Damp Morning

I wasn't going to make the extra trip to town, to call the phone company, because I'm going in tomorrow to lunch with TR. Got up early and turned on the radio, then went back to the sofa and slept through the news. I'd dried a couple of Boletus, they look like jerky; reconstituted a small hand-full in sherry and soy sauce, fried them in butter and made a superior omelet. Dawn walk down the logging road, and everything was so wet that I was drenched from the knees down. But, as Michael said the other day, the snakes are moving back up to the ridges, and these first cool mornings of fall are a safe time to be out in the woods. The spring, but especially the fall, is the time for gathering roots, so I meet some interesting people, out in the forest. People ask me what I do with my time and I'm hard-pressed to answer, mostly what I do is just listen. I can always retreat, I have a back door planned, but it's hard to disappear. Someone in France emails someone in Otway. And there are cameras everywhere. I went down to explain the phone situation to B and we talked about books for an hour. There are only a half-dozen people in my world, maybe less than that, with whom I can instantly engage. The dome and the truss both solve the same problem. Spanning a space. Do you ever make pyramids with your fingers? It's always my first step, when I'm solving a construction problem. Roll a smoke, get a wee dram of single malt, I favor Sheep Dip, because it has that raw edge of American whiskey, then configure my fingers to carry a load. It's just a game I play. Cat's Cradle without the string. Given that, the way we fiddle, how could you not discover the truss? Clearly a triangle solves a great many problems: span, load, your view of a tidal estuary. When I get going, it's hard to stop.