Rhapsodies

Today started with my mom finally getting ahold of the axe she’d been waiting for. The purpose was to deal with a rotten log blocking a trail. While soft, it was too big for the band saw. I had some experience using an axe from a summer camp I’d gone to years ago, so I was pretty optimistic about this going fairly easily.

It turned out the rotten wood was only an inch thick and the rest of it was an exhausting ordeal. Mom and I took turns and going back and forth between using the axe and a saw eventually got it through.

After that the next job of the day was to find “shelters” made by a moth caterpillar, my dad is studying, in sensitive ferns. (Shelters are when a caterpillar folds up a leaf to protect itself) Of course that means that we had to go and find all of the places in the woods Sensitive ferns grew, mostly in muddy bogs. The first patch we found the remains of one. We couldn’t search more since there was a lot of poison ivy growing around it. We went to another forest trail down the road and found another.

After lunch we went to my old favorite, Pemaquid point. I always love the near moonscape of the rocks, as the surf crashes against them. We started by going to see the Lighthouse at the tip of the point which had a small museum of Maine maritime history. Nearby there was a gallery of local artists and a video about Maine lighthouses.

Finally we went to the Point itself where I took pictures of the rock formation until I filled up my camera’s chip.