Batty Doe, for starters
Friday, 14 August 2020
We took a mid-day jaunt to enjoy the (newly rejuvenated) AC in the pickup during the heat of the day, in a generally southerly direction. Do that far enough and you encounter: Lake Michigan.
With small beach-wash zones of aging zebra mussel shells. Invasive species, oh yeah.
We poked around an eventually covered some miles on Batty Doe Lake Road. We thought the side road to the lake looked rather private, so we never saw the lake, but we spent some miles on the road including crossing a huge puddle that was larger than it was deep (we checked with long sticks), and with a good stony bottom rather than much—so: crossable, we judged, and the stalwart pickup (with street tires) crawled through without problem. Yay!
We don’t know when the road was named and could only speculate on what “batty” meant when the name was chosen. Crazy? Loony? (Wrong species). Just strange? (Like chronic wasting disease?) Yeah, we batted around a few ideas; perhaps all were batty.
Some stretches of Batty Doe Lake Road connected active limestone quarries. Limestone dust is almost white, and rather dramatic. We were lucky we encountered no mining vehicle convoys that would have intensely dusted us. Or any other vehicles.
And almost home, we watched this osprey with a fish balanced on a high branch, just looking around. We only saw it because our out-for-a-walk neighbor had spotted it, and we saw her in that looking-up/phone-up photography pose that points to Something of Interest. My theory is that the catching and flying took rather a lot of energy, and we caught the osprey in the resting-before-eating phase. [Without a cocktail, is such a pause still eligible to be called cocktail hour?]