It was calm this morning after the Dunkirk-esque scene on the water yesterday, so I was out early for a good row up to Glen Island and back (16 miles total), making good time with my new scalloped pine oars and enjoying the blessed peace of a quiet lake. The Glen Island store must have known I was coming, because next to the coffee urn was a stack of Saran-wrapped Crumb Cakes, the kind where the streusel topping crowds the cake like big cumulus clouds and breaks off into thumb-sized dollops of buttery goodness.
I think I only bought one.
But to sit down in the boat for the return row with that buttery miasma on my hands and then on the handles of the oars with the boat soon smelling like Big Al’s Bakeshop and me thinking that maybe I should have picked up a second one, or maybe even a third, for the trip home…some extra “stores” in case the weather or circumstance turned against me which is maybe what the Coast Guard had in mind with “Semper Paratus”? (sorry for the breathlessly run-on sentence, but a great Crumb Cake does that to me).
The obvious question is whether sixteen miles of rowing is enough to counteract the dietary impact of a slice of crumb cake as big as my head. I’m not slender because I treat exercise as permission to behave like a teenager, and if you think that those crumbs on the dock got kicked to the grass for the insects or the hugely attentive seagulls, you haven’t rowed (or dined) with me. I’ll fight them for every last golden crumb.
Anyway, on the way up to Glen Island I passed Log Bay and saw more than a dozen boats on the hook. It was pretty obvious that given the hour (well before 7AM) and their rafted positions, they had been there all night.
I wondered if the Park Commission has changed the rules about boats dropping anchor and spending a night in a place like that. To my knowledge, Lake George traditionally has not been open to cruisers in that way; except for Red Rock Bay a bit to the north, I didn’t think that The Authorities would allow boats to spend the night at anchor without a permit at a designated island dock. Maybe I’m wrong and this is now permitted?
My worry, of course, is the obvious: are these folks equipped with the kinds of equipment for taking care of personal hygiene that will not impact the lake? Many years ago I heard Andy Rooney predict that “we’ll love this lake to death,” and when I see new concentrations and new high-impact uses like this, I worry a lot about the future.
Anyway, this morning I rowed a bit, I ate a big bite, and I wondered a bit more about the price a place pays for increased popularity.
Tomorrow marks one week before I hit the road for the Finger Lakes. I’ll never be ready with training like this, but maybe I can treat the actual rowing as training and convince myself at end of the adventure that I can do it after I’ve done it?
That’s Crumb Cake Logic.
Love you guys!
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