We weren’t really, but it felt that way for a while, and it’s a great word to get a chance to say. My grandfather once said that word described a sheichet (kosher butcher) in Scarsdale. Or, in short, “lost”.
We took a walk around the block in Casco, which, as I’ve said, is a three mile walk, and decided to try to come back through the conservation land which we hoped abutted our property. Either it doesn’t really, or we need to find a trail through it that does come out to our boundary. In any event, we ran out of trail. We figured that if we kept heading downhill we’d eventually have to run into the road along the lake, so we weren’t too worried.
Going up the paved road from our house, we could look back down to the lake —
So far so good. Up on the main road, we noticed an absence of deer in this field —
We’ve seen deer right there on two occasions, but it’s been more like 9:30 or 10:00 at night.
The second house on the right has a big barn and a curious window. It looks to me as though there was an extra double-hung window lying around when they put an addition on the house some long time ago, and it was too good to waste. I can’t imagine that the sash weights work when you put a window like this on a slant, but it gets some light in. We’ve seen several, or at least a couple of, windows like this in older country houses in Maine.
Another beautiful feature of this building is its big granite front step:
At this point you’re just about where you can see the White Mountains over Pleasant Lake.
Back in November, or maybe it was still even October, there was one time when you could see snow on Mt. Washington (we thought) before we had been anywhere with snow on the ground.
A little farther along, back on the other side of the road, the conservation land abuts the edge of a field. We thought we’d check it out. The trail starts out as a very wide, clear trail, apparently once a road, with a stone wall on the left and a row of trees separating the trail from the field on the right. Looking back at the stone wall where another comes in at right angles to the trail —
… and I had to catch up with Arlene after I paused to take the picture —
Somewhere along the way the main trail curved off to the right, leaving the stone wall for good. I thought the stone wall was going more or less the way we wanted to go, and that the trail to the right wasn’t going to get us closer to our place, so we followed a smaller trail in the same direction we had been heading. With the sun out we weren’t afraid of going in circles, and it just wasn’t that big an area to worry about getting lost in. We came to a tree that had steps nailed to the trunk and a platform at treehouse height, probably built as a tree stand by hunters. This tree —
.. has been hacked up pretty well by pileated woodpeckers. Some of those holes are big enough to hold the end of a 2×4. We have trees like that on our property, too. We’ve only seen a pileated once up here, so far.
This gate was a little reassuring. At least other people had been in these woods before!
We kept going downhill in about the same direction. Eventually we could see something that looked like a building. It turned out to be a house along the road down to the lake, the little green house that had been for sale when we were looking but which we hadn’t really looked at. The lot adjacent to that, on the side we were coming from, is currently being built on. We breathed sighs of relief, squished through the muddy driveway out to the road, and walked on home.