New Year Challenges

As I dip the tip of my toe into 2024 — chilly but refreshing so far — I receive an enticing invitation to join the WordPress Bloganuary challenge. Daily prompts conjoining, possibly rhyming the thematic current of multiple bloggers around the globe. And so it is that the first of my new year challenges (though not one of my biggest challenges) is to massage my January 1st message such that it responds to the first Bloganuary prompt.

What are your biggest challenges?

It’s seems that recent years have presented no paucity of big, bigger, and biggest challenges. So I’ll exercise the curator’s right to reduce rigorously, ruthlessly even, the often ominous cloud of tribulation too often gathering like a thunderhead, darkening the outlook, threatening thunderbolts and inundation. I’ll single out two of the biggest challenges specifically associated with Rosslyn, not the nation or world at large, not climate change or the wellness of family and friends, and not anything else.

So, what are my biggest challenges with Rosslyn as we venture into these early days of 2024? Let’s focus on two of my biggest challenges, one nearer term (flooding) and one longer term (untethering).

Lake Level

One of the most pressing (ie. the most immediate) of my biggest Rosslyn challenges is the still unusually high water level of Lake Champlain. The most recent level is 99.37’ while the median level between 1915 and 2023 is almost four feet lower at this time of year.

The USGS graph above shows the current recorded water levels in blue/purple and the median in gray. Stark contrast, right?

Here’s an even closer look at the uncomfortably small margin between the current water level and the inside of the boathouse.

Water damage to the bottom of the clapboard and trim is already evident in the photo, and some of the hemlock timbers cladding the pier beneath the boathouse have already come loose with wave action and floating debris.

A week and a half ago, on December 22, I shared a thinly veiled but optimistic observation that, at last, Lake Champlain’s water level *appeared* to cresting.

The current lake level is flirting with flood stage (prompting me to refresh the USGS data tracker obsessively.) I’ve spent about 30 hours willing the graph’s upward arc to bend, to level off, per chance to begin falling. At last the curve seems to support my hope that Lake Champlain is cresting.

It’s worth noting that this is not normal. At all. For comparison, last year on this date, the Lake Champlain water level was 95.35. That’s a significant difference. And that photograph above, if taken a year ago, would show almost 4 feet of pier beneath Rosslyn’s boathouse.

(Source: Champlain Cresting?)

I’m still clinging to that hopeful benchmark, but it’s increasingly clear that no significant drop was primed by my optimism.

While we have removed the docks and boats from the waterfront and emptied everything from the first floor of the boathouse, there’s very little that we can now do to proactively address this challenge. We must wait. We must wish water levels lower. And wait. We must will winter weather to spare us significant precipitation until the lake recedes. And wait some more…

The biggest challenge, then is to stand by with little-to-no control over the conditions now threatening this historic building. Forbearance!

Untethering

Now for the *BIGGEST* of my biggest challenges.

I’ve been alluding to big news for many months. Despite the fact that Susan and I are hedging just a little bit longer, still allowing ourselves the opportunity to debate and dither and second-guess, we’ve all but definitely decided to put Rosslyn on the market. We’re at least 90% there. Maybe even 95%.

Here’s what I was thinking 14 months ago.

We are brainstorming and daydreaming and contemplating what it would look like to untether and disembark on a new adventure. The vision is still forming, the seed still germinating. But you’re invited to join us as we contemplate and eventually cast off.

(Source: Leaping & Untethering)

Here’s the progress in my thinking as of last week.

Almost exactly fourteen months later… we’ve made notable progress in 1) imagining an Adirondack Coast successor to Rosslyn, and 2) developing a plan — albeit preliminary and still much evolving — with an engineer who has been methodically iterating, revising, pursuing permitting, etc.

In other words, we’re no longer just contemplating what it would look like to untether from Rosslyn to embark on a new adventure creating a home ideally suited for our new chapter. We’re well into the adventure…

[…]

We’ve come to recognize an inevitable although many times delayed transition. Rosslyn is almost ready for a new family. And we are almost ready to create a new home.

(Source: Untethering Revisited)

In short, we’ve been beavering away on plans for a new home nearby, presenting plans to the Willsboro Planning Board for approval last summer, etc. There’s forward motion (albeit haltingly slooow) toward inventing a successor to Rosslyn. It’s incredibly exciting for us. Poignant in the most positive sense, but also bittersweet.

If you’ve been with me for a while on this adventure, you understand that our transition, at least my participation and agency in this transition has been intricately interwoven with more than a year of introspection and creative meditation on Rosslyn, on “homeness”, and on the almost two decades that Susan and I have lived at — and to a large extent *because of* — Rosslyn.

This inquisitive quest, this multimodal scrapbook, this curious collage is at last coalescing. Or at least, it has begun to coalesce. I’m beginning to recognize Rosslyn Redux as an extended love letter from me to the home that has nurtured us since 2006. Part “Dear John” (Dear Rosslyn!) letter steeped in catharsis and creative exploration, part chronicle, and part epistolary memoir. There are some other parts as well, I suppose, but I still haven’t figured out what exactly they are. Junk drawer. Experimental art studio. Archive.

And “knowing how way leads on to way”, one fragment falling upon another, and another, and another,… I’ve decided to… trust the “singing underneath” and trace my index finger along this newfound map, starting with a few snippets from Max Cole’s “Thoughts on Art”.

(Source: New Year’s Eve)

This may resonate from a similar post one year ago.

Art is something that must be lived. It is long and there are no shortcuts.

[…]

Most of reality is not visible. Art makes perceptible the indefinable quality of presence.

[…]

The motivation for making art is art and its insights into that which transcends the material. Nothing else.

[…]

All creativity draws from the same source regardless of discipline and eventually merges at a common point which is philosophical.— Max Cole, “Thoughts on Art” (SITE Santa Fe via “New Year’s Eve”)

Rosslyn Redux is first and foremost an art experiment. A creative inquiry. Little by little I’ve come to trust the process, to put all of my will and hope into living the art so that I may eventually perceive the indefinable.

Today, as I prepare to plunge into 2024 with renewed curiosity and creative risk taking, I know that I will be prepared to meet one of Rosslyn’s biggest challenges yet: untethering.