more snow in prospect

Yesterday it seemed like marshmellow fluff. Today, globs of it caught in tree limbs, it seemed a lot like shaving lather, thick and in many places throughout the park unmarred. I don't think I'd have gotten far if it weren't for a network of ski trails that were tamped down solidly. I wanted to go see the waterfalls because of the smerfy feeling the snow's been giving me, what with every circular object wearing a gnome's hat. It wasn't so smerfy there at the falls, more straight up 18th Century gloom.

There was a moment I wish I'd captured, it was when the dark wood beyond the lake was shot through with the white marks made by a large flock of seagulls, flurrying their graceful white shapes, rephrasing the falling snow in avian form. Once on the frosty lake they were no longer white, not when set off by the white of the lake's snow-covered thin ice.

regrowth

creature from the lake

We fished this out of Prospect Lake yesterday, at a spot the fisherman angling nearby called "The Alley." He says he and his brother are working on a map of the lake with the areas labeled according to their idiom, something I'd love to see.

The creature clings to the stems of duckweed, pulling them down. It is tubular, worm-like, still, lined with a fine visible strand of tissue resembling a slinky, a kinky slinky. I wonder if it's some kind of hydra. Whatever it is, it seems to be in good condition, no doubt thriving in the lake filled with the water sluicing in from the New York City water system, which serves up what some know as "The Champagne of the Adirondacks." It is amazing water, having gotten used to it, I can't drink DC water anymore.

Please double click the image to see it in more detail.

still icy

...at least on the Southwest side. The water was so low I could walk out about 6 yards on the gravely lake bottom towards the geese which couldn't have cared less. There was no buillion and no sunken ship on the lake bed, no seven Chinese brothers, not even a turtle in hibernation, just some broken bottles and chunks of cement and brick. The song of the of Red-Winged Blackbird cheered me up, it sounded like a splashy guiro spazzing it up for fun and profit.

winter glazed

I don't think that's ice covering these buds growing on a tree in a grove near the lake. I was shooting blind when taking this picture because the limb was out of my reach, which explains why she lists. In this case.
The buds swelling under syrup suggest that the tree's just barely pulling off dormancy.

after skating

To amuse myself at the Wollman Rink on Saturday–I was finding skating a little painful–I asked a man who worked there if anyone had ever fallen through. He had no idea I was just kidding and answered very earnestly that the rink was only 2 inches deep, not a swimming pool in fact. Just in case you were wondering...

No one had the notion to try to skate on the lake although I suspect most who gazed at it thought about it. I saw what looked like a key chain on the ice and imagined someone had thrown someone's car keys out there. Keys on ice, what a prank.

thin ice

Hey, when did that happen? The ice near the edge was about 3/4 of an inch thick, and the lake had the look of bearing stretch marks thanks to yesterday's brief snowfall. Whether you find those signs of growth and fertility unsightly or fortuitous or both I have no idea. No ducks in sight near the Wallman rink, just Sparrows, Canada Geese and some Herring Gulls flying backlit by the high sun and flanked by a smudge of half moon.

Duck Duck Goose

Shells and Buns

My father-in-law gave me a field guide to sea shells a few years ago, I think he picked it up at a yard sale. All I usually find are scallops, clams and moon shells, so I never expected to use it, but when I leafed through I was struck by the beautiful vocabulary of the uni and bivalves. Better words than those I saw on the highway signs driving back from Rhode Island last night, most especially better than the word Mianus. Some shells go by alaba, cingula, bittium, ovatella, sayella, auger, lora, phose, pyram, colus, chank, drupe, volute, spindle, triton, alvinia, merelina. turrid, turbonille, triphora. Is that enough? I can keep going...I have a list right here.

Those aren't shells in the picture above, that there's my mom's homemade cinnamon buns. Aren't my mom's buns adorable? They were fairly amazing, she's really got the baking bug this season. I'll miss all those treats, so spoiled am I, and thanks to her husband I barely washed a dish for the last 5 days.

Here's a cinnamon sunset I shot when we fed the ducks at Prospect Lake some cracked corn today. I fed half-beak from my right hand and nearly jumped out of my skin because the squish of goose tongue mixed with the hungry jabs of the bottom beak was so intense. You've got to have a tall pile of corn in your palm to soften the effect or don't even try it. He's a very hungry goose.

friday winter mix

During today's storm, the ducks and geese on Prospect Lake were very still, seeming to stare the storm down, what choice did they have? Meanwhile, the swans took advantage of their lengthy necks. The family of three bobbed there in the channel between an island and the Eastern shore of the lake, each one curled into itself. What a lovely way of finding refuge. The Heron that winged by–what was it doing flying under those conditions?–looked more blue than grey in all that grey. Now that's a shot I wish I had caught. That wingspan...

Hurricaner

On Saturday I snuck down to Prospect Lake to see what the storm had done with it and found it hadn't been too rampaged. On the way I noticed small piles of browned and fibrous London Plane leaves the weather had gleaned from the trees, and found a jewelry box which I snagged for my little daughter, who I worry is getting too few chances to appreciate that kind of femininity around our house. Twist the key, and it tones away while the classic ballerina in tutu whirls slowly in front of a little mirror. Hard for me to believe that she couldn't see it as a cliche, and has never heard comb and peg Mozart before.

The lake was a sparkling emerald bleeding to sapphire when I got there, where 2 puppies on the shore nervously yapped at the geese and ducks that clearly outnumbered them. The goose I call half-beak lumbered around and I tried to get a good shot of its bizarre defect that I've come to love. The front half of its top beak has broken off revealing half of his rough pink goose tongue, and making it hard for him to eat I think. It prefers to be fed from a cupped hand full of cracked corn. When I've fed the goose, I used my left hand.

I met a man named Eugene down there, a man obsessed with the Park I think, a man who'd spent Saturday afternoon hunkered down in a shelter by the lake shooting pictures throughout Hurricane Hanna's torrent. I know he's not the only one to have done that, or at least to have wanted to. I can imagine that there are many who long to be outside when heaven plays water drums on the earth, granting significant relief to those suffering from all the dry and spiritually fruitless business of contemporary life.

Speaking of contemporary customs, I asked him if he had a flickr page, but no, he didn't, so I amused myself with the foolishness of tkaing pictures of his pictures as they appeared on his Canon's display. Among the images he showed me was one of ducks flying and he called it a "fly pass." I don't know if that's a Jamaican idiom, a birder's idiom, or a Jamaican birder's idiom, but I like it. He showed me a bird he called a kingfisher, swans with beaks plunged in plummage, water drops falling against a field of darkness, the lake shrouded by rain. Before I left he submitted to my whim of taking his picture, which I did while he gazed at the lake he loves. Unfortunately, a sunbeam made a gash through his cheek.

On the way home I found another jewelry box (?), although when I first laid eyes on the strange object I wasn't sure what it could be. It looked part frame, part small squarish casket, bearing a print of roses under glass. I found out it could open, and inside the bottom section was divided into three partitions, one holding a brown swag of velvet not cut to fit in the least, while the lid was lined with a mirror bearing a decal that read "Doyle Sailmakers." I've grown attached to it because of its strangeness and I don't think it will be too hard to hang it on the wall. With some help.

Lake thick with Fowl

When the little one and I dropped by last week to kill some time feeding the ducks, a birder told us there were at least ten kinds of birds on the lake, including duffle-heads, shovelers, koots, ruddy ducks, mallards, swans, geese, farm ducks, among others, some of them regulars, others recent arrivals from the North. Many bills to feed.

And people like to feed them. I think it was very therapeutic for us and it seemed to be for others. By the time we left we were covered from with dust from the cracked corn we bought at Key Food, which wasn't cheap but we were trying to stick to the recommended diet. While we were there, someone came by and fed them a large bag of some kind of generic fruit loops, so now I'm wondering if our efforts are worth much anyway. And I envied the ducks, the fruit loops looked good.

Don't you think male mallards look dapper because of those fabulous green heads and the little ascots around their necks? It's a good look for an art opening. I just read that Salvador Dali dressed as a chicken for his.

Coots

Koots have really groovy feet. Please double click image for a better view.

Ugly Duckling

Aw. This too shall pass...