I was reading on the lawn, the smell of cookies wafting out the screen door, when I heard Haley shout, “NO! This can’t be happening!”
  
Curious about the cause of the outcry, Charlotte walked in and also let out a shriek.
  
I decided I’d have no choice but to follow suit and investigate.

What I found was Colin, wearing nothing but my apron, baking cookies.

This was an interesting first endeavor into the world of domesticity to say the least, though in the end it was quite successful- anyone who can read can cook, and Christine had quite a reliable cookie recipe in her collection.

Now, instead of waiting for more Oreos to arrive from the supermarket on the Big Island, a hungry Colin can make his own chocolatey snack.

Eager to make more progress on the oven project, I enlisted Aidan to come to the North End with me to look for the sand we had heard was at the end of Petrel Path.

Carrying shovels and large plastic bins, we wandered the entire northern half of the island in search of the stuff but came back, hot and thirsty, with none.

After some rest and some water, I decided to try at West Beach.

Colin and Emily came with me, and we quickly filled seven large bins.

Because the day was so warm, Emily and I decided to go for a swim, which was surprisingly more pleasant than usual as the water had been warmed by the sun.

We came back to the dorm and laid in the sunshine, further enjoying the weather.

Damon and Janet were cooking dinner, and they made a beautiful meal of grilled chicken, whole-wheat pasta with sundried tomatoes, parsley, lemon, feta, and toasted almonds, and a gorgeous garden salad.

Dessert was also extra-special: Janet’s Crepes a la Civilizacion featuring bananas and nutella.

Because of the good weather and the relaxed Sunday schedule ahead of us, Charlotte, Emily and I decided to sleep on South Hill.

We had a lovely night, with numerous shooting stars, strange optical illusions involving the moon (which appeared to melt and drop into the sea), planes flying overhead on transatlantic routes, and the sound of the surf crashing into the rocks.

When we returned to the dorm on Sunday morning after sleeping late, we told everyone about the moon’s strange behavior, and it was quickly explained away by Janet as being caused by the bending of light due to atmospheric something-or-other.

We spent a lazy Sunday reading in the sunshine, with Colin making more of his now-trademark cookies, until the time came for us to go to the dock and greet some new arrivals: three Upward Bound students and their advisor.

Once everyone was comfortably onshore, Damon, Elisabeth and I took the skiff to West Beach to collect our seven bins of sand. We had very little time in which the tide would be high enough for us to work, and we found that each of the bins weighed at least as much as we did, so we were only able to bring two of them back to the dock with us.

After that was all in order, Elisabeth and I decided to go on a trail run before dinner.

We ran a mile or so down Petrel Path and I felt so lucky to live in such an amazing place and found myself regretting not taking up running on the trails earlier.

I am also falling in love with barefoot running, loving the way my feet interact with the surface of the earth and glad not to experience pain in my shins the way I do when I wear running shoes.

Christine and Charlotte made a lovely meal of traditional Swedish cuisine, and as we munched away we all introduced ourselves as we do each time our group changes.

While the dishes were being washed after we’d eaten a rich dessert of Kanelbullar (amazing puffy Swedish cinnamon rolls), an after-dinner Wobble Session arose, perhaps spontaneously.

The oven-building crew decided it was time to go collect the sand at the dock to start building the form for the dome, so we went down the hill with the hand cart.

After struggling in pairs to lift the bins of sand into the cart, we began to drag it, and the handle slid right out of the braces that hold it in place. Nope!

We carefully lowered the bins out and replaced the handle.

This was a job for the tractor, to be sure.

When we asked Mark if we could borrow the trailer, he advised us to load the bins into the bucket (very carefully, keeping the bucket as low as we could without catching it on anything, driving slowly, and wearing seat belts at all times).

This was a good technique, and soon we were pouring water into the sand to start building.

When I asked Colin to find me a 16-inch stick so I could keep track of how tall we were building the dome he emerged with a meter stick from the lab (“Does it need to be 16 inches or do you just need to know how big 16 inches is? We’ve got plenty of these in there.”)

While Aidan, Charlotte, Emily and I dug our hands in the dirt, some of the others played a sunset game of ultimate (after which they casually tossed a disc in the yard). The whole atmosphere was lovely.

When our dome was of sufficient size the next step was to create a release film for the mud layer which could later be burned out.

I had read that wet newspaper was ideal and that wet leaves were trickier to work with but also functional.

Damon offered some scrap paper from the lab, and soon we found ourselves plastering our sand film with water-drenched pages of someone’s scientific paper.

If they only knew the fate of their research…

Hi! I’m Elisabeth, a rising junior at Bowdoin, where I’m studying English and art history. As one of this summer’s artists-in-residence, I have been pursuing a creative writing project, focusing primarily on short fiction. So far, I have completed one story a week, using my experiences on both Kent Island and Grand Manan as inspiration for settings, characters, and overarching themes. In carrying out my project, I’ve had the good fortune to explore the plethora of environments that this island offers. A sunny day might find me searching for a place to work in the middle of the ancient forest on the north end of the island, or dodging belligerent herring gulls on my way to a good spot on the beach, while I tend to remain indoors (unlike the scientists) during the stretches of rain and fog. I typically split each week between brainstorming, planning out stories, reading published work for inspiration, and, of course, writing. On Saturdays, Charlotte and I peer edit each other’s work, and we pin our completed stories to a wall in the dining room so that anyone who wishes may read and comment on them. In addition to writing, I’ve enjoyed many afternoons baking in the kitchen, and many evenings playing Frisbee outside or participating in Everyone Together in a Band. I’ve had an incredible experience here so far – it’s hard to believe that six weeks have passed already!

The morning finally brought the warm sunshine we’d been longing for all week.

Of course the first thing most of us did was bring our laundry out and wash it in buckets, getting it to a state of Kent Island cleanliness (not to be confused with actual cleanliness).

When I was satisfied with the amount of dirt that had been transferred from my belongings to the bucket of soapy water I hung them on the line and returned to the kitchen.

I had a euphoric 15 minutes of kneading sourdough with my toes in a snowy drift of flour listening to the Grateful Dead. What decade is it?

When the dough was ready to ferment, I took the hand cart and a couple of fish feed bins down to the muddiest part of the path. I quickly filled the bins with my shovel but found it was impossible for me to lift the full buckets (which weighed at least as much as I do).

I dragged the bins to the edge of the path so as not to disrupt the flow of traffic and brought the cart, empty, back up the hill, where I found Emily.

She agreed to help me and we found that the two of us could easily lift the bins, though getting the full cart out of the mud was no small task. We succeeded with a few extra shoves though. Womanpower!

Once we had the mud where we wanted it we began building the foundation, which is just like a bigger version of a mudpie or a sandcastle, except that it gives you bread instead of being washed away with the tide.

Aidan and Christine stopped by to join the fun and we finished quickly, at which point Sara announced that she needed a break from being in the lab and teamed up with Emily to collect small rocks to fill in the cracks in what will be the floor of our oven (also made of beach rocks because we have no bricks-here’s hoping none of them explodes!)

We ladies did pilates in the sunshine, accompanied by more 80s tunes from Colin’s laptop (he was painting the trim with Haley).

Lunch was an amazing mélange of leftovers which Janet, as if by magic, transformed into delicious fried rice.

Elisabeth and I enjoyed one of our now-routine fern showers before we started preparing dinner.

She made coffee bars from Cooking Down East, which Marjorie Standish describes as “very popular”- as well they should be.

We had the surprising discovery that the squashes we had were not butternut, but spaghetti. The only cooking instructions available were for a microwave, so we did not know how to cook this squash. We did it anyway.

This, I find, is the best way to approach life’s difficulties: when you don’t know how to do something, you can usually do it anyway.

We also roasted the seeds, which were delicious.

When dessert was out of the oven, bread went in (or was it the other way around?). Either way, I burned my hand on the cast iron dutch ovens I bake the bread in and now have quite a magnificent blister to show for it.

The rest of our meal was thankfully simple, considering I couldn’t touch anything hot with my left hand.

The pork and tofu (with garam masala) needed only to cook in the oven.

Elisabeth patiently did dishes in hot water and devotedly checked internal meat temperatures for me.

Since the weather was so magnificent, we ate dinner outside (for the first time all season- it’s been an unusually foggy year) and spent the rest of the evening outdoors as well. There was another Frisbee tossing session and we caught the sunset from the dock as a group.

The lower lab crew spent the night sleeping there as well, but after stargazing in the yard a while, the rest of us went to sleep indoors.

Summer was on Kent Island, if only for a day.

Greetings Outside World!

As the summer is starting to wind down, everyone’s projects are reaching their apex and last minute adventures are being had at a rapid rate. At this point, if you blink, you’ll miss something! This part of the summer is also the perfect opportunity to reflect on what has happened so far, what is currently happening, and all the last minute things I must do before I leave the island on the 27th.

            I’m always amazed at the hidden gems of knowledge I am presented with every single day. On Kent Island, it’s not only the people that have taught me life lessons, it’s every part of the place: the birds, the weather, the water, the way of life, and the island itself. I thought that for my guest blog I would pass on some of these tokens of wisdom that have been truly inspirational to me this summer. Spoiler alert: some are goofy and others are kind of common knowledge.

The first lesson came on the first full day on Kent Island. Colin and I were walking down to our study site with our advisor Bob who, out of nowhere, announced: “Treat any place you’re in as the only place you would ever want to be. That way you can fully soak in the moment. Also do this with food. Bad food will taste so much better.”  It’s such a simple concept, yet so easy to forget when it’s been raining five days straight, your clothing smells like something rotten, and a bird shits on you. However, there is no other place I would rather be then on this tiny island in the Bay of Fundy.

The thing that has taught me the most is Oceanodroma leucorhoa, the small, pelagic birds I have devoted my summer to studying. In particular, these birds have taught me about love, loyalty, equality, and selflessness. Leach’s storm petrels can have the same mate for their protracted lives. They will spend their entire winter apart from each other, flying as far as South Africa completely by themselves. When late spring rolls around, the storm petrels head back to the same burrows they shared with their mates the summer before. In these burrows they wait for their mates to show up. Doesn’t this sound like every hopeless-romantic’s dream?

Sometime mates won’t make it through the winter. Other times mates will divorce. However, these divorces generally only happen between young couples that fail to have a successful breeding season the previous summer. About one fourth of all petrel pairs will fail to successfully raise their solitary egg each summer. For petrels, selfishness kills. Males and females are equally responsible for incubating and caring for the helpless egg. The parents will stay in the burrow for up to seven days or until they can last no longer. With older couples, it’s like clockwork . When one parent leaves to find food the other parent returns that very night. However, if one parent does not replace the other, the egg will lay cold and benumbed. If the egg does not receive the warmth that is essential for life in seven days, there is no hope. No amount of warmth will bring the prospective chick back. There is no such thing as being a single parent in the petrel world.

Can you imagine if people acted more like Leach’s storm petrels?

The most beautiful part of Kent Island is not the beaches, the fields, or the breathtaking sunsets. Other people’s passion for their projects or work is in fact the most enchanting part of Kent Island. This applies to every single person that has been on the island since I’ve been here. Even if they were here for a day or several months, their love and determination to accomplish whatever they are aiming for has left me speechless and heartened. I hope to find this fervor in every aspect of my life when I leave Kent Island.

Lastly, I have learned that 12-year-old boots WILL NOT survive two months on Kent Island (Ya, Mum. Not our best idea ever). However, that means that one can always live up to the Grand Manan expression of “Fill Ya’ Boots.”

There are so many other lessons I have learned this summer. However, that would take forever and I have to go grubbing for petrels soon. I am so lucky to have had this experience. The people and the memories will forever have a very fond place in my heart. I can’t wait for all the adventure and lessons that the next two weeks have in store for us.

Seek the Joy of Being Alive,

Hale

In the morning the weather still felt like it would stay gray forever, as it was indeed forecast to do.

I was, however, determined to get started on building my oven, intimidated by how much it seemed like there was to it and how little time we have left on the island.

Emily and I moved Mark’s pallet to a good flat spot near the garden and found some plywood to nail to it so our mud wouldn’t go through the slats (on Mark’s sage advice).

We then spent the rest of the morning trudging back and forth from East Beach to our building spot with shopping baskets (and in Emily’s case a computer bag from IT) full of rocks.

Later in the morning Aidan and Christine chipped in to aid with the rock carrying as well.

Many hands make the burden light, we found, and we soon had as many rocks as we thought we would need for the foundation.

Sara was my sous chef for the day.
We prepared a classic Sunday-dinner sort of meal, despite it being only Thursday.

I coated chicken with a mixture of Panko, parmesan, garlic, and herbs and baked it in tinfoil-covered pans to keep the meat moist, removing the foil in the last few minutes of cooking to brown the Panko. Perfect! Try this with the seasonings you would put in pasta sauce or Italian dressing.

The tofu was marinated in a simple balsamic vinaigrette.

Our side dishes were quite simple: mashed potatoes and a blend of steamed baby peas and green beans.

Since we had a lot of extra time in the kitchen, when Sara was done with her triple-batch of snickerdoodles (delicious at any time of year!) I made granola to replenish the supply in the canister. Janet has been urging everyone to eat the overabundant yogurt in the refrigerator so the granola has been disappearing fast this week.

I also fed my sourdough starter so I would be able to bake bread on Friday.

There was still more time built into our schedule, so I prepared a double-batch of honey-wheat bagel dough and set it aside to rise while we finished cooking and everyone ate.

At dinner we discussed the imminent arrival of several high school students to the island.

On Sunday, three Upward Bound students will come to join us for the week. They have expressed interest in field biology and will be spending time with each of us on our projects. We were encouraged to think of areas where it might be helpful to have a couple of extra hands or opportunities for us to mentor the younger students, who will be living in the dorm with us.

When the meal was over, several students threw a Frisbee around the yard while Emily and I boiled bagels and we danced to Afro-Cuban tunes.

Damon and Janet joined us for a bagel snack before our second movie night, which featured a showing of Little Miss Sunshine.

The feel-good movie met a receptive audience of Emily, Sara, Haley, Kathryn, Elisabeth, Charlotte, and myself.

Exhausted from hauling rocks, I slept the whole night through. 

The weather was once again wet and gray, as it is expected to remain until at least the weekend.

I spent much of the morning kneading bread and waiting for it to ferment- sourdough takes much longer to ferment than yeasted bread does to rise and rather than a two-hour process from kneading to baking one can expect anywhere between four and ten hours.

In the afternoon Elisabeth was with me in the kitchen. We were treated to her boyfriend’s Hip-Hop+ Playlist (something like 100 hip-hop songs and 3 non-hip-hop songs), which was developed over several years and is of the highest quality.

Soon after we started on dinner Damon arrived with groceries and mail from Grand Manan.

Janet had mounted a campaign to keep the produce from freezing in the refrigerator, so she put it all in the baskets in the top of the unit to keep it away from the freezy bottom.

While things were being put away, I was making a salad with lettuce I had harvested from the garden and various other things that had just arrived with the groceries.

Elisabeth was boiling black beans on the stove (they had been dried and needed some serious boiling even to reach the consistency of canned beans).

We also cooked beef and chickpeas, corn, and rice.

We had the especially exciting addition of hard taco shells to our usual repertoire of multi-varietal tortillas.

We had an exciting variety of sides as well: salsa, sour cream, and black olives.

For dessert, Elisabeth experimented with a new moosewood recipe for chocolate pudding cake, which was a great success.

After dinner there was the usual noisy and enthusiastic card playing as well as a contingent of quiet crosswording.

Having finished my friendship bracelet I started another one, experimenting with new patterns.

We had music from DJ Colin for the entirety of the evening, starting with 80s music and moving on to remixes and mashups.

Elisabeth and I spent some time decorating the dorm by taking interesting clippings from and old issue of National Geographic and hanging them in various places.

I started knitting yet another hat, and Emily and I made green smoothies with spinach, apples, and bananas, much to Colin’s disgust.

Hi! I’m Sarah Cottrill from Williams College. I’m a rising junior, studying biology and neuroscience. 

And I’m Simone Frank (everyone calls me Mo, or as Jesse calls me…”Moses”) also from Williams. I’m studying biology and anthropology here.




We are a part of the Savannah Sparrow project, working with Heather Williams (also from Williams College, Williamstown, MA- go Williams!) During our stay at Kent Island, we attempted to record all of the Sav sparrows from the Grid to add to a long-term data set. Mo and I also outlined pair territories in the Eagle’s Nest field for playback experiments. In the playback experiments, we are looking at the unique middle sections of sparrow songs and recording behavior responses.




Our hypothesis is that the middle sections of the songs act like first names for each bird, so we tested reactions to isolated sections from a neighbor, a bird that sounds like a neighbor, and a stranger. More results are yet to come! 




Even though our stay on the island was short, it was definitely memorable. When we stepped off the Ernest Joy, it was hard to get our bearings at first. Here we were on a small island in the middle of the Bay of Fundy, surrounded by expansive ocean and constantly changing tides. We had to find our way through the grid (don’t step off the paths!), get used to the outhouse and survive the dive-bombing gulls.




We felt like we became true members of the Kent Island clan once we got pooped on (by both herring gulls and baby savs), embraced our smelliness, and could keep our footing while traversing the slippery rockweed. We were fortunate enough to have a few spare hours to check out other experiments too: grubbing (aka sticking your arm into a dark small hole and pulling out a cute petrel), cutting rockweed and watching Sara crush snails/crabs/anything else from the intertidal zone, and helping Aidan with his plots (dog whelks anyone?) Also, we did our “chores”- I can’t really call them chores because even dishwashing is fun if you’re belting out tunes and Wobbling around the kitchen. Before we knew it, our two-week stay was up. Although it only felt like two days, we left the island as lobster boaters, greasy pole victors (well only Sarah, but I had some pretty sweet wipe outs), HUGE puffin fans, mud boot lovers, bird experts (well, that’s kind of pushing it…), Bay of Fundy swimmers, and friends of a new group of absolutely amazing people. 




A huge thank you to everyone at Kent Island for making our stay an amazing experience! 

This morning I decided not to make more bread because, with the much-reduced number of people we had on the island, there was some sourdough left from Monday night.

The morning brought more rain, which, though only light showers, kept things dreary. The pattern is supposed to continue at least through Saturday.

I did some crafting projects in the morning, working on woven bracelets in between writing and doing small chores around the dorm.

My braid had stayed mostly in place overnight and I still loved it, though it was starting to be a bit unruly. 

Mark brought a pallet for the oven project I’ve been wanting to get started on, which meant I wouldn’t need to pick a specific building site or make a particularly heavy foundation, because the oven could be moved from place to place with the tractor when we wanted to fire it or to put it away for the winter. This new development also eliminated the need for a roof or other shelter for the dome because it could be stored in the cow barn or under the porch.

One of Mark’s projects for the morning was bracing the kitchen table, which had become rather loose, because after 25 years he was tired of having his coffee spill when he or anyone else sat down.

We all agreed; it seemed that in order to rock the boat quite noticeably one needed to make only a very small motion.

The endeavor was a success- the table now holds its shape even when you sit on the bench and swing your hips with considerable force.

When Mark had finished vacuuming his workspace under the table, I used the shop-vac to clean the space under the oven, which had been badly in need of attention.

Elisabeth had been scheduled to sous chef, but considering she was allergic to every dish I had planned for the menu and this was the last day before a shopping trip (preventing me from shuffling days in the weekly menu), it seemed that it would be a bad idea to have her in the kitchen around peanuts, peas, coconut, and soy.

Christine bravely stepped in, despite having been in the kitchen for much of the weekend: a brave and steadfast soul.

She made coconut macaroons, some with almonds and chocolate chips (more allergens for Elisabeth, but absolutely delectable with a flavor similar to that of almond joy).

Meanwhile I prepared a marinade for the chicken and tofu and blended the peanut sauce for the noodles.

Christine made a triple-batch of naan dough while I cut tofu and bell peppers and started kitchen cleanup, and she washed dishes while I cooked naan on the griddle and the chicken baked in the oven.

I realized once the water was already boiling for the noodles that each of the 30 servings in the package was individually bundled with lovely ribbons, which proved difficult to remove. Getting the pasta to cook evenly was therefore tricky, as I frantically ripped ribbons from bundles and tossed the noodles into the water.

Dinner was a quiet affair, with only 13 people gathered at the table.

The amount of pasta I cooked, then, turned out to be reminiscent of what Janet and I refer to as the risotto incident from last year. We used all of the Tupperware to store leftovers and still had to compost some of the noodles.

Cooking for 22 is very, very different from cooking for 13, and sudden transitions require lots of extra thought, it turns out.

When the dishes were cleared, we played a game that I have always called sweaty manos, but which Haley referred to as slaps.

Deciding we needed an activity, plans for a walk to the north end to see the blooming fireweed were made but quickly disintegrated.

Lacking anything else to funnel our energy into, we marched onward with the prank war.

Sara went to bed on the early side and found a herring gull decoy in her sleeping bag

as the rest of us remained in the kitchen playing a new game along the lines of scattergories.
About 20 minutes later we heard shrieks and she emerged with a plastic bag containing water and live crabs. “THERE ARE CRABS IN MY BED!”
She decided Jesse must have been the culprit and put the creatures into his sparrow toolkit.

Nobody seems to know if he is really to blame, but time will tell…

Hello! My name is Christine Walder, and I'm on Kent Island for the summer doing research in the intertidal zone. I'll be starting my Junior year at Bowdoin in the fall, where I'm a Biology and Environmental Studies coordinate major. Some fun facts: my favorite intertidal creature is a red-gilled nudibranch, I ate a periwinkle yesterday (it was surprisingly not bad), and I haven't used the shower yet! Don't worry though, I go swimming and take bucket showers pretty regularly.

The intertidal zone at Kent Island is amazing, and I absolutely love it! At about 30 feet, the Bay of Fundy has the largest tides in the world. The intertidal zone here stretches out almost a quarter of a mile in some places, and is dominated by rockweed-covered bedrock. Tidepools ranging from bucket-sized to swimming-pool sized are peppered across the intertidal, and underwater are a whole host of beautiful and unique creatures--ballerina pink coralline seaweed, delicate anemones, kelp, giant periwinkles, whelks, etc. There can be hundreds of snails, mussels, and crabs within just a few square meters.

I'm working on a rockweed harvesting project. Ascophyllum nodosum, the dominant algal species from Maine up into Canada, is a rope-like olive green seaweed that is central to much of the life found in the intertidal. It's essentially the old-growth forest of the sea, forming a floating seaweed jungle that provides shelter and alters water flow during high tide. When the tide is out, it insulates organisms from extreme temperature fluctuations and dessication. Removing too much rockweed could seriously affect its ability to perform these functions. Current rockweed harvesting protocols are based on the seaweed's ability to regenerate, rather than the ecosystem's ability as a whole to withstand its repeated removal. Because of this, I'm working to set up a long-term monitoring site to look at the effect of rockweed harvesting on ecosystem health.

I've set up 15 sites, each consisting of a control plot and an experimental plot. I surveyed each one (it involves counting a lot of snails among other things), harvested the experimental plots, and then surveyed them again. I'll be starting a third round of surveys right before we leave, but right now I'm making the plots permanent so they can be found next year. Which is actually quite challenging, since everything in the intertidal always seems to be moving around.

My stay at Kent Island has been absolutely incredible, and I love it here. Time is flying by, and I can't believe we're all leaving in a few weeks. I'll miss all the glorious sunsets, and who knows, I might even miss the gulls! Not until I wash the latest splatter off my clothes, though.

Having been given the “bread and granola” chore for the week, I knew I’d be spending not only my afternoons in the kitchen but my mornings as well.

When a fresh batch of granola came out of the oven, I was deciding what kind of bread I would like to make.

Anja took a look at my starter and told me it seemed ready to make bread, so I decided to give it a shot- yeast researchers know their yeast!

I followed the instructions from Hannah Field’s chapter of Build Your Own Earth Oven and set the dough aside to ferment.

The weather was acting strangely, with a dark sky and unusually calm air. This quiet, of course, was followed by deep rumbles of thunder which shook the dorm. It began to pour rain, but only continued to do so for a few minutes before giving way to gentle showers, which themselves soon cleared up.

Weather on Kent Island is like weather in New England: if you don’t like it, wait a minute.

Perhaps the biggest excitement of the day was a visit from a dozen or so elderly folks, many of them artists, mostly from Toronto.

They seemed to be on a sort of creative tour of the Bay of Fundy.

They arrived in Russell’s skiff, ate lunch in the Lower Lab, and received a tour of Petrel Path from Damon.

When Emily and I walked down the path to the waterfront, we saw the prints of ballet flats and walking canes in the mud.

We arrived in the nick of time, for the visitors were already climbing back into the boat in which they had come to the island.

We introduced ourselves, and they began taking photographs of us.

“Which one’s Emily?”

Damon explained that Emily was a filmmaker and I was the cook and also kept a blog.

They asked my specialty, and I replied “what do you mean?”  Damon took the question to be kitchen-related, so he clarified for me. “Baking.”

The murmurs from the skiff:

“Bacon?”

“Oh, yes, Bacon, mm-hmm.”
“Bacon, oh my, yes.”

As Russell pulled away from the dock, they must all have been marveling that anyone could have had such a culinary specialty as that.

By this time I was heating the oven and the cast iron pots to bake my attempt at bread.

The signup board for chores had the initials DG in the sous chef slot for Monday, but it was Janet who arrived at 2 pm.

She was an excellent sous chef as always, making a beautiful salad with what extremely limited ingredients we had: lettuce and radishes from the garden, broccoli slaw from the refrigerator, avocado from the pantry, and corn and black beans from cans. She made a delicious spicy dressing to give the salad a southwest aesthetic.

Next she shredded pounds and pounds of cheese for the lasagna as I prepared the sauce and baked the bread.

At one point we had to stop to replace the propane tank.

Despite the oven having been much colder than recommended for much of the baking time, the bread came out perfectly. Real sourdough!

For dessert, I made a cardamom coffee cake, which the Moosewood cookbook where I found the recipe describes as “one of the world’s richest cakes”.

Indeed it was, and it was quite a hit. (Recipe)

Having baked the cake in a Bundt pan, I felt obligated to fix the hole by filling it with our Tabasco-bottle bud vase.

At dinner, we were delighted to find that we all fit at one table together- while this is the norm for Kent Island it was the first time this had happened for our group the entire summer.

Emily, the braiding queen, put my hair in a style of braid that was new for me and which wrapped all the way around my head. Since this somehow manages to keep my hair out of the way even better than a bun does, I’ve decided to try to maintain it for the rest of the summer.

Once all the dishes had been cleaned up and Janet and I had spent some time upstairs and in the pantry planning a shopping list for the upcoming week’s menu, Emily, Christine, and I decided to go swimming at East beach. 

Picking over the slippery rockweed and bringing Charlotte and Elisabeth for company (Colin stayed on the rocky part of the beach above the high tide line), we found the water was cold to an unpleasant degree but also quite invigorating.

The refrigerator had received a thorough cleaning, of which it was in dire need, from Colin and Kathryn.

We spent the remainder of the evening working on crosswords.