On Burying My Uncle

Last week started very badly, with the news that my much beloved uncle, Elie, had succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting since late last year. The burial was on Monday, and so Beth and I drove down to Long Island to be there for that. It was nice seeing family (some of whom I hadn't seen in a couple of decades), although the circumstances for bringing us together were the saddest imaginable.

I am very thankful that we now have a GPS device that gives us on-the-fly directions to where we're going. The trip was estimated at 4 1/2 hours. With the NYC-area traffic thrown in, it took us just 5 hours, which gave us plenty of time to get there early and have some lunch before heading to the cemetery. (This in contrast to a few years ago when we missed my grandfather's funeral because the mapquest directions we had printed were wholly inadequate and got us so very lost that we never did find the cemetery. On that occasion, we ended up heading home thoroughly disheartened just by the fruitless effort. This time, we're strictly devastated by the loss.)

Beth only met Uncle Elie once, at our wedding, but she ended up doing a lot of crying at his burial because (1) it meant the world to her that he came a couple of thousand miles to our wedding when my own father wouldn't even make the trip a couple of dozen miles and (2) she knew how wonderful a person he was, how much he was loved by so many people, and how unfair it was that he should have to die so young.

What I found at Uncle Elie's burial was that I felt compelled to participate quite heartily in the shovelling. For some reason, the possibility of letting the cemetery workers and their machinery put the dirt over him was a bit too unbearable to accept. I felt it needed to be done by people who knew him and who loved him instead of by strangers just doing their job.

Kayaking, Part 2

As "promised" in my previous kayaking post, here's a picture of our (Beth's) Mini loaded up for a kayaking trip. Pretty silly looking, eh?

Well, we went out again today, this time to McDaniels Marsh. This body of water covers well over twice the area of Grafton Pond, although it's extremely shallow. I remembered to take a GPS unit this time. We paddled together to about 1.25 miles away from where we parked before Beth decided to stop for a rest while allowing me to go on for a while alone. I got to what I believe was pretty much the far end of the marsh, at 1.65 miles from the car.

We saw a painted turtle, some small fishes, and a few ducks. I also spotted a couple of amphibians (newts or salamanders, I'm guessing), a kingfisher, and a healthy looking snapping turtle.

When we got back to shore I flipped my boat to try draining it, and (much to my surprise) discovered that there were about a dozen (maybe more) leeches attached to the hull! Which leads to my question of the day: Does anyone out there have advice for the best way to humanely remove a leech from a kayak's belly?

I'm really quite bewildered as to why they would have attached there in the first place. Surely, they didn't find it loaded with any tasty juices!

The best approach I was able to come up with for removing them was the "grab and pull" technique. This was fairly easy in the case of the smaller ones, but the larger ones really had quite a good grip on the boat and weren't too keen on letting go. I have nothing against the leeches (although I really don't want to transport them around the state) and I have no desire to cause them any harm. I can't help but think that the amount of squeezing I had to do to maintain my grip must have been uncomfortable, if not downright damaging, to the poor creatures. Perhaps I'm underestimating just how hardy they really are. They certainly turned out to be less squishable than they look!

After getting my hull cleaned, We flipped Beth's kayak and found leeches there, as well. She had fewer of them, which I'd tend to attribute less to the color difference in the boats than to my having gone farther into the marsh than she went.

New to Kayaking

After half a year on layaway, Beth and I finally completed the transaction and took delivery on our new kayaks this past weekend. We learned or were reminded of several good lessons:

• What is known in New Hampshire as a fairly small pond is the equivalent of what would, in Maryland, be known as a pretty substantial lake. Our first outing with our new boats was to a beautiful body of water known as Grafton Pond. It has apparently grown from its original size as a result of damming, but it's still considered to be pretty small. In Maryland, there are no natural lakes. (A fact I learned years ago from Beth, who knows many things.) This means that our Maryland-oriented sense of inland bodies of water is pretty warped. In a sense, these lowered expectations are good for us. They keep us from taking for granted the comparative grandeur of our new environs.
  
• When the wind kicks up, a flat body of water can become surprisingly choppy, surprisingly quickly.
• There are places (for example, one particular area I found myself in while trying to complete a circuit around a little island) where paddling against the current is a fairly futile exercise. Sometimes, it makes sense to just let the current do with you as it will for a while. When the view is nice and there's no rush to get anywhere quickly, this can be a most enjoyable approach.
• It is wise to carry a GPS device with you when kayaking. Covering pretty good stretches is really quite easy in a kayak, and without a GPS device handy, it would be easy to lose track of where you put in. As Grafton Pond is not very big (by local standards), and as we were eager to get out on the water, we had neglected to pack a GPS device with us. So, once out on the water, we made an early decision to not go into the various coves and out-of-the way areas of the pond. Instead, we made sure to keep the access beach in pretty plain sight. This, of course, detracted from what the expedition could have been, but we had a wonderful time anyway.
• Mini Cooper + roof rack +kayaks results in an assembly that's too tall to fit though our garage's doorway. So, while we can attach and detach the rack to and from the car inside of the garage, we have to load and unload the kayaks to and from it outside. The overall appearance of the whole assembly is fairly comical. (I'll try to remember to take and post a photo on our next trip.) We got ourselves some pretty short kayaks. Had we gotten the Pungo 120 model instead of the Pungo 100, the boats would actually have been longer than the car.
  

Population Density

Below are two satellite images. One is centered on our old house in Maryland. The other is centered on our new (much older) house in New Hampshire. We used to live in a "town" (in quotes because in reality, it's nothing...not a city, not a town, not a village...really just a "rough idea of a place") that's ten square miles with a population well over 50,000 people. We now live in a town that's 40 square miles with a population between 6,000 and 7,000 people. I'll let you do the math. (What you'll come up with is that there's a lot less crowding here than there.) I figure what's pictured below is less than 4/100 of a square mile of ground in each case. And in case it isn't obvious, what you're looking at in the top photograph are two cul-de-sacs, surrounded by townhomes (or "row houses", depending on where you're from).



If I've done my figuring correctly, I've scaled these two images to show a land mass that's just about equal. (I figure ten seconds of latitude is the same distance no matter where on Earth it is. If you know otherwise, please let me know.)

Thanks to the USGS for making this sort of imagery so easily accessible. To get your own, go here: http://nationalmap.gov/