Kira Rambles

“Do you need a doctor’s note to not work this afternoon?” The ER doc charts my visit–a quick one. I managed to give myself a three-milimeter-deep laceration diagonally into the joint on my left thumb with a handsaw trying to take the end off a fifteen-foot poplar sapling we felled to serve as the sprit…

Every day at work, I give at least one 75-minute boat tour about the nautical history of Lake Champlain around Fort Ticonderoga. The fort, where I’m a historic interpreter, owns a 1920s style Thousand Island tour boat, a gorgeous 58-foot long motor vessel with a covered roof held up by inch-long strips of varnished, glazed-duck…

I’m getting ready to wrap up the season as a maritime historic interpreter at Fort Ticonderoga and move to Kingston, NY, to do winter maintenance on Pete Seeger’s environmental education tall ship, the sloop Clearwater. Moving, plus my first semester of online MFA classes, has me feeling a little overwhelmed.  On my days off from…

My twin remembers a tour guide at Colonial Williamsburg saying men at balls would present their calves to women they wanted to dance with to showcase that they were rich. Nice calves meant one rode horses, which meant one had horse money.  I remember hiking with my grandpa, mom, and sister as a kid and…

If you were a ghost on a battlefield, would battle reenactments piss you off? As a staff member at Fort Ticonderoga, I participated in my first battle reenactment in September. We reenacted Brown’s raid, when American forces returned to the fort and tried to take it back from the British and their German allies in…

Fort Ticonderoga sits on a bulb of land sticking out into Lake Champlain. State Route 74 t-bones the lake on the peninsula at a cable ferry and heads West, perpendicular to Champlain, where it becomes Main Street in Ticonderoga, NY. Between the ferry and Main, there’s a four way stop, where, recently, I braked for…