix of tiny rocks are not hard packed but in a buoyant, thick layer. The uninitiated person who steps there sinks and throws their body sideways. However, if you can find a rock to sit on it feels good thrusting your sore hiking feet in the grit and wiggling your toes.

I’ve come to the half way point around the lake end. The big rock wall here has an overhang that would make a good place to ride out a rain storm pushing west, however a storm coming opposite would make you feel like a seed in a mortar.

The shoreline is within reach and just over the next bench is probably the most sizable source of water filling this lake. But I’m no expert. Water is likely sifting in everywhere at the base of these mountains. There is not a lot of visible snow left but who knows how deep the ice goes in those cracks.

I’m thinking I should use up the day as much as possible and cook dinner after the sun goes down tonight. It will make cleaning up more difficult, but going to bed at sunset makes for long hours of no sleep.

I’ve been stopping so much I only have a vague notion of what time it is. Noon? Two? Four? I forgot my wristwatch at camp and, as I’ve said, my phone has died. Much as I wish I could take more pictures, I’d likely not be writing much if I was. Writing is often the last thing I do. Strangely, it is the thing I love most to have done.

I’m down at the lake’s edge now sitting on a gently sloping whale of a rock. If the definition of a boulder is a rock that is free of anything else, this is not one. This is part of a shelf firmly cemented to whatever is beneath it.

It’s easy to get water here. Filtering is becoming second nature. It occurs to me that I could take off my clothes and swim over to find where that hidden fall reaches the lake. I was in the water yesterday and it’s cool and refreshing. Without a cloud in the sky it would take no time for me to dry off.

On second thought, if I mess around too much the rest of this adventure might begin to feel like a chore. Best to eat my snacks and move on.

In the distance I hear a male sooty grouse making its mating call. I saw one near my camp this morning sitting very still under a bush. The sound is similar to the sliding bass you can make by hitting a conga and pushing a wetted finger across the skin. It also sounds a lot like the empty 5 gallon water drums I used to bring to school for my first graders to bang on at recess.

It’s taken me three days but I finally feel really good about being on this adventure—just don’t ask me tonight when I’m tossing and turning.

I’ve made it over the bench to the falls. They are certainly making a grand noise. I can see my orange tent peaking from behind the granite wall in my camp and the large, ancient and rare Foxtail pine with its orange exposed wood nearby.

**Where the bark is broken off this foxtail pine shows the spiraling wood grain that helps it withstand the fierce winters and high winds.**

The noisy waterfall comes from behind a boulder surrounded by bush. Then it drops in a series of steps and slides into a curvy s-shape before pouring over that dark bar of rock that I could see from a distance. I’m no expert at estimating flow but I’ll venture a guess of 180 gallons a minute.

A second fall further west is joined by a trickling stream. They flow together into a shallow brook with skinny steps that goes parallel to the lake for fifty yards and contains darting trout fry. I walk out to the end where it joins the lake between two long rocks that form a sort of slip dock for a boulder parked in the middle like a tugboat that has skidded in.

I then walk back shoreside to look at where the main fall enters. I climb back on the prominence. From the bar the water slides down a slope into a pool then flows beneath a flat bush reaching across the banks. It rolls down over double-head-size stones into more pools before entering the lake on three broad offset steps that have me imagining a 1950s Hollywood movie goddess sashaying out of her swimming pool. All architecture is copied from nature.

I think I’d better eat that granola bar that I ended up saving. I’m getting a little punchy and still want to make it up to the middle lake.

I work my way around a wide area of bush across some long boulders where the white mountain called Florence Peak trails into the red one named Tulare Peak.

I double back to the top and find where the fall begins. It is not coming directly from the middle lake but a series of three ponds, each lower than the next. None of these ponds were visible from the high pass I was on yesterday. All have clear water and appear to be about five to ten feet deep. A breeze is rippling the surface making it difficult to see if there are fish.

Each pond is surrounded by red scree from crumbling Tulare Peak a thousand feet above. Most of the rocks are no larger than a fist. My footsteps make ringing glass sounds where thin shards come against each other.

There is some sort of yellow buttercup flower in bloom along the east side of the first pond. All these ponds are eminently dippable except for those fist size rocks that line the shallow water. The only way to get in without water shoes would be to carefully prostrate yourself and scooch in until the water safely floats you from shore.

Phosphorescent green moss clings to the rocks in the rapids that connect the ponds and looks like a blurry photograph.

The top pond is separated from Middle Franklin Lake by a mounded field of a 100,000 tons of red rock. (Okay, maybe my powers of estimation have reached their limit here, but it’s a lot.)

It’s clear these ponds are fed by the lake but there is no obvious exit of water in the form of a fall or stream. Perhaps it comes up unseen somewhere in the middle of a pond.

On the lake side, however, I see where it enters. There is no through-stream, cave or hole only a U-shaped indention in the mass of scree where the lake spills into a stream and then five feet away becomes a pool where the water is sucked into the stones.

With the amount of water it seems like I’d see a whirl or hear a slurping sound but there is simply a calm pool where it all goes down. The broad heap of stones is just a sieve for all that water to pass through. I suppose there is not enough debris up here to clog the holes. There are no trees. It is barren of plants except for a few lakeside flowers and sedges.

I walk over to the lowest patch of snow on the mountain. The red scree shifts under my weight. At least the round ankle-twisters are rare here and easy to avoid.

The snow is not ice, but it’s firm with a top slushy layer that takes my footprints. Fine red sand blown off the talus colors parts of the wavy field making it look like a large topographic model of some Siberian landscape of snow-patched hills.

What appears to be one of the smallest birds I’ve ever seen, outside of hummers, hops across the landscape pecking at something. At this distance I cannot see any coloration. The bright sun makes it appear as a silhouette.

A few rocks are in the snow at the bottom of oversized conical pits as if they were dropped there burning hot and melted to the bottom.

It’s time to leave this landscape. The sun has moved from east to the west. I’ve been out all day. I’m getting hungry and tired yet… I can’t help but stop at the lake again to admire fine bunches of rush with perfectly cylindrical stalks surrounded by blue moss and another ground cover as tidy and bright green as newly laid synthetic grass. It feels more like a modern art exhibit than living things.

The wind dies for a bit and I see trout floating inside an invisible medium. Again…unreal.

I make it back to the sturdy, large boulders relieved to be beyond the loose rocks that pivot under my weight. I’m drawn to the overlook but afraid to get too close to the front edge where it begins to slope downward and has patches of slippery sand before the two-hundred foot drop. The side is safer and I can see well-enough the first steps in mapping my way back to camp.

January 4, 2026

I was helping one of my students with doing some multi-digit subtraction a few days before our winter break and he asked me “Why do they call it borrowing if you never give it back?”.

I was flummoxed. I didn’t have a good answer and I’m not sure if I do now. Subtraction is just about taking away. You don’t give back at all. In the subtraction algorithm one digit takes from the next digit over so it can give what it needs to the digit below it. It’s all just part of a process. It’s like your body taking nutrients from your stomach to power your brain.

I think in the education world the correct term to use might be “regrouping” which makes more sense in terms of meaning but maybe not as much in common language. We are a nation of borrowers, but how often do we regroup? That involves teamwork or at least the notion that we have multiple things going on and sometimes we need to sort them out.

The language is important to me as a writer but I didn’t care much about it as a kid which made this student’s inquiry kind of special.

Back when I was his age my number sense was better than my word sense so when teachers said, “borrow from the whatever and carry the one”, it didn’t matter that the language didn’t make sense. I understood it was just a shortcut to get to the answer even though there was more wrong with the language than just the teacher saying “borrow”.

Carry the one was a complete lie. In the subtraction algorithm you never carry a one (for whole numbers any way). You might carry a ten, or a hundred or a million, but one is not a number that gets carried.

From what I remember teachers didn’t pay much attention to number sense. You either had it or didn’t and the addition and subtraction algorithm (stacking numbers on top of each other) was hoisted on us pretty quickly before we had a good idea of how much bigger 1,012 is than 112.

But what did I know about what teachers were paying attention to? I wasn’t paying attention to them!

_________________

I made it back to Tennessee for some time on the land and family visiting. My old friend Steve joined me. I met Steve way back when his wife was his girlfriend and I worked with her at Hospitality House in the Tenderloin neighborhood of SF.

Steve and my Aunt Linda hit it off big time. Often, when I left them alone I’d come back in the room to see them laughing and smiling, telling stories or talking history.

My trip was short. Steve’s even shorter. I arrived on a red-eye last Saturday and he came that night. He left on New Year’s Eve and I left New Year day. Still we got a lot in which included some delicious meals made by Aunt Linda and winter camping on a night that got down to 22° F.

Surprisingly, the red-eye wasn’t too bad. I had everything I needed to make sleep possible—my 40+ year-old down jacket from college days, a window seat, a neck pillow, Benadryl and two doses of NyQuil in a 2-oz bottle. It’s one of the few times that having a congestion cold was convenient. If I ever take a red-eye again I might try to skip the cold but take the doxylamine. I made sure to clear my ears with a gentle, pinched-nosed push at intervals all the way up to cruising altitude and again on the way back down for both jumps of my trip.

I think another thing that helped was that when I got to Tennessee, I stayed up and didn’t try to “sleep off” the red-eye which would have likely just confused my body more.

I purchased the track barrow I’d been pondering. Linda picked me up from the airport and when we got back to her house I went straight to work unpacking the crate and putting it together.

Before I got too deep into it I walked down to the farm office nearby and picked up Stewart’s truck, then drove out to my land picking up some gas for the new machine on the way. I wanted to see if I had any lumber that might fit the bill for making ramps, but I pretty much knew I didn’t. It was really just an excuse to check in on the land.

It’s exciting to walk the main trail after I haven’t been there in a while. Not much had changed beyond everything. Absent summer foliage, I could see the shape of the land through the vertical line of timbers. Shades of brown was the theme instead of green. There was a small tree down across the trail near the south entrance. It was at head-height caught up in some limbs and would be easy to take out with a chainsaw.

At the north driveway entrance, the long limb barrier that I had placed on forked branches and hammered into the ground was down on one side. A fork had rotted out.

A thick pile of leaves covered the gravel drive and all the trails. The top leaves were dry but underneath recent rains made a wet matted layer. My footsteps had a lighter, higher pitch than the tumbling sound that can happen when walking through leaves that are dry and basket-deep.

The planks I’d cut from the oak last summer had all dried without warpage, but none were thick or long enough to be used for a ramp. My new machine weighs 660 pounds. The ramp kit I bought recommends two 10’4” 2x8s for the truck tailgate height of 32”. In the shed I had one twelve foot, 2×8 from the orange box store, but by itself it was useless and two six foot planks were two short.

By the time I walked the land and looked around the sun was getting low and I still needed to pick Steve up at the airport. I locked the shed and started out the 22 miles to the big box store. I at least wanted to have what I needed to load the machine the next day.

The next morning as Steve birded on Linda’s front porch I finished attaching the handles and sides to the track barrow. It comes partly disassembled to fit in a smaller crate.

Steve scored a Red-breasted woodpecker for his life list and I grabbed Linda’s binocs so I could add it to mine. When I finished putting together the barrow and ramp I lined everything up to load. Steve helped with the eyeballing. Of course, I’ll have to get used to doing this alone, but it was nice to have the extra set of eyes this first time. I’d had the not very practical thought of only loading the track barrow on ground where I could stake the ramp planks to keep them from moving but Steve had the idea of cross bracing the planks by screwing a piece of lumber between them.

First time loading the track barrow I ran out of gas half way up the ramp! I had only added a little because I wasn’t sure how much I would use on this trip.

By the time we got the track barrow out to the land there was only enough time to unload it and hide it beneath some tin roofing inside the falling cabin. Days tend to slip away fast in the winter. Hiding the machine was in all likelihood an unnecessary step on a private road that has numerous postings about its privacy including, until recently, one that mentions getting shot, but I was beginning to consider the machine my baby and asked Steve to help me take measurements of the bed so I could cut some plywood from the crate it came in to protect that beautiful powder coat from any scratches and dings.

I imagine the neighbor took down the posted threat of trespassers being shot out of consideration for our other neighbor’s relatives. The other neighbor, Dennis, was shot and killed by accident last April. I’m sure his relatives appreciate not having reminders about what will likely never be far from their minds.

Screws to hold the ramp together evolved to push pins which make for easy removal and loading in the truck.

When we got home I used the last light of day to cut the protective pieces for the track barrow while Linda and Steve talked in the kitchen. That night we celebrated and relaxed with drinks, food, and wonderful conversation.

The next day we set up camp at the proposed cabin site and then headed over to the falling cabin with the track barrow. We did three loads of rock and a load of seasoned, cut oak to take back to the campsite. I learned pretty quickly that a full load of heavy rock gives the machine a heft that can pretty much yank your arm off if you change direction too quickly. Back at the camp I also learned why people like chopping seasoned oak logs with an ax. It doesn’t take much to split. The pieces fly apart with a satisfying crack.

Load of big rocks. The machine is rated for moving 600 pounds but one YouTuber claims to regularly use it to move 2,000 pound loads.

When it got dark and we had the camp ready to make a fire we walked back to the truck and went into Blaine for a meal at the Mexican restaurant. We returned full-bellied, started a fire and played two games of chess reaching down to the ground between our camp chairs. When we turned in we didn’t feel the need to bank the fire as it was safe in the rock walls.

It took me three hours to go to sleep which is how long it took for my body heat to win out over the intransigent cold inside my sleeping bag. After that I slept pretty soundly according to Steve’s report of my snores although I felt like I was just below the surface of wakefulness. In the morning I stuffed my down jacket in my sleeping bag to warm it and watched and waited for the light to grow before I rose.

It was easy to build a fire back up from the coals. When Steve woke we went back into Blaine and ate a hearty Waffle House breakfast, came back, broke camp and then hiked up to the top of the knob and came back to camp on a longer path. Driving out with the track barrow and all the camping equipment we stopped at a pond to look at some small birds floating among Canada Goose. We steadied ourselves on a fence to get a good look with our binocs. Ring-necked ducks—another addition to both our life lists.

Denouement

It certainly wasn’t the highlight of my trip but yesterday, I found a had a stowaway accompany me back from Tennessee. Ticks don’t have necks, so I guess the best way to describe the one found on my back would be to say it was embedded up to its shoulders. (So much for the idea that ticks aren’t active in cold weather!)

It apparently was dead and didn’t wiggle its legs when I asked Jillian to touch it with a hot match hoping it would let go and back out. (No longer a recommended procedure.) While I’d like to believe that my body produces some substance that kills ticks who dive in head first, it probably has nothing to do with any superpowers of mine.

Complete removal was unsuccessful. The head is still in there.

An interesting psychological awareness has come from this. I’ve learned that I’m not freaked-the-fuck-out by a tick embedded in me. I only get that way when I find one crawling on me.

I have a prescription of Doxycycline which I got specifically for this contingency. I’ve taken two doses. Unfortunately it has a “Discard 6/2/24” date on it. An email with pictures has been sent to my doctor.

I think this was coming into Chicago which was 12°F

January 19, 2025

I have a new routine to write when I’m fresh in the morning and look at news when I’m tired at night. I get free library subscriptions to The NYTimes, The Washington Post and am currently paying one dollar for a year-long trial subscription to the SF Chronicle which has automatic renewal at a much higher rate. I bet they hope I forget about that but I won’t. That’s what calendars are for. I probably should support my fellow writers and just pay, but there’s a reason they are free—or close to it—and who am I to try to figure it out?

Together with these three newspapers there is more news than I can look at. I’d be better informed if I substituted one of these papers for a more radical doomsday-type publication and added in a more conservative Tennessee newspaper but my gut is probably going to churn no matter what news I take in.

The Post and The NYT usually have similar headlines. The writing is good in both. The NYT usually sends me three or four breaking news emails every day in addition to The Morning and I have to ask myself how much news can break?

The SF Chronicle seems to have lots of strange gaps in their reporting that often makes me ask “okay, what happened?” but it’s local(ish) news for me even in Concord and I should probably pay attention to that.

I’ve also decided that with all the crazy people in Trump’s junk drawer (Jillian told me people are calling it that instead of a cabinet), it’s probably best not to get worked up every time Broken Stapler #1 says they are going to invade Greenland or Dried Up White-Out says we need to stop requiring vaccines for children in public school. I just can’t be a yo-yo all the time on their rubber band.

This is my 2025 pick for book of the year (although it came out in 2022). The story is so compelling. It’s heartbreaking at times but there are lots of wait-for-it moments when the soul sings.

My favorite MLK jr. book that I’ve been reading to students for years. Warning: You will likely cry with joy at the end. Fantastic illustrations.

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I’m feeling better about the prospect of getting a cabin made. It’s been close to five years since I’ve been exploring this land and it feels, for the first time, like I’m finally getting a good map of it in my head.

For one thing, I found a good place where I can stage logs and then take them out to the road for cutting with a portable mill. I’ve passed by this spot a thousand times walking the trail the 170 yards from the proposed cabin site to the shed where I store tools. It’s flat, close to the road and largely free of any big trees. I think I never considered it before because it’s directly across from my nearest neighbor’s house and in the summer it’s overgrown with vines that offer a visual barrier that I like.

The neighbor’s chickens were scratchin’ around next to the road and stepped into the woods when I approached them.

Now, as I’ve gotten to know my neighbors the idea of having complete privacy from the road doesn’t feel as important.There are plenty of spots on this 25 acre lot where I can get that.

Most distant and remote is a little valley on the other side of the central hill and between the next hill which becomes the neighbor’s property after it tops out. This little valley—more of a holler—is almost completely absent of woods. If there were flying fairies, quidditch tournaments or witchy broomstick games this is where they would be played. It would be nice to have a cabin here, but there is no flat spot. Where the hill ends, the next one starts. The valley is a V not a U. A cabin could be built on the hillside with supports like you see in the Bay Area’s Oakland hills but my joy in this place is about the absence of human intrusion not dreaming of what it could be.

A pretty winter weed that I’m too lazy to try to identify right now. It’s probably something obvious.

A while back I named the machete as the most valuable tool in my kit. That remains true even after making trails through the ever-encroaching wilderness. When I go back in six months there will be vines and saplings trying to take over again.

With this in mind I’m offering up another tool that tops the list and was most useful on this last trip. I threw a pair of $15, fleece-line gloves in my luggage at the last minute. I figured they might come in handy if it gets very cold, but that wasn’t why they ended up being so valuable.

It was the extra thickness that offered protection pulling up Multi-floral Rose. I got plenty of practice on that patch of land that I’ve decided is the perfect staging spot for bringing out all the logs to be milled. This species of rose is very aggressive and next to Poison Ivy the most prevalent vine on the land. It grows in clumps that extend out in an exploding firework shape. It grabs hold of your clothes like blackberry bramble and a thicket of it is not something you want to take on in the summer unless Aguirre, the Wrath of God and other Werner Herzog movies inspire you to go into nature and do the most difficult thing you can think of.

Winter is definitely the time to clear Multi-floral Rose. The leaves are gone and you can see where every shoot is heading. Though it still has live green vines, most are brown and dead and if you are lucky, as I was, the soil is soft with recent rains. Some of the clumps I could pull out on my first effort, gathering most of the vines in my hands and leaning back. Any that gave trouble, I’d dig around the edge with my shovel and lean back on the handle to break roots and get some uplift on the ball. This preparation was usually enough. The next time I leaned away with a handful of thorny vines imbedded in my gloves the remaining roots would start popping like a kettle of corn and soon I’d be holding the whole explosion of plant in the air, triumphantly carrying it to a neighboring pile.

The log-staging area I mostly cleared of Multi-floral Rose

The gloves also made it easy to pull up all the Loblolly and Winged Elm saplings on the PCS. It was rare that I had to use the machete on a sapling in this area. The ground is covered with pine needles and moss of varying shades of green and grey. Beneath this is about an inch or two of topsoil followed by white shale and clay that becomes increasingly hard to dig into about six inches down. During wet weather it is a miniature flood plain with much of the water washing off the knob behind it. The moss and top soil make it spongy.

Shale and clay earth just beneath the PCS surface

I used the harvested moss to line the rock stairs I put in last summer. I’ll see if it lasts but I don’t know why it wouldn’t. The stuff is pretty hardy and there was some in the stair area before I brought all this extra in.

The poor quality of soil on the PCS is probably why there are only a few species of trees there — Loblolly, Cedar and Winged Elm. Oaks which start out with a single, deep tap root definitely don’t like it. I imagine the shale is too difficult to penetrate. Those other species have roots that spread wide and shallow—at least in the beginning. I’ve no idea what the root system looks like for some of the older, surrounding pines that top out well over a hundred feet. I imagine when a tree grows that big it must start to have powerful roots that can make their way into deeper territory.

Ideally, I would have a well here on the PCS pumping water directly into the house, but I don’t know how much water makes it through the clay. Neighbors, Chuck and Rhonda, across the road, are roughly at the same elevation and hidden behind a small knob. They told me they hit water at 150 feet but drilled to 200 and take water from that level.

They came by on the day I was cutting up some fallen trees near the road. They arrived in their new, gleaming diesel pick-up and put it rumbling into park. Michigan natives, they had a retirement home built here five years ago and are still adjusting to it. Chuck misses the snow but they have a daughter who lives nearby in Knoxville with her fiancé. Ever-friendly, Chuck invited me up to their place to say hi. I told him I may take them up on that. I’ve been a few times before. Rhonda said, “I’ll give you a piece of pie!”

The next day I called them when I started to get hungry and asked if it was okay if I took my sandwich up and ate it while I visited.

“We have food,” Chuck exclaimed in his cheerful voice that made it sound like the introduction to a Broadway song.

“Oh, thanks, but I made this sandwich and I better eat it,” I said.

“Well, you like coffee,” Chuck asked?

“Sure”

“Well, we can give you some of that.”

We talked more about their water while I was there. Chuck gave me a glass to taste and it was exactly what I would want in drinking water—pretty much tasteless.

Their aging dogs Fatty Mattie, a standard poodle mix and Waggy Maggie, a black lab are slightly mis-nicknamed since Maggie is a bit plumper than Mattie and Mattie is a bit more waggy than Maggie. At any case it was nice to get my hands on some dogs, missing Sasha so much in the short time I was in Tennessee. The feel of a short shorn standard poodle’s curls is a textural delight.