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Made it back to Lower Oneonta Falls at the end of October last year. It was unofficially my first time.

I had tried several years ago to get back into this gorge but was quickly detoured when my dog, Roy, nearly drowned trying to navigate the infamous log jam that greeted us at the start.

I was instantly overwhelmed with guilt for even thinking he could make it back there with me. Way too dangerous for him. I grew up with farm dogs who often went on day-long creekwalks with me. Roy was not a farm dog. Not his fault. And I should have known better.

It was that guilt that kept me from going back (along with the fact that I don't like to ever leave him behind on a hike, and going here would mean leaving him home or in the car).

But finally I decided to try again.

I had read all the accounts of the monstrous log jam and potentially having to go directly through the waist-deep torrent to get back to the falls. Sounded fun.

Clambering over the discarded pile of trees was indeed interesting and reminded me of only the very best creekwalks I had as a kid.

I did not expect to have two guys in full wetsuits and scuba gear greet me on the other side of the jam. I felt pretty foolish standing next to them, talking briefly, asking what to expect ahead, dressed merely in two layers of t-shirts and some cheap jeans. But they could tell by the flimsy tripod I was carrying what I had gone there to do. And that I didn't care if I got wet. Or cold for that matter. I expected to. My camera gear was secured safely inside my backpack, nestled dryly in tiny zip-lock bag cocoons. That's all I cared about.

The scuba guys warned me that the cutout where there was no dry place for me to step was deep. How deep? I would find it was deep enough. In a minute I would have ice cold water up to the armpits of my 6'2" frame. I knew we had some rain recently but I wasn't quite expecting that depth in the chasm. It was nearly debilitating. I've heard of people wearing hip-waders back there but they would have done me more harm than good.

It was all worth it. A prehistoric cavern of vibrant moss walls with a speckled creek bed of reds, greys and yellows was a feast. An absolute feast. I nearly froze as I tried to fire off a few shots - soaking wet from the shoulders down. I played the game of shoot-wipe-shoot-wipe as the thundering cataract ahead coated my lens with misty droplets within seconds.

It was wonderful.

So Rachel, the rubenesque girl (or grrll or gurl, as she likes to be called) wearing the punk rock t shirt, pigtails the color of electrified Kool-Aid red, with a skull and bones Hello Kitty knapsack, and sitting down with scuffed up maryjane heels turned inwards asks me if making papayas into a drink is traditional to hot dog eating.

Rachel tells me her Trotskyite Jewish grandmother, who was a painter, college professor, and sexual social worker (whatever the hell that is) and who lived in a very nicely spacious rent controlled apartment in Moringside Heights in the 1980s with her twenty nine year old assistant Gupta, would have eaten the kosher variety, chased down with egalitarian New York City tap water (the very best water in the world in my opinion) that would be converted into charged water from an ancient scratched up soda water seltzer dispenser with a siphon that had seen better days.

Rachel, who looks as if she still is a red diaper baby, due to the downtown radical artsy hipster aesthetic she easily sports, and is always mistaken to be a member of the “Party” by many in her Alphabet City environs, but who knows better politically, tells me that she attributes her grandmother's love for tyranny, her excessive obsession with sexual hedonism, or simply mental illness (yes, grandma was out of her freaking mind) as she lovingly describes it, with the very fact that the seltzer nana was drinking came from dirty soda bottles. Grandmother wasn't the most hygienic of persons.

I haven't the slightest, I say about the proper way of pairing up a frank and drink, I usually drink cheap beer with my hotdogs. However, the papaya drink dog combo is the oddest combination, but it's a combination, akin to, say, chocolate and peanut butter, or cucumbers, mint, and yogurt, like basil and tomatoes, like Democrats registering dead people to vote, a union only a mad man could think of, but then again, aren't we all insane in differing degrees?

She agreed with me as she stood up with her arms akimbo and very determined at making a point, but with a good Upper West Side analyst, covered under a good insurance plan, and who has extra copies of the New Yorker magazine in the waiting room; miracles can be had for the price of a reasonable co pay.

How our conversation went from hot dogs to psychoanalysis I will never know.