Rolling On One

For our big anniversary party next month, we’ve arranged to rent a pontoon boat for the day. When we spoke with the marina owner last week, we admitted that I’ve never had any experience with a boat that size — I mean, although I took the handle of the outboard motor on Sheepshead Bay off Brooklyn when I went fishing with my grandpa and father when I was about 9, and ran a 5 hp outboard by myself when we were at the Belgrade Lakes when I was 15, and have done a fair bit of canoeing and kayaking recently, I’ve never driven a power boat bigger than a 12 foot rowboat. Well, the marina owner was a little hesitant, so we asked if we could get a lesson on running a pontoon boat.

Arlene phoned the marina yesterday about 8 in the morning to ask about a lesson then, left a message on the machine, and kept getting the machine when she called a few more times. Joel (oh! Millie and Joel and their 1 3/4 year old grandson Jacob are up in Casco this weekend, and we all came in their car) drove me to the marina, where we found the owner vacuuming out a boat. He said that there was nobody else working right then, but there would be on Sunday. We arranged to come back at 9 this morning.

So Arlene, Joel, and I went back this morning.Tyler, the recent college graduate son of the marina owner, took us out on a boat the exact size of the one we’re going to rent. He went over how to run the motor, how to untie the boat from the dock, to remember to tie the anchor to the boat before tossing it overboard, where the channel markers were and where the no wake zone was, and let me run over to our association’s dock across the road from our driveway. It was really good to have seen the dock from the middle of the lake, just so we know where we’re going when we need to land there to pick up passengers. Joel took the controls for the way back. We now have two drivers checked out on a ten-passenger pontoon boat.

On the way out we passed quite close to a loon who didn’t seem to mind the boat at all. It was raining lightly on the way back, but we all enjoyed being on the lake anyway.

Ashton, Idaho, is sort of at the border between the agricultural plains and rolling hills of the Snake River Plain and the forested areas on the Montana line. There’s a main street with a couple of blocks of stores. Off the side streets you can see grain bins.

The Trails Inn seems designed to appeal to folks who are driving north to cabins in the Island Park area to go hunting and fishing. I’ve figured it out — it’s the real deal that Bugaboo Creek is trying to package. Only one room, right as you enter, is packed with trophies, but it’s a doozy:

It’s not 100% hunting. Remember that one of the most important inventions of the 19th century, in terms of land use patterns in the West, was barbed wire, which allowed the transition from open range grazing to ranching on fenced land? The men’s room is decorated with a collection of various types of antique barbed wire, neatly displayed on three boards.

To get to my mom’s house a few weeks ago, we got up ridiculously early, I mean I set the alarm for 4 AM. There is a nonstop flight from Boston to Salt Lake City, but another route with a layover in Phoenix was several hundred dollars less expensive (at least for two round trips) so we chose that.

The flight from Phoenix to SLC went right over the Grand Canyon. That’s not surprising. The Grand Canyon takes up a big fraction of northern Arizona. I did get a picture of it from the air, though:

You know how some people say, “When I’m in London, I always stay at the Ritz”? Well, when I’m driving from Salt Lake City to Pocatello I try to eat at J.C.’s Country Diner in Elwood (I thought it was in Tremonton until I checked the business card). Take the I-15/84 Tremonton exit #376 about a mile off the highway.

We’ve stopped for lunch or a snack at many places on that route over the years. In the SLC and Ogden metro area there are lots of suburban malls just off the highway with places to eat with as little personality as any in the Boston area. This one has plenty of personality in the decor, menu, and layout. One quirk that I like is that the mens room wallpaper has a border of lighthouses. Why, I always wonder, lighthouses, up there 800 miles from the nearest one? Just because someone likes them, I guess. The food is good and inexpensive and there are always local people who look as though they’ve worked up an appetite moving irrigation equipment eating there.
J.C’s is not fooling about the “Country Diner.” There was a tractor parked out front:

… a truck full of hay in the parking lot:

… and a beautiful view of fields and the Wasatch mountains behind the restaurant:

It was a gorgeous day, not too hot, with that clear intermountain West air and snow on the mountaintops. There are beautiful days in the Boston area, mostly in the fall or late spring, that make me say, “sure, California, but when we have weather like this, why would anyone want to live anywhere but New England?” I felt that way when I took the picture above — when they have weather like that, why would anyone want to live anywhere but Tremonton, Utah?

Sometimes when we visit my mom we like to take an overnight trip away from Pocatello. This time we went on a long day trip with her.

We headed north on I-15 through Idaho Falls. There’s a highway rest stop along the way at a lava flow called Hell’s Half Acre. It’s a lot more than a half acre, and has some short walking trails among the basalt rocks. If you’re not going to get to Craters of the Moon, it’s a quick introduction to the volcanic history of this area. We stopped, used the restrooms, walked, and photographed cactus blooming among the lava.

At the far side of Idaho Falls we got off onto US highway 26 and drove through Rexburg to Ashton, where we stopped for lunch. Ashton is a very western looking town with grain storage bins as the dominant architecture. Chriswell’s Trail’s Inn looks like a renovated old lodge, with mass quantities of hunting trophies as decoration, a barbed wire collection on display in the men’s room, and good french fries (you hope so, in Idaho). An older man in full cowboy regalia, jeans, leather vest, ten gallon hat, garish red, white, and black shirt (no chaps, though) was walking into the restaurant as we were leaving.

From Ashton we headed east and north on route 47/Mesa Falls Scenic Byway to Mesa Falls. I had remembered the road as mountain driving from a previous trip, but the road was much wider, less winding, and less exposed than I had remembered. It wasn’t a Boston area parkway, but it was pretty mild as mountain driving goes. We stopped at a lookout (where we saw a western tanager) and at both lower and upper Mesa Falls parking areas. Wildflowers, balsamroot, yellow and white mule’s ear, camas, larkspur, and chocolate lily, were in profuse bloom (chocolate lily not so profuse; we had to look carefully because it’s not showy, but there were lots of plants in the one spot where we saw them).
From Mesa Falls we continued north to Big Springs. It’s the source of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, one of the country’s best trout streams. There are immense, I mean easily two feet long, trout under the bridge in Big Spring, easy to see and easy to understand why people want to fish in that river but of course they’re not allowed to fish right there.

We stopped for ice cream back where the road out to Big Springs joined the main road. A ten-year-old kid was minding the ice cream counter. A teenager who was more in charge told me that the wild huckleberry ice cream was excellent, but the tub of it was empty. The kid went to look for more in the back room which had an “authorized personnel only” sign on it. I asked him if he was authorized, and he said, “sure”. A real grownup came out and asked, “Where’s Jason?” I said, “here he comes back with a three gallon tub of Wild Huckleberry” and everyone was happy.

Heading back south, we pulled off at Swan Lake when Arlene thought she saw sandhill cranes on the far side of the lake. Sure enough, that’s what they were. There were lots of yellow-headed blackbirds there, too. We pulled off again to walk out to the edge of the river.

We took the main route back to Ashton and then turned east and south on the Teton Scenic Byway. Most of the pictures you see of the Teton mountains are from the Wyoming side, where Grand Teton National Park is. We were sort of on the “can’t get there from here” side of the mountains, but plenty close to have spectacular views for that whole drive.

We stopped for supper at O’Rourke’s Sports Bar in Driggs, Idaho. I doubt if any of my regular readers will ever need a restaurant recommendation for Driggs, Idaho, but if you found this from a search, they have great pizza. We split one large pizza and thought the crust was as good as any. The pizza came out quickly and hot. Go, O’Rourke’s. There was a Red Sox game on ESPN showing, as a bonus (but the Sox lost to Arizona, phooey.)

Time to get dressed to go out for dinner — more in a few days, and pictures too.

We’ve been visiting my mom in Idaho for a few days. Charley was here last week. He took off for a drive around all the national parks in Utah and posted lots of gorgeous photos (I’d say many are of calendar or postcard or at least screen saver quality) on his blog, so check there for current pictures. He writes pretty well, too.

Besides taking my mom to an eye doctor appointment, we’ve gone to see a movie (Under the Same Moon) at the Idaho State University alternative film series, gone to the farmer’s market, talked to a Shoshone woman making beaded moccasins (size 0, newborn, size), gone on an early morning birding trip and seen lazuli buntings and bulloch’s orioles, gone out birding ourselves and got a really good look at yellow-headed blackbirds, and heard a concert by an outstanding Israeli violinist. (check out his “fiddler on the … tank” video, linked from that page). Meanwhile (and some of that meanwhile was while waiting at the eye doctor’s) I’ve done five pattern repeats on the back of my Aran sweater, so it really is starting to look like an Aran sweater. I hope I get better at doing the cables, because they each take an effort. I’m probably knitting the previous row too tight, or maybe that’s just how it is with a lot of cables. Oh, also I read, starting on the plane out here, one of the Spenser detective stories. We used to watch the TV series, but this is the first of the books I’ve read, and I thought it was really good.

On our way home from the FIber Frolic Arlene spotted a sign for a Reny’s store. We’ve been in the Reny’s in Bridgton many times, but never in any other of their stores, so she was curious to see another. We turned left, and there was downtown Gardiner, with a beautiful main street of brick stores that looked as though they had all been cleaned up sometime in the last 20 years.

There were galleries and gift shops, but nothing (except Reny’s) was open on a beautiful June Saturday afternoon. Maybe in a couple more weeks when the tourist season is really under way.

The library building was particularly nice.

We couldn’t find much on line to explain when Gardiner revitalized its downtown. At least I imagine that’s what it did, because it’s rare for small cities in New England to have stayed like this through the ’40s to ’60s. We did find an article about a big fire there in 1882. I suspect that people who knew the town’s history would have told us, “See that marker that says ‘1882’? That was the first thing they put up when they rebuilt the town after the fire.” The city seems to have been a lumber milling center in the late 19th century. It’s the head of navigation on its river — I think that’s the Kennebec — so it’s a natural location for processing logs that have been driven down the river into lumber for shipment by ocean going vessels.

I’ve decided that I can call almost any small wood turning a weed pot, so long as I drill a hole down from the end I want to be the top. That means this one counts. It’s made from the piece of wood that’s standing up in the picture of the previous weed pot.

This thing, on the other hand, is supposed to be a top, the kind that you wrap string around from the bottom, then toss out of your hand and pull the string away fast to get it to start spinning. It still has a lot of excess wood attached. I cut it down too far at the bottom, which was on the driving center of the lathe, before taking off the excess at the other end. At that point it wasn’t stable enough for me to be able to cut away all that stuff at the top. I ended up cutting it off with a coping saw. It’s standing on a little drying rack made of half-inch mesh hardware cloth, so you can see that it’s about an inch and a quarter in diameter. I’m working small.

And here’s the finished top and a third weed pot:

I put significant elbow grease into sanding the upper surface of the top (I didn’t want to say “the top of the top”), ending up with something like 1200 grit paper (or maybe it counts as crocus cloth). You can see the reflection of the blue crochet cotton in the finish. There’s a brass nail head at the point of the top for a spinning bearing, and it does spin nicely. If I had escutcheon pins I’d use one of those; as it was, I had to file the head of a brass finishing nail to a dome shape. These are all finished with walnut oil from Hannaford’s natural foods department.

… or shrubs. The mail order nursery I got my pear trees from had an end-of-season sale flyer. I was still willing to dig a few more holes after I put in the walnut trees. They were out of the dwarf cherry trees by the time I called, but I got two beach plum plants. One of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten, and this might have been thirty years ago so you know it made an impression, was a slice of my whole wheat bread toast with some beach plum jam that my Aunt Elsie had made from fruit she picked near her beach house on Long Island. So I have a soft spot for beach plums. I don’t know how they’ll grow in Maine, but on end-of-the-season sale from the nursery two shrubs didn’t cost more than Arlene routinely spends for a few flats of annuals. The flyer says “usually produces fruit the next year.” That probably means there will be one or two fruits next year, not enough to do much good, but I can still hope. Here’s one of them in the ground right after I planted it two weekends ago:

I ran into a quote I liked on the Woodworker’s Journal eZine (that will take you to whatever issue is current when you click). Dave Schweitzer, the guy they were interviewing as woodworker profile of the month, had worked as a welder before he started doing woodturning. He said, “I had good hand/eye coordination and was used to working with my hands. … the bottom line is that people who can make things with their hands can make almost anything with their hands, and the materials and tools they are using are quite secondary.”

On the way to the Fiber Frolic we stopped at a yard sale at a VFW or American Legion hall. I got a couple of actually useful tools and a box of old cut nails, the kind with square shanks, but rounded heads, too bad.

I was blown away by the abundance of used saws at, or should I say next to, that guy’s table. I guess axes, too.

The guy selling these said, “Just make an offer. I ain’t taking shit home.”