Turkey Trot - 2014

Hi Daryl,

Congrats on finishing the Wellesley Turkey Trot today! Your time of 26:56 gave you a pace of 8:40/M.

Please find a link to searchable results below:

http://racewire.com/live_results.php?id=4179&bibnumber=836

Thanks!

Team RaceWire

Postcards from Dickinson

Postcards from Carlisle

Such a place

   Bourdain travels in the best way - widely, frequently, and at someone else's expense.   Surprisingly, he has a decidedly favorite hotel - the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills.  

   The writer Andrew O’Hagan has a favorite hotel in the city where he lives, to which he retreats to recharge and refresh, to indulge and escape.  For him, it is Claridge’s in London, of which he says, "Claridge’s is a state of mind and everyone should have such a place, even if it’s just a café, a bench or a patch of grass, a vantage point from which one can clearly survey the possibility of improvement."

   Great stuff, that.  

   I don't have a favorite hotel, although maybe I can work on that.  The closest thing I have to "such a place" would be a stream in Vermont.  Not a particular one.  Any one which has in it my waders, my brothers, and some trout.

Clarendon Springs

The Clarendon Springs Hotel, also known as Clarendon House.  Built in 1834.  One of many hotels and “curative spas” that thrived in Vermont in the 1800s, capitalizing on the  purported benefits of the local spring waters and a thriving railroad industry, which brought Southerners and city dwellers north in great numbers.  An article in the August 29, 1867 edition of the New York Times describes the village of Clarendon Springs as “one of the pleasantest places to which [one] can resort during the summer, to avoid the heat, and dust, and noise, and other great annoyances of the Great City.”  The hotel is long closed, and gutted -- the Southerners and city dwellers, the picnics and music and dancing, long gone.  The springs remain, along with just the husk of this once fine hotel.

  

Horses, fences, barns and wires

   So, what do we like about this picture?  Horses are nice, as are barns and fences.  

   And what is not to like?  The angles, for sure; the slope these horses are on make the picture seem tilted when it's not (see the roof line of the barn).  Also, the overhead wires, which are prominent and disrupt the otherwise bucolic scene.  How much better might the picture be without the wires?

   But imagine not the picture but the actual scene, the actual place, without the wires.  Imagine the farmer going out to his barn in the morning, in the dark, to milk his cows with nothing but his own cold hands.  Before the power lines were put in.  Imagine how he felt the day the poles went in right in the middle of his field.  

   I imagine he likes the view just fine.

Fly fishing - season 2

   A Sunday morning in July.  KC is in Los Angeles.  Megan is in Centerville, on the Cape.  Rachel is in Italy.  I am in waders, making my way down the Mettawee River, between North Rupert and Pawlet, Vermont.  A beautiful morning - not too warm yet.  As usual, not another soul on the river.  I move along from pool to pool, trying first a woolly bugger, then a small wet fly with dark red coloring. Casting pretty well, I think, but raising no fish.  I come to a riffle in a narrow crease of the river, with a downed tree on the left.  It like it covers a fairly deep pool.  I take the time to tie the woolly bugger back on, thinking I can float it down through the riffle and then swim it back up through the pool, making it look like a minnow.  I have trouble tying it on, for some reason, but stick with it, and take my time testing my knot.  I position myself left of the crease and loft the fly into the head of the riffle.  The line spools out as the swift current takes the fly downstream.  I have no idea what I'm doing, I think.  I start wondering if maybe I should pack it in early, and spend the morning driving the back roads on camera safari instead.  Half my mind on this, the other half working the fly up through the pool, and WHAM - a fat trout strikes through the fly like a blitzing linebacker, thrashing up to the surface one, twice, heavy on the long, pulsing rod.  I work the fish up into the shallows - stay on, just stay on - and up onto the rocky side of the stream.  A beautiful brown trout - which measures a full 12 inches.  A fine fish for this little stream.  A trophy for the novice fly fisherman.  Heart pounding.  Smiling ear to ear.