Maybe I can't write poetry, but I know it when I see it

For the first time since the day after we arrived, I woke up to the sounds of rain. I was expecting that- it had been predicted. Nonetheless, the sky was very pretty so I went out and took a couple of pictures.

Then the rain stopped, everything was still, the lake was smooth as glass, the clouds in the distance were sliding by and changing the light moment to moment, and I realized (1) I had to take a time lapse photo and (2) I had to go out and be in it. So fully clothed (no shoes), I ran outside and got on the paddleboard and headed for the middle of the lake.

I can't remember ever being on the lake by myself before. I didn't even see anyone on the shore. Of course, it had stopped raining just moments ago after steadily going for 3 or 4 hours, but it was still striking. I paddled out to someplace I could see the entire lake, then stopped to watch the clouds and the water. It was deeply moving, and for whatever reason I decided to lie down on the board, which I did for 10 minutes or so, sharing the lake with 6 loons and nobody else. It was indescribably beautiful, watching the clouds drift by the mountains beyond the southern end of the lake.



I knew in the back of my mind that I was going to have to take my daughter to the airport this morning, I had no idea what time it was and how long I'd been out there. So reluctantly and slowly I began to paddle back, now viewing what was going on at the northern end of the lake.

On that end of the lake there are a couple of nearby hills- big hills, but not big enough to be mountains. I could see some scattered banks of fog hanging low along the hillside. You know the phrase “the fog lifted?” Well I spent the next 10 minutes, standing on top of a lake surface, and watched an updraft take a piece of the fog bank and stretch it skyward like it was a piece of taffy, until it became so thin and translucent that it simply disappeared. Then I watched, all at once, the remainder of the fog bank get pushed or pulled or lifted up the hillside like a series of rivers flowing up the hill and cascading over the top like waterfalls.

I was completely slack-jawed the entire time. It was literally jaw-droppingly stunning in every meaning of the word. It rendered me almost speechless, so I decided I'd better get it written down. I've never seen anything like that and it moved me to my soul. It was totally completely spontaneous, so it was the best kind of moment- one you can experience on its own terms without any expectations or judgements to apply or evaluate it. It felt like real magic.

New house, same stuff

Life in the new house is similar to life in the previous house. Usually my day has focus on riding my bike somewhere. The first day here I rode to Saranac Lake, which is 10 miles from here, and back. It's not a wonderful ride but it has some very pleasant and some reasonably challenging moments.

Like every other ride around here, you start off going downhill and so therefore have to climb to get back. On that ride, there's about a one and half mile climb back into town.  It's not super steep, but that's still a long way to be pedaling uphill. And of course it's right at the end after you've already done 17 miles. But they're all like that.

Yesterday I went north toward the Whiteface ski area. I took a roundabout route because it took me through my favorite 4 miles of road that I've ever ridden. There's a back road that connects routes 86 and 73, the two state highways that intersect at Lake Placid.  It follows a small branch of the Ausable River and cuts through farmland and woods, keeping the river in view for most of the way. It's relatively flat, the pavement is good, there are very few cars and the air smells amazing. I usually enter it on Route 73 near the ski jump, used continuously since it was build to for the 1980 Winter Olympics.

The Lake Placid Olympics, best known for being the site of the Miracle on Ice US hockey team story, was what they call the last small Olympics. They built a new skating rink (the rink from the 1932 Olympics is still in use as well), ski jumps and (I think) a new bobsled/luge track. And that was about it. All of those things continue to be used for training and for high level competitions. The downhill ski races were at an existing area on existing trails.

There was none of this building up a whole village from scratch thing going on. Completely different from now, where it's a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that ends up mostly being discarded when the games are over and saddling the host with a pile of debt. All the Olympics did here was improve the town as a resort attraction and destination for athletes.

Anyway, once on the main road, you are treated to glorious scenery, along a somewhat larger branch of the same river. See what I mean?

Whiteface is the big mountain in the background. The riding is mostly downhill to the ski area, which seemed counterintuitive until I realized that yes, you start at the bottom of the hill. Once I turned around, it was a long, beautiful uphill slog. I fill my lungs with the good air and hope my legs don't give out. Tomorrow I intend to do a 45 mile ride.

The rest of the day was spent in and around the lake. We walked to town, paddled on both the SUP and a kayak, and I walked my lap around the lake. There's a famous book about meditation called "Wherever You Go, There You Are." This place is all meditation all the time for me; I feel completely here. It's been a long time since I've felt this relaxed and at ease. Can't beat it.

Neither here nor there

Saturday was limbo day. Not the good kind of limbo where the fun music plays and you bend yourself under bars; the kind where you are between places and have nowhere to go.

Lake Placid weekly leases are clear and consistent. You check in at 4:00 on Saturday and out at 10:00 the following Saturday. Houses must be cleaned, things rearranged. We knew this was coming, but we'd never experienced it before. So what do you do with 6 hours in Lake Placid without a place to be? As much as we love the place, there are a limited number of things to do here and an even more limited number of places to go within easy driving distance.

So what do we do? Well, we take our time getting out of the first house. We probably could have stayed longer. By the time we left at 10:45 the cleaners still hadn't shown up, and we probably could have hung out on the dock without them even noticing we were there. But leave we did.

First we went to town to get some coffee. While there, we met a couple who had showed up in Lake Placid for a wedding and hadn't realized that it was black tie, and could we tell them where they could possibly find dress shirt and a bow tie and cummerbund. I've never even seen anyone is sports coat here, but we suggested a couple of places they might try and we saw later that we steered them right.

From there we went over to the nicest hotel in town to see if we could get a massage in their spa. They had something available a little later, so we went to the one decent sized town near here and walked around (and saw somewhere that sold bow ties and cummerbunds), checked out the farmer's market, had a surprisingly good slice of pizza and then headed back for our massages.

I work my legs really hard here. I've ridden 10-25 miles on my bike every day except one, a total of about 150 miles. I also walk the 3 miles or so around the lake every day. So not surprisingly I had some soreness, which I had the massage therapist attack, which she did with vigor (a lot more elbow and forearm than hands). The pain involved in a deep tissue massage is intense and difficult to describe, but you put up with it the best you can because you trust in the end it will make you feel better. In this case, it really did and I haven't returned to that level of soreness since, in spite of my best efforts to induce it.

Finally, we went up to see John Brown's farm. John Brown, you may recall, was the crazed abolitionist who let a raid on a US army depot in Harper's Ferry, MD, which set off a chain of events leading to the Civil War. For whatever reason, he actually lived here. He had a farm in a beautiful spot where he and his very fertile wives (one at a time) had 20(!) children. Yes, the second wife had 13 children. Pretty hard to imagine. Three of his sons died with him in the Harper's Ferry raid and the 4 of them are buried on the farm. As we were looking at the gravesite, I got an email saying the new house was ready, so off we went to unpack once more.

Laketime

Lakes are many things. They're very wet, of course, which is sort of the point. They're quiet things by themselves, but invite people (and birds at times) to make a lot of noise. They're smooth and reflective by nature, but that is easily upset, even with a small breeze or someone paddling. Unlike the ocean or even a river, they're contained, which adds an element of peace, especially when juxtaposed with mountains.

Mirror Lake, along whose shores we're staying, is absolutely perfect for paddling. It's about a mile long and a quarter mile wide. No motor boats allowed. Our house is kind of in the middle the long way, which give one lots of options for routes to take.

The first choice is, do you want to be in the water or not? For in the water you can either swim or go on a paddleboard with a rambunctious child who will push you in at some point. For on the water the three preferred choices are the aforementioned stand-up paddleboards (aka SUP- you stand up, not the paddleboard), kayaks, and paddleboats. There are a few canoes and waterbikes as well.

Of all these options, the paddleboat is definitely the easiest and least satisfying. It's very nice if you're going to a short distance, but good luck if you find yourself in the middle of the lake with the wind in your face. I'm not sure if it's by design, but the fact of paddleboats is that after a certain point, if you pedal harder, the teeny paddles move too fast to catch any water and so the thing just stalls. I was in a kayak yesterday afternoon watching these three tween-looking kids try for what seemed like a half hour just to turn around and head back to their hotel. They weren't still out there at 8 this morning so I guess they eventually made it back.

Swimming is set up for the Ironman Triathalon that happened a couple of weeks ago and an Ironman 70.3 (?) that's going to be here in a month. The 70.3 thing exists I assume because whoever runs Ironman is trying to extend their brand to cover any legit triathalon. I'm not sure how good that strategy is, because there have always been lots of triathalons but Ironman stood for something. It was 140.6 miles, with a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and 26.2 mile full marathon at the end. I've ridden my bike on the Ironman route and it's hard but not impossible. The real Ironpeople do it twice though. Anyway, anything less would seem to require a less impressive sort of metal. Pewterman maybe.

Back to swimming, here they do one lap around a lake-long line of buoys. I assume they do 2 laps for the big race unless the do it in Lake Placid lake, which is bigger, instead. But every day I see people in wetsuit tops swimming around the buoys. It's pretty impressive really. I can swim about a half mile in open water before I have to rest, and I'm not a bad swimmer or anything.

Aside from all this there's yoga on the lake, and if you haven't done a downward dog on a paddleboard you haven't really yoga'ed I guess.

The lake is pretty quiet early in the morning and around dusk. Those are my favorite times. I typically kayak in the morning and SUP in the evening.

Not our house

We're in Lake Placid, renting a house on Mirror Lake (Lake Placid lake is adjacent to the town but not right in it). Part of the fun of this kind of stay is exploring someone else's house.

The first thing one needs to do is to mark your territory by using all the bathrooms, so make sure you conserve your bodily functions until you arrive. Once you do that you will no longer feel displaced and can begin to move in.

Coming to a new house you have to get a sense for the layout, figure out how best to enter and exit, scope out the best bedroom, find where the TV is and which remotes you use, and where might be a comfortable place to sit. Then you dump your things in the appropriate places and go to explore what is always the key element of a vacation home, the kitchen.

Part of the fun of this is to see what kinds of random stuff gets left around. Some of this is based on how often the owner is in the house and the rest depends on how much non-perishable stuff the previous tenants bought and left. Sometimes there will be almost nothing there except salt and pepper (often multiple salts and peppers). This particular house has a surprisingly well stocked pantry, with extra virgin olive oil and cans of soup and more. Other things that get left are sugar, flour (in a bag marked "December 2016" in this house), vegetable oil and, for some reason, tea.

There must be something about coming to a vacation house that makes people think they're going to drink tea. Sometimes they do drink a little bit of it but, but really when it comes down to it, people don't like tea, mostly because it doesn't taste very good. Even if you call tea "good" everyone knows that means "for tea that is." So they either don't like it enough to take the extra home with them or think it would be a nice thing to leave "for the house." It's unusual for there to not be multiple boxes of tea. I think there are 5 in the house we're at now, plus we brought 2 that we'd gotten for a gift. I think it would be nice to leave them for the house.

Then you can look in the refrigerator. The door will usually contain some condiments of varying ages. Mustard, ketchup, mayo, jelly. There might be some butter or salad dressing. Our current house has some whipped cream too. Most of this stuff ends up being usable, but check the expiration dates. At least at the places we go, the people are good about having a clean refrigerator for you.

Then there are the cabinets. What's in which cabinet? Plates? Glasses? Coffee mugs? Enough wine glasses? People bring even more wine than tea to these houses, but they rarely leave any. Silverware, sure. The biggest question involves whether or not there are any sharp knives. We used to stay in a place where we knew we needed to bring a sharp knife. And a vegetable peeler. All the houses here favor big, heavy plates and bowls. It makes emptying the dishwasher better exercise than at home, but I'm not sure if there's any other point to it. Lots of big heavy coffee mugs too.

We're in the Adirondacks, so most of the houses have that theme, in case you forget where you are. There are lots of images of moose and bears, neither or which I've ever seen here, and some loons, which I have. Some houses have chandeliers made of deer horns. I've never been quite sure what to think about that; I think deer shed their horns regularly but I'm not sure enough about that to be quite comfortable. Our current house has little of that.

There are also cute little signs about lakes, woods, mountains and such. This house has a nice little poem in the master bath about their "little cottage by the lake." This little cottage has 3 floors, 4 large bedrooms with full bathrooms, 2 screened porches with cushy bed-sized swings, an open-plan main floor with a 50 inch TV (all the bedrooms have TVs as well), multiple gas fireplaces, a teak ceiling and top of the line appliances. Just a little $2 million cottage.

But after a couple of days you almost feel like you live here. And that's the point I guess.

Not about selflessness

I was talking with a friend of mine about smartphones and social media, and the age-old (which I think now means more than a week- did that sound too much like a cranky old man? I don't care, I'm just curious) discussion about whether it is a GOOD thing or a BAD thing. I'm of the mind that we have no flipping (easier to type than f---ing but we all know what it really means) idea. I'm quite certain that it is both in some ways, but overall there's no way to really know. There are things that will have lasting value, both positive and negative, and some that are just fads of sorts.

Among the more obvious fads is the food picture. I've managed to enjoy a lot of food in the last 60 years without ever having a picture of it. Taste sticks in my memory much better than visual images, because I receive about 2 zillion visual images coming at me every day, and only a dozen or so tastes.

Anyway, we then started talking about the need for social validation via the picture. How many likes did I get? I know, that's a broad stereotype and not everyone cares, though I know some people do.

I let it slip that I have taken exactly one selfie in my life (I've been in selfies that other people took of us, but I'm not sure that should really be called a selfie). I was on a single chairlift on the side of a mountain on the island of Capri, off the coast of Italy. For whatever reason, I wanted a picture of myself there and there wasn't anyone else available to take the picture (I'm not camera-shy. I'm one of the lucky people whose photos tend to look pretty much just like me. I'm not sure if looking good in 2 dimensions is a good thing or not, but it's what I got. I have plenty of pictures of me, just not selfies). So I took one. That being said, I can't find it- only this

Not exactly a selfie. A footsie?

Self, but not selfie

My friend expressed surprise that I had not taken selfies. They pointed out how easy it was to take and that I'd been lots of places and why not have pictures of me in those places. The easy thing, well, lots of things are easy. I'll leave it at that.

As for why I don't want those pictures, I gave it a lot of thought after the conversation (which is crazy, we talked about a lot of much more interesting things but that stuck with me for some reason. Maybe because I spend so much time with teenagers). What I eventually concluded is that when I go to a place, I like to be there. We use an easy shorthand for that now- being present. I've not studied mindfulness but one of the things I frequently remind myself (call it a mantra if you wish) is "Be where you are; do what you're doing." Everyone reading this knows how hard this can be.

So when I'm experiencing something there is not me in it. Does that make sense? When I'm standing by the Grand Canyon and marveling at it, my experience is not me at the canyon. If it is, I'm missing the point. For better or worse, I'm always here, even if I'm in Target. My presence has nothing to do with the grandness of the canyon, except in my own experience of it.

If this sounds tangled, all I mean is, when you look at something, even your food that you're taking a picture of, are you in it? Is your face there? I don't think so. For other people, my face would be there, but not for me. I can't say that I don't care what other people think (well I could but I would be lying), but taking a selfie is not experiencing, it's collecting at best (I was here) and showing off at worst (I was here!).

I think that's what's always bothered me about people taking selfies at special places. If that's all they do, they're not experiencing where they are. So let this be a test of how mindful you actually are. It's easy to say you're being present, but if you catch yourself just trying to memorialize your experience, you're not actually having the experience itself. I hope that's a fad, because otherwise I would count it as a BAD thing.