Coot Club

I have some catching up to do! I started this post on Wednesday evening, but now it is Thursday evening. We are expecting Susan Gelletley and Christian Petrach to arrive from Boise in a couple of hours. So, let me go back: Wednesday evening: As I write, there is thunder, lightning and rain. No eating on the deck tonight. Too bad - it's a nice place to eat. Today has been another really low-key day. I lay in bed working on word games until almost 1100a.m., then got up and fixed a late breakfast - smoothie and cereal. I did my exercises and waited until Ellen wrote postcards and was ready to go to the post office, which has a 1:30p.m. outgoing mail pickup, the last of the day. We went from there to the pharmacy, where I turned in 2 prescriptions for refill. Coming out from Broughlims, the supermarket where the pharmacy is located, we drove up a short distance to the condos where we lived before Paul moved into his new house - that must have been in 2019. I wanted to see how the surroundings had changed - we used to walk from the condos over to the Snake River and down a path to the highway and over the bridge into "downtown" Alpine, if one can use that term. Alpine is pretty much spread out along U.S. 89. It has changed. A huge RV park now covers much of the "field" we used to walk through. But it does not extend quite up to the condos. There is now a new cluster of condos being built. The old ones where we stayed, however, are unchanged. So, it is quite different in the way it "feels," but not totally transformed. Tuesday night, Ellen and I watched a movie on the computer: Coot Club. It is based on the book by that name by Arthur Ransome, part of the Swallows and Amazons series. Watching the movie was inspired by a suggestion from John, growing out of his kayaking in New Hampshire in an area that reminded him of Ransome's Secret Water. Coot Club was fun to watch. I have read the book, more than once, but Ellen has not. It does not feature the "Swallows" (the Walker Family) or the "Amazons" (Nancy and Peggy Blackett). But it does feature "Dot and Dick" who visit the Swallows and Amazons in other books and are a prominent part of the book Winter Holiday," one of my favorites. Dot is an aspiring writer who sees all the adventures she is having as possible novels, and Dick is an aspiring scientist, who methodically takes notes on what he is observing, and analyses them. They are visiting a family friend, a woman who lives on a boat at Norfolk. Living on a boat is a highly romantic way of life for Dot. They arrive at a time when there is a kind of war going on, however. There is a group of boys whose lives are filled primarily with life in little boats on the river - they are the Coot Club. They have a mission: protecting the nests of coots from the incursions of tourist pleasure boats, big, noisy, motor-powered tubs which moor near or even on top of coot nests, oblivious to the harm they are causing. The confrontation between the boys and these tourists - which the boys call "Hullabaloos" - has reached a peak. Tom Dudgeon, one of the Coot Club members, has done something radical, and illegal - he has slipped the mooring ropes of a Hullabaloo boat that was on top of a coot nest and set it adrift. This after telling them of the harm they were doing and asking them politely to move. The tourists are obnoxious and dump a bucket of water on the boys. So Tom sets protecting the coots as a higher priority, and after his radical act, goes into hiding. Dot and Dick and their host, Mrs. Barrable, and other children - the "Death and Glories" and twin girls, "Port" and "Starboard," all get drawn into this drama, and that's what the movie is about. It's free on YouTube, if you are interested. Here are some scenes:

Dick and Dot, learning to row a boat.

The "Margoleta," the big, offensive motorboat belonging to the obnoxious tourists.

Tom Dudgeon, slipping the "Margoleta" free from its mooring.

"Port' and "Starboard."**************************** EARLIER: Tuesday evening after supper, Ellen and I drove up McCoy Creek Road, which goes off U.S. 89 down near where Paul used to live, and went about 8-9 miles to a place we have gone before, and we like a lot, where you can pull off the road and take a little walk. This time we found it sort of "occupied." There was a dog in the corral and what looked like sheepherder wagons beyond. A few years ago, at another place nearby, we encoutered Basque sheepherders. We wondered if these might also be Basque sheepherders. So we didn't go up the trail as we have done in the past, we just walked near the road. It was a beautiful evening, a perfect evening for a little walk. Of course I forgot to bring the iphone/camera, but here are a couple of shots from a previous visit to this spot (but at an earlier season when flowers were in bloom. Today, all those flowers were gone by and brown).

The spot where we were walking.

Me with my poles last year.