Tag: Skiing

OG Bobcatting

Exciting update from one of Rosslyn’s wildlife cameras when I awoke this morning. Not sure why, but I always get especially enthused when we document a Bobcat. The sequence of three images captured at 2:29am appears to be the same bobcat we photographed a few months ago. Still healthy. Strong. Well fed.

Bobcat, May 10, 2023 (Photo: Rosslyn Wildlife Camera)

I’m struck by the fact that we capture bobcat photos and witness bobcat tracks, but I’ve never actually come across a bobcat at Rosslyn. Elsewhere, yes. But it would seem that our Lynx rufus representatives are especially stealthy, keen to avoid human encounters. Susan prefers it that way. But these photos do incite a persistent yen to meet — safely, respectfully — one of these regal neighbors some day.

Bobcat, May 10, 2023 (Photo: Rosslyn Wildlife Camera)

Thank you, John Davis (@wildwaystrekker) and Tony Foster (@anthonyfoster335), for siting and creating this trail last winter. Susan and I thoroughly enjoyed our cross-country skiing outings on thus new loop back in February and March. And it’s abundantly clear that our wild neighbors are fans as well!

Bobcat, May 10, 2023 (Photo: Rosslyn Wildlife Camera)

In this third photograph a small sapling appears to have sprouted along the downhill side of the trail. Do you see it camouflaging the front legs of the bobcat? It took me a moment to determine that’s what I was seeing. The disparity between the stout forward striding front leg and the strong but slender rear extended front leg — likely an incongruity exaggerated by the angle more than actual physiological discrepancy — initially drew my attention. But the darker mottling, especially on the forward leg, perplexed me. An injury? Atypical fur patterning? A skull and crossbones stocking?!?!

No. A sapling. And a handsome, healthy bobcat.

May 10, 2023
Perspective vs. Nostalgia

Barns, March 2023 (Photo: Geo Davis)

I am not quite sure where I belong but I have always been engaged with where I am. I like to think this gives me both a resistance to nostalgia and a breadth of perspective but I could be wrong. — Edward Relph (Source: Placeness.com)

Much thinking these end-of-February, beginning-of-March days on seasonality and sense of belonging, on perspective — especially evolving perspectives — and nostalgia, sentimentality, wistful-if-illusory longing.

This icehouse rehab, moving closer and closer to the vision that has beckoned for years, and the snowfall after snowfall after snowfall, such welcome gifts after a fairly light winter. These absorbing present tense plots are playing out against almost eighteen years of Rosslyn custodianship.

Twin Tracks & Tranquility, March 2023 (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

Cross-country outings transporting me deep into memories that Susan and I made during our first winters together more than two decades ago. And deeper still, recollections of skiing as a child in the mid 1970s, with my younger brother and sister, with my mother.

I’m learning something about perspective and nostalgia. Something still coalescing.

March 5, 2023
Saturday Snow Day

Susan Skiing Through Saturday Snow Day (Photo: Geo Davis)

No progress on the icehouse project today. None. By design. And by the benevolence of mother nature. Today we celebrated a Saturday snow day!

Carley and Geo on Saturday Snow Day (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

Although Saturdays and Sundays are usually rest days for most people, our amazing team has worked through weekends and days-off for months in order to ensure forward motion seven days a week (with very few exceptions and holidays and extreme weather days) ever since this project got off the ground last fall. But today was a planned pause. To reboot. And to accommodate a major March blizzard.

Carley at Library Brook on Snow Day (Photo: Geo Davis)

So I share with you a few snapshots from a day that was snowing when we awoke and that’s still snowing as we head off to dinner.

Carley on Saturday Snow Day (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

These first photos were taken during our late morning cross-country ski outing through Rosslyn’s back fields and forest. Overcast, snowy wonderland. These last two photos were taken earlier, easing into the snowy morning with Carley, Mud/WTR in hand, observing our avian neighbors breakfasting.

Cardinals on Snow Day (Photo: Geo Davis)

Although primarily intended for songbirds, Rosslyn’s bird feeders also welcome enthusiastic opportunists like the mallards.

Mallards on Snow Day (Photo: Geo Davis)

March 4, 2023
Cross-Country Skiing

What is the cross-country skiing equivalent of schussing down a powdery piste? If it exists — some etymologically Nordic, onomatopoeicly swooshy reference for scissoring smoothly across a snowy meadow or through a snowy forrest — I could sneak it into today’s outing. But I’d be waxing poetic. Projecting fantasy onto a considerably stickier cross-country skiing experience.

Cross-Country Skiing Library Brook Trail (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

Don’t get me wrong. Venturing out into Rosslyn’s backland with Susan this afternoon for some slippery sliding and gliding was the perfect reentry. Especially on a Monday. Decadent!

Cross-Country Skiing Beaver Meadow (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

But the new fallen snow was far from powdery. Perfect snowball weather. But the only snowballs we’re those clinging to Carley’s undercarriage as she raced across fields investigating animal tracks. The temperate was week above freezing which made for a highly agreeable jaunt, but the snow adhered to the bottoms of our skis, clumping, slowing out progress.

Carley Criss-Crossing Ski Tracks (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

Sticky snow. Overcast skies. And yet it was perfect. My bride, my dog, and time taken to tour Rosslyn’s wilder side while cross-country skiing. Perfection!

Cross-Country Skiing (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

February 27, 2023
Another Nival Homecoming
```
Back for another
nival homecoming.
Fluttering flurries
obscuring sunset,
muting day to night, 
ground mounding, rounding
with fresh fallen snow.
The sound of no sound,
snowflakes silencing,
softening contours,
and settling scores.
Slumber’s siren song
swaddled in silver,
swirling and whirling,
mesmerizing me,
mesmerizing us
until tomorrow. 
```
Another Nival Homecoming (Photo: Geo Davis)

Nival?!?!

There aren’t too many opportunities to nudge “nival” into conversation even in this northern wonderland. But as a language romantic often employing Spanish for my day-to-day communication, the word “nieve” kept burbling to the surface. In English, naval is about as close as we get, so, it was simply irresistible. Or perhaps the snowy sirens are to blame.

That said, it’s worth noting that naval is more metaphorically than literally appropriate in this context. Despite the fact that midwinter — and, yes, late February is still midwinter along the Adirondack Coast — may suggest perpetual snow and ice, spring is only a month (or two) away. Snow and ice will yield, grass will green, snowdrops and hyacinth and daffodils and jonquils (Narcissus jonquilla) will once again awaken springtime from her beauty sleep…

More. Snow. Ahead… (Source: Apple Weather)

And better yet, the snow continues to fall. Certainly cross-country skiing will be woven into tomorrow’s itinerary between icehouse rehab meetings and hands-on problem solving, carpentry, etc. Perhaps even some sunshine to enjoy the swoosh and glide of a mud-day skiing adventure.

Another Nival Homecoming (Photo: Geo Davis)
February 26, 2023
Almost Logical

What if? Wondering what life would be like living full-time in the Champlain Valley…

Within minutes we were tripping over each other, drunk with excitement, imagining one whimsical “What if…” scenario after another. No filter, no caution. Our reveries flitted from one idyllic snapshot to another.

“What if I finally sat down and finished my novel?” After dawdling self indulgently for a dozen years – writing, rewriting, discarding, rewriting, shuffling, reinventing – my novel had evolved from failed poetry collection to short story collection to novel to a tangle of interconnecting narratives that loosely paralleled my life since graduating from college. Too much evolution. Too little focus. But what if I made time to sit down and knock it out? Reboot. Start over. Find the story. Write it down. Move on.

“What if you weren’t sitting in front of your computer all day? Every day?” Susan asked, returning to a common theme. “What if you went outside and played with Tasha? Took her swimming or hiking or skiing every day?”

“What if all three of us went swimming or hiking or skiing every day? What if Tasha and I went jogging along Lakeshore Road instead of the East River?”

We could waterski and windsurf for half the year instead of just two or three months, starting in May with drysuits and finishing in the end of October. We could sail the Hobie Cat more instead of letting it collect spider webs on the Rock Harbor beach. I could fly fish the Boquet and Ausable Rivers in the afternoon while Tasha snoozed on the bank. We could join Essex Farm, the local CSA, supporting a local startup while eating healthy, locally grown and raised food. I could grow a vegetable garden, an herb garden, an orchard. Susan could work for an architecture firm in Burlington and volunteer at the animal shelter. We could buy season passes to Whiteface and downhill ski several days a week. We could cross country ski and snowshoe and bike and rollerblade and kayak and canoe and hike, and maybe I would start rock climbing again. And how much more smoothly the Lapine House renovation would be if we were on-site every day answering questions, catching mistakes before it was too late.

“I could interview candidates for Hamilton!” Susan said. She had recently become an alumni trustee for her alma mater, and her already high enthusiasm had skyrocketed. She had become a walking-talking billboard for the college. “You know how much more valuable it would be to interview candidates up here? There are tons of alumni interviewers in Manhattan, but in Westport? In Essex? In Elizabethtown?”

Suspended in lukewarm bathwater, our collective brainstorm leap frogging forward, it all started to make a strange sort of sense, to seem almost logical.

June 10, 2011
We could live at Rosslyn

We could live at Rosslyn

“We could live at Rosslyn,” I said.

“What?” Susan sounded startled. “You mean buy Rosslyn and live there?”

“Why not? If we lived there, if it were going to be our home instead of just an investment, maybe we could justify buying it.”

We had joked about how much time and money it would take to make Rosslyn habitable, categorically dismissing it as an investment. And yet it clearly had captured our hearts. If it were our home and not a short term investment, then maybe the criteria were different. Maybe the potential was different. Maybe the risk was different.

“Will you be relocating here full-time?” a realtor had asked a month or two ago while showing us a house.

“Uh, maybe, yes, we’d like to,” Susan had lied, glancing at me awkwardly. Some locals disliked out-of-towners buying, renovating and reselling, so we kept quiet about our plans to do so. Our hearts sank.

“Are you serious? Would you really want to live at Rosslyn?” Susan persisted.

I was unclear whether she was horrified or excited. I had made the suggestion spontaneously, without forethought, and now I felt embarrassed. I knew the idea was absurd. We both knew it made no sense at all. And yet we had returned to see the house again that morning. A second visit to a house we had already decided not to buy. Why? It exerted an inexplicable pull for both of us. It had awakened our imaginations, our fantasies, our hopes.

“No. And yes,” I said, hedging. “No, I’m not really serious. I just suggested it off the cuff. It’s probably the stupidest idea ever, or at least the least serious idea ever. But yes, there is a side of me that would love to live at Rosslyn. I’ve felt it each time we’ve visited the house. I’m not sure I can explain it…”

“You don’t need to,” Susan said. She was beaming. “I agree.” She rose out of the bath and wrapped a towel around her broad shoulders. “What a dream it would be, to live in that grand old home!”

“Really?” A wave of relief and excitement rushed over me. What a dream indeed. I stood and wrapped my arms around Susan as we drowned each other out, pent up monologues bursting out. We sounded manic as we catalogued our dreams. Waterskiing from Rosslyn’s pier still visible in photographs from the mid-1980’s. Awakening in the yellow bedroom brimming with sunlight. Entertaining our families in the evening amidst mingling aromas of arborvitae and grilling hamburgers. Eating cheese fondue next to a crackling fireplace with friends after a day of downhill skiing. Watching the Fourth of July parade from the front steps with our nephews, still fascinated with fire engines, antique tractors and costumed clowns. Recalibrating our urban rhythm to the comings and goings of the Essex-Charlotte ferry. A pair of effervescent hummingbirds flitting from blossom to blossom in the flowerbeds that we would coax back to life. Puttering around in the carriage barn on Sunday afternoons. Tossing bocce balls in the side yard while nursing gin and tonics and watching Vermont’s Green Mountains slide into pastels, then monochromes, then memories…

June 15, 2011