Last Boat Ride of the Season

The old Arrowhead Club, Willoughby, Ohio

Barry O'Donnell at the Helm

Nancy and Jim

Moi. Willoughby in the background.

Interesting Structure on the Willoughby Shore

Boat Ride on Lake Erie--Off Mentor Lagoons

In Mentor Lagoons--getting ready to go out.

Carolan on the bow of the boat

Colin--maybe a bit nervous about the boat ride

Ed, Carolan, Colin

Carolan, Colin, me

Colin and me

Late Summer Cruise on Lake Erie

I have a 26-year old boat, not exactly a rustbucket--it works well and is safe. And last night Linda and I took it out from the Mentor Lagoons onto the Big Lake, Lake Erie. Here are some photos:

Leaving my dock in Mentor Lagoons

Linda riding on the bow while in the Lagoons

Out on the Big Lake we always where life jackets
(seemingly the only ones who do this!)

The Lighthouse where the Grand River meets Lake Erie

Looking at the town of Fairport Harbor and the old Fairport Lighthouse

Sundown, as seen from Mentor Headlands Beach

The moment of sunset, right before the Green Flash

"The sweep of easy wind and downy flake" (Robert Frost)

This winter I have gone cross country skiing about 7 or 8 times. Often I go to Chapin Forest, a Lake Metropark in Kirtland, Ohio, following the Arbor Trail to Luckystone Loop, climbing up what we used to call as kids "Gildersleeve Mountain." At the top of the "mountain" there is a bluff over an old luckystone (milky quartz) quarry. And from there, on a clear day, you can see Lake Erie and the taller buildings on the Lake in Eastlake, Willowick, Euclid, Bratenahl--and even Cleveland. You can see the skyscrapers of Cleveland, some 18 miles away. The valley underneath Gildersleeve Mountain looks like a vast forested wilderness in the summer. But that is an illusion because hundreds of thousands of people live on the East Side of Greater Cleveland. Still, you start to understand why Cleveland was once called the "Forest City." So Chapin Forest is one of my favorite skiing venues.

I also like to ski at the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, one of the world's greatest arboreta. There are miles of trails through deep woods, through prairie and plantings, around ponds and Corning Lake.

Today I skied at the Mentor Lagoons, another of Lake County's treasures--with hundreds of acres of lagoons, forest, marshland, and a mile of untouched lake shore. I took the lake trail, and as it emerged from the deep woods, I could see a completely frozen Lake Erie--solid ice as far as the eye can see. And at this time of the year, a kind of silent dessert, awesomely beautiful. I stood there on my skis thinking of Robert Frost's great poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I especially thought of the lines, "He gives his harness bells a shake/ To ask if there is some mistake. / The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake." That's exactly what I heard--nothing but the sweep of easy wind. This wonderful music and this wonderful silence!

[There is a fantastic Wikipedia article on Gildersleeve Mountain at this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gildersleeve_Mountain]

Two Bald Eagles Seen Today at Mentor Lagoons

Today we walked along the lake shore by Mentor Lagoons, a wonderful area within the city limits of Mentor, Ohio. Mentor is an eastern suburb of Cleveland and has a population of about 55,000. It also has about a mile of wild lake shore that is now protected parkland. This must be one of the few undeveloped areas of the southern shore of Lake Erie. I guess the bald eagles we saw today noticed the great fishing, the wild lake shore, the hundreds of acres of undeveloped forest, the hundreds of acres of marshland--and they thought, this looks like a great place to live, to raise our babies.

These eagles flew directly over our heads, about 50 feet above the ground. We felt incredibly blessed.