Brettuns Village Trunks & Leather
Old Trunks, New Leather. All from Maine.
July 30, 2009
28 hours without
rain – a new record this summer. It�s looking like we may have just
run through our best stretch of summer weather for
the year. Just great.
Luckily, we were able to take advantage of it by going, or being, uptacamp.
This is short for ‘at our cabin on the
pond’ ‘ and that would be
Brettuns Pond. In Maine, when you head to your summer place, you’re
not going to the lake, not heading up to the
cabin, not driving upcountry
for a few days at the second home, you’re just plain up to camp. Uptacamp.
More importantly, it’s not just a
place ‘ it’s a whole change
of lifestyle, a re-arrangement of priorities, a shift into neutral, and
it carries with it a pile of
regulations and lifestyle
codes, such as wearing shorts and flip-flops, wearing the same t-shirt
for 3 days in a row (on account
of you almost always have
it hanging on a tree limb because you’re either swimming or drying off
from swimming or heading out for more
swimming), and eating something
or other from the time you get up until you collapse late at night after
paddling out to the middle of
the pond and watching the
stars for a while. That’s uptacamp. All that and killing spiders
too.So, we made it uptacamp for
a few nights, and we liked it so much we’re heading back up there next
week. As a result, it’ll be tough to
catch us on the phone (as
if it’s easy now), but we’ll be checking the e-mails in between grilling
out and killing another spider. I’m sure
it’ll continue raining the
entire time, but we’ll be at camp so what difference does it make?New leather ‘ we got in two
nice shipments this week: First is a nice, soft side leather in black,
struck through, large sides running
about 4 oz in thickness.
This one is called Black Butter, because that’s what it feels like and
that’s how it cuts. It’s buttery, but
don’t put this on toast,
not even at camp.Next is a very nice, rustic
reddish brown side leather in 5.5 oz, known to the tannery as Red River.
Nice leather, great for footwear,
quivers, etc, and the sides
are all over 22 sq ft. This is nice leather right here, Jackson.The Weekly Deal, in case
you got busy trying to figure out how to move all this extra rain we’re
enjoying in Maine down to some of those
rather dusty zones like,
oh, for example, Texas, is a good one this week. Full hides in a
nice, dark taupe color, tanned by Spinneybeck
in Italy, for $100 flat,
with free shipping to each and every one of our customers in the 48 contabulous
states. Might be worth a look if
you have a use for nice
full hides in that color.I want to point out that
being uptacamp in Maine is a little different than heading over to Lake
Logan Martin outside of Birmingham or Lake
Conroe just north of Houston.
Those are great lakes, and what’s nice about them is that your swimming
suit becomes the exact same color as
the lake water after you’ve
been swimming for about 10 minutes, so then you’ve got this great souvenir
of your outing, and it won’t wash
out ‘ it’s a permanent reminder
of the water color. We don’t get that sort of cool benefit here in
Maine. If you take a canoe out in
Brettuns Pond you can see
the pebbles on the bottom in places where the water is 15 feet deep.
The darned water is so clear your swimming
suit never gets discolored.
If you scuba dive or snorkel, once you’re down under you can see 60, 70,
or 80 feet in any direction. This
takes all the fun out of
swimming, as you almost never swim straight into a sunken tree or big rock,
so you don’t have those cool battle
scars to show your friends
and co-workers. How dull. OK, so you get the idea ‘ the water
is clear. Great, we’ve got it good here. Well,
to be honest the water’s
also cold enough to kill you in about 10 minutes, so our kayakers all look
like lost crew members from
Deadliest Catch, sporting
the latest in survival suits. Swim for a few minutes and I swear
you can hear Sig screaming about the crab
count. Maybe that’s just
the early symptoms of hypothermia. Beats me.OK, so feel free to order
yourself into a frenzy next week ‘ we’ll get it shipped the week after,
and don’t forget to check out the new BV
hats that we have on the
site. They’re hideous!Maine Swamp Station out-
Churchill Barton
Human Rain Gauge
Auburn, Maine
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