day 11 DENARE BEACH - no car miles, only foot miles
june 11 (BIG ICE STORY!)

eschewed the car altogether today and did four miles on foot with a pack of dogs this morning.

we started off, me and Sarah, with the three dogs of this household - Trog (short for Troglodyte), a fuzzy squat mutt who could easily be a wrestler if he were human; Chino (short for cappuccino), who is a salt and pepper pure-bred Cairn terrier without an ounce of flounce - independent but affectionate; and Skipper, a black and
white herding dog who picked up Buz at a party and ended up a member of
the family.
almost immediately we ran into Big Mary, from the village, who asked to join our walk and came along with her canine friends Hunter (an enormous retriever mystery mix) and Cappy (a tiny scrappy alpha mutt with a bandana round his neck).

we hiked out around the peninsula through deep woods that smelt of moss and fresh growth. the array of greens was stunning, studded with browns and rusts while the ravishing blue of the sky peaked through the canopy here and there and the water lapped slate green when we approached the shore.

eventually, the repeated baritone cries of a raven alerted us to the existence of a nest perched high up in the crook of a birch. big well-built nest of stout sticks.

Mary told an astonishing story about having fallen through the ice last winter.
she was on a section that should have been frozen solid 8 feet deep but apparently
it was bumpy so had some vertical faults which weakened it.
the extraordinary thing was her presence of mind, or the way her mind observed and guided her body as she moved through this perilous experience.

as she told it (i'm paraphrasing):
...once i'd broken through and was falling, i thought - stick out your arms - so i didn't go under. my arms caught on the ice and held my chest above the ice. when i realized that there was no one nearby, not even a ski mobile, and that calling out would be useless, i closed my eyes and i saw this yellow line. at first it was vertical and then very slowly it pivoted so it was horizontal. then i realized it was just like swimming, just like the position of my body. so i let my legs rise up behind me so i was floating parallel to the ice. then i was able to crawl forward out of the water...

this alone was demonstration of an extraordinary amount of consciousness and heroics, to me, but then she had to walk 45 minutes home in her soaked clothing. the only thing that bothered her was her EARLOBES which were painfully cold and somehow, the flaps on her fur-lined hat that was strapped to her snowpants when she fell-in, had remained dry so she put on the cap and this warmed her lobes.

this is a woman who used to work at the dump and had much direct communion with BEARS. but that is another story.