KETCHUM

KETCHUM: A YEAR AT THE LAKE

Some Autobiography

by Robert C. Arnold

stormy day, we are visited by a heterogeneous array of waterfowl along our grassy beach. For weeks now, these guys have been grazing the shallows of the lake, gobbling up the dying vegetation—mostly Elodea and the last of the dying duckweed and its look-alike cousin, the Mexican water fern.

I sort out the following: two pairs of mallards (most ordinary), eight coots, six American widgeons (four females and two males, unpaired, the males showing up only recently, with their shiny pates), and four female northern shovelers, but with nary a male in attendance all autumn. Evidently the males are all off somewhere together. (Playing cards, drinking beer, smoking cigars?)

All the ducks are surface feeders, but the species vary somewhat in their habits. For instance, the mallards and widgeons will invert, turn tail-up, in order to reach deeper weed in the shallows. So will the platypus-billed shovelers, but they have less far to descend before touching grubby bottom. The coots will actually dive to grab the matted green. I’ve never timed them, but I’m sure they stay submerged a full minute or more.

On shore coots are odd-looking birds, with their whitish beak and bulbous body. You’d think they’d have trouble flying and they do. It is easy to pick them out in flight, for they buzz along the water, unable or not choosing to soar. They skitter, they flutter, they fan the water with their feet and wings, they churn the water, both taking off and landing, usually not far away from their starting point.

I ask Norma what color feet they have, these soft black coots, and she replies, “Green.” So be it, though I don’t remember seeing any duck with such feet. It is only when there is a windstorm, such as now, that they and the others waddle ashore. Clearly none of the ducks are meant to be landlubbers. They strut most awkwardly, their upturned tails nearly nubbing the ground.

For now it is the shoreline they all occupy, stepping in and out of it. Occupants neither of the deep water nor the land, they miserably occupy the nether region. It is the chop they shun.

In spring I’d say they were feeding on the snails and other crustaceans they find along the marginal edge, but now it is deep autumn—those creatures are dormant or dying. When the days get longer (soon, soon), the seed or larvae of such things will germinate and spring into life. For now the ducks can find only the matted brown weed, or perhaps the newly exposed roots, white threads twined among the gravel. Ducks hurry along the process of breaking down the organic matter into its elements and making it disappear by degrees. This is what the lake needs now.

Shotguns boom off in the distance. It is the wildfowl hunting season. A duck that has been eating this fetid weed must have a terrible taste. One bite and the rest of the bird goes into the garbage. Is this another form of recycling?

Meanwhile the feeding ducks relieve themselves in the lake, adding to its already noxious phosphorous burden.

This is an animal story. (Bear with me.) All animal stories today involve people. It is man’s fate. Our neighbors to the West are Anton Ehlinger and Carrie Urling. In spite of the different last names, you may be assured they are married. They have two young children—Haley, a girl of six, and Keaton, a boy of two, pretty nearly three.

Carrie has kept her maiden name for professional purposes; she is a high school teacher, half-time now that she has a family to raise, who now counsels students with social and learning problems. It is a tough job, and often she comes home with a whipped look. Normally she is bright and cheerful, full of chatter.

Anton teaches PE in a high school many miles away to the North and—is it necessary to say?—is wonderfully fit. Weight-lifting is one of his classes. I know not what the others are like but I remember my own school days and there was a lot of horrible gym stuff, like wrestling in your weight class, shinnying up ropes, running obstacle courses involving tagging a wall or something before making the return run, and vaulting a most dreaded object called the horse, made of padded leather, with a pair of grips for mounting and flinging yourself over (if luck be with you today). I’d guess that many of these implements of torture remain and only a few have been superseded. Aside from what he does for a living, Anton is a nice, quiet guy. He and I share a solitary vice: He is nuts about fishing and goes at every opportunity.

Until Keaton developed a severe allergy to cats, the Erlingers had two and the kids’ play revolved around them. When the decision had to be made to find them new homes, all four family members were devastated and grieved their loss. To fill the gap, they adopted two large feral neighborhood cats. Haley and her mother feed them from afar, since the cats will not approach anyone close enough to be touched, let alone petted. A shame. Carrie and the kids put food out in little dishes, then retreat behind glass sliders and turn on the outdoor floods. This is the sign it is cat chow time.

It is chow time for the raccoons, as well. The cats wisely scurry at the approach of the overcoated terrors. The raccoons eat their food with impunity. From behind the glass the Ehlinger kids and their parents watch the well-lit, bright-eyed critters vie and forage freely. When the food is gone—in seconds, often—all disperse. The lights get snapped off, the kids go to waiting beds.

I have seen a raccoon at the lake only once before. Perhaps I saw two, that night. It was dark. Norma has sighted them more often. After dinner my son was busy installing a new ZIP drive for my computer—a belated birthday gift. My son thought of it. He is an expert at computers and makes his living programming complex networks and performing related difficult tasks. The computer lives on the lower level of our house at the lake, so we were all down there, wife, self, daughter-in-law.

The installation was not going well and the expert was having problems. It sometimes happens. For some reason the outdoor floods got turned on; there are several of them, and they produce a powerful glare. Brilliant light got splayed across the cement patio. After a blinding moment we began to see huge dark shapes moving across the light field. The beasts grew in number until there were five of them lumbering about—great shaggy ominous-seeming creatures, each bigger than a spaniel.

Incredible, but true. All were thickly dressed as for a Russian winter, their coats thick and shiny, the fur standing out from their from their bodies Ears like spear points, muzzles tapering to a black bead of a nose, paws smally fingered, clutching air, and eyes, those eyes, masked for trick or treat. Why here, why now?

We had given them the signal. Turned on patio lights mean food, come running. You want to get your share, don’t you? Not a cat was in sight. Banished. But Carrie and the kids will settle for a raccoon any old day. Cats are common place at the lake. I have a hunch the raccoons may prove more than a nuisance. They may be a menace. Even if you aren’t a cat.

My life revolves around rivers. They are always in my mind. Never am I happier than when my feet are firmly planted on the bottom of some stream, the current pressing against my waders, the water green and clear to a depth of more than three feet. Give me a few of some leafless alders and shaggy, black/green cedars on the far shore, with no signs around of civilization, and I am as complete as I will ever be.

I have seen watersheds literally vanish under my feet. First it was the Green, near Auburn, back in the primal Sixties. Next it was the Skykomish, in the long reach between Sultan and Monroe. Finally it was the beloved Stilly, where I’ve had a summer camp for more than 35 years; fifteen of those have seen the watershed grow hopeless wasted from multiple slides, while its channel became massively silted.

By degrees I lost my love of fishing. My favorite rivers were ugly, an unpleasant place to be around. Gradually my joy at being out of doors, with the hope of getting a steelhead or two for my efforts, went away. Each time I heard the call my mind filled with visions of muddy water and beaches buried in silt. Each flood brought more of the ruinous soft debris and pea gravel; afterwards you could see where the rivers and attendant creeks had carved recent paths through the stuff; the beach looked like it was midway through the road-grading process. So I simply stopped going out fishing, winter and summer.

Since moving to the lake my interest in rivers has rallied somewhat with my rediscovery of the Skagit, a huge stream with a vast watershed. If not pristine, much of it will serve until the real thing comes around; with it I will make do, in the absence of anything better for hundreds of miles in any direction. But recent logging and road-building has bit deeply into this watershed and its tributaries already show alarming signs. I will explore this only slightly familiar river and learn some new reaches where it can be bank fished and, hopefully, no other fishers be found, or else few of them. I must fish alone, unless it is only occasionally with a good friend. Now that I no longer have a dog, I am bereft of true company.

So yesterday I drove out to the Skagit. It was a sparkling day, the sun low-angled with approaching winter and casting deep shadows in the lee of the hills that elsewhere would be called mountains. (If you have any doubt what mountains are, look directly to the East and you will behold some impressive ones already capped with snow.) My watch tells me I have about three hours in which to fish. It is enough.

I drive to the road leading to the Mixer Hole. It is now gated, but we used to be able to drive along an old railroad grade exactly one mile to where a path cut down to the huge river bar. For the past several years fishers must walk the distance. This separates the walkers from those who won’t or unable to—the big majority. I used to have qualms about walking it, but Norma and I daily walk the two-mile circuit of the lake and the distance has shrunk. It is no more than our normal trek. On a day such as this—clear, with a patchy sun banding the track—it is a pleasure, but I must take precautions against getting overheated on the way in; on the way out, the grade will be deeply shadowed and there will be no problem. It will be crisp, and the walk will serve to warm me up from the river’s chill.

About halfway in I flush a half dozen ruffled grouse and the covey explodes on both sides of me. Stupid birds, each flies off fifty or sixty feet and lands he believes invisible in a tree or leaf-packed copse bottom. If you track them with your eye to their landing site, they are easy to spot. This they don’t know, the dumb chickens. A hunter could, and does, I suppose, blast them standing, which is illegal and unsporting; either way, they taste the same.

A few small shotgun shells litter the ground. (They will biodegrade in about one century.) From their size, no hunter I, I would guess they are quail loads. There must be those here, too. As I continue on at the same brisk pace two of the grouse start again, exploding on to a second stand. This time I lose them in the brush. All is quiet, uneventful, for the remainder of my walk in.

The river is high but a wonderful transparent green. No one occupies the enormous drift; it must be a third of a mile long, though not all of it is good drift water. Only the lower half is slow and deep enough, with an irregular bottom that causes my lazy feet to stumble occasionally. This kind of water will hold resting steelhead. But not today. It is still a little early for them.

An old man drifts by in a powered sled, fishing alone. He exchange pleasantries. He caught a five pound dolly varden earlier, he tells me, when prompted. When I ask about steelhead, our common quest, he has nothing to report. No salmon, either. The river is supposed to be full of chums. He is fishing bait and appears to know what he is doing.

It is enjoyable, Spey-casting out a long line, with the day’s red marabou attached at the end of my leader. I touch not a fish in an hour and a half, and decide to leave early, perhaps to fish another pool. Cool now, I wonder how long it will take me to hike out. I check my watch and when I reach my car look again. Twenty-six minutes. I had thought it might be twice as long. That’s not a long walk, when measured by time.

One more stop before it is too dark to fish. The new pool I call the Widow, in tribute to a kind woman who lets me park in front of her humble house, from where it is a very short stroll to the river’s edge—another long bar. I caught a fine steelhead here last year, just as the season drew to a close, and its memory keeps bringing me back, though I’ve caught nothing here since except small dollies.

One strikes but I miss it. Then it is too dark for even an optimist to fish any longer. I drive home through a memorable raspberry sunset.

Directly across the lake lives Hans Berg and family. On a crisp autumn morning—it is not yet winter, but sure feels like it—his lawn is the first thing I see on my way to breakfast. It is deep in frost and gives the illusion that a light snow has fallen overnight. Soon the lawn will be bathed in sunshine and the green will return by degrees.

The lake is flat, nearly black. A few ducks inscribe long tapering vee-wedges, each at a different angle, for these cruising surface-feeders are not behaving as flocks these days. Without binocs I can sort out the female shovelers from the widgeons of the same sex partly by size but mostly by how they swim. The shovelers have their heads in the water as they paddle along. The widgeons are a little smaller and swim with their heads erect and seem forward-looking. The lone horned grebe in residence is asleep, his long white neck curled back on itself like a miniature swan.

Hans has four grown daughters. All have worked at Thrifty grocery, I heard. They have heavy blond hair. Since Hans is sick, his wife and visiting daughters—a team—do all the yard work. Earlier this fall I watched them rake up leaves industriously, their hair flying. Since I had never seen them up close until lately, I must admit to a bit of middle-aged male fantasizing. Nothing major. Mostly it was how vital they looked hair flying among the flying leaves.

Hans has cancer. He is dying. I do not know him well but find him highly likable, with his gruff German manner and big flashing smile. It is myeloma, a disease of the plasma cells which are in the bone marrow. The plasma cells produce some of the protein that circulates in the blood. The cells manufacture antibodies, my textbook tells me. (It is Choices, by Morra and Potts, 1980.)

In Europe, where he came from, it is called Kahler’s Disease. It sounds like he is German. I shall think of it and call it Hans’s Disease. It is also called multiple myeloma. Because the bone tissue is being systematically destroyed, Hans’s bones are becoming fragile, brittle. This is painful. It is worse at night and often makes sleeping impossible, but I never see his lights on late. He must lie abed. Tumors develop. There is excruciating pain in the back. The immune system no longer functions and infections develop, with fevers and sometimes bleeding. Pneumonia is likely.

Radiation helps reduce the growth of the tumors, while chemotherapy sometimes bring down the bone pain. It is important for the patient to exercise, for the cancer is causing the blood cells to release calcium from the diseased bone in quantities the kidneys can’t handle. There is pain urinating. Patients, my text tells me, “become weak, nauseated, and disoriented.” There is the constant threat of bone fractures.

It is not a pretty condition and Hans has had myeloma for several years. He is younger than I and retired early, perhaps because of the onset of the cancer. He was the first mate for ships on an international cruise line. He has seen the world many times over. Now he is pinned to his house. From his speech I gather a first mate is a member of management. He speaks accordingly. Not the captain but next in command responsibilities. On a huge cruise ship they must be considerable. He has taken all the radiation he can handle. They have cut him off from all but palliative pharmacology. This means he is supposed to die at home and be quiet about it. The hospital will not welcome him back but must give him emergency care when his wife, Joanne, deems it necessary and drives him fifteen miles there in their red pickup truck. Always they return him promptly home. This is how it is today.

When Norma and I take our daily two-mile walk around the lake, I always am alert to signs of activity from Hans. Usually he is closeted inside. I check to see if the red truck is present and accountable. There are other vehicles there often—Joanne’s, a daughter or two who are visiting, perhaps the daughter who still lives at home. It is not idle or morbid curiosity; I am hungry for the sight of a vertical Hans and for an opportunity to renew our casual association. We are more acquaintances than friends. Yet I care.

Once lately I saw Hans move slowly along the side of the house, as wife and daughter were working in the yard that was not the lakefront but faced the road and presently us. I halted him with my piercing whistle and waved heartily, I who could, perhaps foolishly. He waved wanly back.

Just the other day I caught him between house and car. Wife and visiting daughter were taking him out to lunch in a restaurant. It was sunny, which meant no rain would fall on his head. Perhaps he was feeling better, or there was some occasion, some small personal triumph to celebrate. Norma and I stopped in our tracks. Hans and I chatted for too long. He was much thinner and leaned heavily for the first time I’d seen on a cane. This fit the scenario, the myeloma syndrome. Then I permitted him to enter the car that was waiting for him. No, seeing how tired he looked, I urged him, turning away.

Will he make it through Christmas? Or will it be better, more charitable, to hope he doesn’t, and his long suffering swiftly end? I have no answers. I can only observe the public fringes of his life from my distance—while out walking or from across the ocean of our lake.

And there is now the seasonal question: should we give them, him—no more than acquaintances—a poinsettia, as we shall our neighbors on both sides. Or would this be too much—too massive an invasion of his privacy and need to suffer alone? Mightn’t it be received, though, for what it is? A simple sign of commiseration and good will? I hope so.

There are days like this that pass alarmingly fast. Where do they go? Beats me. Well, there was a bit of computer programming to be done in the morning, after I’d checked the stock market, national news, e-mail. I had to teach myself how to copy and save a graphics file off the Internet. Clue—it involves the use of the right mouse button. (The left is what does most of the daily work.) You copy it to a word-processing program, such as Word, give it a name and save it to a file folder and certain drive, probably my new ZIP drive, E. then you can it call it up and display it on your screen. It can even be printed, if you have the need.

Also there was the problem of converting an old Word Perfect file, with all its codes, into Word, which I’ve gone over to in the past couple of years. Word will convert it, however reluctantly, and there are usually some awful code mixups, such as WP’s block protect command and a pesky capital C, closed up, which is how my WP em-dash translates. I have to replace them, one by one, which is tedious and time-consuming. Aside from these small things, the tasks went smoothly, including backing up nearly all of my hard drive, labeled C, on my removable ZIP discs, each of which holds 100 megs. Copying my Windows directory took a long time, for it is a big, rich program that does a lot of work.

A four-chapter Ms. came in the mail from my old college chum Verna Maclean, and it had to be . . . scanned is the word for the day and I’ll use it again. I gave it a quick runover with my eyes. Then there was a long phonecall from my fishing friend, Russ. Norma and I then took our usual two-mile walk around the lake; always there is a distant neighbor to stop and chat with for a moment. This slows us down some. Today it was a new one: I heard her name as Elliot, Norma thought it was Evans. We will have to check the lake roster.

Then I blew some leaves and cedar duff away from the gravel drive with my new (new for me, anyhow, though I was given it for a birthday present a year ago) Tomorrow leaf blower/vacuum. I put off learning how to use it for a year because I believed its only use was to suck up leaves and shred them into a long swooping bad that I must carry over my shoulder, all the while. But it does a blow job additionally, with a series of nozzles or spouts which attach. I’ve discovered that to blow leaves is fun, or nearly fun.

And then it was full dark. Soon after dinner on the History Channel is part umpteen of David Halberstram’s The Fifties, an adaptation of his book which I’d read a couple of years ago, when it was remaindered. What a tedious trip down Memory Lane it is! Tonight is a two-hour special on the Beats and Elvis Pressley. Kerouac and Ginsberg are two of my specialties, so I’ll watch closely. I’ve read most of both of them. Film clips, however, put your right there, in the living past, the burning present. I’ll probably tape the program for the archives, so to speak. My personal archives, of which I have many on video tape to date. Most are old movies.

And there it is, my day. Is it a lot or a little? Oh, yes, I’ve edited some on an old book that just won’t clean up satisfactorily. And I’ve written this fresh diary entry.

Well, it was pretty awful, this episode of The Fifties, and like most the others jumped around thematically and chronologically, and this was distressing to watch. An old Ginsberg finally appeared as segment narrator and what a gray eminence he has turned out to be. (He died recently; nobody on film is every truly dead and persists on, his age frozen, speaking and smiling into a future he never lived to see. How ghostly.) Then there were young Ginsberg, skinny, with a lot of hair, and Kerouac, whom the script writer called a famous football player. How little does she know. At these words I guessed her age—probably about forty. She did not live through the period and got the tone all wrong; what she read in Halberstam’s book got misinterpreted through the summary method and her conclusions were all wrong.

It was a disappointment and, though I taped it, I decided it wasn’t worth keeping for its real-life snippets. I ran it back to the beginning and afterwards taped a movie that, I suspect, will be just as ephemeral.

It is about five miles from our place on the lake to the village of Stanwood. There are three possible routes for us to take, each about the same distance. The easternmost takes us into a large new shopping center dominated by Hagen’s, a modern food pavilion. First a McDonald’s built there; a couple of years later a Burger King was constructed directly opposite, the same way a Shell and Chevron take each other on, tet a tet, mano y mano, or as we say, head-on.

The second route is the fastest. It is to the West , but is not the most westward way to travel. It is called the Pioneer Highway, State Route 530, which skirts the village and continues on along a winding course through farmlands to Silvana and hence to Arlington and points far East—eventually it goes through Darrington and continues on to Rockport, where it ends in a merger with State Highway 20, plunging through the North Cascades pass and ending up in Winthrop at the mouth of the Methow River, at its junction with the great Columbia. This is a long ways off and the pass is presently closed because of snow. It will remain so until June, if a normal spring lies ahead.

The third route is my favorite and I usually take it. It is the Old Pacific Highway and aptly named, though it now is two lanes of speedy blacktop. If I hurry to the village by the quickest route, the middle one, I usually return to the lake along this one because of the grand view it provides. I can see the major mouth of the Stilly to the South and Port Susan, a bay so heavily silted that a huge beige shadow indicates its extreme shallowness and extends nearly to Camano Island. I can also see from here to the North to Skagit Bay, with its attendant flat fields dedicated to extensive agriculture.

The flats of the Stilly are also farmed, but on a reduced scale, as if not to contest what goes on just to the North. If the Skagit was not so near, so awesome, a person might be impressed by what these farmed fields provide. The Skagit simply dwarfs the other river valley and outclasses it from a scenic standpoint. There is no doubt why my favorite regional landscape painters, the late Richard Gilkey, chose the Skagit on which to live and paint. So would I.

Lake Ketchum straddles the two watersheds as if it can’t quite make up its mind which to belong to and might want to claim both. Thus it is truly neither. This is the perfect situation for the likes of me. Years ago I published a photoessay on the two river valleys, comparing and contrasting them. Today I am of the same divided mind. For so long the Stilly has been my adopted river, first as a city sojourner, then as a place where I lived for short times while the years advanced. But it is ruined and shows no signs of recovery. Lately I have had to switch my allegiance, with regret. It was either this or to dwell for the rest of my life in the shadow of a ruined river, remembering only its ghost self, for its gray water never clears anymore.

Along the Old Pacific Highway the farmers’ fields stretch off to the near horizon, flat as they can be, a vast geometrical arrangement of color bands that appeals greatly to the eye, or at least to mine. Do not think because it is winter the fields lie dormant. No, there is a lot going on. Winter crops are growing, or else the rich brown fields are newly turned. The colors are vibrant. I prefer the sight of them to summer, when all is various shades of the same intense green. These are winter colors.

Last year at this time the fields were under water. Now, enjoying the benefits of a minor drought and sparkling skies for more than a winter week, the fields are only puddled, here and there. A new color to my eye is this buff. I first saw it in a Gilkey painting (mine) and thought it all wrong, unreal. No color anywhere near to it exists in nature, I thought. Well, I was wrong, inexperienced. Now I see entire fields of that surprising, nondescript color.

What is it? What is being grown? A thoughtful farmer has provided the answer in the form of a sign erected just far enough away to be hard to read from the highway. After Norma has clued me, I can just make out the first part: “Barely for the birds.” I kid you not.

Barley probably has some practical uses besides feeding the flocks of snow geese, mallards, and immense trumpeter swans. It is used for making beer and ale. Also whiskey, I know. Good—it is a long winter ahead, and if the land provides the makings for some respite, so much the better.

My dictionary tells me additionally that barley has two possible word origins, but has been around a long, long time. Meanings fuzz and meld over time. One is Latin, far or farr, having to do with spelt, a hardy wheat grown in Europe,, or a grain from which farina is made. The word is also Germanic, coming to us from the Saxon occupation in the form of Old English: bere, baer, baerlic, barley. I suppose this is where we get beer. The word also means barn. A barn is where the good crop, barley, is stored to keep it dry, or else it will rot in the fields with winter rains. In middle English the vowel sounds have blended into a single one, barli. It was pronounced the same as today.

If I drive to the village the most direct way I see a number of farm animals, plus a few exotic species. First come Twetter’s cows. He used to have a big dairy farm, but the good denizens of this lake took him to court and charged him with polluting Lake Ketchum with great quantities of cow manure over the years. Worse, in times long past, he used to import chicken manure to enrich his fields and grow more and better grass for his cows. All this fed into our lake after draining through a wetland, bringing its burden of phosphorous and nitrogen. It is still here and the lake is adjudged eutrophic.

Milk cows are worse at polluting than beef cattle. I learned this only recently. Milk cows shit two or two and a half times as much and it takes a lot of well water, or water from a tiny stream, to wash out the barn repeatedly so you and your cows are not inundated. All ends up trickling into the lake; winter rains speed along the process.

Tweeter now raises only calves and beef cattle. He no longer grazes his North pasture, which is closer to the lake and the wetland feeding the lake through the small inlet that goes dry in summer. Nor does he import chicken manure any more. An invalid (he has an artificial leg), he is trying to be a cooperative farmer and good citizen. He has made a number of sacrifices that reduce his already small income. Joanne Berg says, “After all, he was here first.” But most of the people of the lake, including its two major long-time officers, paint him as the arch villain. They want to see him stop raising cattle entirely; they want him to pay the Lake Association hundreds of thousands of dollars in reparations. He does not have the money, of course, and even if he were to sell the farm he would not have. Such is the pair’s vindictiveness.

I do not believe him to be the enemy, but wouldn’t blame him for responding as if he were. Nobody likes to be hauled into court for just trying to make a living. His cows are Holsteins mostly, but it is a mixed herd, Norma points out. (I always yield to her superior country knowledge; she was born hereabouts.)

Continuing down the road apiece, on the slow middle route, we come across a field of oddly striped cows. These are Dutch belted. They are incredible and look to be wearing a saddle, or girdle, or else somebody snuck up on them in the night and painted them in bold stripes. A little farther down the road is a horse farm that could well be found in Kentucky, it is so large and splendiferous. (Never had use for that lovely word before.) Its owner is as rich as Tweeter must be poor. His house is palatial. What a vast difference there is between types of valley farming, horses and cows. These look to be thoroughbreds. They graze imperially.
A few are wearing overcoats against the onslaught of inclemency. They stroll; they own the spread, their manner says. What luxury, what ease. I envy them.

Then, barreling along the Pioneer Highway, my eyes scanning the cloud-streaked horizon, I almost miss what is nearest at hand. A filed holds some dark gray sheep. One has an overcoat on—his own stuff, woven, wool. It is a garment. I wonder why, why the need? Isn’t this a coals-to-Newcastle situation? Or did its owners unwisely shear him?

Oh, yes—two more tall guys, white and black, looking down their camel-like noses as through lorgnettes. These are llamas, elegant and strange. I remember seeing in the upper valley of the Stilly other llamas. But the new favorite there is ostriches. Once a woman realtor brought me several mangy, molted feathers as a gift. She knew I tied flies. They were useless for my purposes and not ornamental, either; they made me realize how high-grade were the materials we routinely use.

The ostrich-raisers will sell you eggs, if you will buy them, but they are not cheap. Well, they oughtn’t be. One egg will feed many. Each is as big as one of those toy footballs they sell parents so their toddlers will grow up to be NFL stars. I was offered one—either as a gift or to buy, by the same woman. I declined, with thanks.

Later I noticed that many of the ostrich farms had signs offering ostriches for sale. I doubt if there were any buyers. Another “hobby” farm on the blocks. I mean, would you buy an ostrich. Me, I can’t stomach so much as the idea of eating one of their eggs.

“We sure could use some rain,” I tell the gear fisherman walking out of the Grandy Creek Drift as I approach it. “Lots of rain.”

He grins and replies, “Yes, that’s right, but it is so beautiful like this.” We pass on. It is about two-thirty on a clear day growing increasingly gray.

He’s right: it is beautiful, with fresh snow airbrushed on the tops of the hills. Those hills are managed with recent clearcuts that hold the snow and logging roads that whitely crisscross the steep slopes.

It is a short pleasant walk through an alder copse to reach the creek and cross it; a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t ford it and backed away. Russ Osenbach was with me and had already crossed, but he is six-feet five and weighs in the neighborhood of two-forty. That is a lot to hold him down in the swift current, and he has long, long legs to match. I went back to my car and continued on to the Widow’s, urging him to stay and fish, and join me later. The river was rising rapidly and going out, as we say, and he left to join me half an hour later. He said he barely made the creek crossing, for it had come up even more. Today the creek is nothing, a mere trickle, and I splashed through it haughtily, my trepidation gone.

We are nearly a third of the way through December and in less than two weeks it will be officially winter. Funny, but winter is when the days get longer, though microscopically at first. The days have been getting shorter since late June. It seems long ago, that warm time.

There are few if any steelhead in the river and none reported being caught. It is often this way, with an early cold snap in December, and a prolonged low-water situation. Historically, if we had several days of hard warm rain and the river rose several feet, when it began to drop again, the river would be full of bright winter steelhead. And wouldn’t we all have fun?

To live on the lake is to become intimate with its birds, ducks, and geese, or else purposely to resist such a feeling and blunder along according to one’s old ways. In winter the panorama is constantly changing because the ducks are moving along the Pacific Flyway; they stop here on their journey South for varying lengths of time. For example, this morning I counted nineteen mallards near our dock, all congregated, the sexes mixed, feeding in the shallows. The unevenness of the number bothered me. I longed for one more to complete the package. Sure enough, in mid-lake, I spotted a mallard drake steaming to join the others.

Additionally there is a small remnant flock of American widgeons. They did not materialize in the numbers of last year, when often there was more than a hundred in a bunch, all wheeling and lifting off as one, or nearly so, scurrying down to the far end of the lake when disturbed by something or someone such as myself rowing a boat around my new lake. Then they would burst into the air, peppering the water with hail-like duck shit. Lovely.

There are shovelers lingering; all females except for one lone guy, sighted earlier, now gone again. The hens have been here for a couple of months, their peaks constantly plowing the water as the feed on weed and algae. And we have one horned grebe in daily attendance, a lovely bird, with an artfully carved neck. I also spotted (but could not confirm it until this morning) a solitary female ringnecked duck.

I don’t know why they call them ringnecks, when the ring is at the far end of their upper beak, on both the male and female. It is as though they have been sipping milk. Both sexes have a pointed head.

It is clear to me, even from a cursory inspection: Daffy Duck in the comics is a ringneck.

There is a new painted sign to be found at the junction of certain side roads along the highway. It reads, “No Outlet.” My God, what does this mean? Is there a lake or pond nearby, one that probably is stagnant, if such names can be trusted? No, no; it is merely a new confusing way of saying an old simple thing. Dead End, we used to call it. Everybody knows what this means. The road ends here, down the road a piece, and hopefully there is a turn around. (If there isn’t, there will probably be a lot of wheel tracks on both sidings, as many somebodies tried to make a turn around by zigzagging back and forth on the shoulders.

If Dead End won’t do for all time, how about No Exit? I’ve always rather liked it, for it has a European flavor and Sartre, I believe, wrote a play with that splendid name. It means additionally there is no hope.

Nobody will ever write a play named No Outlet, I predict. Unless it is about a frustrated electrician.

Here and there along the Skagit river right now there are eagles. Not until today, however, have we seen what might be called a lot of eagles. Where did they all suddenly come from? That is not so important as, What are they here for? It is for the dead dog salmon.

Nights are cold enough for the rotting salmon carcasses to freeze and days just warm enough to thaw them again. The refreezing process prolongs the food supply, I figure, which is another way of saying that it slows the decay to the point where the corpses will last longer.

Each season the great birds come here around early December to stand on river bars and gorge. They will eat so much that they can barely fly and become nearly ground-ridden. When not feeding or flying off to some more comely place—an eagle Nirvana of stinking meat—they perch in trees. A leafless tall alder is ideal.

Old birds, mature eagles, have brilliant white tail feathers and heads. It is a bright color found nowhere in nature, unless it is icy snow caught at a certain angle by the emerging winter sun. I can spot them on distant littered beaches by their unusual shine, knowing few days ago that nothing gleamed so in that location. It has to be an eagle. And if the bright spot moves around some, I am confirmed by the bird’s act of feeding.

Younger birds are present, which makes me wonder if they do not stick with their parents long after the first year, after they have achieved wondrous flight. I suspect mature birds mate only with mature birds, and so such a pair is not a breeding pair. They bond for life, unlike many of us. So if we see—and I’ve just seen them—a bald eagle in close company with one that has no mature signs yet, can we presume it is a family still? From the familiar way the different birds behave I think so. The smaller one is constantly hectoring the one that is white, fore and aft. The old guy (or gal) puts up with a lot.

My dentist is Jack Randall. He is from Nebraska, long ago, and studied at the university there. He describes himself as a country dentist. To me this is a new breed—though it may be a very old one that I’ve just come to know. The breed might be classified as threatened or endangered.

I like the idea of an accessible, friendly dentist, one who takes the time to chat and gossip familiarly about non-dental matters. People, politics, the Internet.

“You are Marcus Welby of the mouth,” I tell him, with as much of a grin as his hand in my mouth will permit, knowing he is old enough to remember the role of a medical doctor who made house calls (and more), portrayed so well and memorably by the late Robert Young.

Norma has been to see him for the first time, at my urging, because of a painful tooth infection or abscess (are they different?) not properly addressed by her previous dentist, a man who seems inept, to put it mildly. So she calls Dr. Jack on a Monday morning, late, and he agrees to see her right after lunch, which is two o’clock. That is pretty expeditious service anywhere.

He gives her some special medicine and soon she begins to feel better. Next is my turn to see him a week later for a routine one-surface filling. Seated, bibbed, and tipped back, I thank him for seeing her so promptly. I suspect he doesn’t realize she is my wife and I want to underscore the point. If he doesn’t know, he handles it well.

This surprises me. “I should think they would,” I persist. “You’re very friendly and you like to chat and tell stories. You put people at their ease. You listen. Doesn’t everybody like that?”

He says—sad, plump, moon-faced, completely vulnerable—“Not everybody likes a country dentist.”

Seven cormorants on the lake together. One is busy folding the broken umbrella of his wings. This they do regularly. It must have something to do with drying them and also keeping warm. Over and over.

These are double-crested cormorants. They can be told from the Brandt cormorants by their bright orange chin pouches. The Brandts have yellow chins and, directly under the lower beak, a patch of light blue. As for crests, the double seems to have a solitary one, the Brandt none, not unless on both sub-species one counts the rough back of the head as one. Immature Brandts are white on breast, but dark on the belly. In flight the double cresteds hold their heads higher. They do too on water, giving them a snooty appearance.

On our lake they tend to cruise in loose formation. The pattern widens out, then reforms more tightly, but often there is a bird or two out of formation, cruising here and there. I’m sure they are all aware of the other cormorants in the flock and what each is doing. Frequently two individuals heading in an opposite direction in the center of the lake will come abreast of the larger component and will join them, reversing the direction of the group. Then two others will split apart.

Right now they are patrolling the center of the lake, which just happens to be deepest. In is probably no accident. I’ve been waiting to see them dive as a body, but they seem to have no cause and continue their surface activity. A solitary common merganser male is also moving up and down the lake’s center. When the cormorants approach, he goes winging down to the far end of the lake, flying low.

There was a second male common merganser here last week, but I don’t see him today. I remember how easy it was to identify them at a great distance on Lake Washington in Seattle, when there were common goldeneye males about; the merganser male is decidedly pink in the body, where his head is dark—green, approaching black. But the pinkish-beige tone to his body’s whiteness is unique in nature. The goldeneye is brilliant white, and so is the smaller bufflehead. The eagle (to which none of these ducks bears any resemblance) is extremely white, head and tail, when he is mature.

The merganser evidently doesn’t like being approached, be it by another duck or by man. Off he goes. Meanwhile the cormorants remain reluctant to go sub-surface. The reason why I watch and wait so intently is because Norma has correctly noted that they dive as a body, bing-bing-bing. Our seven would disappear in individual rings in a matter of seconds. What they do then, underwater, Norma calls seining. The work within a few yards of each other, at the same depth (this is a guess, you realize), headed in the same direction. Seven of them presently on our lake, I pity the fate of any perch, trout, or bass that they encounter.

For long periods they remain out of water, usually choosing to roost on one of the docks of my neighbors that is gradually disintegrating and by degrees submerging. In fact all the ducks prefer the docks that are ride low in the water, for they can hop aboard them and dismount just as easily. John and Tracy’s dock this autumn is covered with whitewash.

This morning on a rainy wind-tossed lake to heads bobbed near the center. They belonged to the first of the returning otters. Last year there were five or six—one died, apparently of natural causes. Otters will travel over land—generally at night—to reach a new body of water. December 16, this year, for the record.

People around the lake are of two schools of thought about otters. Anton, my neighbor and fellow fisher, plus some others, see otters as the enemy, for they diminish the fish population (though generally this is scrap fish). And they leave a filthy mess on people’s docks—the residue of their fishy meal. But many of the lake’s denizens enjoy watching them and their antics, seeing them as an essential part of the lake’s ecosystem. I tend to side with them. Why is it then that I tense up at the sight of them each time? I guess I must be of a mixed mind. But I find that they have contributed to my strongest memories of the lake.

Walking around the lake yesterday, I quickly pushed Norma aside as we came to a vale. I thought she was going to step on top of a small injured bird. It appeared helpless, fluttering wanly along the littered asphalt in the lee of a wind storm. I believed the bird unable to fly, or to fly for more than a few feet, for it kept fluttering off about this far as I kept boldly approaching it. I found I could come within a scant yard of it. That’s pretty close.

Suddenly I saw a number of such birds, all hopping around among the dreck. They behaved the same way. Each held its position until nearly trod upon; none fluttered off very far. There must have been a dozen.

About the size of a large egg, they were prettily marked with a brilliant red/orange strip on the crown, then with a band that was nearly black, and last by a white stripe or chevron at the eye. Otherwise the bird was buff, with a reddish tinge. They were feeding on seeds from the windblown cedars and firs.

We identified them promptly upon returning home and consulting two good bird books. Ruby-crested kinglets. We had never seen them before. Another birder’s first. Such small things have inordinate importance. The books said the birds were insect eaters who frequent evergreens. Today they were eating seeds from the same trees. Not many insects present in cold December.

Attrition is necessary part of life and inescapable. Continuing on our morning walk, we came across a U-Haul moving van parked at the bottom of the steep curving drive at Dana Base’s lakefront house. Only recently has a For Sale sign sprouted there. We caught him at the start of the moving out process. Naturally curious I dragged Norma by the hand to the bottom of his drive.

We saw only people we didn’t know carrying large items out of the house and into the deep recesses of the van. I asked one about the whereabouts of Dana and Dana immediately appeared in the door, as if in response. He looked harried and rushed.

He explained that he had a new job with the state Fish and Wildlife. He was getting out of habitat work and into game management, his specialty. The new job is in Pend Oreille. I asked if this was in Idaho. No, he said, it was the name of a tiny county here in Washington state, in the extreme northeast corner. He will be concerned with moose, elk, and deer populations. Also with game birds, which are his favorites.

We had worked together ten years ago on a program called Timber/Fish/Wildlife, correctly ordered in terms of its priorities to participants. He had taken a beating from the timber companies and the state Department of Natural Resources, which had used the program as a guise in which to keep clearcutting. I dropped out when the hard work I did proved unfruitful. As it was his livelihood, he had to continue.

“There are no words to describe how I felt about it,” he said bitterly. “Nobody can understand.”

I said, don’t forget, I was there, too. Of all people I would understand. And Curt Kraemer, the fish biologist and friend. But apparently Dana felt as though he were all alone. Well, words come more easily to me, and I can find them; also I understood.

A look up in the mangy, denuded hills and mountains above the Sauk and Skagit rivers provide constant, never-healing, grim reminders. In case any one should be tempted to try to forget.

We gave our next door neighbors on both sides inexpensive poinsettias because they are cheerful tokens of the season, Christmas. We bought two extras, one for the widow who lets me fish across from her home on the Skagit and one for the Hans Berg family, who lives across the lake from us. We finally delivered it to them last weekend.

It is a dark time for them. Hans is clearly dying. It takes time. Will he last till Christmas? The first of the new year? Their house was earlier strung with Christmas lights, as usual, and they burned brightly for a few days straight, but now have been left off for many days. When we brought the plant by, he was in bed. Joanne came to the door in response to my light rap on the glass pane. She was carrying a new grandchild, probably the one that was christened a week or so ago.

The message is, life goes on, regardless. In the midst of Hans’s slow dying, a child is born, a grandchild, not the first, and the child is nourished, blessed, and grows. How wonderful. There is constant attrition, but heir in constant renewal. All the same, the sight of the nearly dark house, day after day, is sad. I miss its tall morning column of woodsmoke that Hans used to build and light, along with the evening spangle of lights. It is a dark time for all of us, but especially for him and his.

I think of him and his plight often these days—myself an acquaintance, not quite a friend.

How near is a movie theater? Norma and I were talking about this at lunch. Neither of us knew. “Mt. Vernon?” she responded. I doubted audibly whether there was one there that operated on a daily basis. (Often lingering small town theaters open just on weekends, with matinees aimed at school kids.) I guessed that Burlington might have a multiplex? Marysville? I knew the Everett Mall had one, but it was so far off. A good thirty miles.

The point was, in years we’ve never gone to a movie theater, not since a library benefit where they showed Dickens’s Little Dorritt. But here is the clincher: we watch a movie nearly every night.

It comes to us via TV. This is how most of America receives its meal of movies, and I suspect it is daily, as with us. Even President Clinton owns up to watching one regularly in the White House. (He can’t very well go out to a theater to watch one, even if he wanted to, for fear of being Lincolnated.) But he enjoys watching one at home—first run, before they reach the theater—with perhaps a homey fire in the grate, in his royal house slippers. And so do I.

We have a dish, down by the lake. Not the smallest, it is nonetheless of discrete size, about four feet in diameter and perched on its mast beneath a tall hemlock. When it snows heavily, the hemlock boughs dip low with their load of heavy white stuff and the signal from the satellite can’t fight its way to the receiver. We get absolutely no picture, no daily movie, nothing, until I don boots and go outside, wading my way through the drifts until I am able to dislodge the snow with a broom. Lo, a picture again.

If not a hometown (read Seattle, Seattle still) sporting event, it will be ever a movie.

We subscribe at the moment to two packages of premium channels. One is Star (Sundance/IFC, which includes a few other vintage channels such as Encore, and the other package is three channels of Showtime. We subscribed to Showtime for a month precisely to get several movies we badly wanted to see—Hamlet (Brannaugh’s) and the old Nosterafu (Klaus Kinsky’s), which Norma greatly desired. We will probably drop Showtime (don’t tell them, it’s a surprise) at the end of December. But it is impressing us with some good movies we hadn’t known about. Each comes as a bonus for the fixed price. Of course we are fools for movies.

A month of Showtime costs $11. For this you get three channels running 24 hours per day. The number of available movies is not quite infinite but is impressive. It is more than any person could watch without burning out his eyes and his mind. God save him if he should try.

Much of what is on the screen is garbage. But—as with life in general—in among the garbage is some gems. The discriminating modern person will discriminate what he serves his eyes. He prefers a life of choices. They must be his.

Since movies are important to me and I see so many of them, I thought I’d try to learn more about the complex industry that makes them. My fishing friend, Dick Sylbert, who has been production designer on so many fine films, suggested when he was here over Thanksgiving that I read Sidney Lumet’s book, Making Movies (Knopf, 1955). So Norma put in an interlibrary reserve on the book and soon it arrived. It is as good as Dick said it would be. I’m not surprised to see him mentioned on page 54.

A movie must immediately create a convincing and interesting world, with characters of some complexity and appeal. If it does, I become instantly rooted in the action and will watch, enthralled, till the end.

If it doesn’t do this well, I may continue to watch but guardedly, giving the movie makers a little more time in which to capture me. I am a good audience, fairly easily seduced, time after time, but a sophisticated one. I love movies, but if the makers play loose with me, and are not careful about details and what is called continuity, soon it will be goodbye from me. there are so many movies in this world—the accumulation of decades and many nations—that there is no problem quickly finding another that is better from every critical standpoint.

Lumet mentions early in the book Twelve Angry Men, which has recently been remade. It is about a jury deliberation after the judge has sequestered them (all men, all white, and this is unquestioningly how it was) in a pretty much cut-and-dried murder trial. At first vote there is only one holdout to a guilty verdict, and it happens to be the handsome, persuasive Henry Fonda, now dead. All or nearly all the actors are either dead or incredibly old. Fonda is the doubter, who asks to be persuaded that things are different from how the other eleven feel and believe them to be. But the opposite takes place. Instead of them persuading him to change his vote, one by one they go over to his side. They become doubters, too. This is the movie.

Eventually it is eleven to one, in the other direction. All but one now want acquittal. Finally the remaining juror—overplayed but consistently so by Lee J. Cobb—breaks down, sobbing, and confesses his bias, based on having an ungrateful son himself, and changes his vote. Now they are all for acquittal and can go home. The movie ends on an emotionally (but not intellectually) satisfying note and the audience feels purged. Now we can all go home happy and relieved from the theater in which we saw it, casting each other smiles of commiseration.

Only nobody goes to theaters anymore to see movies. Instead we stay home, build up the fire, make our own popcorn, and the movie comes to us. Movies arrive in a ceaseless stream, with both chaff and seed. It is important to be able to tell them apart early, or a lot of time will be wasted. Nobody has to sit through a bad movie in his own home. It is not as though you bought an expensive ticket. Another movie is waiting—live or nearly so or on video tape. Just punch in the numbers of the channel and it is yours. The charge for it is usually by the month for unlimited, round-the-clock use of the channel. And then there is pay-per-view. Channels of it.

It is not surprising, given the circumstances, that many available movies are less than great. They are less than good, as well. Many are simply awful. This is what happens in a democracy of taste. Movies today are being made carelessly for an omnivorous market. America needs its nightly movies fix.

The Skagit Flats are aptly named. They resemble a cookie sheet and go on for rough miles, the fields in winter varying shades of rich gold, green, gray, umber. Along the edges of some vast acreage lie what appear to be clumps of old snow. Some is alarmingly white, some dirty looking. It is not snow. You are looking at trumpeter swans, with a few tundra swans fixed in inconspicuously. How do you tell them apart? Or do you?

Who can tell the difference between a trumpeter and a tundra? And does it really matter, if you’re not a swan yourself, in full breeding plumage? Otherwise the distinction is moot. (Or it is “mute,” if you happen to be a swan of that name, and not inclined to betray your true identity with so much as a honk, whistle, or toot.

Whatever, the differences are small, indiscernible from a distance, and these large birds are reluctant to let you get up close to survey them. They insist that you keep far away and use powerful binoculars or a spotting scope. If you don’t, there is a blast from the assorted brasses, and off go the swans in a whirl of white that apes a snowstorm. A whole cloud of them will move to the far field and you are ever farther away from your goal of species identification. So don’t alarm them by crowding too close.

They can be told apart by small signs. Trumpeters (Cygnus buccinator) dominate and announce their arrival with a noisy blast—B-flat, perhaps. They come in winging low, like aircraft homing to their carrier but of course many more in number, all at once, to their stubbled landing field. Wings drooping they settle low and often drop with a splat to the muddy ground. They are birds of a flock, with flock joining flock sociably throughout the day. I wonder why it is—on a given afternoon—they will frequent one harvested cornfield and ignore another? The waste-corn quotient in each must be about the same, or is one field already picked over, the other ripe for post-harvest? The likes of me can’t tell.

Swans are often mud-splattered, giving them a soiled look; also the immature birds are beige or gray. Only the mature ones are clean and snowy.

One can presume, until proved otherwise, that all of a flock gathered in a wintry field are trumpeters, not Cygnus columbianus, the tundras. To make certain look for a more rounded skull and a yellow spot in front of the eye (though not all tundras have the spot). Tundras also have a goose-like head, with more facial slope toward the bill. The black on the bill of tundras is less conspicuous and does not reach the eye or seem to touch it. The Bewick’s swan is a sub-species of tundra and has a big yellow spot between the beak and eye. There is a sub-species of trumpeter as well; it is the whooper, the Eurasian version, no doubt an ancient geographic mutation (as with widgeons), and a large yellow of a portion of the distinct black nose patch on the trumpeter. Also the whooper’s sound is different, hence the name. It’s sound is a bugle note, the National Geographic field guide tells me; in fact, it is a double note. Honk-honk.

The trumpeter’s forehead and beak remind me of the canvasback duck, and if you have see the duck, but not the swan, you will know what I mean at once. The slope is a steady forty-five degrees, and is quite handsome and distinct. Tundras, my text informs me, whoop and yodel; the trumpeter simply sounds his brassy note or a pair of them. the tundras used to be called whistling swans. I regret the name change and feel that something ancient and fine has been lost, lost again.

Both species became greatly reduced in number and were approaching endangered status, but have responded well to protective regulations. The Golden Guide to birds describes the tundra’s call as “a muffled, musical whistle” and says its honking resembles that of the Canada goose. Golden disagrees with the National Geographic (birders always quarrel) over the trumpeter’s sound. “A sonorous single honk or double honk,: says the National Geographic, while Golden describes it as “a low note, followed by about 3 on a higher pitch.”

Around the West, and perhaps around the nation, Audubon members perform a Christmas Day bird count. I am not presently a member, but the urge to join them, at least on my lake, through a window, is too great to resist. So here goes, as the fog providently briefly parts:

Five male common mergansers and a solitary female, she looking and perhaps feeling slight out of place; a large (say, two dozen) mixed flock of mallards, all puddled together in the center of the lake and collectively sleeping in a pod, head bowed; four female northern shovelers, all swimming with their large, spatulate beaks under water, gathering in some continuous ingestion of minute vegetable matter; lone piedbilled grebe near my shore, about half the time underwater, fishing.

I must presume that about half a dozen double-tufted cormorants are also around, though not now accounted for. They appear to be in winter residence, like the mergansers, no doubt because of the spinyray population, which both species of birds will largely decimate. But this will make room for next year’s crop of these fish. The survivors will spawn in spring and replenish the stock.

Fog again obscures everything. But that’s okay. My son and his wife will soon arrive for lunch and an exchange of gifts. Right now I can see my dock but nothing else. The homes across the lake are obscured by a light gray veil. Above this I know an invisible sun is burning.

After lunch (borscht—how’s that for Christmas fare?) my wife and I lead our son and his wife for a two-mile post-prandial. It is a good way to clear the head and get some mild exercise. Once, near dark, Lisa decided to take the walk alone, not knowing the countryside and its roads. She soon got lost and, when she was gone overly long, my son set out in his car to find her. About this time she stopped at a distant neighbor in Wilderness Ridge and was set straight on the route. But Garth found her and drove her home, slightly shaken and embarrassed. So today our daylight walk served to lessen the trauma and show her the clear route.

The sky was cool gray and obscure. We walked rapidly but not so fast as one or two will take the course. We pointed out some general points of interest. For a distance a foursome of people younger than we kept us remote company. We reached the point where, through the trees, between property lines, the lake could be glimpsed, and my son recognized several familiar points from when he had kayaked the shoreline. The lake was calm and winter-gray. The fog had lifted some but still produced a constant even neutral tone. Sky and lake were about the same color.

It had been quiet—too quiet—at Hans Berg’s house across the lake. They had strung colored Christmas lights along the raingutters on the front, where it faced our house, directly across the lake, but lately the lights had been left off. We knew Hans was sick, deathly sick, from the cancer that had hounded him the past several years. Family and relatives had piled up their cars in the drive to visit, and there had been the big party following the latest grandchild’s baptism a couple of weeks ago. But the house had been continuously dark at night, or when not dark inside there had been no Christmas lights turned on. One night a few days ago they had been switched on and burned late, forgotten, long after the house’s interior lights had been turned off, early. Since then nothing but darkness. And no telltale plume of smoke from the chimney. I remember how Hans had always lit a morning fire.

We had been approaching the house with some trepidation for days. Now we saw a pickup truck pull out of the driveway and head our way, its driver presumably one of the several daughters’s husbands or boy friends. I hailed it in my usual excessively outward manner, raising my hand like a traffic cop and in effect ordering the driver to stop. Stopping he cranked down the window.

I reached in and clasped this stranger by the scruff of his jacket at the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised. He suffered terribly, I know. At least he is no longer in pain.”

Words come to me easily, sometimes too easily. But I liked Hans and dreaded the greatly anticipated news. When I first met him at a lake association meeting, I had thought him gruff and complaining. Then, speaking to him afterwards, I became quickly acquainted with his great smile and warm manner. He had been first mate on a succession of passenger liners. Either he had retired a bit early, or else his disease had dictated that he give up his job, for I knew him to be sort of sixty-five. This made him younger than me.

I did not know him well and only had talked to him, briefly, on six or eight occasions, but each of them had been pleasant, friendly. Always the big smile. I had seen him get thinner, weaker. Last time, only a couple of weeks ago, he had leaned on a cane and I kept him standing longer than I should have, locked in conversation, when his family was taking him out to what was probably their last luncheon outside of the house or hospital.

He had shot me a “I-doing-the-best-I-can-expect-to-do” look. Chemo and radiation had stopped weeks ago; he was at the point where they simply try to make you comfortable and the medical authorities want to forget you. They want you to go home and die there. You are willing, but family members keep rushing you back to Emergency when you show signs of death that are alarming to them.

I hoped he had died at home but suspected that he hadn’t. But he had remained at home long, right up until recently. And perhaps he had been at home last night in the darkened house, as Christmas Eve ended and Christmas Day had begun.

Tonight, because their house was dark again, it seemed wrong to light our outdoor Christmas lights on the deck that faces them. Or our tree inside, either.

In summer, when I really want to bug my wife, I tell her that the days are getting shorter already, though imperceptibly so far. But when we’re both depressed in fall, which really seems and feels like winter, as we approach Christmas, I am quick to point out, for both our benefits, that now the days are getting longer. This is a truism, but I’m not certain it is absolutely true.

I decided to consult the oracle, The Old Farmer’s Almanac for 1998. (Funny, but I don’t remember that “old” being in there before.) And sure enough, it informs me that I’m not quite right. Well, if you’re not quite right, you are wrong.

The entry for December informs me, “The winter solstice occurs on the 21^st at 5:56 {ST.” Well, isn’t the situation pretty much as I’d described it to her, except for having the precise time? Let’s round it off at six o’clock in the dim afternoon. Or is my problem that I round off too many things? The Almanac goes on to tell me “the earliest sunset occurred two weeks earlier, and the afternoon daylight is already growing longer.” (P. 86.)

I consult the table below. The sun has been setting at 4:51 steadily, all month so far. But suddenly on the 15^th, it is a minute longer, and on the 18^th yet another minute. On the 20^th and 22^nd we gain another minute each. By the 30^th the sun is setting at five o’clock—in San Francisco, anyway. To adjust this time for Seattle requires some complex minute calculations that I am, frankly, incapable of performing, or even attempting for something so puny as this.

The length of the day—hours and minutes of light—continues to shrink throughout the month until we reach the 27^th, at which point we acquire one minute longer of dazzling daylight—this is nine hours and thirty-four minutes. How can this happen, if the sun is setting later, ever since the 15^th? It must be because we continue to lose from the other end. Sunrise is getting no earlier, early in the month. Ah, but the table indicates the sun is rising later: on the first it is at 7:06; by the end of the month it is at 7:25. What’s going on? Shouldn’t we be gaining time and daylight at the other end of the day, the beginning?

Not according to the Almanac, that knows all, tells all. We can only believe and try to enjoy what studying one’s watch and the visible signs of the sunset indicate. Light’s benefit is all on the sinking end.

The day’s length is still receding at the end of December. It goes from 9 hours, 45 minutes at the month’s start to 9 hours, 36 minutes at the month’s (and year’s) end. If we look only at the sunset, though, we can detect a later sinking of the golden orb, and tell ourselves that it’s really not true that the days are still growing shorter.

It is bitter cold, the lake frozen over. Five coots tentatively walk where yesterday they swam familiarly. Extra clothes are donned for our late morning walk. No fishing on the rivers for obvious reasons, ice flows being the chief one. Snow, forecast, several inches.

After nearly a week of dry cold—with freezing at night, daytime temperatures about forty—clouds begin to roll in from the South, pushed by winds. The firs and cedars at the lake begin to stir, rustle, whisper their boughs, lean to one side. Visibility disappears by degrees. The Berg house is gone, the far edge of the lake; all the attendant rising, encircling shapes are eaten up by what looks like fog. Suddenly the wind hushes. Dry flakes of snow begin to fall. So small in diameter, so fine, they can hardly be expected to add up to anything. Oh, yeah? Yes, the souvenir globe has been shook again.

By the time we finish watching a movie on videotape and it is past time for bed, nearly three inches have silently piled up on the porch rail and the deck glitters from the lights when I snap them on to see how we’re doing, snow-wise. Throughout the night the stuff continues to fall. A kind of expectant hush fills the air. You can practically pick up the vibes of the neighborhood kids, still abed; school called off over the radio, the day dedicated to playing in the white stuff and rolling up great heavy balls of it into first a snowman, then his wife, then (until we tire of it and all the good snow is gone) a bunch of crummy snowkids. They generally remain uncompleted, including the snowpets.

When the rains come—and assuredly they soon will—it is the parents who will be left standing the longest. They always are, for they are staunchest.

Of course the lake froze clear across, days ago, so the snow had something solid to fall upon. We knew it would; it doesn’t take too long for it to happen. The water seems to thicken before your eyes into a kind of slush or mush, then draws itself slickly together. How does it differ visually from the ordinary lake? Well, it lacks any wave action. Also, it loses its rolling glitter, one might say. The lake is no longer water but some new element, not quite land, but more like land than anything else in earth’s easy repertoire.

The first thin scud of snow on the lake increases reflectance three-fold, at least. All of our front windows (13, but who’s superstitious?) flood with light, even though the sky is uniformly leaden. The interior of our house lights as if by a dozen photofloods. Why, we’re on the set of somebody’s movie. (Careful there what you do next.) I’ve never cast my own shadow on the livingroom rug before. How marvelous. It’s more like a play, really. The windows are our footlights. The lighting guy’s gone crazy with power, electrical power. Why doesn’t the director notice and say something to him? Wrench away his switch, or whatever?

Inside and out a novel drama is taking place. We move like ghosts, like dramatis personae, from chair to chair, across the kitchen floor, to a table to pick up a book, newspaper, magazine. Every mundane action takes on a stage significance. Our eyes shine in each other’s gaze. When we have occasion to speak there is a hushed expectancy on each other’s part. Yes? What? The words will have great import, but always prove to be disappointing.

Out on the street he county’s snowplow has honored us, but turned away disdainfully just a few doors away. If we have been improvident (but we haven’t) and need a trip to the grocery, the route will be clear and only mildly eventful. For our neighbors a half block away, though, the trip will be as adventuresome as most could hope for.

When the snow leaves, we always know it is coming. The local TV stations have had nothing much to say for days except woe and weather. Since they are fifty miles to the South, Seattle, they belabor and whine about the icy streets and show gleeful pictures of sad automobile skids and the aftermath. They also announce the coming end of the snow—proudly, as though they themselves created the storm (needing so badly a media event) and now they have in their vast paternal wisdom decreed it is enough, and it is time for something else.

Unchain the Metro-bus tires, put away the plows, open up the schools again. Rivulets run in the streets and the translucent slush at the curb gradually shrinks in on itself, hourly halving its bulk, its core substance. By another morning it will all be gone, all except for an irregular gray mound or two sadly left standing. Snow Mom, Snow Dad. You’ll only recognize their remains if you’d seen them a day or two previously.

Our favorite ducks return to the lake, but not until it fully thaws and the vast half-sunk ice sheet breaks up and is swallowed. This takes longer each time than we think it will.

When the lake was solid, all we ever saw was a few potbellied coots walking miserably around, flatfooted and tentative as penguins. They didn’t stay out on the ice cake for long but plodded to a snowy shoreline and poked around with their yellow snouts. All the other ducks—less hardy, evidently—vanished. When I search my mind as to where they might have gone, I come up empty-handed. Only they know, and they ain’t talking, Copper.

Today the lake is ordinary, tame. Our house is filled with dull gray light and not awful much of it. We are on the morning edge of turning on individual reading lights if we want to see the pages. Norma gives in. In my window writing chair I hold out, hoping for more light from the sky. No longer a studied actor on my stage, I welcome the low-level light and know in my heart my winter-dimmed eyes will settle happily for it.

A flock of seven tightly linked ducks land in the center of the lake with minimal splash and beg to be identified through my binoculars. They are small, far away, and the light is bad, both too weak and too strong, making them into near silhouettes. My first guess is scaups, but it doesn’t seem right. I don’t remember the white crescent at the scaup’s shoulder. Could they be . . . (the envelope, please)? I consult the Golden Bird Book. It shows just such a shape and coloring; even the telltale crescent.

They are ring-necks. There are four brilliant males, three drab females. (I don’t care, feminists, what you say, that is how they look.) The ducks hang together, far out, as though a raft. What they are is a raft of fish-eating, diving ducks.

There will be an occasional fishing report, but, I promise, you, not often nor long. So bear with me. It has been a terrible winter for hatchery steelhead, and the fear is there will be few wild ones returning, also, so the Fish and Wildlife people have put emergency closures into effect today and nobody can fish the upper reaches of most rivers. In turn, fishers have deserted their favorite streams. If you can’t fish where hatchery fish predominate, nor keep the wild fish that happen there, nobody wants to fish except a few of us. And they are right—there are few fish being caught by those of us who still must suit up and go out.

I hooked and lost at the beach last week a fine fish of ordinary size. I was standing on the beach at the mouth of Grandy Creek on the Skagit and had the fish all played out. I was ready to land it and thought of it as mine for the oven, when the hook pulled out and the fish swam away. I laughed, but I wanted to bring home a fish badly. I’d had all the fight out of a fish that is possible and the only thing remaining was to slid it on the beach and perhaps kill it.

So yesterday I returned and while at the top of the run hooked a fine fish that showed itself several times in jumps and appeared to be a female of six or seven pounds. Nothing sensational, true, but a strong, good-fighting fish. I fished out the rest of the pool with no bumps, no hits, and returned to the top. I fished on down to where I hooked the first fish and, lo, another hit softly at the end of the drift. When I tightened, it proved to be a fine male fish, very strong, and one that made repeated runs out a distance, even when I stood on the beach and was ready to land it. Summer runs are like this, but usually not winters.

It was a beautiful bright well-proportioned male fish, with a pronounced long jaw and tiny lower kip. Wild. I killed it for one of Norma’s special dinners, and perhaps for our neighbors, John and Tracy. It is Norma’s choice whether or not she shares it. [She did.] This is the couple that likes fresh steelhead and salmon so much that, a year ago, when I gave them a piece, they couldn’t resist it and, gulp, ate it . . . raw! I shall never forget this. Now, many months later, I look at them closely, but detect no untoward signs from having done this. They told me the Japanese do this all the time. But then they are the ones who bombed Pearl Harbor.

It seemed odd, bringing home a dead fish again; it even seemed odd carrying it out the woodsy trail and across the braided channel of Grandy Creek. But it felt good, too.

Before we came to the lake to live, we tried country living for, oh, five solid months. We moved into our place on the river, got a telephone installed, linked up with the Internet, brought up an old computer with my favorite word-processing program (WordPerfect then, Word now), my active files, brought in a satellite dish, and hooked up to Primestar.

The question was, could we function in the country as well, or nearly as well, as in the city? I had to find out. With a few exceptions we found out that we could.

The exceptions first. Well, there was laundry. We either had to run into town, Arlington, to use a laundromat, or else travel back to Seattle to use the washer and dryer at home. Invariably we chose the latter. And there was our mail to collect, though we had a mail delivery to our mailbox up on the hill on the long road leading back to the Whitman Road. Our mail there was only cursory. The bulk was directed at the city. This was proof that our river interlude was idyllic, temporary.

It worked out well, better than I expected. We learned that one Seattle daily newspaper had a rural route that passed by our mailbox and as soon as we started a subscription to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the carrier installed a pretty orange tube, stenciled with the paper’s logo, for the paper’s dry delivery. It resided on the same pressure-treated post that we had installed to hold our large rural mailbox. The post also held our street address numerals on a small signboard, courtesy the Oso fire department, a volunteer outfit three miles down the road. They didn’t want to have to hunt for us, once it was reported to them that we were burning down.

Groceries were a long ways off, but they often are, and we discovered that once you were in your car and headed for the nearest good supermarket (not the Oso General Store, certainly) you might as well ride the accelerator a bit longer, for it makes only a small difference in gas and time—in the long run, two minor elements. And we bought large, each time to the mart, in order to lengthen the time before we had to head back for some necessity.

I was surprised, then, how much my life (especially my morning routines) resembled the one in the city. Of course our domicile was quaintly rustic, which is a nice way of referring to the tight shambles of an old mobile home. The view out the windows was one of green lace, , as spring came on and the willows and vine maples budded and came into leaf bloom. Much the same thing was happening in town. The flora was slightly retarded in the country and different, though we had fresh maples blooming both places. In the city, birches, in the country, copious alders.

The morning coffee tasted the same, the paper to read identical, though I often saved it at both places till later, going to my writing first, or procrastinating this task by going into Internet mail and visiting my favorite Web pages. If a good movie was scheduled for some peculiar time of day, I’d try to plan ahead and tape it on the VCR, as I did in the city, or, much like the city still, I’d forget and kick myself for not remembering in time and miss the whole thing. Then I’d settle down into one of my long writing stints and not come up for air until summoned to lunch.

Oh, yes: when the fish started to run in the river, I’d drive three miles after morning coffee and fish whatever favorite run of mine near Oso was unoccupied or, at the least, uncrowded. For it was summer soon, and it would be too hot to fish in the middle of the day, and I had better seize the cooler hours of late morning or perish later. I could write during the worst part of the day, for we had an airconditioner, and in my writing cubbyhole, where we didn’t have cool, piped air, there was a circulating fan. It went back and forth, prescribing a 180-degree arc, making a little tic at the outer edge of its reality.

Norma would garden—heavy work, oft repeated—or else read, if it was rainy. When the day got really hot, we would don swimming suits and water sandals, and we (only I, really) would dash down the slope and into the stony shallows. The water was always shockingly cold, cold enough to wilt resolve (and lust), and I’d usually splash myself some and we would settle down on some mainstream boulders, our feet in the streaming current, and turn our faces to the sun—which was in the same direction as came the invariable upstream breeze, always cooling.

The remainder of the day was much as it had been in the city, replete with noises from children, dogs, airplanes, trucks and cars, and too often rock-and-roll radios. If the temperature and my work schedule permitted it, and sometimes even it they didn’t, there was an evening fish-through of a pet pool, starting at about six o’clock. This happens to be the hottest time of the day, but who cares if he is miserable and streaming sweat, if there are fish in the river? Soon it will cool down with darkness.

This is why we ere here and not in the city. And if a woman liked to garden, it could be done on a more extensive scale, for we now had an acre and a half. The original rhododendrons had touched limb to ground in many places and rooted. They were ready for transplanting. A few soon grew into dozens.

We learned that nothing essential was missing from upgraded country life. Only a few extras were, and these were more important to her than to me. A variety of stores, especially specialty stores, were lacking in a wide circle. I’d never noticed these before or now missed them. I found that practically everything I ever needed—clothes, fishing tackle, books—could be obtained over a one-eight-hundred number and a Visa card, and the good folks from UPS, whom we all knew here by face, if not yet by name, would happily deliver it in three working days.

What fun to wait for the chocolate truck to arrive and to see the new rod in the man’s hand, its aluminum to be unmistakable from any visual distance!

All these cheerful successful experiences paved the way for extended country living, namely the lake. As things turned out, we landed at Lake Ketchum. It is complete for me in nearly every way. Why do I say “nearly”? Because Norma would nudge me to add that the nearest shopping mall is fourteen miles away. In the car, one soon gets not to notice the time and distance.

The blackbirds are back! This is January 31^st. I lie in bed at dawn and hear their sweet call in the cedars. It is muted, in a minor key, softly descending, fading away. In the midst of repeated clusters of notes is a dotted one, followed by a flagged one, then the diminished fading pipe, perhaps twice as long as the dotted note earlier. I wait, anticipating the rest of the song, but only hear the identical song, after a long sleepy pause, when I almost give up hope and think I have imagined the trill. I thrill when I hear it, and am almost out of this world again when I hear the third repeat. Wonderful.

All the sings and predictions are for an early spring. Today it may hit sixty; it is everyone’s great wish. The weatherman (whatever happened to those bubbly, curvaceous weathergirls?) is antic with anticipation. If sixty occurs, it will be a record. Do weatherpersons live to experience and report new records? God, what a life.

In the city, reportedly, rhododendrons are thickly budded and opening into wary bloom. Sure enough, on the tube comes a quick camera shot to prove the point, but we jaded watchers know such shots can be faked, the footage from the archives. Yesterday Russ Osenbach and I spent a c couple of fruitless hours dragging flies through the Grandy Creek drift on the Skagit, looking for a steelhead or two. We agreed, it was a beautiful day and a near-wilderness experience. You really had to crane your head to see any signs of civilization—and that was only the back of the Birdsview Grange Hall.

There used to be a syndicated newspaper column called—if I remember right—“Signs of The Times.” (Perhaps it is a sign of the times that it is gone.) It was dedicated to recording written and visual archetypes reflecting in some meaningful or symbolic way items that made a moment in time distinctive, significant. Accordingly, here and there, now and then, I shall list a few of my own.

Here comes the first, ready or not. And be prepared for a mammoth anticlimax, will you?

A readerboard outside a motel on the I-5 exit into Burlington: “Microwaves, refriges.” (See, I told you, it would be hugely insignificant.) But the announcement keynotes an important change in Western motel policy that has subtly taken place over the past few years.

It used to be medium hard to locate a motel on the I-5 exit anywhere with a kitchen, and woe if you tried to find one, late at night, after driving some impossible distance. You turned into the first motel, dove into bed, neverminding the fact that you were starving and would be burning holes in your stomach by breakfast time.

I first encountered the new policy (new to me, anyway) last summer in Cashmere. The Village Inn (lovely name, isn’t it, and not a bad place) is run by a genial Oriental couple whose English is mostly unintelligible; this makes for interesting conversations, with constant misunderstandings, constant repetitions of what is said by either party, and much smiling. I must admit to not understanding them much more than they couldn’t make sense out of anything I said. But somehow they communicated to me that my non-smoking unit had a tiny refrigerator and there would be a microwave oven available, only, other people had already asked for the ones they had, sorry. I made a mental note for a tomorrow that hasn’t yet come.

The refrigerator I can understand. It is for beer and mixer. It has a tiny frozen-food compartment. This has several uses. You can also expect to find cable TV, probably HBO, perhaps a VCR, and in certain sleazy establishments, rental movies, including the ubiquitous porn.

It is the refrige/microwave provision that interests me most. This makes prudent a trip to the nearest all-night—I mean, allnite—grocery, and a return to the unit with assorted frozen meals—microwavable dinners, snacks, and breakfasts. Plus the cold beverage of your choice.

In some motels there is a microsink to go with the other items, plus some micro-forks, knives, and spoons, all expendable, plus chipped coffee cups and a bunged plate or two. But often there is none of these, or a minimal quantity. By omission you are advised to bring your own, along with a rag and towel and some liquid detergent.

So equipped you are able to nourish yourself on a minimal scale. Of course people have been doing this in motels for years. My parents use to make coffee with their own hotplate and pot in those motels that didn’t provided coffee-makings packets of instant to go with water that was usually tepid from the tap. Remember those packets of sugar and artificial creamer, generation one, brought home as trinkets for the kids? My parents use to bring along on the trips some Danish in a bag, plus some little cans of fruitjuice, all strung on a tough plastic web.

Now the fine art of cooperative motel living and bare sustenance has been raised to a new level and another icon created. It might be called the bed-and-board motel.

The longer the diving duck remains under water, the wider the circle you must prescribe with your eyes in order to locate him when he bobs to the surface again. Rarely will he have a fish in his mouth, though I’ve noticed some species are more efficient at this than others. It is not as one might expect. The piedbill grebe has the highest percentage I’ve observed. The double-crested cormorant and the common merganser are next. The others, a long way back in the pack.

On rivers, I’ve seen the osprey hover and plunge breathtakingly (my breath) and strike and pull up with empty talons, many times. If he comes up with a fish one time out of seven, that’s par. But it is magnificent to see him laboriously flap off, his sizable prize clutched more than firmly below him, the fish’s body still thrashing, side to side. Am I projecting onto him my personal feelings in the matter—a version of the pathetic fallacy carried too far, I suppose, when I say he is proud of his catch and shows it. Or am I simply being proud for him?

Often when the piedbill dives very near to my beach and I think he comes up empty-handed, so to speak, I suspect he has been harvesting snails or tiny bivalves. And so if I count him as being empty-beaked I am wrong—wrong again. I am unable to see the meal he has just ingested. Can only deduce it from the tiny drink he permits himself in order to wash down the stony object.

Just before the end of the year, I went into Payless Drugs to renew my fishing license. This annual ritual involves plunking down nearly twenty dollars on the counter of the camera department and waiting for the clerk to deign to notice you and come over and copy down your vital statistics onto a new license. Each year the same data goes into basically the same waiting slots on the form and the clerk verifies only the number of years you’ve lived in the state. I am puzzled as to why but always stoically provide the information. The other data remains constant, normally unchangeable.

This year a pretty redhead, chewing her cud, filled out my license form. I hoped for a moment or two of near-intimacy, all the while, but she scarcely saw me. (Now, if a gangly youth had strolled by, I’m sure her lowered eyes would have not so stealthily followed his form down the aisle.) I, I might as well have been a grocery cart, only grocery cars don’t ever pathetically long for a sweet smile. Finally, the last blank on the form completed, carried over from before unquestioningly, she separated my license from all the unused, waiting licenses, tore it along its dotted line, and handed it to me. My money she scooped up off the counter. Still not looking at me, she delivered me my change. The store keeps a dollar of the fee for filling out the form. It seems reasonable.

Then—perhaps because she could feel the weight of my waiting eyes pulling on her, and my waiting hopelessly for it—she cast me a sort of look that might contain a ghost of a smile, only it missed my eyes and went idly over my shoulder, perhaps seeking the outline of the unglimpsed and still sought youth of her dreams, pimples and all. Not finding him, she cast me (still over my shoulder, averting my anxious, lecherous eyes) a frowning look of dismissal.

Sometimes we must settle for that. Turning away, preparing to fold up my license and insert it in a plastic wallet compartment, I scanned my stats—perhaps just to make sure it was really me. When I came to the color of my hair I began to laugh maniacally. Brown it said, repeated this way many years over. I laughed because it hadn’t been, couldn’t be stretched to be, brown for going on two decades.

Today—February Second—a day that may go down in infamy along with Pearl Harbor, Norma and I bought two Labrador retriever pups, a brother and sister, from a litter of ten that are now about two months old, having been born (this the clincher) about the day of my birth, as was Sam, so we can celebrate into a second future, our life on Planet Earth. I am a bit silly about such things, more so as I age.

The seller, Tom Rodin, a far distant relative of the famous French sculpture, he recently discovered, is also a vet, and so for our $400 purchase price we get a host of benefits gratis, such as neutering at about age five months, plus all their puppy shots. So from here on out in this lake journal there will be fresh puppy observations, probably enough to curdle the blood of anybody who is not a Lab freak.

The first: at night the puppies see their reflection in the glass patio doors downstairs (where they are confined and to be toilet trained, in due course) and think they are seeing their shortly lost brothers and sisters. They get all excited at the small dogs looking in at them and press their little wet noses up against the glass, to no avail. Then they wander off, bored with the situation. I have a hunch they will continue to do this nearly all their lives. May they be long. Old Sam lived to be 14, which is a normal span for Labs, plus a bonus year that was not too pleasant for him.

The puppies advance on the dogs in the mirror and those dogs also advance, growing larger. This continues until they touch noses and drift off disappointedly, both pairs wandering away in search of something with decided smells and the promise of challenge.

Sharon delivers our mail in a wine-colored Buick, circling the lake, seated on the car’s right, like an Englisher, in order to reach into the rural mailboxes we all have, which are arranged on that side for her convenience. And since we often take a late morning walk, we spot her (or else she comes up on us from behind on silent tread) and always stops for a friendly visit. I have a hunch this happens to her elsewhere and accounts for those days when our mail is half an hour or more late.

Today she greets us, greets Norma, with, “You’ve got some roses. I left them on your well cover.” This she was able to reach nosing her Buick into our drive and shoving the package out the right side window. Which means she fully circled the driver, first, looking for signs of us, and pulled up there nearly back to where she started from, for the drive is shaped like a gumdrop. Additionally, and she did not mention this, there was a package of remaindered books from Edward Hamilton that she left at the well cover, alongside the roses. But it is the arrival of the roses she wants to share with Norma. Perhaps Sharon is a gardener, too.

Back in the city the mail route by our house in the North end of Seattle was considered undesirable by most all the mailpersons (God, what a circumlocution!) and as soon as he or she had enough seniority they opted for a route with fewer stairs. Consequently we got used to never knowing our mail-delivery person not from choice but simply because no one of them ever hung around long enough to become familiar with.

This is not quite true. I remember a tall, black-bearded fellow who was invariably cheerful and pleasant, even in the worst weather. In fact, he wore shorts, even in the snow. I can picture him still in his blue/gray safari hat, winter or summer, and his blue dun shorts, ankle-high black socks, and sloping black postman oxfords—the kind with special soles so that it seems you are always walking downhill (even when it is most evident from your labored breathing that you’re not). His work was always so heating that he wore those short pants and a short-sleeved shirt in mid-winter, like a boy scout out to prove something to himself. Just when I got to depend on him being there and to take his cheeriness for granted, swoosh, he transferred himself to some kinder site.

Norma remembers better than I the Indo-Chinese woman who delivered our mail long enough to have two babies, for whom each time she took minimal leave. She was a tiny woman, with a huge mail sack, and kept going back to her jeep for more mail packets and packages, until her pregnancy was so advanced that it must have been the law that stopped her from one kind of delivery. She was as big in front as she was from the bag in back, the bag slung over her bony shoulder, the blade of it not much larger than what powers the sparrow’s sing. She was always toothfully happy-seeming in that way of Chinese men or women who may instead be merely indicating shyness and embarrassment and haltingness instead.

And now, in the country today, we have Sharon—who incidentally is sporting a handsome new lower plate and smiling frequently, proudly. By announcing what we have in store for us, on our return home, she is no way diminishes our expectation of the noontime mail and instead wonderfully increases it three or four fold.

Yesterday I went to the Outdoor Sportsman’s Show, or whatever its name is, in Seattle’s Kingdome, luckily finding a metered parking place at the curb along First Avenue, not far away, and providently carrying in my left pants pocket a slew of quarters with which to feed the meter. Eight of them gave me two untroubled, unworrisome, hours in which to roam free. With parking violation tickets at twenty-some dollars, and the lots all full, it was good to know that my sole talent in life (finding parking places) was intact and working well.

Soon I met Kitty Vincent, Jim’s wife, who I’ve wanted to encounter ever since I saw a stunning picture of her holding a large bright steelhead, her (Kitty’s) blond hair shining in the Canadian sun, along with the fish’s flanks. I had a fine talk with her and later with Jim about their flylines, Rio, and leaders, which I have been regularly using with much satisfaction. I knew him a little from a party Trey Combs threw at the Bunny Farm on the Skagit, six or eight years a40go. Later I had a long easy chat with Marc Bale, vice president for Sales for Sage Rods; we’ve been friends for decades, and he was for a short while in my Oso cabin, along with Merlin Stidham, John Farrar, Arnold Timm, and Bob McLaughlin. We were all pups then.

I introduced Marc to my garrulous friend, Russ, Osenbach, and it was hard to get away. Soon we found ourselves in front of the Powell Rod display and I ended up with a Spey rod in my hand, a line on the reel, and the casting pond only a stride away. I vowed never to publicly cast and have now violated my pledge. Good thing it was only to myself.

The pond was about 100 feet long and everybody tried to outcast it, which was not difficult, even with a strange outfit. Russ and I kept putting our ersatz fly into an area ahead where boats were being sold. On my sideways Spey swing I kept hooking a sign that was stupidly put there to attract viewers and not flylines. On a river, there is no such thing, either on open water or even along the bank.

I left in time to beat the meter. Seattle traffic at five P.M. is impossible and it took me a long time to wade through cars and people lined up for ferries home. Finally I threaded myself through the center of the city and on to the freeway for the 50-mile drive home. Except for a few surprisingly located slow spots, things went smoothly and I was able to maintain a good speed. A pleasant day, and a probably beneficial one, since I received many business cards and passed out a dozen or so of Norma’s and my new ones for our little publishing business, Kingfisher Press.

This is not a haiku, you understand, but written in the haiku spirit. Thus it will not scan but—I hope—evoke a proper feeling. Along the roadside, the muddy swans, in a furrowed field. I swoon.

The good folks of Skagit County have named their rural busline SKAT. It probably stands for Skagit Area Transit, and seemed catchy and cut. The Authorities in Charge of Naming Things (acronymed A-CONT—I’m kidding) were not aware that the word means the excreta of certain animals. Perhaps they thought the word was what you shouted after a cat to make it run away in a hurry—or as a bus must move in order to keep to a tight schedule. (Do they have these, in the country?) But it is also what a rider standing in a mountainous rain must think and say, when the pretty blue bus is unavoidably late.

My new Compaq computer—all one-thousand dollars worth—holds many surprises, most of them pleasant ones. For instance, left unattended for twenty minutes, it goes to sleep; it slides into reduced power mode, the monitor darkens to a gray mat not much different from when it is turned off, and the computer’s powerlight dims. Or else I can induce such drowsy stage by pushing a button on the front of the tower that wears a crescent moon sign. When I do, there is a long pause and then, in the upper right-hand corner, green block lettering comes on, spelling out SLEEP. The screen darkens commensurately and the same grayed tone is produced. I feel as if I ought to tiptoe out of the room.

I remember (dimly, darkly) seeing my first hundred dollar bill, decades ago, and about the same time peeling three or four crisp numbers, bills serially numbered, unwrinkled by handling, and given me by a commercial bank teller when I asked for them this way. There was a thrill at the sight that I am, alas, long past. Like many such things the thrill cannot be artificially induced.

A recent New Yorker article on taste and status defines the well-off, or wealthy class, as being in possession of not one but two million dollars, and making more than $150,000 a year. So much money, today it is deemed hardly anything at all. Gone is the millionaire and his airs. The country—the nation—must be replete with millionaires, the product of decades of inflation and pay-raises designed to keep up with the cost of living, or else to thwart it smartly. So just when I was feeling I was nearing a specific goal, that of Olympian Heights (a residential community 30 miles South of Tacoma), I find myself back I the ordinary drink, swimming with the unsuccessful sharks.

Here, we need one or two of these: we are frantic rodents, trapped on a ferocious treadwheel. And while we’re at it, this superficial thought: Life is mostly a matter of attrition.

For Christmas I gave our son a flatbed scanner. It was on his list, up high. It cost a lot, but then so did the ZIP drive he gave me for my birthday, exactly one month earlier. It comprises a tit for tat. Life is often like this.

Because he as super-busy at work (computers again, computers always), and he knew I had a couple of old, good unpublished novels I wanted to convert into word-processing documents, he thoughtfully brought the scanner over to my house and set it up for me, in the process having to tear down my new “sleep” mode computer and actually removed the housing in order to install something called a “scuzzy” card—which makes all of the scanner’s good things possible.

I’ve been busily scanning every since, that is, my wife and I have been, taking turns. Naturally we’ve had some problems, or rather I should say unnaturally, for computers are most mysterious. They are wonderful in how much intricate work they can accomplish in less than an eye’s wink; they are perplexing, infinitely frustrating, in how they can suddenly decline to perform the most routine of tasks, ordinarily simple and quick for them. When this happens, they kindly serve you what is called an error message. The message is much like the one HAL performed in the movie version of 2001, only my computer doesn’t speak (thank goodness) and the message is in an impossible code.

Like some minister abruptly gone mad, all it can do is quote chapter and verse to some unreadable program understood only by Microsoft engineers. Then, with less than a smile of complex satisfaction, the computer sits back on its heels and smugly waits for me to attend to the problem. In the meanwhile it rests, which is different from SLEEP; for the interval it won’t perform a single task. With some problems the computer must be shut down completely and restarted again. This is called rebooting. (I tell you this only if you are from Mars, where they not only don’t have computers, they don’t have people. People are the computer’s necessary adjutant.)

So we would start out scanning a few pages of ancient typewriter text and all would proceed perfectly, the electric light bulb of the scanner moving smoothly down its track like a locomotive happily leaving the station and ultra-quickly the scanned image would pass over into the OCR program and be temporarily stored in the system’s tiny brain and wait to be added to by the scanner’s next page, and the next one. The OCR would store a number of such page images—I decided on ten for a file—until I gave it a simple stop order, at which point it would ask me for a file name with which to save it to my hard drive, which was mammoth and would house a battleship’s storehouse of binary data. I obliged with a name. The default was JOB01, which I deleted, giving it the abbreviated name of my book, with an extension keyed to the book’s page numbers. Thus the book’s first ten typed pages would be saved as BOOK1, BOOK being the book’s short-title name, and its one-hundredth page saved as BOOK10, and so on, until I reached the end. Only it took us an eternity to ever get very far because the scanner kept hanging up—much like the train never getting out of the station—and at page eight or nine the scanner would freeze up in mid-scan and nothing more could be accomplished. Oh, I could visit the Internet, or activate my word processor, but scan I could not.

This necessitated turning off the scanner and its little light bulb and shutting down the computer—only the computer would refuse to shut down because, as it kept informing me via an error message—and application was still running and all data would be lost. These exact words. Hell, I didn’t care about losing my data, which was only a few of the most recently scanned pages, easily duplicated by a computer, scanner, and OCR working in tandem nicely, the way it was meant to do. But even so, I couldn’t get out. The computer wouldn’t shut down.

There is an old trick used to shut down an unruly computer that won’t quit any other way. It is to strike Control/Alt/Delete all at once or in rapid succession, holding down the earlier struck keys still. Under Windows 95, a message pops up like a piece of toast and warns you that if you do this, one more time (repeat the same sequence of keys) the computer will shut down and all data will be lost. This is precisely what you agreed to earlier, but wouldn’t happen.

So you bang the keys again. Nothing happens (again). Was the computer merely bluffing? You hit them again, even more authoritatively, and there is a long moment’s pause and the screen goes dark and all whirling in the guts of the computer ceases.

You must turn off and on the scanner before you reboot, or else when the computer runs through its diagnostic of peripherals and attachments it won’t “recognize” that you have a scanner. Your computer will snub the scanner and send you more error messages to the effect that you don’t have one, it can’t be found, you are a bad boy for trying to trick your computer (who only wants to work hard for you) into believing you own something you don’t (in the real world, this is called lying and thievery) and you will be banished to a remote corner of the galaxy if you ever try such a trick again.

So you select your scanner and it is recognized. (If not, turn the scanner off, pause, turn it on again, and reboot your computer until it gives up and admits that, yes, you have one, just such a scanner.) You activate the OCR program and tentatively, warily, begin to scan the very same documents you scanned many minutes ago, before your scanner froze up and your world (such as it is, such as it was) went down the tube. Now the triumvirate (computer, scanner, OCR program) works just great and you accomplish an anxious ten more pages and save them to your hard drive. Another the pages are successfully done and now you have 30 pages saved of a document that runs 461 typed pages.

Each page takes 40 seconds to scan, according my wrist watch, so to have done 30 of them should have taken about 20 minutes, right? They took an hour and a half. Where did the additional time go? Why into the consternation process of booting and rebooting.

When the scanner is operating well, the pages rapidly absorbed into the computer’s guts, where they will remain inviolate, safe, until I have need for them. (Soon, soon.) I had—with luck, both good and bad—two books to scan, both of them novels. Like a pool player, I had a wonderful run of scans—140 balls, I mean pages. I thought the scanner was healed. Then, at the start of a new scan, relaxed, smiling, the light moved an inch or two and stopped. When I moved the mouse pointer to an OCR icon, all I could hear was a faint toc. The screen remained impassive; my application was in sudden cold storage. The only solution was to use the old DOS shut-down tactic again: Control/Alt/Delete. Twice, with a sizable pause in between. Then, scanner off, scanner on again, the old reboot, followed by a warm musical welcome from Windows.

How to explain the recurring problem? Norma, who was at the scanner even more than I, said it was “broken.” Or else she attributed the failing to a stray electrical (electronic, I wondered?) impulse. Pretty good, that second theory, I thought. My only philosophical explanation went in the direction of “a stray piece of lint”; the lint got caught in the scanner’s mechanism, or in its intricate printed circuit system, and caused it to lock up protectively, or else it would destroy its own vast, complex intestinal system. (Not a bad idea, at this point.)

It made no sense, either, I had to admit, and was not better, no more an acceptable technical explanation of the problem than the broken theory or the odd electrical impulse theory. In many ways mine was inferior to them.

This not being a detective story I have no pat solution, no butler-done-it answer. Sorry to have mislead anyone who expected more of me—perhaps it was only myself who did. Some mysteries are never solved, many murderers left unpunished. The scanner mystery persists. What Norma and I have done is called, in technical parlance, is effect “a workaround.” It means the problem remains acute, is perhaps insoluble, but there is a “cheat” for it. You develop a scheme that permits you to get back to work as quickly as possible, with most of your senses intact.

So we continue to scan, fingers crossed, and save to disc, anxiously, with continuous attendant fear of another crash, and when it doesn’t appear, and the scans continue regularly (as the God of Computer Scanners meant them to do), we say a little prayer and consider ourselves fortunate that we have a computer attachment that is able to accomplish such a wondrous amount of work so quickly, so effortlessly. Most of the time.

My parents in their late years purchased expensive objects that have long outlasted them. It will be so with Norma and me. The Brown/Jordan basketweave metal furniture—a table and two chairs, plus a foot stool—we inherited. They seem sturdy and everlasting. And Aunt Dorothy’s tufted and birdseye maple sofa lives on at the Oso rental cabin, no longer mine, no longer my successor, Guide John Farrar, no longer anybody that I have known, since the place was sold collectively to a developer who, so far, shows no signs of developing anything except more moss on the roof. If anybody sits on it now, it is people who do not know its paltry history.

I suspect there exists a natural affinity between writers and dogs, fishing writers and Labrador retrievers. Of course there are always exceptions. Women mystery writers adore cats. A few male writers—J. B. Priestly and, I only suspect, William Trevor—frequent the unreliable company of cats, too. But these writers don’t fish much, or else only go through the motions that many do. It is not a calling and they rarely catch anything.

All this is surmise, of course, but a few facts leap out in the form of old photographs. One is Ed Hewitt. My former friend from graduate school in the English Department, Jim Lewis, was a good steelhead flyfisher, back in the rich Fifties, and, the father then of three small children, claimed a tenuous relationship with the great writer, E. R. Hewitt, who professed to be a trout and salmon fisher for 75 years, and in fact wrote a book with exactly that for a title.

George LaBranche accepted an invitation to fish dry fly on the renown Carinton Beat on the River Dee in Scotland with A.H.E. Wood, its famous owner. Either he brought his own black Labs (unlikely, knowing the nature of the ocean crossing) or else Arthur Wood was able to furnish enough of the beasts to make them both feel right at home, for in the picture they are surrounded by enough of the dogs to make a kennel owner feel right at home. They fairly swarm. All are handsome grown dogs. No puppies are in evidence. Puppies are always kept away from great men by grooms and stable men except for brief lord-of-the-manner visits that are of necessity short.

No, great men do not suffer foolish puppies greatly. No, instead they wait for them to settle down and become grand themselves and inordinately dignified.

Not I. Two Sundays ago Norma and I hied ourselves out to the acreage of a country vet and bought us a air, brother and sister, of the ebony terrors. Our life has been chaos ever since.

Something there is in the nature of man that abhors calm, order. Or else it is only to be desired in the abstract. If you have such a hankering, don’t buy a puppy. For sure, don’t buy two. But if you want to put yourself in the company of the truly great and hope that some of whatever it is that might rub off and help you write or fish better, more successfully, by all means leap right in. Write your check and become surrogate parents to a dog or two. Make sure they are Labs.

Labs come in all the earth-tone colors. There are yellow ones, brown ones, and the favored ubiquitous black ones. All may come from the same litter as a result of a recessive gene from either the mother or father, or both. Our pups are both black as night. The male we call Biff, after the older brother in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, though I often slip up and regress and call him Bo, after a long-ago cat. Biff (or Bo) doesn’t mind what you call him, so long as you keep the kibble dish full and don’t get too pissed off when he pisses a dark saucer-sized spot on the rug.

The female is smaller, more loving. She is Kate, or Katie, though I often impulsively call her Sweetie, which she is a. She demands and gets more than her ratio of petting. It is never too often for the pair of us.

Two more writers extraordinaire who gave their free moments and more over to efforts involving the species: John Cheever, who only pretended to fish, I suspect, in order to keep his Labs company while they were waterside. His houses were always a pleasant shambles from the activity and littering of his dogs. He could not go gentle into that goodnight unless they were perched alongside him in his favorite, well-chewed-upon armchair, one on each side, statuesquely sitting off each arm like the stone lions affront he public library in New York City.

The other is Roderick Haig-Brown, the writer and fisher most of us hacks would like to emulate. In picture after picture, there he is, a young man in field biologist’s lab coat, surrounded by Labs aplenty, a couple of fine searun cutthroat perched on a log, awaiting (the fish, that is) dissection to learn what they’d been feeding on and their stage of sexual maturity. Or else older, balding, with another generation of Labs in dutiful attendance, casting into a riffle, his dogs watching with that keen-eyed, forward-looking attention that makes the breed look so intelligent but may only be the result of bone mass and structure. If you were to read the mind of so handsome a specimen you find, alas, nobody home.

Quick now, students: several lions, all together, are, what? A pride—that’s correct. And geese? A gaggle. Right, Johnny. Quail? A bevy.

Everybody who lives in the country believes he or she has an inherent right to a fireplace fire any time he or she chooses to have one. It is one of the perks—perhaps the only one—of living in the country. In the city, people used to feel much the same way, but have had the truth of the matter driven forcefully home to them by way or ordinances prohibiting burning, indoors or out, under certain adverse conditions. These include smog alerts, atmospheric inversions, banks of stationary fog, and whatever other environmental conditions prohibit easy dispersal of woodsmoke and the negative olfactory elements it contains.

In the country, with the county sheriff far off and in minute supply, there are in effect no regulations or laws governing woodsmoke and much else, and even if there are appropriate prohibitions, if they are unenforceable, they may as well not exist. People will go on having woodstove and fireplace fires, even while they are choking on the fumes. A right more important than temporary ill health. Or their neighbor’s suffering.

Old Arthur Flatray down the road is a near pioneer of the lakefront. He is ill with a condition loosely referred to as asthma, but may be a catchall term for a number of ailments, including emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and various particulate allergies. Many of us are former cigaret smokers, and the residual damage done to our respiratory systems go unreported, politely (or shamefully) unacknowledged by the rest of us. Sick is sick, whatever its name, whatever the cause. Yet the woodfires go on, day after day, and every single night.

To the West, John and Tracy do not have woodfires for a simple reason. No fireplace. They are dependent on electric heat, and when a couple of old half-rotten alders were deemed necessary by their landlord to be taken down, ere they come crashing down, I begged the wood for my own fireplace. (Have I mentioned that we have three? The builder and owner—in both their fierce, country ways—must have loved wood fires, and so do we. After all, if a nightly fire is everyone’s sacred right, it is ours, too.

Only, on certain close nights, and even on some days, if everybody around the lake (90 domiciles; all right, Henry Thoreau, laugh now, if you must) has a fire on some needy, chill, foggy night, we are inundated with noxious fumes, some our own, and go to bed wheezing on them. It makes for a poor, unhealthy night’s sleep. Multiplied by a chain of such nights and the general welfare of the common is threatened. Asbestos in school walls or lead in paint becomes a minor consideration when the short-run health of us all is at stake.

Anton and Carrie, to the West, believe in the unlimited frontier ethic, and like the good burgher that he is, Anton has a nearly infinite supply of cordwood laid by—enough to last for years, apparently, if it does not rot in the meanwhile and lose all its heat-producing qualities first. He prides himself on heating his entire cathedral-ceilinged home “for free” not admitting the scrounging and hauling of such wood, not to mention its sawing up and splitting, costs effort and time and even money (for gasoline to run saw and pickup truck) as well. It is only illusion that such things are free, but it is illusion that many of us live by, myself included.

Among Anton’s many rights is the one to warm his family all the waking evening, then stoke up the firebox before going to bed early so that rising, again very early, the house be warm still. It is only natural, desirable, that two young children have a warm breakfast room in which to start the day. I understand fully. But when I turn in (late, late) to bed, his smoldering fire irritates my sinuses and starts their thick fluids running, and I know I will have hours of fitful sleep ahead.

I wouldn’t deprive Anton and family of their stoked fire, or even mention its downside to him. His is not the only fire left cooking through the night; the lake is ringed with them. His is only the closes and most oppressive, for that very reason.

My discomfort (let us call it) is partly from my own dying fire, I am aware. Soon, though, it will be cold ashes. But I think of old, long-suffering Arthur Flatray down the lake and his reduced-capacity lungs and wonder if it is all worth it, our cheery evening blaze and gathering around the hearth.

Everybody who has a house here, up till recently, has a well besides. I have two. I’m not sure why the owner/builder had them dug; they had a way of doing everything in pairs, and so we have two complete kitchens, every appliance duplicated, upstairs and down, including washers, dryers, and even freezers. So it seems only natural for them to have double wells. I don’t know, maybe the second one is in case the first ever gives out (thought they must tap the same aquifer), or else it is because the first didn’t taste so good. Rust is the usual culprit.

But six or eight years back, the lake dwellers bought into the Wilderness Ridge water system, thanks to the efforts of Cheryl Allen, who did her multiple good, then moved away from it and us. The system was expanded and community water lines run by the front of everybody’s property. Owners were given a choice of either connecting now or buying the rights to do so later, at their own expense. I think the individual cost per lot was several thousand

Anton bought rights but continues to draw water from his own well. Our previous owners chose to connect at the time, so we have two wells, plus piped water from the community well and its huge holding reservoirs, up the road apiece. For our water we pay an annual fee, plus a monthly service fee based on how much water we choose to use. This is only right. Norma tells me the cost is reasonable. Anton would laugh and say his only cost is the electricity it takes to pump the water from his well. But he and Carrie wisely chose to hedge their bets. Their buy-in allows them to hook up at any time they choose.

For the others the cost is now $10,000. Much building activity is going on, and this water cost is added into the land cost and the price of the new home. It is buried. In the future such charges can only go higher, as the water system is forced by all the new development to expand.

Short-platting-notice signboards regularly appear on small billboards erected on the edges of cleared fields around but away from the lake, announcing the inescapable fact that we will soon have new neighbors, whether we want them or not. These are the Signs of the Times I mentioned earlier. Soon black asphalt cul de sacs will are created, many with light standards lacking their sockets, bulbs, and hoods. Down the road at one of these lurking developments is even a series of grouped mailboxes, each with its own keyed lock, gathered under a little rainproof gabled roof, as though the clutch was a tiny house. But there are no houses yet for occupants to have their mail delivered to, only fields pressed flat from winter rains. Fields not yet starting to green up for spring. Fields awaiting bulldozer and cement truck for pouring the first foundation.

But this is happening, happening fast, elsewhere, back from the lake, throughout the rolling hillside, as former dairy farms and copses of alders are being divvied up, homes springing up like toadstools, most of them painted battleship gray, trimmed in white like a dickey, introduced to passersby by stern-faced garages designed for two cars, a few of the more expensive ones with garages numbering three, and even these not enough to contain all the cars of a growing family or visiting relatives at some holiday.

In the morning, at an hour earlier than I am used to rising, Norma and I are awakened by the clamorous yips of a competing puppy chorus; we don clothes suitable for the day’s weather (usually inclement) and hasten to the basement, that is, the lower daylight level. The dog’s are chiming to be let out of their makeshift enclosure—a small chest, a wooden two-door filing cabinet, a square piece of thick plywood—and reenter the adult world. We prudently keep them closed up tightly in a space not much bigger than what is necessary to include their dual bed of canvas-enclosed cedar shavings. (Having learned the hard lesson of too much space at night.) Both are u o their hind legs, digging air, furrowing the wood of their prison with sharp puppy toenails. We (she or I) release them, then duck back to avoid the scurry of puppy activity. They head for the providently opened sliding glass doors and the great Outside and go down the eight cement stairs, tall and steep, leading to the back lawn and lake.

At the rosebed, however, they stop for the first long, delicious pee of the day. These children have been confined for fourteen hours and—contrary to expectation—have held both it and the other, all this time. Extraordinary. Biff pees the longest, squatting like a girl still, his tiny tufted penis touching the ground. His gonads are housed high up in his abdominal cavity still. She, Kate or Katie, or Sweetie, etc., pees next, nearly as long, squatting in the same manner. Then—myself clad in street shoes and socks, pajamas, bathrobe, Gor-Tex parka, billed corduroy Seahawks cap, and Norma, already dressed for the rural world—we take them farther away into more distant flora or to the compost bed, the bed already enriched for next year’s vegetable crop, or to where the ten-foot pram is stored upside down on sawhorses to turn away the elements and so it won’t fill like a bathtub from rain (heavy as lead after a shower) and needing to be turned over with a hernia-producing effort to return to its former lightness of being. The hope is, the pups will squat again and have twin copious bowel movements, but don’t count on it.

This they resist, perhaps a bit constipated from long confinement. First one, then the other, shit only a few marbles. This means there will be much more to follow, the only question being precisely when and how much; “precisely” because both are quick as birds. Now, instead of further shitting, which is desirable, they begin to play. I know, from short experience, there is no point in waiting longer. I usher them into the house in a rush and they head for their joint feeding bowl. It is already half-filled with kibble—the world’s best, judging from its cost. This is the tenderloin of dog foods. Gold by the ounce scarcely cost more.

They feed like stoats, like a little of puppies ceremoniously reduced by half, then by half again. There were ten for starters. There is a break to guzzle water. A quick wander around the synthetically carpeted room, I hope is search of toys, but, no, there is a sudden squat from Biff (the biggest, the monster shitter) and I am again too late. Will I always be? He looks askance at me, surprised by my speed, over his shoulder. Now, why would I spring like that? Once more the sliding glass door is flung back; once more we three dismount the cement stairs, still numbering eight. We arrive at the rose garden. It looks familiar to all of us.

Both pups regard me with mild astonishment, as if to say, “What are we doing here again already?” (“A little variety in our lives, please.”) Nobody performs a thing. Soon it will be back into the house to resume feeding at the trough. Meanwhile, the little, thankfully hard, shards of stool await me, cooling. Afterwards, my innards all the while growling from hunger, I hurry to a breakfast entirely my own.

I am the Lake Monitor and have been, oh, these ten months or so. (Do not bow, do not scrape, do not salute.) I took the job—I tell folks—because I understood a Smoky-the-Bear hat and tin badge came with the job. They don’t, but I got a five-gallon container that holds my Secci disc, Celsius thermometer, waterproof pen, and various forms and charts for me to complete throughout the green portion of the year.

Actually, I got the job by curious default. My neighbor, Anton, was Lake Monitor (respectfully, I capitalize the title, always) in years past, but since he is gone for a fat portion of the summer, his wife, Carrie, surreptitiously took over his chores, dutifully taking and recording precise scientific measurements, while he was off Kodiak Island, Alaska, catching sockeye salmon in purse seines and cooking for the small, hungry crew of which he was an intricate part. But she was pregnant and soon had another baby full-time, which is the only way to do it. She resigned (for Anton, technically speaking) the job at the annual meeting of the Lake Ketchum Improvement Association, a year ago.

I modestly accepted it in front of all the assembled members, some thirty of them, thinking in might be somewhat different from what it turned out to be. I mean, in return for my diligence in all kinds of weather (generally good, for I got to pick my times), I might be due a little tribute and subservience. I thought people—my fellow lake dwellers—might seek out my knowledgeable opinion on watery and other matters involving the lake. Ha! Instead, I found my views ignored and, when more forcefully put forward, shunned. It sees the seat of power in the lake association (not that I do not further capitalize it) resides in a cadre who has lived here for twenty-five years or more and whose average age must be seventy-five. Half of them carry the same last name and the others are often related by a network that at first seems obscure but which, I assure you, makes the Medici and the Bogias seem amateurs.

Among the officers of the lake association are the members of the Water Board. Once more the old-boy network is alive and functioning. The Water Superintendent (or whatever his true title is) is the past president of the nefarious lake association. He did not step down so much as step over. The woman he appointed to replace himself, and who was duly elected, defers to him on nearly every matter, large or small, like a viable toady. There are two other members of the Water Board. One is a good-old-boy who does not live on the lake but has long maintained summer camp here. Since the chief function of the Water Board is to keep a weather eye on the lake’s condition and level, I wonder how he can perform his minimalist duties if he shows up only in the summer to quickly cut his grass, then scurry away to presumably more scrumptious digs, many miles away.

The superintendent and the other remaining member of the Water Board bracket the outlet and the water gate, which regulates its height, and are conscientious. The Lake Monitor is not a member of the Water Board, but ought to be, at least in the opinion of the present Lake Monitor. Though I be he, for now, I am not proposing to harvest more power (though I have none at present) but to improve the composition and functioning of the Water Board when I, the Lake Monitor, am no longer he but Lake Monitor Emeritus.

The Lake Monitor reports—along with a host of others, one for each lake in Snohomish County—to the Surface-Water Utility of the county’s Department of Public Works. Each of us records data (more on this in a moment) on his forms throughout the growing portion of the year, when algae, etc., is most abundant., and submits it to the county offices in a postage-paid envelope every two weeks (this is called semi-monthly or, if you will, bi-weekly; take your pick), where it is reviewed, analyzed, and recorded in the compute data base, and later compiled into printed reports, lake by lake, county-wide. There must be fifty or sixty lakes so monitored. Thus my efforts are but a drop in the bucket, so to speak.

You’d think that, at the least, they’d hold an annual dinner for us, wherein we could meet each other and discuss hardships oft endured and recount the funny things that happened to us, in line of performing our fortnightly duties, wouldn’t you, but, no, no such reward is scheduled. We work on in silence and cunning—very much like James Joyce, in Portrait of An Artist.

In many ways we Lake Monitors are artists, though few of us are young and nearly half are women.

Just what does a Lake Monitor do, you must be wondering, if he doesn’t get to don special garb by which the broad world recognizes and venerates him, or her? Or if that person isn’t saluted in person or at an annual banquet, in which one of us is proclaimed (the envelop, please) Lake Monitor of the Year (for Snohomish County, anyway)? Good questions, both of them.

First, he is supposed to have a boat. Fortnightly, the Lake Monitor pushes off from shore, armed with his bucket, monitoring tools, twin anchors and attendant ropes, and rows to the deepest part of the lake, stationing himself there with sunken weights. For me the deepest part of Ketchum is thought to be about 400 feet off the port bow of my dock. It is about 22 feet deep, there.

The thermometer is attached to by a length of striped (blue and red, for those who care) cord to a Styrofoam block float. This is so that it can be set adrift for a good, long submersion and provide a correspondingly accurate reading, while other data is being collected. These are mainly Secci disc (it is often erroneously called “dish”—a matter inducing mild, superior laughter from experienced Lake Monitors) readings resulting from lowering the disc over the side of our stationary craft on a nylon cord (blue and white striped, this time) until it seemingly disappears in the lake’s murk.

The disc is about two feet in diameter and divided into wedges, like a sliced pie; slices alternate in color, black then white. When viewed from over the gunwale of a boat the colors remain distinct and separate for a short vertical distance, then merge, and soon disappear in a blur. At the point where the disc can no longer be seen the striped cord is clasped in the hands and, without moving one’s clenched fist, the disc retrieved. In a moment it is hauled with a plop to the surface, all wet and shining. The cord proves to be marked in fractions of a meter to a considerable depth, making me envy pellucid lakes not mine. Since Ketchum is brown tinted, murky, and often ridden with algae, it is only the first meter of cord I am concerned with. In other words, visibility is never more than one full meter at best. During the late summer I get readings of 0.4, 0.5, 0.6 meters frequently.

I take these from Secci disc readings, one or two from each side of the boat, because light falling from the sky is tricky and rather than illuminating matters often obscures them. Light on a lake’s surface is shimmering and confusing. It can harm as well help matters of science, which so often involve measurements of finitude. The measurements I take I record on a little pad, later, back on land, to be transferred to the appropriate county forms. The forms are white, for the one I am to submit in the prepaid envelope to them, and pink for a duplicate, in case I want to keep the readings for a record of my own. I do. Oh, how I do.

Meanwhile the thermometer is floating a few inches beneath the lake’s surface, held there by the white Styrofoam block. I don’t know why this is—Murphy’s Law, some quirk or quark of hydrodynamics—but the float always drifts under my boat while I’m working with my Secci and seems to have disappeared from the lake’s vast surface.

Oh, but I know where it’s gone. It is always the same place, but exactly where I’m not certain, so I can’t simply reach under, say, the stern and grope successfully for it with fingertips. No, I must pull up both anchors (else I spin in circles), the anchors covered with coffee-colored muck, their ropes slimy to the touch, and row away from the trapped float before I can spot it. Often it follows a goodly distance in my wake. I row on, and ultimately it reveals itself, a couple of meters off to one side—a surprising distance away for something thought to be so securely trapped. I must now row after it, catch the float in the lee of the wake, lean low over the gunwale, and snatch it up. Then I read it. I set it back adrift, none of us evidently having learned our lesson, and seek a second reading. This all Lake monitors are instructed to do. It is known to be good science.

Usually I take my measurements from the end of my dock. I have found, you see, that they very hardly at all from the eight-foot depth there from what they reveal take out farther, at the presumed deepest portion of the lake. Only a fraction of a centimeter in either clarity or degree of warmth or coldness. And my floating thermometer will drift under my dock (perverse things!), rather than under my boat. But it is easier to retrieve from there. All I have to do is lie down on the wet wood an feel along the edge of the dock’s float a bit, crawling along, scuttling, before my fingertips discover and dislodge it from its tiny harbor, and it is mine again.

If you place it on the windward side, I’ve found, it will float to dockside and not into open water. This is important, for else you will have recourse to taking out the boat, after all, which is what we’re trying to avoid. Proudly you read off the elusive column of mercury, turning the tiny tube into the light’s glittering glare.

It points to 6.5 degrees Centigrade, or Celsius. Take your pick, they are the same.

A Lake Monitor is supposed to observe and record other littoral phenomena. This makes him a bit of a naturalist, if he isn’t one already. I would like to think I am, but I have my moments of deep doubt and think I know absolutely nothing.

One of the questions to be answered on the county’s monitoring form is, “Number of ducks and geese on the lake.” Ah, were it this simple! Ducks and geese. . . hide. Or else they do not easily reveal themselves. The tulles and weeds are home to them. They have camouflage coloring. Also, some of them dive underwater to catch fish or to collect and ingest small invertebrates that live on the bottom. So how do you count a variably visible population that often, but not intentionally, is in hiding? Do you guess (not scientific and shame on you) or do you devise a random-sample collecting tactic of your own?

I guess, but it is a wise, calculated, prudent type of guesswork, and I am in no way of ashamed of it. You see, I maintain a running inventory of the lake’s duck population. (I am not so keen on geese and only keep a rough track, depending on their honks to clue me in.) Ducks—surface feeders and divers, both—are my birdy specialty, and I’d like to think we have minds that run along the same track, divers predominantly, since we are fishers at heart.

So I give the county much more data on this subject than they request or have any intelligent use for. I give them ducks galore. But I do it my way. I keep a running inventory—isn’t that what they call it in business, when you sample the stock, the stock-on-hand, throughout the day, week, month, year? It’s what you do instead of counting them all—sock or ducks—at one fixed arbitrary time.

Off and on, throughout the day, I scan the duck population for species, numbers, sex, individual peculiarities, behavior patterns, deviation from the norm and expected behavioral patterns of the species, etc. I don’t do this consciously, of course; I do it with my peripheral vision—out of the corner of my eye, literally speaking. (There is a trick, you see: if you really, really want to see something, do not stare at it. Do not look at it hard and directly. Pretend you are a still camera with a motor drive. You’ve got lots of film—endless film. You start snapping your eyes at what you’re most interested in, but you want to position the subject on the edge of your film’s frame. If you center the image, you’ll lose it. You’ll lose seeing it in the general and you’ll lose it in the particular, too.

In the duck world there is constant coming and going. Oh, some individuals remain nearly constant, but there is a general interchange of population. It’s much like an airport or an old-fashioned railway station. A small family here, a same-sex few traveling partners there, here a solitary man, there an unaccompanied woman (lonely, slightly scared, showing it, all killing time, all waiting for the next departure—you get the general idea.

At my lake, the tagend of winter, the duck population is abbreviated. The big migrations are over and the summer residents months away from arriving. What we have is this:

Five double-tufted cormorants still; they have been here most of the winter. Only they can tell the se or gender of each other; only they care, but not yet. To me they are exactly the same, cookie-cutter diving birds, with (as I’ve said before) a snooty appearance. They look at the near sky through lorgnettes, with a serrated orange beak designed for ripping fish flesh, themselves all buff, brown, and black. I’d guess they were mostly same-sex birds, judging by the other species. Now the common mergansers are female, except for one lone guy, who appears lost. He’ll group himself briefly with the ladies, hating it, but remains aloof, nonplused. It’s tempting to plunge more into the pathetic fallacy, but I’ll restrain myself. (I’ll don my writer’s shackles and hide the key.)

Female mallards outnumber males but are keenly aware of them, off on the lake’s fringes, and will be first to shun single-sex society and pair up, she always the dominant one. It will be she who decides where and when they will relocate, however short the distance, through air or over water. I discern no sign form her ever, but in a wink she will make a move invisible to me, announcing their imminent departure, and he—unthinking creature that he is—will ape her moves and join her in near tandem movement. Off they will go, their destination nowhere special.

These are our paltry residents, more than halfway through an El Niño February, one mimicking an ordinary April, as far as the advance of flora is concerned.

The trouble with an inventory—one running or standing still—is that it will sometimes catch you short of goods. In this sense it is more like an audit. I wish I had more to report—greater numbers of unusual ducks and much more variety. But then I would have to lie.

The county also wants to know the following, and they provide a little table for my ease in reporting data that is highly subjective. For instance, “algae in water” (where else might one expect to find it)? Is there “none, slight, moderate, or heavy”? And “algae scum,” unappetizing as it must be. Again I must estimate its absence or degrees of abundance, as prescribed above. And “aquatic plants”; we all know what these are , only do I count the ones growing solely under the surface?

Next comes “odor.” We all know what that is. Does your lake . . . stink? And after we identify the extent to which it may, which it might, running “none” to “heavy,” we must define and describe the odor according to a commonly recognized family of stinks. These are: “fish, rotten egg, musty, septic-like.” It is an interesting series of categories (if you are a dog). I can imagine several other categories nearly as good or better.

Beware if your lake smells like rotten eggs or a sewer. You and it are in deep trouble. The lake is dying or dead. It is apt to be toxic. Now, a little must is okay. And if a lake contains fish, it ought to smell fishy, or something near to that, which I call nicely fishy. (There is another kind of fishy smell which is not so pleasant, but I, a fisher, refuse to admit that any county lake worth its monitoring would smell as if a fish-kill had taken place.)

In spring there is a wonderful fishy smell a good lake takes on that excites me. I describe it as the odor of roses, but it really isn’t. Much like the art of seeing peripherally, smelling is best conducted obliquely and not head on. If you aren’t overcome by an odor (a woman’s certain perfume in an elevator will do to pin this down, or, I suppose, a man’s aftershave), smells are fleeting, vague. Did I smell it, did I not? The smell of a lake when it holds trout and natural watery foods are coming into abundance is, well, sweet, at least to me. If not like roses, certainly like something as fine and ennobling.

But there is no place on the county’s chart to describe such an odor. Good thing, too. It would take too lengthy an explanation to make it clear.

The county wags would also like to know whether there has been any rain in the last two days. Are you kidding? This is the Pacific Northwest, guys. Why not pre-print the answer on the form, or else issue me a rubber stamp, stating, “You best you last plug quarter there has been.” Or simply “Yes,” as we put it in mnemonic computer dialog boxes.

Current wind conditions? They want to know this, along with percentage of cloud cover. Cloud cover is measured in odd multiples, or in percentage of the whole: 0, 10, 25, 50, 75, 90, 100. As for wind, it is calm, light, breezy, strong, gusty. Are these progressive, as with the percentages? Is, say, gusty stronger than strong? Not in my book. This type of classifying is a long way from being either objective or scientific, but I suppose will do for yeoman’s fieldwork and general light conversation.

It reminds me of what Kodak used to tell people about taking pictures without the benefit of a light meter. Are there shadows on the ground? Look to the sky. Would you describe the prevailing light as bright-cloudy? If so, good. For black and white film, try 1/250^th of a second at f5.6. I shooting color, shoot at a quarter than shutter speed. One-sixtieth of a second will do nicely.

There is one other thing the county would like to learn from me about my lake, every two weeks, spring, summer, and fall. That is the color of its water. I am given these to choose from: light green, moderately green, pea-soup green, greenish-brown, light brown, dark brown, black, milky green, clear. Clear? Have we such lakes? And one more category: other.

I am tempted to have unfunny fun at country expense (this is not monetary, you understand) and further sub-divide these classifications, which might be done almost to infinitum, in the manner, say, of boxing a compass, viz. Green-brown-green. Or brown-brown-green. Or black-brown-green. But never is Ketchum clear. And I am greatly tempted to define “other” in new and surprising ways. But I resist.

I would describe Lake Ketchum this winter as simply brown, edging toward black. Ugh. This is not good.

Finally, the county would like to know if I detect the presence in the lake of oil, garbage, etc. Thankfully no.

On a schedule known only to themselves but deemed sufficient, again solely by them, a pair of experts from the county’s Surface-Water Utility come to the lake, unload a boat from its trailer at the public access, row or more often paddle in tandem to the presumed deepest part of the lake (which I, in turn, am supposed to mimic for my measurements), drop anchor, and commence to take water measurements and collect samples way too complex for he likes of the Lake Monitor, namely, me. But I am sometimes asked if I’d like to tag along and watch. Usually I beg off, with some flimsy pretext, but once I went with them and sat in a gently rocking boat queasily for more than an hour, observing, studying intently how the pros do it. It was vaguely interesting.

They are Gene and Heide. Both are trained scientists in the biology of water quality (or lack thereof). The work they do makes me look like what I am—a slovenly amateur. It is important, I know, to make each measurement in exactly the same way each time. It is as important, say, as a dentist washing his hands between patients: either he does it slowly, time-consumingly (after all, time is money, everywhere), or else he does it insincerely, carelessly, half-assedly. And we get sick or infected as a consequence.

Gene takes most of the measurements, relaying his data verbally to Heide, who writes down the precise numbers in the places waiting hungrily for them on the ruled, pre-printed forms, in neat columns. The waterproof marking pen she uses, I am delighted to see, is exactly like the one issued me by the county and passed along by Anton. Gene is busy measuring the phosphorous—the single most prolific pollutant of the lake and the direct byproduct of what used to be a dairy farm, a mile and a half distant and on the upper end of the wetland draining leftover cow manure and ancient chickenshit into the lake in a slow, steady process Now, they’ve stopped grazing their North pasture entirely and raise only beef cattle and calves on the South pasture, these cows being less than half as polluting as dairy cows. Still the phosphorous leaches into the lake. It probably will for eternity—which is a long, long time. It is much longer, for instance, than from here to Christmas.

Gene calls out some unintelligible but exact number to Heide, complete with zeroes and a decimal point, as he continues to measure certain things at different levels. Phosphorous, dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature, clarity, and something called conductivity, which has to do with the extent to which water will carry a small electrical current. This in turn depends on the amount of metallic particles suspended in the water column.

All these measurements are more comprehensive and scientific than the ones permitted me, as Lake Monitor. I must look and record what are largely my impressions of what is going on. The equipment issued me, I now realize, is sophomoric. It is in the same category as Leggos and Tinkertoys. Real scientists—and I don’t dispute that Gene and Heide are truly this—get expensive, delicate instruments to measure things we lay persons do not even know how to pronounce, let alone perform.

I learn these crass fundamentals: there is practically no oxygen at or near the bottom of the lake and the only creatures that can live there are awful, slimy ones that don’t require oxygen to breathe. These are mostly nymphs and larvae of such things as mayflies. Also, water brought up from the benthos, or bottom, in sampling tubes stinks. It smells like rotten eggs. The lake is full of phosphorous, layer on layer of it, and when the wind blows and waves are formed, the phosphorous gets stirred up into what might be termed the living water, and the lake becomes further enriched to an unhealthy degree.

The pH of the lake is around 7, slightly less, here and there, and this is considered normal, healthy, in balance, neither too acidic or alkaline. As the temperature—here, in late winter—of the water, top middle and bottom, is mostly the same. It is mixed, churned by wind. Later on in the year the lake will become temperature layered—warm on top, coolish in the middle, and downright cold on the bottom. Eventually the lake will “turn over,” actually invert its layers. The cool water will rush to the surface. And, I’ve learned the hard way, the fishing will stop abruptly for a good, long while.

I ask Gene about the phosphorous content of the lake today and how it will compare to a year ago, when a comprehensive study was underway. Today is cool, fairly calm I the lee of a recent wind storm, with no rain throughout the morning.

He shrugs. The water from various depths is housed in a series of numbered vials, each labeled and charted by Heide. The vials will go to an independent lab for chemical analysis. It is expensive and the utility’s budged is limited. The results won’t be forthcoming for several weeks.

Our hope is that the thoroughly mixed phosphorous content of the lake happily will be down from what it was last summer and—more importantly from the standpoint of good science—what it measured at the same time, one year ago, under weather conditions most like the ones of this day.

The Grandy Creek drift on the mighty Skagit river is one of my favorite pieces of winter fly water, and I am lucky in that only a few fellow flyfishers seem to frequent it, and not gear or bait fishers. Perhaps it is too slow for them and they are always hanging up and having to break off their bait or lures; this will make them go away fast, and nearly for good. And since not all fly enthusiasts can cast 80 or 90 feet, time and again, and press the rod to reach out an occasional 100 feet, I feel I have a small advantage with the Spey rod.

The drift has a nice, slightly away-from-you flow to it over a stony bottom that is difficult enough to wade to be an attractive challenge, for I’ve found that fish love this type of water and will hang out here.

To reach this long, lovely run, one drives to a public-access parking area with room for three cars, if one presses it. This is a short distance off of Highway 20 near Birdsview and the local road leaving it; one then wanders off down a well-trod, easy path, passing a couple of capped well heads to the left. They remind me that this was the proposed site of hatchery steelhead rearing ponds, ones not built because of outcry and legal action taken by a couple of ultra-conservative fishing organizations that have an unreasonable fear of hatchery fish harming the river’s wild run of late-winter steelhead, fish that have an entirely different spawning cycle and mostly use reaches many miles upstream. The concern these groups have over rearing space has no merit and any hatchery fish spawned accidentally in the river are of little consequence because of their low fertility. But even if there are some survivors, the vast Skagit has nearly unlimited rearing habitat to accommodate these few juveniles and, if they should return in three of four years due course to spawning themselves, should produce no genetic problems for the river, for these fish will spawn no later than February, while the wild fish do not start to spawn until two months later. Thus there will be no mixing.

Be this as it may, the fact is that there are no egg-collecting station and no rearing ponds here at present, nor likely to be in the future, and, as a consequence, no crowds at Grandy Creek’s mouth, which is all to my liking. When I walk down the trail, cross the creek’s braided channels (three, now), climb the bank, and take the rough trail through the woods an interesting short distance to where it ends at the start of a long river bar, I am apt to meet or see nobody. Ahead lies only open water and a riffle that breaks fast and slows gradually into a pool that must be 200 yards long before it becomes uninteresting. Gradually the pool dies into the kind of slowness that knowledgeable anglers call “frog water”; there the bottom becomes easier and sandy. You can fish on, but I’ve found there is not much point if you are looking for steelhead.

Across the river, both up and down, there is the illusion of wilderness , and while I know it is not, I lived largely by illusion and will happily settle for this one. The Skagit must be two or three hundred yards across and is typically carrying a flow of about 14,000cfs. It’d call this mid-low winter water. It is just right for the fly on a line that does not sink too fast and land the fly in among the catchy stones.

I use fourteen feet of Hi-D tip on my Rio floating line and have not lost a fly in several trips. But if I were to switch to a faster-sinking tip of the same length, I’d lose four to six flies each time I fished through the run and much of the pleasure would be gone.

An early spring, in mid-February (a slack time for steelhead, by the way, encompassing a lull between the strong runs of hatchery “keep” fish and the early wild “put-back” fish), the woods are surprisingly springy with whiplash willows already heavily greened up and bearing frothy white blossoms. I’ve been promising myself to bring pocket pruners on my next trip, but keep forgetting to do so, and the tangle I must wade through keeps getting denser, more impenetrable.

The trick is never to prune near the head of a trail that is not already well known or easily recognized, but to encourage it to have a thick configuration that will discourage exploration and penetration; once you’ve admitted yourself to the known but still obscure trail, whack away merrily. Provided yourself (yourself only, or mostly) with a wide, easy swath, one in which you won’t be whipped to death by your own passage, or (worse) tripped by some low limb underfoot. All of the above tips are natural subterfuge. I did not learn about the trail until some kind, unthinking angler told me in passing that it existed, and even went so far as to point out its entrance to me, which I had previously missed seeing.

This was a mistake, his not mine, kind fool. I’ve been careful not to pass such critical information along further, that is, up till now. Writers are thought to give away too much, but then what are we to say? Lies? Prevarications? Anyway, next time, I’ll bring the cutters, or else risk greater punishment from the whiplash trail.

I have not told the story of how we got the pups and how I tricked and bullied my wife into gradual submission, first, to the abstract notion, then to the very physical presence of the dogs themselves, which, though they be undeniably adorable, is not wholly convincing even with their presence to induce one to go against his or her basic common sense. And this needs to be violated before any dog gets purchased, let alone two of them.

I’d begun by showing her maliciously pictures from flyfishing catalogs of home-furnishing items for one’s cabin, or one’s home, and always in the background or foreground there was some Lab at rest or at play. In one—perhaps a presentiment—a black Lab pup had chewed up the expensive Portuguese cork handle of a flyrod, and the company had assured the reader that just such things were covered by the rod’s lifetime warranty, he-he. I hoped that they truly felt that way about it and that the ad was not a heedless come-on but a genuine guarantee, for such a condition is likely, if you buy pups.

In picture after picture—lawn furniture, rugs, bedding, etc.—some Lab lolled as accessory, but to me the dog was the heart of the ad and its sole purpose was to induce wives to get used to the idea by degrees. Or so was my intention. But Norma is not exactly dense or lacking in intelligence, and so the examples got tedious and deadly. Finally she called me on it.

“I get the picture,” she said. “Now, what is the point? You want another dog. Is that it?”

“Something like that.” Since our old Lab of fourteen years had died the previous August I’d been pining, my life sadly out of shape without his dark presence somewhere in the room or in my outdoor life.

I pounced on it. “What a wonderful idea. Two? That way, one would not get lonely. He’d have the other to cheer him up, keep him meaningful company.”

And since the likelihood of any dog, let alone two of them, still seemed remote to her, she did not trample the idea but let it come to a natural rest.

I felt as though I had won a minor tactical battle. I hadn’t won the war, but I was more on the way to victory than it might appear on the surface. After all I had fought the dog battle with her three previous times, always coming out on top (the traditional male position) but often doubting the wisdom of my bullheaded course.

So, a day or two later, reading the voluminous Sunday Seattle Times, I was, I swear, looking for a second-hand digital camera, but let my eyes slip over to the Dogs For Sale column, which is practically next door. Like all classifieds, they are alphabetically arranged, so Labs was about halfway down the list, though occupying quite a bit of bulk, since they are among the most popular breeds.

“Look here,” I soon called out. “There’s a man who has a litter of eight-week old black Lab pups and he has the same telephone prefix as ours. He must not live very far away. Why, he must nearly be a neighbor.”

She was not sufficiently impressed with my discovery as to utter a word. Taking her taciturnity as assent, I pressed on. “Why don’t I give the guy a call? It can’t do any harm.”

She knew that indeed it could do harm, but a kind of fatal oppressiveness had come over her and there was no point in protest, not yet. She would save it until it would be more effective.

So I called the guy. He loved about six miles away and was, get this, a vet. Now a vet, everybody knows, understands all there is about dogs, their breeding, general healthy, etc. If you have to buy a dog, and have any choice in the matter, I’d advise buying from a vet. I mean, by definition, the guys knows everything. Or else—to put it another way—what he doesn’t know about dogs, Labs, is inconsequential.

His bitch had had a litter of ten pups. Whew. Three of them were gone. This left seven. He wanted something in the range of $250 to $400 each, depending.

He explained that while they were all pretty much identical, and this proved to be true, one or two of the males looked to be of show stock, and they would fetch more on the market. And one of the females looked to him as an ideal breeder. More for her, too.

He owned the mother and the father, the sire, was a dog routinely brought into his veterinarian clinic, and he had long had an eye on him. The father had a recessive brown gene in his lineage and the mother was a chocolate. I knew that a litter could be comprised of yellow, chocolate, and black labs equally or disproportionately, depending on fate and complex genetics. But the vet assured me all ten pups were coal black.

He would be home this afternoon, a Saturday. We would be welcome if we cared to drive over. Would we ever! Norma was quiet, but then she usually is, and her long silences portend nothing special and I’ve gotten used to them, chatting on happily, oblivious to not getting any pronounced response. But I did think that, while getting into the car, she evidenced a little of that heaviness with which one goes to the dentist, at an appointment for, say, a root canal.

The vet was named Tom Rodin and his farm was East of here, in the direction of the interstate, then briefly North and then under the freeway, via a kind of little tunnel I’d never noticed before. Of course I got lost, on the way, turning every which direction than the one I needed to go and having to retrace my route, and stop and ask strangers for help; easily lost, I get quickly found again, and soon proceed blithely on my way, often in the wrong direction. Nobody in the neighborhood seemed to know where there was a kennel full of black Labs seeking homes. Not even what proved to be his next door neighbor.

We found the place finally, for there was a huge sign out in front, and turned in, winding down to a shed with a basketball hoop rising on a standard in front of it. A tall skinny man in desert fatigues and his tall skinny son, in jeans, were desultorily shooting baskets. The kid was pretty good. Also, there was a smaller kid that occasionally got to shoot the ball, and he was good, too.

Up on a hill was a teenaged girl washing a horse with a hose. The horse seemed to like it. At least the horse was standing still for it. But then the horse was tied, so I can’t say for certain, and it doesn’t really matter. All that does is pups.

Well, he had them. It is a beautiful sight, a brown bitch, dugs dragging, being pursued by seven squealing black balls of animated fur. I realize that some would not find this a thing of beauty. Now, for instance, John Keats might not, but then John is dead, and who cares what he thinks about dogs, wherever he is? Not I.

I told the vet, Tom, that they appeared to all be cookie-cutter dogs and I could not tell one from the other. I had long believed that you ought to pick out the most eager and aggressive of the pups—the one that came bounding up to you and asked to be taken home. (One by one they all will do this, until there are none left to sell.) But how could I follow this eagerness principle when all the dogs were as active as windup toy dogs circling a vendor on a city street? I could not distinguish one as being more hyper than another, since they were all manic. And they seemed to relate mainly to each other, chasing and scuffling in pairs or threes, then as some laggard rejoined the pack, mixing indistinguishably in and adding to the fray.

I then announced my intention of possibly purchasing more than one. Two, I said. He looked at me levelly and showed no sign of questioning either my intelligence or my sanity. Of course he was in the business, a pro. Pros do not betray themselves with careless enthusiasm or glee, but keep it contained, so as not to give away the show. Neither do they snortle with derision. They have a code.

We left, promising to stay in touch, for I’ve found that I do not trust myself, my judgment, in making large purchases and must defer to time and to my wife’s superior sense. She continued to stay quiet and I thought this not a good omen. Neither was it a particularly bad one. But it was worse than neutral.

I tried making cheery dog conversation, but got no response. We returned home and afternoon turned into evening. I did not dare to get out the catalogs and lay more incidental dog pictures on her. That is, I knew better.

Sunday dawned sunny, which be definition is what the day is supposed to do. We had our usual mammoth breakfast and collapsed, digesting it all, into the newspaper, with its copious colorful inserts, which take up a large proportion of my day, usually. We had a scan lunch and then I suggested, “Like to go for a drive again?”

She then began to speak. I had waited for this and hung on her words. They weren’t many. She reminded me of my mother, this once. She pointed out all the drawbacks of owning young dogs. They are not housebroken, they chew on things, you have no freedom again, they get sick, they eat a lot of expensive food, etc. The child that I was dismissed all these objections as inconsequential, though I knew they comprised pretty much what might be called my life. I was altering my life and pushing it off in a familiar untoward direction. I ought to know better. Etc. Yes, yes, then it’s okay, asked the little boy, me, again?

So we went for a ride. I did not get lost and, in fact, reached the vet in record time. He was waiting for us, appearing not too eager. I told him—perhaps for the first time, I can’t be sure—that if we bought one, we’d buy two. He nodded sagely. “There’s an idea,” he said. I started to list my reasons, as if he were dead set against my buying two, instead of being delirious, hilarious, about my wanting to do so. And then he mentioned the clincher.

“You get free shots. The pups will need them every three weeks for, oh, six months, then again at one year. And if you decide to neuter them, I’ll do it for free. I recommend it at about five or six months.”

“Did you hear that?” I exclaimed, turning to my wife. Again she did not show the same gleeful excitement and maintained that stoicism for which she is famous.

It was too late to ask if he’d take three-hundred. Or two-hundred. But I truly doubt whether the would have. They were fine dogs, all with AKC pedigrees.

I asked him to help me pick out a compatible pair, he knowing them better, longer, than I. I had, as a matter of fact, only given random individuals quick pats as they raced by me, chasing each other. They still looked pretty much alike to me, but I’d noted that the males were a bit bigger, slower, more ruminative. The females were tiny racehorses, their ears laid back, usually in the lead.

He took a long time doing this, selecting my pair, as if unwilling to give them up, and I too thought it was a shame, perhaps a crime against dogdom, to break them up. They were a matched set. Why, their very behavior proclaimed them inseparable. But two or was it three had already been ripped away from the pack and their mother. She, the mother, lurked in the background, regarding them with a wary eye, giving one or another of them a friendly lick, when that pup would stand still for it long enough, and looking old, sad, and eager for them to be gone. She wanted, I think, a chance to miss them and to communicate for brief seconds her sense of loss.

I wrote him out a check. It seems the tall, gangly son was the owner, and with money from the sale he was going to buy an ’84 Mustang that had a shot engine but otherwise was in top shape. The boy’s name I wrote on the top part of the check. He pocketed it, while his father went off for a couple of syringes full of puppy shots.

Then it was my job to load the dogs in the back of the red Explorer. How heavy they were already. When I placed them inside the commodious back, they froze. I mean, they struck positions in among my rod tubes and held them, all the way back home, a drive of twenty minutes. They were terrorized. All they had to sustain them was each other. Just two now. And of course us. Whom they barely knew.

On the lake the common mergansers are still largely female, with russet heads drawn back to a point in back, white chests, gray everything else. Their beaks are straight, serrated, and with a downward turn at the furthermost extremity, designed to do the utmost damage to what they decide is food. The lone male has a black head, white body, and the selfsame beak. He seems no less lonesome for true camaraderie than he has yesterday and the day before. He looks like he’d enjoy shooting a few baskets or putting his elbows down on the bar of a short beer.

On the Skagit, however, the mergansers are either paired up or pairing. They keep to a considerable distance from intruders in what is essentially their world and generally hug the far shore. On the Skagit this is a long ways off. The mergansers like such distances fine. They prefer them. And so does the lone male common goldeneye that comes tooling up the river, flying low. They don’t call them whistlers for nothing.

No female goldeneyes are in attendance. They are still all sex-segregated elsewhere. Often I never see them with the males. By the time they are off the nest and with ducklings, the males have all gone somewhere, whistling their way up the rivercourse, much in the manner of jets from Whidby Island Naval Air Station.

What I am looking forward to is the return of the Harlequin ducks, but I’m afraid I won’t find them either on the lake or on the Skagit. A pelagic bird, they frequent smaller streams, such as the Stilly, where I find them in another month, the male so colorful and yet, from a distance, appearing almost slate-colored, the female with her three white head patches. Surprisingly they are not shy, and will often drift with the current within a few yards of me, and otherwise will hang out in an eddy pocket a few dozen yards downstream, while I fish.

Once, at Blue Slough, four were perched on a half-sunken log directly across from me, three with their heads tucked under their wing, the remaining one eyeing me, all the while. I cast directly toward them, coming within intentional inches, and they ignored me, or rather paid me no special heed and the compliment of not flying off, almost as though they rightly knew that I posed no threat.

Dogs, it might be said, are little machines, and not very efficient ones at that. They perform no useful function (retrieving a shot duck, every year or so, doesn’t really count as work accomplished), yet consume a prodigious amount of fuel. Our puppies, for instance, go through a 40-pound bag of super-high protein dogfood in a very short while; I can practically see the bad rained own, like the sand in an hourglass. The stuff cost $38 a bag, and what with state sales tax added in, brings the price to about a dollar a pound. I suspect the stuff I eat is in the same neighborhood. I do not scrimp or pinch pennies—not on myself or on these inefficient machines.

And what is their product, these cuddly, organic machines? Why, dog shit. If the kibble vanishes from the bag like sand from our hourglass, the shit the pair produces appears almost as rapidly and as copiously. Why, if I were to gather it all up (and I do!), I should refill that bag almost in volume. In fact, that might be a good way of moving it off the property and onto some recycling site, were there one specializing in this.

Instead, we have bought a doggie-do- digester. (That might even be its real name.) Don’t ask me; I’m not responsible. Wives buy such things and, after their initial dismay, husbands thank them for it. Ours cost less than $50 and required me to dig a narrow hole about four feet deep. This I learned how to do in the Army in Alaska, providing holes for telephone poles along the Richardson Highway, and I proudly retain my expertise. I dug this one fast and clean and to the correct depth, laying the glacial till nearly to the side on a used tarp for later carting away to Norma’s new composting vegetable bed, which needed it.

The tank is of green high-impact plastic and sits almost flush to the ground on an obscure knoll well above the lake and in no danger of perking its contents into the water. Regularly I make trips to it, almost as though it were a holy shrine in the Far East, carrying the same five-foot spade before me with which I dug the site, the shovel now bearing almost as an offering to some distant, underground deity my tribute: hard little dog turds, when I’m luck; when I’m not, some scooped-up mess the consistency of porridge, but smelling much worse—especially in the early morning hours, when my thoughts until a moment ago were on my own breakfast.

I come bearing my offering, say, slightly bent over, as if in supplication. Perhaps I am. A foot lever opens the hinged door to the sky. I drop the shovel’s contents into the water to which is periodically added by my wife some chemical enzymes. These are the expensive parts of the digester. Ideally water and chemicals go speedily to work on the dog shit and the result perks harmlessly into the groundwater system, adding its burden to that of 90 separate septic systems sprinkled round the oval lake.

Chemical analysis of the lake (as reported to the Lake Monitor) reveals no alarming coliform bacterial count and the phosphorous and nitrogen mixes in indiscernibly with the discharge from the dairy farm and the fertilizer washout from everybody’s lawn and garden. All forms one worrisome toxicity, mild now, more troublesome in summer’s low water.

I thought I knew my ducks and had observed, usually from a distance, but not always, all the diving and surfacing feeding ones native to the area, or briefly in residence here during winter along what is commonly called the Pacific Flyway, but one species has been maddeningly elusive. It is the pintail.

My fishing friend, Dec Hogan, is a fine wildlife photographer, aside from being a river guide, and has sold over and over a twilight shot from around here of two or three pintails bathing in an orange lake at sunset, just as the ambient light fails.

Lovely; just lovely. Now, where do you go to find pintails like that—feeding or not? I ask in awe. I suspect the situation is like trying to watch a pot come to boil. Best turn away and briefly occupy yourself with some other minor task, meaningful or not. Return and the pot will be boiling away furiously; remain hovering and it will not. So, going to Stanwood yesterday, in a race with the postal service’s last pickup of the morning, I drove rapidly along the Old Pacific Highway, my favorite way of getting anywhere locally. It is a microscale of the Skagit Flats, this one belonging properly to the Stillaguamish basin. Flat it is, though, and a rain-gatherer, with puddled grain fields and still-stubbled cornfields stretching not quite to the horizon but only to where Port Susan terminates the land in a slough marking the river’s larger of two mouths.

First, in a ditch, I spot a solitary male ringneck, the species I think Daffy Duck was modeled after. This specimen evidences no hilarity or even mild amusement, let alone a laugh. And what is more, his famous ring is nowhere in the vicinity of his collarbones (had he any) but seemingly has slipped well forward, almost too far, and is now circling the end of his beak. Head and beak both black, the ring is alarmingly white. The duck looks as though he is modeling for one of those popular commercials pointing out the advantages of drinking milk.

My car passes along the wet macadam in a fast, steady churn of mid-morning, mid-week traffic headed equally in and away from town. It makes a constant loud roar that pulses. Off to my left in a wet field is a flock of graceful birds feeding in what appears to be . . . mud? Is there nourishment there? It can’t be. They are alarmingly near the edge of the road and separated from it by a drainage ditch but no fence.

Mallards probably, or else widgeons, though this is not the season for widgeons, not here. They dominate in the fall and make up for such bright abundance then by being totally scarce in late winter and early spring. What sleek birds these are , though, with their tall necks, much like Western grebes. But these are not any sort of grebe; grebes do not gather so and instead seek deeper water.

Their heads are tall and the males have dark ones, with a white crescent running up under their chins. Now I have seen this before, but not in real life, only in pictures. But couldn’t these be widgeons, caught in a special cold light, and I was seeing them all wrong? No, I was certain they were pintails. Quickly I ran through the gamut of known ducks—those familiar and those hardly known, or not known for some time. None fit the silhouette or this strange coloration. Only remembered, unexperienced pintails did.

So many of them, too. I pulled the car into the driveway of the nearest farmhouse and turned around, backed out, and took to the road again, reversing my course. I passed by the birds again, more slowly, the thin traffic beginning to pile up behind me. (Screw them; this was a birder’s first, a new species to add to the list.) The ducks looked more and more like the mysterious pintails of books. I was almost totally convinced. All I needed was the verification attainable only at close range. (I had no binocs.)

I parked at the same driveway where I had turned around and, doors left unlocked and motor idling, walked back for a look-see. Of course I spooked them. When the first of the flock startled and began to take to wing nervously I halted, of course, hoping to stay them, but it was already too late and in twos and threes they rose in a thunder of many wings, and finally the entire flock filled the near sky—there must have been thirty or forty of them—and they few in a clot Eastward, landing hundreds of yards farther away and along a route so packed with mud and falling-down fences that I couldn’t have followed if I had wanted to.

The ads for electronics—competitive electronics, you might call them—in the daily and Sunday papers knock me out. For years they have. I read them studiously, assiduously, constantly. I always hope for some new breakthrough and it available to me at what I deem reasonable cost. Over the years what I consider to be a fair price has gone up. But so has the quality, diversity, and value of what is for sale.

Discount electronic chainstores have made this all possible. I am their victim. Salespersons lie in wait for the likes of me. There are many of us. But we have grown cautious with time. We have multiple doubts. Such stores are mere vehicles. They sell packaged goods that come from all over the world, inviolate in their foam-lined boxes. Japan, Korea, Thailand, Sri-Lanka, Hong Kong, etc. People we do not know, shall never meet, could not speak successfully to, even if we did meet, assemble these goods and pack them in tight boxes to be opened only by customers—almost as sanitarily packaged as those toilets requiring one to break a paper seal before he can relieve himself. Or perhaps those water tumblers wrapped by possibly filthy hands and offered anonymously in motels everywhere. Yet the illusion of cleanliness and perfection is what keeps us going. It keeps us believing, as well.

I have not lost my sense of wonder and hope you haven’t, either. I mean what is a TV set but a windowed box full of magic? The Primestar dish in my yard brings me at a flick of my remote a nearly infinite selection of channels reflecting broad and narrow bandwidths, tastes, choices. It is so rich that often I don’t feel up to the task of choosing and leave the set off in dismay and bewilderment. It is all too much.

It is a stupid, specious question. Obviously not. The problem lies in our stars, or rather in our satellites, Horatio. We are doomed by a surfeity. Yet if we can only choose, choose right, choose well, our lives will widen out their horizons and we will be invariably richer. I for one intended to take full advantage of the situation. I promise to watch a lot of television.

Pablo Casals is not dead. Likewise, J. S. Bach. All live on, forever, or to the next best thing. In my house is Pablo, Yo-yo Ma, and Rostopovich, all play for my royal amusement, at my whim, any hour of the night or day, the wonderful partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied cello. (If you like your cellos accompanied, I have them also, with similarly accomplished dudes at the keyboard. Whoever, back in the Eighteenth Century, dreamed of such luxury, such opulence? Not the composers, whose living often might be described as grubby.

Americans are passionately pledged to their personal music. Tastes are narrow cast, diverse, in some instances positively weird. Americans all, we will fight to the death our right to hear our music, whenever and whatever we wish. And woe be to him or her who says we play it individually too loud. This is a nation of handguns and sawed off shotguns. No longer does an irate thinking man give the bird (the finger, that is) to some motorist who commits the unpardonable in front of him on the highway. No, prudence says to look aside, be calm, never, never meet a stranger eye to eye. It may be the last straight look you’ll ever experience.

Meanwhile we retreat inward. We create electronic cocoons in which dwell in less than splendid isolation, listening to our special music, music that speaks to and says special things to each of us. Sometimes what it says is certifiably sociopathic. That too is our right, so long as we don’t carry it so far as to get into somebody’s face, somebody who is important and has clout. Then our floor becomes his ceiling, and we have gone too far in terms of exerting personal liberties.

The chain electronics store caters to our freedom of choice and our power to exert it. This is money; money is freedom, and the only way freedom recognizes itself is by the exercise of free choice. We go to the mall and buy something. This is why we have risen early and worked for The Man doing often unpleasant, demeaning things we have dulled our senses to, or else we’d rebelled like the postal clerks who have long suffered some supervisory wrong and, one day, blast out of existence whoever happens to cross their path, this star-crossed day. And briefly become history in the recyclable pages of yesterday’s newspaper.

When you walk into your first discount electronics store, you may think you are in the President’s war room, with visual data streaming at you from all over the world, all at once, with mammoth decisions begging to be made. But it is only CNN picked up from the store’s dish or cable feed, cloned into dozens of TVs packed into a solid war of display, all aping each other, all these John Chancellors or Tina Turners appearing like sheets of synchronized postage stamps. I’ll tell you, it’s enough to frighten a dog.

It is impressive, too. You study the small differences between video monitors and make instantaneous lasting judgments about the quality of the companies who manufacture the sets, setting aside for now your knowledge that often it is a single company with several different names, the result of international mergers that seem almost continuous and designed to fool the buying public. Which TV is the one for you? It is hard to judge, when the settings are preset in the factory and the feed is replicated. My old Zenith continues to do yeoman duty and is about as dependable as they get, or so I suppose.

More infinitely interesting is the audio department, with its banks of systems, stereo and hi-fi, speakers lining the wall like something out of Big Brother, only he is listening to you, not watching you, for what is a microphone but a speaker turned backwards by some diabolical soul in search of evidence with which to incriminate you. Crowds, it seems, gives me a paranoid feeling.

I am at the store because of a special. Now the fact that they have specials every other day is no cause for my dismay. I know this, know it for a fact, but nevertheless stay attuned to the ads and the specials, hoping for another hundred dollars to be reduced on, say, that new Compaq computer. (I monitor, then buy, Compaq computers because it is what Bill Gates uses, and who knows better? He, I’ve heard and also seen on TV, drives a simple Ford Explorer, as do I, making us brothers, or as close as a $40 billion difference can make us.) Or a Pioneer receiver, looked at with love because the last one, more than twenty-five years old, functions with as much clarity and precision as it ever did. Of course the difference here may be reception and I am fooling myself. But I continue to believe; oh, how I believe. My CD player will eat twenty-five discs at once and issue forth music for eighteen straight hours. I tell you, it gives a reflective man pause.

On the lake now, six or eight male common mergansers. They stick mainly to themselves, but there are females around, and the temporary shyness is like that early at a teenage dance. Tomorrow is March. Soon the big bass will be pairing up and moving into the lake shallows to build their nests. And I will tiptoe around the shore, going into those neighbors’s yards who will permit me via lack of fencing, and look for their shadowy forms, usually disappointed because the light is wrong, my hand at my forehead, cupped, to reduce the glare.

Madness is not when you hold to an idea and nobody else will admit to seeing its merit, but when you recognize everybody else’s point of view as having value, equal worth with somebody else’s, and each seems reasonable and entitled to pursuing to its individual end. It is then that you are determined to be quietly but absolutely bonkers.

Not every pool on a river bears a recognizable name; not everyone agrees as what to call it. In fact, many popular pools go by two or three different names. This is perplexing, confusing. Anglers often have to ask, “Do you mean. . . ?” And then a lot of watery exchange takes place. “No, I mean the pool down from there, around the corner.” As if rivers had streets and blocks to refer to, as cities do.

Yesterday I headed for Russ Osenbach’s long new pool on the Skagit. I haven’t heard it called much of anything, this 300 yards of fast water, with a nice gravel beach extending most of its length, only a part of it under water. But it is easy enough to identify and rather specifically: it is directly across from where Loretta Creek empties into the Skagit on the South side. There is a public fishing area opposite and a boat launch. As a matter of fact, there are both of these on the side I was fishing. So launch faces launch, and public parking and fishing areas are, as they say, virtually eyeball to eyeball.

I’ve heard the hole referred to prosaically as the boat launch by a guy who reported taking a twelve pounder from there a week ago. Or I think it was from there; the description is pretty ambiguous, since there are boat launches up and down the river. It provides a nice ambiguity, though, if you don’t want people to be able to catch in their crosshairs where you hooked your fish. (If you really did.)

I have yet to hook a fish there. Of course I’ve only been to it twice, and neither time for long. The first time was because of Russ’s generosity; he’s not one to keep a hole to himself for long, not among friends. He hooked and spectacularly lost a fish in the new hole and wanted to share the place with me. I’d do the same, I think. I eagerly drove there, a day or two later, and was somewhat intimidated and disappointed by so lengthy and swift a run of water. Where did the fish lie, I wondered? Anywhere and everywhere, or nowhere? I couldn’t puzzle it out and it offered no clues. The line I had on did not sink well and I never grazed bottom and was too lazy to wade ashore and change shooting tips. I fished dumbly on and soon left the water, disheartened.

But I noticed one encouraging thing. The water leading up to the lower bar was slow and only about eight inches deep. Ahead lay dry shingle. It would be just the place to initiate my young dogs to river life. (In comparison, lakes are static, tame, never changing.) The pups would be able to wade and shortly to swim a tiny distance, then be greeted by a vat new area begging for exploration. This would be its appeal. It was perfect.

My second time to the hole was yesterday afternoon. Again I was alone. Again I recognized the hole’s potential, at least for young dogs. I fished through it much more comfortably with a different line, one that sunk fast. Occasionally I ticked bottom. This is the way it is supposed to work. The sun came out and, it being the start of March, I turned my billed cap around backwards, like a teenager, to catch the rays on my face and with a little luck start my season’s tan.

By God, the water looked great. Deep green, with just a touch of off-color from the previous day’s hard rains, it was beautiful. In spite of an annoying upstream wind, my double-Spey from the right bank (so the cast has long been called in the British fishing books) sailed way out in the river and swept the run well. I never touched a fish.

I am determined to return once or more often before this reach closes meaninglessly to even catch-and-release fishing at mid-month. (Meaninglessly because there is no good biological reason for it to close, since it was recently order by the Commission that all wild winter steelhead be released.) And when I return to the Puppy Bar, as I have named it in my mind, I have a hunch I will not be alone.

As for others, they may name it anything they wish. Such is the nature of rivers and its fickle pools. The river cares not one hoot what you call it.

Joyce Carol Oates (a breakfast food, according to that wag, Peter DeVries) and John Updike (who seems to get along quite well, with only two names) are two literary luminaries of my time, and each is due—no; overdue—for the Nobel Prize. But that prize is vastly over-rated, judging by some non-entities who have won it, over the years, and by the glaring omissions of those who have not, including Graham Greene, V. Nabokov, and Henry Miller. Yet the award remains oddly coveted and surprisingly elusive.

The best way to get it is, perhaps, not to want it truly nor think that you deserve it. Then it may fall in your lap like an overly ripe plum as you sit in your lawn chair on some balmy mid-summer’s day.

I live on a lake, true, by my heart remains imbedded with the course of rivers far and near. Yet I not unintelligently chose a lake on which to live, already having a place on a river, one that, alas, has been ruined by poor land uses, namely, logging. I do not want to swell on this dismal matter because it is depressing to read about, as well as to write about, and I have enough already. Suffice it to say here that if my beloved Stilly remained healthy, vibrant, I would have built a home there and fished the way I love to—an hour or two at a stint, no longer, but often. Perhaps daily. Daily when I feel like it. It would remain my choice whether or not to fish, and, if the past be any clue, I would fish daily or near daily in streaks, then let other work (fishing, work?) occupy me for long bouts. Weather would have a lot to do with it. Too cold, too wet, I would choose to write, garden, read, split firewood. On some good days, all four, but not in that exact order. Reading will always come ahead of gardening (mainly cutting and edging the eternal lawn), any old day. And this is the major benefit of living where it rains frequently.

You can’t cut a lawn in the rain. Who says. Well, everybody. It is an axiom. I’ve done it and know it can be done. But don’t tell anybody the news. It makes a wonderful ploy. Especially when you can fish—lake or river, have you either or both—in the rain. But it is best—as the folksong has it—when the rain is small.

This morning on the lake the first two male wood ducks of the year. Norma spotted them when she got up before me to pasture the dogs, as we call it, after their long night nap. They loomed near in a fogbank.

Meanwhile, later, with the fog lifting so we could see the far shore, the Bergs, the double-tufted cormorants were active on the glassy surface, rising from their dive in a ring-widening splash and plunging deep again—themselves like a feathery fish—in search of their breakfast. When one came up with a fish, he often played with it, turning it around and around in his bill, dropping it, quickly pursuing it under water, emerging with it again, dropping it again, plunging again, on and on, until the bird either swallowed it under water or it escaped, which seems unlikely.

I hoped it was not a holdover trout, or one from a recent hatchery plant (unlikely; it is too early), but a sculpin or runt perch from last year. I had to admire the duck’s determined fishing effort. Of course he has to hunt and dive and eat in order to stay alive. It is not play but dead-serious business, and I cannot really begrudge him any fish he catches, trout or scrapfish. It is we who have no real need, and play does not count, in the grand scheme of things.

Today they took us to the country, my brother and I. (Kate speaking.) They threw us in the back of the red Explorer and chained us there, one on each side, so that only our heads could touch and we could not curl up together, as we are accustomed to doing, for increased bodily warmth. Boy, what inconsideration!

They drove through stormy countryside, alternating bright sunshine and showers with black sky, until they reached what he calls the Puppy Bar. It is on a river, which is very much like a lake, only the water is in motion and tends to push at a dog’s legs and come clear up to one’s belly. Also, the water is very cold. But it is clear and cold, and good to drink.

Meanwhile he put on his plastic pants and shoes and walked out into the water, coming out onto what he calls the bar (it is dry, surrounded by water, some of it moving, some of it not, and cold, cold, cold) and went away with that long pole of his, I know not why.

We remained behind, my sister and I and her. We went for a walk. It was okay. We strolled along a dirt road (easy on the old feet-o) and sniffed at things, all of the new odors, some of them exciting, especially the bones of dead farm animals, longtime dead. Then we returned to where the Explorer was parked, and I wanted in, and Biff wanted in, but it was not to be, too early, I guess, and so we walked on some more, until she took us to a sandbank, which we scampered up and slid back down, all covered with sand. It was okay. We did this a while and she seemed pleased. I could have done it some more, practically all day, but he came back and called to us, and we had to come because that is what dogs do. Besides, maybe had food in his pocket, because he feeds us, or else she does.

He stood on the dry part of the Puppy Bar and called again, bending low, crooking his finger at us, then showing us his open hand. I know well enough what it means but was unwilling to participate because it meant entering the still part of the water that was, in my opinion, a little deep for venturing forth in. And of course plenty cold.

My stupid brother ran up and down the bank, letting out yips, darting in and out of the shallows, which was cold, let me tell you. He wanted to cross the deep part in hopes of him having some food there, but I knew better and did not participate. Biff actually went into the water clear up to his belly, but prudently stopped, showing us that he had a modicum of good sense. I was proud of him. Myself, I simply stood there and stared in my usual winning way. It softens their heart and works well for me always.

He continued to squat and cluck embarrassingly, showing us his open hand, even tweeting with h is mouth, using his stupid whistle, which he loves to do and startle us, and which is additionally hard on the old ears. Finally I could stand it no longer. I waded out, into the cold-cold water, and felt it lick meanly at my belly. Also, there was some unsuspecting current, not much, and it began to push at me, and I grew light on my feet. Buoyant is the word, I guess.

Then I plunged boldly ahead and felt my feet leave me, leave the earth, I mean, and I was afloat. Goodness, my head nearly went under. I began to run, that is, paddle with all four feet, as if my life depended upon it, which I believe it did. I moved along rapidly, trying to keep my head and ears dry, and after a long anxious moment felt the earth appear delightfully, wondrously, beneath my four paws, and was soon scampering up the stones of what is now the Puppy Bar. Let me tell you, it is nothing special. But it is dry and air is warmer than water.

God I was cold. I looked back over my streaming wet shoulder and saw my brother watching me closely. I could see the envy in his eyes, the big coward. (He always looks to me for leadership and I always provide it.) I scurried up to him and tried to press myself to him for warmth; also because I remained a little bit scared. He praised me, as is his wont to do, whenever I consent to do what he asks of me, the idiot. But it is good to hear, all the same. So cold and wet, I felt shrunk, miserable, but the turned his eyes away from me and with a pat of one hand placed his attention on my stupid brother and bade him do the same thing, the floatation/scurrying thing I had successfully done only moments earlier.

Only Biff continued to play coy, the big ham. He scurried sideways up and down the dry part of the river bank, getting only his fat ankles and huge feet wet, the big sissy. That guy. It was all an act, I knew, for I understand him, inside and out. He was after attention. He always wants to be the center of it. I was tempted to dash back into the water and show him, Biff, what the game was all about, but I didn’t really want to, for I knew what my brother did not, that the water was cold-cold-cold. Besides, it had motion to it. I knew one more thing that my recalcitrant brother did not, namely, I could swim.

That is what it is called—what I had just accomplished. And Biff did not know what to do with water. Perhaps he would sink like a stone, ha. He might have thought this. But I knew better. There was no way I could transmit this knowledge to him but by example—he who had come out of the same womb.

I could tell by his actions (which are my actions, too) that he wanted to set himself afloat and then run through the bottomless seam of water until his feet trod again the bottom. I know him and his every motion semaphores to me the full meaning of whatever lies behind the motion. So I could feel in my bones his wanting to swim and also his fear. I wanted to calm him, assure him. At the same time I wanted to remain ashore in my superior knowledge that I could swim and he could not. Or rather than he did not know that he could.

All at once I saw with some alarm that his feet too had lost purchase on the bottom and he was presently floating, paddling—that is, running—hard and heading for us. How strong he is, my stupid brother. A single stroke, economically accomplished, carried him twice the distance that a frantic one of mine did. Once again I choked on envy. And suddenly he was aground, ashore, wet and as slippery as an eel (whatever that is) and his little otterlike (whatever that is) tail strung out behind him like a wet rope that is caught in a freeze (probably was, it being so cold out). I felt for him, but not too much, since now he was getting all the attention and praise, the slow, stupid lout. But I guess some dogs need more praise than others who are less dense.

You know what he did next? He went right back in the water in those plastic pants and boots of his, and demanded that we cross again that deep cold watery stretch that stood between us and the true shore and out waiting transportation out of this place. I could see how it was a geographic necessity. I familiarly plunged in again and in a few paddlewheel strokes felt earth beneath me once more, scampering out to more of that foolish, redundant praise that humans like to issue. My brother was close behind me and got issued what seemed to me more than his fair share.

He made us do it again. How unfeeling, unthinking, downright stupid of him. Into the cold-cold water and across to the bar, following him and his plastic garments that were insensitive to coldness of the element. I moved quickly so as to get it over with, this thing called swimming. My brother followed me; it is what he always does, the clod. I mean, I could lead him straight into the jaws of hell (whatever that is) and he would blindly follow, the dolt.

She met us with a towel to dry us off, but, no, he would not permit us that luxury, for he was not done with us and our torture, that is, our lesson—the cruel bastard. Once more, brother and me, into the drink. It was, let me add, no warmer the third time. I was already ashiver; I had been quivering with cold since the initial immersion. So had my brother. But he did not care, the son of a bitch. And I am not referring to my brother.

He even chose a deeper part of the channel for our third and final effort. Talk about your sadists (whatever they are). And then, adrip, streaming water that was (have I said?) cold, he permitted us to be smothered individually and collectively in the voluminous towel she had waiting for us. While it must have removed some of the surplus water, it had the net effect of wetting us thoroughly to the skin, which had been kept previously dry by our thick winter fur. Hey, thanks a lot.

My brother beat me back to our means of transportation, the red Explorer. He threw open the back to admit us, and while our little legs (attached to our still little bodies) furrowed the air, they were not nearly long enough to permit us a leaping entrance into the vehicle; oh how we tried. We vied—we always vie—to reach the lip, rising up on our little hind legs, time after time, and attempting that which we will soon be capable of doing, he keeps promising us: a vaulted entrance. My brother and I kept futilely falling back. We are, after all, only puppies.

Finally—as he got a clue as to our paired intentions—he gathered us up and flung us inside, one by one. We shot back into our riding niche for security and warmth. Our dungeon keeper fixed us there again with separate snaps and chains. They piled inside, the people did, up in front. The engine started with a rocking sideways motion.

Again I could not reach the warmth of my brother’s wet flank because of my cruel constraint. Thus I shivered on our mutual mat, with only a cheek-to-jowl contact to sustain and comfort both him and me. We are of course inseparable. It grew warm, though remaining damp. We smelled strongly from the water. I think I slept some. Then we came to a stop. It seemed a familiar place. I guessed we were home when I heard him yelling at us to wake up and get out. Reluctantly my brother and I did so. Then it was on to the puppy gruel.

The Skagit Valley is beautifully banded in gold today, its flatlands bursting lushly with advancing spring. Up close, that daffodil-yellow color appears sparse and widely separated as individual plants rise spindly out of the not-long-ago plowed fields. The plants are thinly stalked, topped with multi-bract flowers, some of them facing right, some left. But at a distance they merge, gather their hues, combine, and produce ever denser layers of blooms, turning the far fields brilliant, dazzling, veritable bands of gold, which when the sun consents to come out glow even brighter.

I had long thought these faroff bands were commercially grown daffodils, next year’s crop of bulbs—a pretty compliment to the region’s acres of tulips, which run the spectrum, but they are not. They are but weeds. Weeds are what we call plants and flowers in low esteem, ones which our society assigns no value. But the tulips are still a few weeks away, and so are the hordes of visitors who will come with their cameras to carry home souvenirs of what they saw. Most spectacular then are the deep lavender and black tulips; the yellow and red and even blue often overlooked in their abundance, for the eye seeking the more exotic.

My neighbor Tracy tells me she thinks the yellow flowers are from last year’s vegetable crops, which have gone to seed or else are grown for that purpose—cabbage or cauliflower. I was semi-satisfied with this answer, for I had poured over my book of weeds, fully illustrated in color, and could not identify the plants for certain. They looked like mustard, but then there are so many different kinds of mustard and my specimen gathered yesterday from what is locally called The Big Ditch tide flats did not conform exactly to what was in my book (Ronald J. Taylor, Northwest Weeds, The Ugly and Beautiful Villains of Fields, Gardens, and Roadsides, Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montana, 1990), or in various other old books in my library. But this one is the best, the one I usually turn to, usually in considerable doubt and confusion.

I accepted Tracy’s answer because it made good sense. This is, after all, farmland, rich and famous for some distance. Her answer corresponded to my knowledge of the crops locally grown and observed the past two summers. “What is that?” I would ask my wife, and she would provide, “Cabbage.” Or the stuff that looked like artichokes, “Brussels sprouts.” Or carrots or cauliflower. Thus I grew knowledgeable, knowing to strangers who know less or who come from afar.

Seed crops do produce excessive seeds and these will germinate unasked for in spring’s rain and sunshine. But Tracy deferred to her husband, John, who would like to be an organic farmer but is working temporarily for his father as an electrician’s apprentice. John really knows this stuff.

John phoned the same evening. “A mustard,” I suspect, he pronounced professionally. “Now, if you only had a sample I could say for certain.”

“Funny you should say that, John, “ I told him, “because I do. It is, however, more than 24 hours old, so, be prepared, it is pretty wilted.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Bring it over. I’ll be able to tell from the leaves.”

It was a pathetic specimen, having spent the night on the livingroom table. It was as limp as if a truck had run over it.

I knocked at his back door, the way we always do, his or mine. He gave the wan plant a quick inspection.

“A mustard,” he pronounced, giving it a turn in his hand and laying back a leaf.

So what we have is fields full of mustard. There are many species and the exact one is not important. But beautiful, both up close and viewed from a distance, when it takes up the full, far field.

Just before he died in the fall of 1997, suffering terribly from cancer and the despair it brings on, Richard Gilkey painted some of the most beautiful, tranquil landscapes of his more than 50-year career. Paradox and irony are two facts of life and so I am not greatly surprised.

For about the first time in my life I had some money—just enough so extra so that I could afford to do some things others might deem foolish but without the performance of which life becomes dull and without verve. These things include ocean voyages and the purchase of fine art. The previous year I had bought my first original Gilkey, opting for this rather than turning in the old car on a newer one. I mean, a car is a car, but a Gilkey is a beautiful painting. Let the old car do for another year or two, I thought; it is running well. Since Gilkey’s prices were in eclipse I was able to get one I liked for four thousand dollars. To put this into relative scale, Gilkey’s friend and mentor, Morris Graves, has paintings selling for a quarter of a million dollars in NYC, Gilkey’s agent, Janet Huston, told me. Now I like Graves a lot, but not that much more than Gilkey, and I don’t think Graves is worth than much more—what is it, twenty-five times? Irony raises its cruel visage once again.

Because I’d lucked into some more unearned (that’s what the IRS calls it when it is a matter of appreciation of either real estate or common stocks, that is, capital) money, I was able to buy two more Gilkey paintings the following year, his last. I did not buy them because I thought the price would go up (as I had Microsoft) but because I found them beautiful and wanted to live with them. I was not wrong in my judgment and can happily report that they wear exceedingly well.

One was a small landscape, again from his last year, but the other was a great floral bouquet from the early Sixties, one of his best periods. It is happy, flamboyant, bursting with life. It had come upon the secondary market, as dealers call paintings put up for resale by owners who no longer want the art object, or who want cast more, and Janet, alerted by a friend in the auction-house business, scurried forth and picked it up cheap, for she sold it to me for a mere—note the mere—four thousand. It looks down on us now, and blesses us, so to speak, from a key wall in our livingroom each day. That’s how people feel about the art they acquire with their hard-earned money, and with money earned in other ways.

Among the paintings done by Gilkey in his final year is an especially memorable one, though nearly all are memorable to me. (The remainder are simply striking, fondly viewed.) It is, of course, of the Skagit Flats in spring. Ninety percent of the time it is some such landscape. I know it is spring because off in the painterly middle distance stands a swath of field mustard. I know it for what it is now because I presently see that same bright band of color not quite everywhere; inexperienced, new to the valley, I thought it was commercially-grown daffodils and dismissed it as a matter of no worthy curiosity. Well, I was wrong and happily admit it. Often I am, but not so often to own up to it. I do now because it is a minor matter.

Or is it? Gilkey—dead these five months—continues to teach me and others how to see and to observe what is truly there, in front of our eyes. In the past I guess I and others weren’t curious enough. For curious, read interested. And it is a shame.

The picture I so admired is huge, much bigger than I would have space for even on my largest wall, stripped down of everything else. So it was out of the question; also it cost fifteen thousand. I don’t have that kind of money and if I did I would probably choose to spend it for something much more utilitarian, such as badly needed transportation or shelter.

The late Gilkey landscape belongs in a bank or library or foyer of a large office building in which hundreds of people come to work each day and hundreds of happily thousands of others visit daily in order to conduct that folly we call business. A friend of Gilkey’s and mine, Jan Thompson, a painter herself and longtime gallery employee at Foster/White Gallery, told me that there was a chance that Richard’s old high school, Seattle’s Ballard, might buy it to hang in entrance to the modern, entirely new building, when it opens. To me that sounded ideal—and a wise use of public funds dedicated to buying art.

But it was not to be. I don’t know what happened to the plan or how it failed. Art goes to the first buyer. A private collector bought it—some guy or woman with impeccable taste. I envy that person, but just a little. I’m sure it is someone who lives far from the Skagit Valley and does not get to visit its burgeoning fields as often as I do. Perhaps it is some Seattleite who occasionally drives North through the Flats and, with Gilkey-trained eye, gets slightly tipsy on what is there for everybody to see for free. It is a magnificent landscape, the Skagit Valley is, and deserves to be honored by a man like Gilkey. Every time I see the Valley the light is different and something new comes into fresh perspective, and in it I see Gilkey’s colors flung back from the paintings, as if by some wondrous mirror. How fortunate I am to live where I do and get to visit the place so often.

By degrees, day by day, I am learning to see what is there for everybody. For free.

Signs of The Times. I warned you, there would be come of these, perhaps a whole bunch. Here comes another: rosy finches at the deck feeder, along with the ubiquitous Oregon juncos and the self-same pair of Stellar jays making frequent sorties into the melee, frightening away the others.

Out on the lake, on the first warm day of the year (near seventy; seventy in a few places, anyway, judging by the proud thermometers on the way to Burlington) there is a hatch of chironomids. The swallows know; the swallows time their return closely. The lake is dotted with tiny rings that look like fish rising and continue to fool my neighbors, like Tracy, who want to believe that fish are actively feeding on top. Well, maybe one or two rings an hour are perch fry feeding, but the rest are swallows feeding greedily.

“Look,” says Norma who—lakewise now, after a year and a half here—“that swallow hit three, four, all in a row. Talk about your precision flying. How do they do it?”

“Some kind of radar,” I say, fibbing, guessing, for swallows surely operate with some kind of acute guidance system, like bats do. Or else they have incredible eyesight and coordination to time their catch so.

If you look very closely you can see the soft ring of the emerging midge, the mature fly of the chironomid larva, very small, with an air sack and skin shuck left on the surface as the mosquito-looking creature flies off. And the fish here as in many lakes ignore them.

Under the surface, far from our gaze, coming up from the mucky bottom where they’ve lived this winter and longer, it may be a far different matter. Some of them start out as a red worm, then undergo their first molt into a larval form. Now they are propelling themselves surfaceward by emitting a tiny gas—jet propulsion, you might loosely call it.

Fry and fingerlings of all kinds, including spinyrays, may be cruising with open mouths down a bit, ingesting vast sums of larvae inching themselves in fits and starts toward the surface and the struggle for flight.

And when the reach the tedious top, the swallows swoop and wait, fighters in hot pursuit, with ready beaks.

What else is there, dubious teacher, as potent signs of an early spring? Well, you might listen a while to the frog chorus. First there are no frogs, no frog sounds, anyway, and then in satori-like suddenness there is enlightenment at dusk and the air is full of their chiming. It is a wonderful, roaring sound, as from a seashell pressed hard against the air, and at bedtime I listen intently for it, and when I find it I am enhanced, steadied. It is there for everybody (again free) until just before dawn, when (like shift workers) they all turn in to watery beds. They hide themselves along the shore’s jetsam and when you stride near reveal themselves with noisy leaps and splashes that make you think, Bass.

In bed, with my head lowered from the open window, the sound seemingly disappears. Have I mentioned I am a bit deaf in my right ear? Even quite a lot deaf? When I lift my head again, there it is, at the window ledge, the froggy roar. I play the game with myself, over and over, making them appear and disappear, all with the lifting and lowering of my head like, I suppose, a moron would.

The grass is growing, too; another sign of early spring. I’ve tried to ignore the grass but it has help in having my attention repeatedly drawn to the fact by my neighbors. First it is Bruce King, two doors down to the West, who sees with alarm the dark green tufts widen their domain in among his mole mounds. (Have I said that, winter and summer, Bruce raises the lushest crop of moles of anybody, hereabouts?) He picks up the phone and dials his lawn service. This is a man and woman who do not look like a husband-and-wife team but more like an odd couple. One or both may be somewhat intelligence handicapped, as we say today; whatever, they arrive in a big old Ford F-series truck off of which is loaded a riding-type mower—the kind we all secretly covet but nobody will spring for. Around and around Bruce’s long, narrow spread they go, circling their cut, she riding, he tending to the edges with various power tools, all of which are gasoline-powered. It takes the pair much longer than I expect. Perhaps they are being paid by the hour. (How I remember in my own life that induced slowness.) then they are suddenly gone, the big rusty truck gone, the power tools gone, the riding mower gone. Bruce’s place looks empty. What is left is a closely cropped Kelly-green lawn, in place of the shaggy one that looks the right color and depth and consistency for Easter-egg baskets, their time nearly a month hence.

Next comes Anton, damn him, and his smug cut of his lawn on a Saturday after the mid-week day Bruce picked up his telephone. Back and forth he goes, cutting at a prudent diagonal so that the slope won’t have its grass roots bitten into and expose, but this happens, all the same, always does, and I observe this with secret glee, and then watch during the following week the unharmed lawn green up nicely again, impervious to insult.

My own lawn? Well, it waits. The pups have damaged it some and packed the grass down beneath their eight thick paws, each with its several pads. But along the edges—primarily along the edges—it is tall and thick, getting taller daily. So today I remove Norma’s long plastic edging strips and the many pegs, both plastic and cedar, that hold it in place, and take my tried-and-true weedwhacker to it. I hate the plastic edging and the way it destroys my whacker’s “string” without much harming the tall grass and have longed for an occasion to rip it out, bundle it up, and haul it into storage. So I do. “Glee” is the right word to describe my feeling of satisfaction at seeing it gone. See how the grass along the edge of the beds, where I could never reach before, bows down to my will and the relentless pursuit of the string and its bite? Satisfying, and in a deep sense, too.

Another sign, please. Okay. Neighbor down a way, Paul Wiltenberger, a steelhead-fly hotshot, by his own admission, slowly fishes his way around the lake in his small driftboat, The Little Drifter. That’s its name. He’s fishing the year’s first conspicuous chironomid hatch and reporting (and who am I do doubt it?) many strikes of fish that he says are probably (probably?) perch, as he searches for one or two holdover rainbow trout that will make the effort worthwhile.

My textbook on weeds, earlier cited, says that the mustards “have successfully adapted to a world disrupted by mankind. . . .” Would that I had. This is putting it a little strongly, I think, but it is a fault pointed in the right direction. He (Ronald Taylor) goes on to state that of these members of the mustard family “many species have developed into weeds.” These are “opportunistic annuals” (nice phrase, Ron) that swiftly find their way into cultivated fields. In the case of field mustard, Brassica camperstris, they are joined by several food crops from the same family and are often confused with them. Thus my neighbor Tracy was right. The plants I saw in my Gilkey fields could just as easily be cabbage, turnips, broccoli, or some others. Ron does not care to specify and the lack thereof leaves me vaguely dissatisfied.

The mustards put out pretty little four-bract flowers and as the plant continues to climb slowly skyward the bloomed-out blossoms fall below and new bright buds open up higher, producing a tall skinny plant or weed. Eventually the old blooms will form seedpods, which id due course burst upon the scene and spread their seeds wide. This ensures plenty of yellow-banded Gilkey fields into a long future.

One last practical note. Field mustard is edible as a potherb or in a salad. (Noted.) Ron adds: “The tender new shoots can be eaten raw.) (Noted again, but only in passing.)

There is something sacred, very special, about wood ducks, not just in my mind but in that of most of the people who live round the lake. Of course it is mainly in the mind and has a lot to do with their relative scarcity. Unlike some mallards, they don’t swim right up to you on a populated lake and beg for pieces of stale bread. No, they are shy, secretive birds, and much like green-winged teal, in this regard. Alas, that species I’ve never sighted on this lake. We must settle for woodies, which I am happy to do.

Everybody adores the wood ducks, everybody here. The male in his full military-dress uniform, so proudly resplendent that you feel like you must shield your eyes from such dazzle, or else that your eyes don’t really believe what they behold. The muted female is beside him or at the least not far away, not now, not at mating time.

One seeks tactile evidence to confirm what is in the air, felt on the backs of one’s hands, layered in warmth on one’s face whenever the sun makes its presence felt, as it does, more and more. To me it is the presence of wood ducks.

This morning, the pups being taken on their first considerable airing of the day, we scampered down (even I did!) to a vacant field on the edge of a huge wetland leading down to and nourishing the lake. At the shoreline, the colorful guy bobbed nervously on a slight swell and soon took off with a squeaky squawk, winging low across the lake as if shot out of a circus cannon. (I almost expected him to somersault and land on his webbed feet, ta-da, far out on the lake.) But no. A moment later the female burst from the door of the wood-duck box, long ago set solidly and correctly at the water’s edge by some wise environmentalist in a thicket of willow and cattail. She had no real need. The pups did not threaten her, but burst she did, and winged on out to join him.

Surely it is too early to expect eggs. Or is it? I’d prefer to think they were engaged still in leisurely nest building inside their cedar box, probably their home for several broods, providing multiple generations. The disturbance (or so I should like to call it) was normal, not life-threatening. Or like the presence of a raccoon might be, or even some predatory crows. Just simple young dogs, living low to the ground and water, oblivious to ducks and how some people shoot them and expect them to be retrieved. Not I.

How lovely they were, how delightfully renewably new and wonderful to see. I can’t imagine an abundance of wood ducks and ducklings as to ever seem commonplace or ordinary. Even if it should literally turn out to be true, one day.

Oh, yes. We spooked a heron at the same time. Last year about this time I saw them mating—a fearful spectacle. It looked like a fight unto death. But this heron was alone. A familiar year-round sight at the lake and elsewhere, its extended wings flapping, the bird headed off, slightly ominous in appearance, or perhaps only somber seeming, so huge and gray.

“So, how do you like living in Stanwood?” I am frequently greeted, usually by some person who lives there, or roundabout. I answer with pained hesitation, for I don’t really live in dear Stanwood, nor do most of us who have it as our post office. We live off in the country—some aspect of it, though it is growing increasingly urbanized, or rather sub-urbanized, or better yet, ruralified. Whatever, small plats of land are being subdivided (like the last wedge of delicious pie) and houses are springing up astonishingly fast. They are not so fast to sell, however, but sell they do, given long enough. Sometimes this is a couple of years. Meanwhile in Seattle the housing market brings on an auction for the most inconspicuous house and it goes for about $30,000 over its asking price. Naturally sellers are jacking them up accordingly. The figure I hear quoted is 8% per month. Whew.

It is enough to make somebody move into a tent and sell his ancestral home. You could eat in fine restaurants, but have to return to your Coleman pumpkin each night, or else move to the country, as we have done, and find it is but a branch office of the city. Stanwood is considered to be in “easy” commuting distance from Seattle. The word “easy” is redefined regularly; that is, the distance is ever moving away. Soon ninety miles will be considered a normal, one-way commute. One-hundred miles will then not be much farther. Double that for the weary trip home, part of it bumper-to-bumper.

What’s Stanwood like, they really mean, and how does it suit you? Well, it is a fusty little burg, its population hard to number because nobody knows the true outskirts of town and what is incorporated, what is slated for incorporation, and what the town fathers don’t have their ready eye aimed at. I’ve heart the population described as short of two thousand; also twice or more that number. You can’t go by what the signboard coming into town says, either. It is an optimistic piece of guesswork. I’d guess they assigned the job to a local fisher, one who has long impressed folks with his scores.

There is East Stanwood and West, both business communities, each quite different from one another, each vying for some sort of marginal supremacy, the two joined by a long corridor along which is perched the middle school, the post office, the library, and a whole lot of strungout (in several senses of the word) businesses, including a couple of accountants (one a CPA), a hearing specialist, one then the other dentists. East Stanwood is the most prosperous of what was once deemed twin cities, in part because Thrifty the grocery is located there, and does a good business, plus the local cut-rate drugstore, whatever its current name and the name of the company that just took the old chain over. Buildings clustered along the route into town, coming off of Pioneer Highway, are much tonier than at the other end of town. They strive to resemble the shops at a mall, albeit a mini-mall, the outer fringe of a mall, say, that is none too successful. There is, for instance, a small restaurant that has given up on lunch and seems satisfied to open late in the day for a short dinner session. There is one called, believe me or not, Bistro Restaurant—that’s in case you missed the owner’s intention on the first pass. There is a drugstore nobody goes to because it is too funky and old-fashioned, its prices outrageous. I think a few geriatric cases frequent it and free safe there from the hordes, cheerfully paying the penalty. The owner (a pharmacist?) greets you by name, last name, often putting a miss, misses, or mister in front of it, or to the chosen, their honored first name, princely, often a nickname, though, and they get to call him by his first name, too, which may be Tom, or the honorific “Doc,” which makes them more confident in asking his medical advice, which he dispenses like pills, only more guardedly, sagely, for free. An over-the-counter remedy is often recommended.

“It’s the strongest I have,” he cautions the customer. “For anything more potent you’ll have to see your physician. Ask him to phone it in, if it’s more convenient for you. But I have a hunch this will do for you.” The placebo effect, no doubt.

Rows of greeting cards greet you at the door, which tinkles your entrance, cards stacked high, in tiers. Cards for every occasion and more, for those recently invented by cardmakers, such as for Grandparents Day and to celebrate Spring, not to be confused with Easter, nearly a month more away, another whole basket of eggs. Soon it’ll be Your Postman’s Birthday, or for the birthday of Your Postal Delivery Person. Happy Birthday, Whomever.

There is a specialty ice cream shop on the East edge of town, a failing computer store, a frame shop, a pastry shop, two taverns, only one of which does a good business. The other one, well, in the evening the bartender will draw two drafts and drink along with you, every so often calculatedly neglecting to pick up the right amount or any amount of change from your puddled loose change.

How do I know this without having ever been inside either place? Well, I’ve been around, know my small towns, recognize how they are all in the business of promoting fixed responses to standard situations in order to provide for people’s ongoing needs, and these do not vary much, community to community.

West Stanwood is a different matter, but not very. It must be the Old Town. It hangs on the edge of the floodplain of the dominant mouth of the Stillaguamish and from this edge of town you can see the rainbow bridge leading to big Camano Island and Port Susan. To the North lies Skagit Bay. The town belongs clearly to the Stillaguamish Watershed and Snohomish County. Yet it draws people from fringe Skagit County and the vast watershed that goes by the same name. Most of the people there identify with the other county and with LaConner and Mt. Vernon. I, a bit farther to the North from Stanwood, tend to, too. I like the idea of straddling both watersheds, two counties, two farming valleys and their separate vast tide flats. I am aware that by being part of both I am really part of neither. My ambivalence I can easily live with. A writer by nature is part of nothing and all, selfishly drawing from any source whatever he needs, be it from near or far (when he dies, he should be planted beside the Unknown Soldier. They would become good buddies. The dead writer might not like the idea, but knows in his bones, his lingering brittle bones, that it is where he belongs.

If you follow Old Pacific Highway in from my place, and you should, you will discover that the road slows to a crawl by some abandoned railroad tracks, a spur that runs up to Thrifty, then simply stops, as from the advent of inertia. Often I have the same feeling here. What does it matter if I go on or I don’t? But my feeling is always more cheerful that that sounds. You and I slow too because of the school half a block to the West and the marked toddlers’ crosswalk. You can be ticketed by the Stanwood Fiend Police, who lurk. A minute ago you were advised to drive the road at fifty, and so encouraged everybody cheats upward on that speed; now you are ordered to slow down fast to twenty. You and your engine balk at such a rapid transition.

You now enter what might be charitably called the dregs of town, though there are some old, well-maintained houses popping up, here and there. This is the rundown, seedy part of Old Town, what with Stinker’s Shoe Repair, a yard full of rusting tractors, cultivators and backhoes waiting for resale, all hopelessly out of date, many of them not working. A good restaurant may be found here, heavily favored at noon and gobbling up all the parking places. Many coin-operated newspaper racks are hungrily lined up in front of the restaurant’s entrance. Across the street is an old-fashioned hardware store with Radio Shack counter and up the block a pawnshop, with ancient tawdry items in the window and to be glimpsed deep inside, as though it were a museum. The head offices of a small, independently owned timber company are hidden behind latticed blinds and all the adjacent parking spots are marked reserved for the employees or their customers? What, trees?

In the next block is the heart of the Old City, with its proud relic, the hotel with restaurant and bar bravely occupying the ground floors, along with an empty, echoing lobby. I mean, how can you tell it’s echoing, for Pete’s sake, for you’ve never been inside by you own admission. Well, I can’t just tell; it simply looks echoing, and that is good enough for openers.

I shouldn’t mind chancing a meal and a drink there, downstairs, probably in reverse order. I have a hunch—and I am a player of hunches and am solid about them—the food is good. Probably others have had the same surmise and experienced an ensuing lack of disappointment, and the truth of the matter is that the place turns a nice profit. Folks keep coming back.

Across the street is busy SR532, a straight shot from I-5 to Camano Island and the motivation for all those who can afford to buy BMWs and SAABs and perhaps Porsches to drive it breakneck to get home (evenings) or to work (mornings), the traffic being nearly bumper-to-bumper in many places and reminiscent, at least to me, of Chester Nimitz Highway leading out of Oakland and deep into the fringe of San Francisco Bay.

Along SR532 for less than a mile runs a strip of false civilization consisting of gas stations and short turnoffs to eateries and various other roadside attractions, plus newly rebuilt Twin Cities Food, the area’s largest employer, specializing in fast freezing locally grown vegetable crops. It burned down a couple of years ago, just before we moved here, and put a lot of people out of work. Now they are coming back, as the company springs skyward, as it were, out of its ashes.. There are a couple of small shopping centers well within sight from here and in hailing distance of SR532, one of them Viking Village, testimony to the appeal to many Scandinavian descendants of the town founders, plus of that lineage who find living here attractive. You don’t have to be a Swede to do so. And now another hardware, one of the two large feed stores, a copyshop, a grocery from a modest string, a Laundromat, a pizza parlor, a braggadocio hamburger stand (which I’m dying to put to the test, for this is my home ground), and a paint and wallpaper store. There is also a furniture store that looks as if it made its last sale three years ago, but might be bluffing and doing well, with its appeal to bargain hunters. What I’ve seen is no bargain but more of a grab-bag selection. Still. . . .

If this were all there is, it would be a sad state, Stanwood would be in, but a true crossroads mall lies just outside of town, along busy SR532 and eventually drags in everybody who is aimed toward or away from Camano. The mall has concrete, undeniable existence and won’t go away. It is American, American to the core, what with brown Texaco staring across the intersection at bilious BP, and on the other two corners, locked as they always seem to be in deadly competition, McDonalds and Burgermaster. McD is the one with the tall windows stuffed with plastic playthings for small people, most of them children.

The centerpiece is Hagen’s, one of those irresistible modern groceries and, it would seem, department stores, or what has take the place of department stores. I first saw one in Southern California, twenty-five years ago, and was astonished at its variety and complexity. Now they are ubiquitous, one every five miles or so, maybe ten in the country. This one offers a green card, as if you were an illegal immigrant, and it rings up great bargains at the checkout counter. I’d hate to think of life without Hagen’s and that other, Food Pavilion, way down the road. They make all the small chains expand into large debt in order to be competitive and survive. In a way they remind me of Microsoft, or seem to emulate Microsoft, the way they’ll cut prices to gain market share and will their competition remorselessly into early death. Already so many small groceries have disappeared beyond the reach of even the longest memory.

And there you have it, pinpointed in time, poised for growth, but then it has been for decades now. Who knows, judging from the toadstool homes springing up around Lake Ketchum, Stanwood might make it, this time.

John Updike is about my age—actually a couple of years younger—and has created a body of work so impressive it boggles me. I, in turn (or not in turn), have accomplished so little it is shameful, in spite of having written steadily, nearly daily, most of my longer life. To dwell on this longer will lead in untoward, morbid directions, and so I shall halt in my tracks. These are the tracks of my pen, for I am trying to writ in long hand in hopes of slowing down my dubious flow.

Earlier I wrote that he and Joyce Carol Oates (no breakfast food, she) have independently produced literary bodies of work voluminous and impressive not only for their quantity but for their quality. Each of deserving of that mercurial prize, the Nobel, which is only occasionally awarded to the most deserving. Yet it remains maddeningly evasive to both. (By maddening I only mean that either of them has a right to get downright mad because he or she hasn’t gotten it. Yet.)

Updike is normally a joy to read. If you don’t like the nature of his characters, you will enjoy how he writes about his fictional persons and the particular Updike way of doing so. And his ability to play with the language and create gripping metaphors—in the instance that follows a simile drawn from the opening pages of his novel, Toward The End of Time: he is writing about the first snow of the year, late in November, and how he has lost his boyhood sense of exhilaration at the sight of it and how it only serves to remind him of how behind he is in his chores. He has “a quickened awareness” of “time that churns the seasons” and brings him “the new offering.” He finds “this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appetite.” (Page 3.)

Wow. It would have been tempting to most of us, having coined this telling image, to develop it further, and thereby ruin it. Updike knows when to strategically quit, and does. The reader is reminded (intentionally, I thin) of T. S. Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table,” but responds to the freshened image carried a bit further and in a new direction. That direction is modern; it hangs on the edge of too much, but never quite crosses the line.

We soon recognize how cleverly we are being drawn into the narrative by the experienced storyteller. This is, after all, his eighteenth novel. His protagonist is sixty-six, the novelist but a year behind him at the time the novel was published. Close enough for the identification with himself to be complete. At the same time Updike is clearly not his aging protagonist, and participating in that particular fantasized life situation, the perceptions are Updike’s, nevertheless, and ring true, unique, from book to book, while remaining universal (at least if you are an American) and illuminating.

I say that he is American and could not be mistaken as anything other, say, a V. Nabokov writing acutely about life in America from a modernist perspective but not quite catching the heart of the essence of things, though Lolita comes close, just as Conrad comes close enough to fool us awesomely. And now this from Updike: “I ran down to pick up milk and orange juice and a bag of so-called Smart Food, popcorn flavored with cheddar cheese.” (Page 24.) Yes, this is what we all do, on a Thursday evening in America, the night balmy with stars. Or crisp without them. Oh, it might be a six-pack of Bud instead, along with Rice Crispies and a grind-it- yourself pound of French Roast, damp in the bag, a little of it sticky on your fingers. Life differs only in its particulars. We breathe the same air, tainted as it is with automobile exhaust, the same stuff that gives us flaming sunsets. Armageddon sunsets, you might call them.

You see how contagious such writing is, and how inferior one comes up with imitation?

While Updike’s protagonist is repeatedly presented as aging, weary, his prostate bothering him, he is constantly renewed by what others have called the Life Force, which does its work unheeded, irresistibly, redeemingly. Once again it is the long arm of the past that jerks him and us back into the present. The image is erotic, for only the erotic is capable of producing temporal rebirth:

“. . . I felt youthful, reliving teenage moments propelling the boatlike old family Plymouth through a Berkshire blizzard, back from a date that had steamed the car windows.” (Page 24 again.)

“How true,” Woody Allen’s Annie Hall might sigh, along with all of us, each of us in turn, for who has not experience such long-ago moments, and who isn’t grateful for having his brought back meaningfully by such writing?

It comes dangerously close to cliché, however, and narrowly escapes by a chin hair, one might say. Notice the inescapable use of particulars to bring about the strong effect. The car is a Plymouth, and it is as big as, and handles like, a boat—he might have called the car cumbersome, awkward, tublike, etc., but he likens it to a boat, perhaps a scow. It is not an ordinary snowstorm but a Berkshire blizzard; however that may differ from a sleety fall of December snow in Seattle I can’t say and won’t belabor the difference, which may be minute. Updike’s Berskhire blizzard is all of ours, varying little, varying naught. It is a gift, one for us to do with what we like. It is to enjoy. His books abound with such intentionally universal images, nailed down, often half a dozen to a page. Each is stereotypical, often banal, but nailed to the board with particulars. His gifts go on and on.

Like Updike, most of us live primarily in our heads, while our ordinary life swirls on about us, filled with such things as teeth cleanings, trips to the cobbler (mine calls himself “Stinkers,” outside on the bricks and in the phone book’s yellow pages, though his first name is Mark), and a stopoff at the mini-mart (mine is called the Superette—how’s that grab you, language freaks?) for Ritz and some gooey substance that comes in a tube like sausage to spread cheeselike across the crackers to make them less dry, more chewable. You get my drift. It is the same as Updike’s, but not so charmingly done, nor so uniquely particular.

A simile comes to me unbidden. Well, almost. It is “as American as . . . Updike.” Could it be otherwise? Do not omit the ellipse, printer please. It denotes Man Thinking.

We are creatures of habit, as oft been said, you and I, but habits are what stitch us together and make life livable, or else is near chaos. I am reminded of this chilling fact after several days of turmoil brought on by my life with young dogs, for they can no longer be called puppies, they are too big. But I can happily report things are settling down nicely, after a terrible time, or else I am deluding myself again.

To start with, it had been a terrible weekend. The dogs had been eating things that were not good for them and it was effecting them direly at both ends—to speak euphemistically. If one dog gets hold of something –whatever—and drops it, the other will immediately pounce upon it and probably ingest it. And so with the other, in turn. Some peculiar things get swallowed this way. Neither Norma nor I are fast enough to intercept the object. It is a speeding bullet. Down the hatch.

Saturday morning the dogs slept in, as was their habit. (Note that all this is about to change,.) One of them—she, I think, but I can only guess—had loose bowels, and there was a huge pile at the end of their tight basement confined area where they sleep on a handsome, comfortable bed of cedar shavings Norma made for them. They had tracked back and forth through the wet stool and the bedcover now was largely yellow-brown, where it originally was blue. I took them outside to relieve themselves and they did, though the guilty party did not perform much and looked up at me questioningly, as if to say, “What are we doing here, boss?” This is how I adjudged it to be she, the guilty party. Of course she couldn’t help herself. Or he, if it was he. The rest of the day proceeded according to routine and habit, requiring no further commentary.

Sunday morning (Wallace Stevens’s famous remarks to the contrary) was hell. No “complacencies of the peignoir” there; no “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” I descended to the basement before any kind of breakfast to see that the dogs had opened up the barricade of chests and bookcases and a wooden file cabinet we had erected as their indoor pen and escaped into the large downstairs room which is a combination rec room and my office or work area. They must have broken out of prison early, near dawn, to have had time to do all the damage they had done. I mean, it takes some time to remove all the fluffy packing from a stuffed duck and to spread it around the room, so that it looked like clumps of snow evenly distributed. The had torn apart a Kleenex box and spread the tissues everywhere, most of them unrecoverable, and to jump up and down on my favorite sofa and the other one, repeatedly, judging by the paw prints. The clincher to their infamy was that they had pissed and shit nearly everywhere, as if in concerted effort to plague us and negate the weeks of training we had carefully given them in order to avoid such a debacle.

Some day, but surely not now, this will all be seen as mildly hilarious and normal.

The shit was in widely spaced mounds, some of it loose, some of it thoughtfully hard, and none of it was on the vinyl-clad floor where it would easily clean up. No, it was on the rug—the same tufted rug they loved to chew on. And the dark circles of urine were all on the rug, too, here and there, and each was old and had widened with time and soaked into the foam core and backing of the rug. No amount of blotting, followed by scrubbing, could remove it. It was permanent, part of the rug, its stench long lasting. So even if the rug had not been chewed away in three major areas, it would soon have to be removed and replaced, when the dogs mature—whenever that might be.

Dogs mature, don’t they, and stop doing these cute things? They must. I remember that they do, though I’ve been warned and also know from experience, in case I didn’t hear my warners correctly, that Labs are particularly mischievous (read: destructive) in this regard. So our day, that Saturday, began without either habit or routine, but settled down only a little during the hectic hours that followed. First came cleanup, then our breakfast, when we could settle our stomachs down to eat it, after so much stench. Mercifully (for you) I won’t detail the events further.

“Enough!” I proclaimed, senselessly, meaninglessly, as fearful dusk approached the they neared their time for confinement and sleep again. Then I added, with less determination than it might sound like: “They are animals, after all, not little people. I mean, they can’t be trusted to behave, no, they must be put into situations and conditions (I was vague here, undecided) where such things as last night and this morning can’t happen. They simply can’t be permitted to. Something else must be put in their place.

I wondered what these might be? Then a decision spread the flap of its wing over me and enveloped me in its grip.

“They will sleep in Arlene’s pen tonight. She is our predecessor here at the lake and the house’s builder. The pen is what she intended for dogs and one of the reasons the house appealed to me so; it was for her daughter’s dog, when the daughter came to visit, which was rarely.

The dogs were a bit surprised and unduly quiet when show their new sleeping quarters at dusk. They were reluctant to enter the steel mesh gate but I managed to get them inside without laying hands on them, using my feet, or resorting to the pair of leashes I usually carry. We turned our backs on them and walked away. Dumbfounded—it’s what the word truly means—they emitted not a bark. I heard only the slightest of whimpers as we turned the visible corner and, to them, became lost. Always the whimper is from her, Kate.

She is the vocal one. She will whimper, she will bark, she will dig, she will whine. He, Biff, will sleep. He can be counted on for that, bless him. Oh, how heavily he sleeps. It is not like a log; it is like a stone. He sleeps flat as a rock, like my old dog Sam’s slept, and when he is plenty warm, he sleeps flat on his side, all spread out, his big fat paws fully extended. Except for his heavy breathing, I am envious of how he sleeps, which is near the sleep of the dead. If you shot off a canon alongside him, he would shuffle his bones and betray life with a slight movement.

We went to bed at midnight, our usual time since getting the dogs. A new habit, you might say, for it is a full hour earlier than before. A new routine for us, and on me which was easier to adjust to than I had thought ahead of time. A habit that is good for us. For if we don’t go to bed then, the dogs will raise us short of a full night’s sleep and we will be groggy all day. One learns these things the hard way, that is, through direct experience. Is there really any other way?

And how went the night? Not well, not the first night. Kate didn’t like her new sleep situation and every few minutes announced the fact, either whining with three or four degrees variety in her pitch, or else by outright barking. As for Biff, his voice is deeper, more sonorous; hers is shrill and penetrating. How they make their small differences know, well, that is an other story.

Bed at midnight, right, I rose in sleepless frustration about a quarter to one, and hied me downstairs to the newly vacated rec room cum office, and flaked myself out on that favorite couch, the long one, piling on first one wool blanket, then just before chilly dawn the providently placed second one. Light streamed in my unaccustomed windows—eight of them—and I turned my back to them around six. I slept till eight then and rose rather stiffly to meet my wife for breakfast—the special Sunday morning one Wallace Stevens alluded to in his famous poem—and ate it without attending to the dogs first.

This was one of the first changes in routine or habit that directly effected us after the problem with the dogs and a most welcome one. We could eat before attending to them and their likely messes.

“The dogs,” she told me, over orange juice, “settled down after you left.”

That is the best she ever offers, while my own response is generally good to excellent.

“Not so great. The sofa isn’t really long enough. If I get my head flat on a pillow (I brought mine with me from bed), my feet are too high on the other arm of the sofa. I’ve found that I don’t sleep well with my feet elevated; I suspect most people don’t. I don’t know why this is. It is better to have your head elevated, as in shock cases, which this was one of. I just learned all of this interesting information.”

It is in the nature of this senseless babble with which I greet and confound my wife. Years of practice.

Breakfast was leisurely, nicely paced, almost idle. Scrambled eggs and baking-powder biscuits and a rasher of ham cooked like bacon for me alone. And lots of thick hot coffee, followed by the bulbous Sunday paper, with its copious brightly colored inserts. But first the dogs had to be attended to. This means shat. They had to be let out and greeted, fed, the pen relieved of the night’s accumulated bodily wastes. There were many of these ochre-colored piles distributed over the cedar chips. Done deliberately, I decided, in order to punish me, punish us, for this new method of confinement. How they must have longed for their old snug bed in a warm room and an area they could easily break out of, if they put their four or eight shoulders into the effort. No Alcatraz, that place.

It went well and the next night better yet. A noisy third night followed, which I slept lightly, doggedly, through. And the fourth night, a dream, a dream night, or rather a dreamless one. I woke once, briefly, and slid back quickly into smooth slumber.

In the morning of each new day we ate an ancient routine breakfast, as of old. If the dogs shat their pen, at least we knew where the stuff would fall and it could be easily picked up and removed to the poop digester. Half a cup of coffee under my belt, I went to release the prisoners, wearing a little half smile.

I’ll swear they received me with no diminished enthusiasm, joy, and—I may be imagining this—respect. Or the start of that precious quality.

Sitting in the sun, this cold Saturday morning, reading at random in David Wagoner’s Collected Poems, bundled in my Brown/Jordan lawnchair, all buff and chocolate, feet up on matching footstool, writing this, surrounded by a visitation of dogs, enjoying the first warm rays of their short life, the poetry smoothly satisfying, the frequent piercing images arriving with a bang. Thinking it is all worth it, the travail, the chaos, for just such moments as this, tranquil and deeply satisfying, Norma at work with powertools, making our life more comfortable, smoother, Neighbor Anton across the wall of unleafed wisteria making soft yard sounds, in charge of his three-year-old son and his welfare, transmitting life’s basic data in the form of fatherly truisms and warnings, his wife Carrie transmitting female data to fellow conspirators, co-conspirators now called, via her cordless phone, on the deck opposite. The islands, these moments, these mornings. Cerebral calm, all serious work holding its breath. The sun, its life-giving rays taking all consciousness, bestowing the wonder of warmth.

Out on the lake a boat strongly being stroked by some denizen, a passenger in the stern seat, trailing a hand in the cold water; I discern this from the fact that there is no car parked in the public access opposite. The surface is rippled like used tinfoil, but blue, blue from the sky, across which clouds like quilt batten slowly pass, sheep on parade, stage right to stage left.

What lies flatter, I ask you, than a sun-struck Lab? Why, he might just be a throw rug. To enjoy so, these first rays of his life. I envy him, but only a little. After all, I have my accumulation of sunning to draw heat from.

I am reminded of cruel Carmel Marches, as this one ends, sitting on a public beach there, one year in uniform, my hair pressed back in front to expose my hungry forehead, seeking the rays of a glistening Pacific, receiving a cold wintry blast instead. I am a college student now on spring break, repeatedly fleeing to the Bay Area, or a new father, briefly reprieved, believing still this is magical country that might save us, save me, the source of renewal anyway, badly needing and seeking some such thing. At night, in my motel room, studying my forehead in the dim bathroom mirror for any signs of incipient tan. Ha. How do you distinguish windburn from Ultraviolet 2 radiation, or is there really any difference? How expensively we fool ourselves, over and over, with what will fade faster than a positive thought.

[Is this what is meant by “automatic writing”? No, but it comes fairly close and is highly assocational. Yet there is a shape (I hope) and control.]

I haven’t taken the big row boat out on the lake yet this year. My feeling is, we have so few holdover rainbow trout that they are not worth going after. The big bass must be spawning in the gravel near shore. Only Eric Balser is able to catch them, however. He has the special skill and approaches them with the stealth of an Indian. Perhaps I should pursue the bass again, after a totally futile effort last year, even with Eric’s help and favorite lure he gave me.

The spinyrays have been heavily decimated by the cormorants and mergansers resident here, all winter long. Yet March brings hope eternally. It also brings chironomid hatches. How sad when no fish rise for them, and we only delude ourselves when we see rings from the swallows and insects hatching.

A plant of hatchery rainbows will be made April 6, my spies at Fish and Wildlife tell me. It will be a thousand legal-sized fish again. Last year I caught more than a third of the plant. I had to use bait to do it, though. Having the exact date of the plant gives me imperial knowledge. It is a richness not to share. At least not for a while.

Sign of the Times again, albeit a time past. When Penguin reprinted War and Peace in telltale orange, orange for fiction., back in the Thirties, it did so in two volumes and produced fewer copies of the second book, figuring not so many people would go on to read it. Now, that is astute human understanding, no matter how cynical it sounds.

As I read, my mind wanders; it does as well when I watch televisions, but there, usually, there is less content that is lost—less of importance, I mean. Thus when I read a complex book—for instance, Mark Helprin’s Memoir From Antproof Case—I inevitably miss whole sentences and even paragraphs; suspecting that I have, or else I have dozed, I retreat and reread regularly. (The Three Rs!) My forward progress goes haltingly,; for I can’t help myself. It is far better to proceed this way than to forge dumbly into the future, having missed so much that is vital and meaningful to my purpose, which is understanding and learning.

Does everybody read the way I do? Then pity him, pity them. It is like the old engineering equation: two steps forward, one step back. Or is it three forward, two backwards? When I worked in engineering education—the dean’s assistant—we had a little joke. It referred to as two steps forward, three back. Expressed as a formula, it looked like the letter E turned into a graphic, with a couple of prongs facing the opposite direction, setting in modernistic type. Futura bold extended, a cap.

The trouble, of course, is my mind, my lack of concentration. There is too much competition for my attention, both inside and from without. Presently, while writing this, alternately reading Helprin, on this cool, blustery March Monday, I am attempting to train two young Labrador retrievers. Like other forms of parenthood, the job is rife with mistake-making. You avoid one kind of behavioral error and are immediately caught up in another—the training technique’s downside. The effect is also expressed by the cliché, “You can’t win for losing.” Analyzed quickly, it is meaningless doubletalk. Of course you can’t. If you are trapped into a losing situation, it is impossible to win at the same time. A win or near win is precluded.

I have decided (God I am) that to train these dogs they must be separated, almost as though they were Siamese and joined, say, at the stomach. They joyfully distract each other from concentration (like mine) by constant rough play and, perhaps worse, prevent serious bonding with a person, namely me. Books tell me I am the Alpha Male, or ought to be. Our life together resembles—to them, anyway—a pack of dogs; it does to me, too. I must take on the role of pack leader. They expect it of me. In real life, dog life, I am sure it is not always a male. More often—sled dogs, for instance—it is a clever female. But the dog psychologists—boy, there is a job for you!--have to devise a vocabulary and an academic scheme, I mean, schematic, by which they will be recognized and given authenticity. Hence the Alpha Male Nonsense.

I am negligent in my duties as he, or else have failed in the leadership test, which is strict and unforgiving. The dogs may like me, but they do not respect me as leader of the pack we three (I exclude Norma, for she won’t play the game) comprise. Their bond is too strong and domineering. Therefore I, who unlike Scarecrow have a brain, such as it is, woolly and not straw-filled, have decided to separate them for longish periods of time—one hour, two, perhaps daringly three, if all goes well and forced each to relate solely to me. This has followed an insane morning romp when neither would obey me and each sprinted separately for my neighbor Tracy’s herb garden, followed by me shouting and screaming, whistling like a demented canary, calling out, “No, no. Come here, you goddamn dogs,” or something worse. And finally I succeeded in tackling her, the closest and smallest, in wet grass, dressed in my pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, and ancient field jacket.

He, curious, came close to her and I caught his choker. Now I had them both snagged. I hauled them, protesting, darting every which way, back to the house and the basement quarters, where they soon began feeding hungrily. I, short of breath still, dropped into an arm chair, lightly sweated, and made this vow. Separation and bonding, this time to me.

And how has it worked out, an hour into the process? Norma informs me Biff has barked continuously from within his pen, howling, too, from time to time. And she, inside with me, whined but a little, drank copiously from a pail, looked longingly and languidly at the door, and settled down to a series of short naps, remaining sentinel-like ever vigilant, though pressed flat to the mat. Presently she is curled at my feet where I am writing this, just as I would have her. She has just rewarded me with a fragrant fart.

My topic though is attention and my lack of it. I am writing this, then alternating with readings in Helprin, who is a richly magnificent writer who often negates and compromises his talent by writing op/ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal. He is surprisingly ultra-conservative and recently called for Clinton’s impeachment—this even before and unrelated to the Monica Lewinsky affair, if there really was one. But Helprin’s fiction is first-rate, right up there with Calvino, Borges, Theroux, Nabakov, and my old peer and standby, John Updike. John the Upright, Uptight, Updike.

A big surprise yesterday. A flock of twenty widgeons came wheeling into the lake, emitting their distinctive twitter, banding the sky at first with their densely packed bodies, moving as one, or rather as several ones, linked, deft, banking, then skidding to a tightly packed, splashy landing, where they dotted the lake at its near center. We don’t remember them in spring; they are ducks of late summer and fall, arriving with the northern shovelers and between them ridding the lake of it dying massive duckweed and Mexican water fern blooms.

As I recall from September, one such flock numbered twenty, too. (How do I know, I count them.) Is the same flock as autumn, or is it a mere coincidence of numbers? It is impossible to tell. Welcome to Lake Ketchum, you guys and gals. Or welcome back, as the case might be.

The close, ground-hugging plant from our visit nearly a month ago to the Big Ditch is red dead-nettle, Lamium purpureum, and the root word is purple, not red. Its flat leaf is spongy, notched repeatedly, somewhat heart-shaped, and only its tiny flowers are red. They will soon pass. Is this the same plant that grows tall and when you are passing through an open field of nettles causes you to raise high your arms so that the leaves won’t brush your forearms and the backs of your hands, producing that instant burning, prickly feeling that lasts unto the next day? If so, it begins life so smally, so low-lying.

As I recall, probably from the Boy Scouts (that fount of slightly skewed wisdom) the antidote is mud, applied early and liberally. Cold soothing dripping mud from a bog. Oh, yes.

I call them the Sandwich Island Estates. They are a triangle of land away from the lake, where the roads part, then come together again, and directly opposite where Jack Donato has his three homes, all in a row. Originally Jack owned the triangle, picking it up cheaply, when land values weren’t so high. He held them a while, then sold him for a neat profit to a builder. Nobody dreamed the builder would erect so many medium-priced houses in so small an area. My God, everybody is butted up against everybody else, as the houses spring up, usually in pairs. Now there are six houses on the island, but stakes in the ground indicate probably four more soon to be constructed. When will it stop? When the builder runs out of land. I’d say he’s maxed his use of the land. Why, the place looks like a tenement. You would think nobody would want to live there. On the contrary. The places seem to sell within weeks of being listed, while other, more attractive houses springing up around the lake sit idle, some of them awaiting completion according to the new owner’s wishes as for color and appliances.

In fact the lake is being settled in on its extremities everywhere where there is no wetland prohibiting construction. Soon it will be that only wetlands won’t be built on, crowded with people. The situation here is near to what it is everywhere within a hundred miles. It resembles within memory the great growth the San Francisco Bay Area took on in the mid-Fifties, and this was—mind you—long before the development of Silicon Valley. We will soon resemble it. What a sorry situation it will be.

In yesterday’s paper there is a long article on the Skagit Valley, of which we are not quite a part but impacted by developments there and to the South. It is not optimistic. Farmlands are being sold off rapidly—one of the richest farming valleys in the world. Sam Sperry, the article’s author, claims it to be in the top half percentile of the Earth’s agricultural lands. Since the Forties, a third of it has been lost. The only thing slowing the demise is a union of family farmers pledged to not selling for purposes of land development, although the offering price is often many times what it sold for only a few years ago. An acre of farmland is valued at $4000; for development purposes it may be $200,000.

The group is called Skagitonians To Preserve Farmlands. They established a land trust with private money and obtained conservation easements. (This led to the Barley for Birds program commented on earlier.) In 1992 it led to a right-to-farm ordinance. Anybody who buys land near a Skagit Valley farm signs an agreement not to file nuisance suits against farmers for normal farming activity, such as noise of field machinery, dust, etc. The county voters even approved a small land tax to preserve open space, wildlife habitat, and farmland.

There are indirect benefits to farmlands, especially these, with its hundreds of acres of tulips presently coming into bloom. Tourists arrive from far away and the amount of money brought into the area and spent for food and lodging seems to my unpracticed eye exceedingly high—more than a million visitors this year (compared to 880,000 last year) and $60 million generated from the festival alone.

Some smaller farmers want to sell their land. These are generally farms under forty acres. The big farmers see these smaller ones as being particularly vulnerable to exploitation through development and the nature of the valley will change if they are bought up and houses are built on them, as on my Sandwich Island (Estates). But there is not much that can be done to prevent it except for existing zoning laws. The large-scale farmers (and I) see a vast band of development underway, stretching from the Canadian border to South of Olympia—perhaps all the way to Portland, Oregon. This is the curse of living in an area widely accepted as ideal and beautiful by many who want to join us here. And of course the beauty and spaciousness will disappear rapidly—as it is doing here on the fringes of Lake Ketchum and so many places nearby.

The fields do not merely stink now; they reek. You round a bend in the road and are met by a wave of stench that is overwhelming. It is best not to be eating your lunch at such a moment, or else you might gag. But the smell is beneficial and is only the farmers enriching their fields in terms of the crops they will grow this summer—80 percent of the world’s spinach seed is grown here, 85 percent of beet seed, 50 percent of the cabbage. For some of Asian greens, it is 100 percent of all seed.

At the turn of the century the valley grew oats for the horses that provided locomotion for the vehicles of Seattle and elsewhere, including the city’s streetcars. Today it is a multiple crop farming industry, with corn, Gravenstein apples, carrots, peas, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries. The little red potatoes grown here, often by tulip farmers, are considered choice by restaurant standards. Farms often turn to dairy farming at intervals to enrich the soil through rotation and sod-building. The grass grown then provides feed for milk cows.

How do I know all this? I’m not a farmer, but I can read. Also I can see, and know how to ask questions.

I’d forgotten how pleasurable it is, how much quiet fun, how longly satisfying, to be early into a good novel. I’d stayed away from them for several years, reading instead the best prose I could find, hoping some of its qualities would rub off on me. Week there arrives in the mail the New Yorker an annual gift from my son, the computer whiz, and I’ve found—others have, too—that its articles are models of the essay form, with all of its variety and complexity. Memoirs or first-person accounts, are in vogue, and often these come close to what I am trying to do in my own writing. They don’t exactly serve as forms to model myself after, for I have never done this, but they serve as prime examples of what scientists somewhat pompously call the state of the art. And I have greatly benefited from these weekly exempla, or samples of what the best writers are up to today.

Meanwhile, novelists and short-story writers are quietly at work in their singular lonesomeness (not loneliness; not exactly), daily producing pages of sustained output on a superbly imaginative level. How hard it must be to keep this up, amid all the daily uncertainty and confusion of normal life. This is, I suspect, what artistry truly consists of. It is production at a high level, from day to day, come what may.

Mark Helprin’s excellent novel is what motivates this outburst. Aside from the pleasure of reading it each day—it is over five-hundred pages long—there is the constant feeling of joy at being immersed in its long good story. One is a part of the novel’s life, its reason for coming into being. I’ve written novels before and actually completed two or three drafts of some, none of which have been published. Oh, I usually quite trying to market them after one or two rejections. NYC seems a harsh place, overpopulated by mercenaries who don’t seem to care—though I’m sure this isn’t literally true in all instances. But perhaps in most, competition being what it is and totally unmerciful. (Quick, what college team came in second in the national basketball playoffs last year?)

So I know first-hand some of the joy of conceiving and executing over a lengthy period of time the big joy and burden of living with a novel and its host of characters. Also the frustration and travail. It is hard work to write even poorly. Helprin must have been immensely satisfied with the daily details of his story and setting it down, and it must have sustained him, even while he sustained it. If the reader obtains so much simple pleasure, think of the great satisfaction the writer had bringing his story into being—into material existence, there upon the page.

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to have been, for instance, William Faulkner, deep in the grip of alcohol and, let us say, As I Lay Dying, or The Sound and The Fury, or Light in August. All those wonderful, horrible novels of his born of the Depression and booze.

Only he knows and, dead, he isn’t telling. (He didn’t tell much about it when alive.) But the rest of us can guess—can actually feel the triumph of emotion that he must have experienced—as we journey through the pages and have our second- or third-hand thrill. Helprin, too. And Updike.

How frail friendships are, how frail. A harsh word, a frown at the wrong time, and they are gone, irretrievable in most cases.

On a lake in winter there are many dreary days, days laced with rain, when nothing seems to be happening. In spring, too, which weatherwise is often worse than an ordinary winter day, for gathered statistics would indicate that it is when we get most of our rain, some years. Presently we are in the grip of our second such day, when it seems as if winter has returned angrily, vengeful, or perhaps has not truly left, as it had seemed, with the first sun. Yet the trees are greening up nicely and there are swallows dotting the cold air in pursuit of hatching chironomids, even when there is no sun anymore.

Because I know the plant of hatchery trout will be in about a week, a week exactly, I’ve inverted my rowboat which Norma and I lovingly patched last fall and put it back into the water, where it has now started to fill up with rain water. Not smart, that. I must lift it up on one side and turn it more than halfway over on its gunwale to empty it out, and the need keeps pressing at me to do it, for the more it accumulates the heavier it becomes, perhaps to some exponential. Today it was heavy, but not so heavy as I suspected, and I executed the lift and press almost with the same motion with which I lift each dog and step onto the bathroom scale.

(Biff two days ago weighted 53 pounds, Kate but 47, a wiry bundle of sinew and nerves. And the boat, only fractionally occupied with water? Twice that, or two dogs worth, I’d say, but then I didn’t have to lift it clear off the ground, either, only onto its trembling side.

Only one visible otter this morning, a guy with a head like a volley ball, but parting the water at lightning speed. I’d clock him at three times the rate of any ordinary fleeing duck.

I dangled a worm off and caught a yellow perch of about five inches. Ta-da. I shook it off the large bait hook and it swam away, first floating on its side for a couple of seconds, feigning death. I thought it typical of last year’s crop and had not grown at all since late fall. The stunted population needs further decimation by the cormorants and mergansers, who have been working hard on this project all winter long, though in small numbers each.

Neighbor Anton and his three-year-old son Keaton caught several from his dock, one day. He must have kept them to eat, for he told me later they were full of spawn. I remembered this now—the thin, watery masses of tiny eggs in spring, yellow-white. Now, when did I experience this, exactly? I can’t recall, can’t bring it back from its depths. How much imagistic trivia we all harbor in the backs of our heads.

This morning I found myself phrasing in my mind a truism that goes like this: there is a tendency that one must fight against as one starts to get old to collect and hoard grievances, and to perceive petty slights, real or imaginary, or otherwise one ends up a bitter old man, with nothing on his hands except his collection of grudges and piques. . . .

“As one starts to get old”? Is that how I see myself? Must be, or I would have phrased it some other way.

Is it another euphemism, that “starts to” jazz? Am I once again deluding myself, and am truly old? How do others see me—and who cares, including myself? It must be a relative term, with some dim correspondence to their own ages. Best not belabor this. It can only lead to grief.

Besides the inlet that drains Farmer Dweeter’s dairy fields (long our source of excessive phosphorous and nitrogen) Lake Ketchum is serviced by three small ponds that empty into each other is series. Each has its particular charms. This morning the pups and I visited the largest of these; it must be six or seven acres. A single modern house sits on a hill above the pond’s Eastern slope, gray and white and fairly expensive-looking. It commands the pond, though I doubt whether the house and its land have any access because of the bog that surrounds the pond. The shore can be reached dryly from only two or three points along the large wetland around it, which protects it well from intrusion. Thus the house controls more than its owner has and legal right to do so. This he and I know. I have obtained a single point of entry to a tiny promontory directly opposite him. Occasionally his dog barks shrill alarm at the dogs and my entrance. The owner himself is off at work.

Over time people other than myself have visited the pond. The vestiges of a trail can still be found as I break in, cross country, or rather cross bog, and traverse a bone-dry deadfall area that lies between the road that circles our lake and the pond not far away. Today, wearing a left-handed garden glove and carrying a pair (why is it always a pair, even when it is only one?) of pocket loppers, the dogs and I, I mostly, opened up the trail for easier access and came into a little clearing, where I slowed and they forged ahead. The placed was boggy and overgrown with dead (drowned?) willow and blackberry vines thick as my thumb and sharp enough to gouge a horse. This indicated that nobody had pressed into here so far in the past year. The blackberry would have made that impossible.

The view was quietly startling. A pair of breeding wood ducks hugged the far shore, aware of our intrusion but not frightened into flight by it. Distance abets caution nearly always. In a moment they discreetly disappeared from view, headed into a small cove. (If discretion is the better part of value, play on!) We stood drinking in the pond and its beauty. At least I did. The pups forged ahead and went out on a sunken log that was rotting away in large fragments. It was partly submerged and so were they. Now a Lab likes being wet but not up to and touching its belly; it will normally hold off and enjoys most having its paws and forelegs (if that is what they are, those ankle-like hinges) under water. It is pure bliss.

They can stand like this a long while, their muzzles poking beneath the surface and their teeth glomming onto things which they studiously extract from the detritus, roll around in their lips and, less than half the time, decide to swallow. Most of it is organic, derived from wood, and passes right on through, a quick study of their stool would indicate.

The pond asks to be fished with float and worm. I have a hankering to do so. I probably won’t, but at the moment the urge to return is strong. I am thinking of a tale told me by Bob Donahoe, who has lived on the lake for thirty years and was its association’s first president, though he has soured greatly on communal efforts since then and prefers to operate as an independent. I can sympathize with that attitude. An engineer with the City of Seattle, he daily commuted a hundred miles or more, a distance that so many thoughtlessly make today. Before completion of various sections of I-5, it must have been a maddeningly slow drive, both ways; today it is slow again, though the highway is posted at 70, most places—maddening again because of all the people who want to live in the country jamming the freeway and making themselves miserable in the process.

Bob told me in passing that years ago fishers caught some of the lake’s tiny bass and carried them in buckets over to the pond and dumped them in. They grew, he said, to epic proportions. I’m not sure how big this might have been, or even if it is true, fisher’s stories being what they are, more fanciful than factual. But even if they were only a foot long, back then, think of how big they must have grown by today.

Or did they simply become more runts, replicas of what the lake now contains by the millions, plus the few lunkers than only Eric Balser can catch? A worm may tell.

The pond has a loon, I think. They are quite rare and any sign of civilization drives them to new quarters. People are too thick on the lake to permit loons what they need, but the pond is still secluded, inaccessible, most places. It would be the perfect place hereabouts for them.

Sometimes about four A.M—dark still, this second day of April—I hear an unholy scream coming from that express direction, as I lie lightly awake, half-dreaming, half-thinking, snug still under my covers, the window over me three-quarters open wide. A loon, I think. I know not what else it might be. Unless the man in the fine gray house has picked this unlikely time to be murdering his wife, and each night she is still around for another unsuccessful try.

What does one do to signify that he is in the presence of authority, and authority always is seeking its due? Why, one mocks it.

Why did I buy two dogs? Well, I needed something to love, and to love me, and feared one dog would not be enough.

Perch Point has moved Eastward since last year. This is one of my names for the jetty over by Edna’s house, where the perch have congregated for as long as I have fished here, which hasn’t been all that long. I know the change has taken place because the perch have begun to hit again, but the hot spot is not where it used to be. No, it has moved. Perhaps there are new weed beds and the old have disappeared or fallen into disrepute, at least among the perch cognoscenti. Now all my strikes, not many, are coming from two-hundred feet away, in the direction of the island and Jack’s house.

This is important knowledge. A fisher needs to maximize his time. So much of it is wasted, that is, unproductive, anyhow. To know where to fish and where not to, gleaned from river fishing, is the key to success and to pleasure. Now I head for where the perch are--spawning and feeding—rowing hard, my lines in, and don’t start fishing until I get to the only productive water around. Now, fishing for about half an hour, I can get three or four strikes, and two fish to the boat. Then it’s time to head for dinner.

Perch are insignificant quarry, you say? Some days I might agree. After all, I’ve caught steelhead to 26 pounds, and on flies, too. But the important thing about fishing is to think of ways to improve and to try to execute what your thoughts have told you, hopefully with some degree of success.

I can think of two great fishers I have known, men whose success is legendary and long lasting. They are George McLeod and Ed Nevins. George, as a teenager, held both the distance flycasting record and the record a few years later for the largest fly-caught steelhead, a 29-pounder from the Kispiox. Over the years he has caught more steelhead perhaps than anyone else. The other guy is Nevins, known only locally, who never failed to come up with a fish—many trout or difficult steelhead under chronically low-water conditions. Both were like children when they hooked a fish. They grinned like apes, pulled back hard on the rod, concentrated absolutely until the fish was landed and usually released; then they dove back into the water (figuratively speaking) and commenced fishing again, with the same undiluted concentration. It did not matter what the fish was, though they surely preferred big, strong salmonids. They fished hard always with an intensity that never relaxed its grip on them.

Now I am not like that, not to such a degree, but I recognize the challenge and the application; thus no fish is safe, though I do not want to kill it, and generally have no use for it afterwards, so I release all but a few trout each year and maybe four steelhead. These are all for my wife. Fish are to eat. I’d keep these perch if she’d eat them. So I carry along some fine long-nosed pliers, with which I shake them free from the hook. It is satisfying to see them splash back into the water, stung but not hurt. Not hurt much nor for long, anyway.

The thrill, always, is in the strike. The tip stays slightly bent from the action, the retrieve, then suddenly plunges, vibrating violently and erratically with the unexperienced fish life out on the far end. What is it—species, size? How much or how little will it fight? Will the fight be difficult, challenging, or simply routine, leading to the knowledge of what is causing the rod to plunge so, line to scoot out of one’s fingers or off the spool of the reel?

Our fishing season on the lake is so short, so insubstantial, that it is necessary to make a case for it, or else it will disappear, or else become totally ludicrous. I do the best I can. And there is always the hope of something rare, something special. Last year produced two holdover trout. One was about three pounds, the other slightly smaller. This among about 350 trout I shamelessly caught.

I let the two of them go, of course. The hope is, they are still around there, somewhere. The outside chance is that the otters didn’t get them over the course of the winter.

Anton and I speak a special language, fishing. It is all we ever talk about. There may be illness in our families, a plague loose upon the nation, our conversation is moot, inviolate. How’d you do? Where are the fish today? Are they hitting? What are they taking. Nick next door to him, who oddly stays at Bruce King but is not related to him or his wife, is disgusted with Anton and his conversation. “I mean, all he can talk about is his damn fishing.” I say nothing. It’s true, but what is there for me to add? He won’t understand, Nick won’t, and he and I talk of everything else. If I’m tempted to relate some fishing matter, forget it.

Anton and my language is exclusionary. It might as well be a foreign tongue—say, Croatian. At times it sounds a lot like that ferocious tongue.

What is an old man without a dog? A stone rattling in an empty tin can? A riverbed without water coursing through it, like you find in one of those sad Southern California arroyos? A tree well on its way to becoming a telephone pole? Ah, but a man with a dog (or two), he’s well on the road to contentment. He sits in the sun and turns his face to it. The dogs sleep on their sides, as dogs do when they are comfortably warm, the rays strong, their tongues lolling, legs splayed. I envy them their deep repose, but not much. My own is good enough.

Today is the day the men from the Arlington Trout Hatchery are supposed to arrive in their tanker truck (it looks like a cement truck, complete with nozzled back) and spray this year’s crop of rainbows into the lake. Or so I’ve been told by my spies in the department. I’ve kept half an eye out for them, but doubt whether they’ve come and gone; last year I caught them in the act and, not knowing who they were or what they were up to, dove in the Mustang and raced over, wheels squealing, halfway around the lake, blocking their exit by my parking diagonally. I thought they were polluting the lake with some dump substance. Imagine their surprise when they saw me hotly advancing.

First I spotted the state license plate—it begins with a telltale C. This made me quickly aware of their legitimacy. They could have been from Ecology; clearly they were not Snohomish County Public Works and its Surface-Water Utility. Sheepishly I began to back off and reconsider: the lake might be receiving its annual fish plant. The men confirmed this to be a fact. They were reeling the hose they used into its special compartment.

A thousand fish—rainbows all, nine to eleven inches in length—I managed not to catch a single one in the next several days, though not for lack of trying. The trout were acclimatizing. Then I caught one; I caught a lot. This was at exactly mid-March. It is presently three weeks later into the season. Where are the trout? All we catch is perch. Today is supposed to be the big day. What went wrong? Or were they planted early, early this morning, say, and I missed the act? I think not. It hasn’t happened yet.

Oh, yes, last year, after I puzzled it out, I caught more than a third of the total plant over the next two months, returning most of them to the water. I caught them on flies, Flat Fish, spoons. And I caught them on bait.

Last year I discovered a nefarious substance called Power Bait. It is made of the same stuff they feed the fish with in the rearing ponds. The stuff really stinks. It smells like spoiled shrimp and probably is. You get it on your fingers—you have to in order to bait the hook—and you must lather and rise your hands at least three times, and even then it is faintly detectable, if your nose comes too close to your hands. So you avoid doing this.

Neighbor Anton rises invariably early. Each morning he is up and about by first light, which is getting earlier and earlier. I suspect he is an insomniac. When he goes fishing, he leaves while it is still dark and strives to be the first one on a given pool or riffle. Here on the lake he is a close observer. Several times he has remarked on seeing the black crappie in schools, feeding; they come to the surface, dozens of them at a time, and churn. The sight, he says, is impressive—so many fish engaged in a feeding frenzy. In a way the fish resemble piranha, which are also pumpkin-seed shaped and prettily barred or somewhat spotted—if not that, flecked. Of course they lack the piranha’s choppers, which are much like those of a ripe dog salmon.

Friends come to flyfish the lake expressly for these crappie. They seek the lily pads and weedbeds adjacent. These men are skilled fishers and usually target steelhead with their flies, as do I, but sometimes go on junkets after Dolly Vardens, searun cutthroats, and these fish. Guide Mike Kinney is one. He will flyfish for them by the hour, with great patience and skill, working his fly in a variety of retrieves until he finds the one that will work successfully for a given day. Dan LeMaich is another dedicated fisher who seasonally seeks the black crappie; his eyes light up when he starts to talk about his good luck and the size of some of his fish. Ketchum is one of his favorite lakes.

“Watch for my white pram,” he tells me, as we fish a drift together for winter steelhead, or chat on the telephone about what to do with the stray dogs we have found while fishing on the Sauk.

“I will,” I say, “and if you get tired or bored, stop by for a cup of coffee. I might even rustle up a ham sandwich.”

But I know he won’t interrupt his concentrated fishing for more than a few minutes chat, me on my dock, he hanging on his oars about thirty feet out.

All of which is preface to my own recent crappie fishing. Not for steelhead, which I don’t seem to have time to do, these days, what with a new book coming out, and all the printing and promotional detail work that toes along with publishing; but I have been getting out just before dark for an hour or so. And since they are late this year in making the plant of hatchery rainbows and our abundant small perch don’t fight well, I’ve serendipitously come across the black crappie, which ounce for ounce is probably as good a fighting machine as any fish that comprises a lake’s biomass. (I say “ounce” because not always do crappie weight over a pound. But that’s okay, for they hit hard usually, more subtly other times, and come to the hand for release scrapping and splashing mightily.

Night before last I grew bored with hauling my Flat Fish lure back and forth off the weedbeds, getting weak strikes and only occasionally a lackluster small fish. I reeled in and began casting one of my olive/brown scuds in among the newly emergent lily pads. Bing, bang, the crappie attacked it vigorously. My first one must have weighed nearly a pound and was a strong, deep-fighting, then splashing, fish that bent my five-weight flyrod sharply. Happily I released the fish. The next five were smaller but equally flashy. Of course I missed hooking about the same number that I landed. Then it was dark. Time to return to a late dinner and some Mariner baseball.

The following night was sensational. Properly primed, I was ready for some fast crappie action. But the evening started out slowly. It had been a cold day, one more like February, and I feared there would be no action at all. Crossing the lake to where the weedbeds begin, I drug a fly and, as expected, had no strikes; there ought to have been a trout or two, but this was not a normal year. I gave my favorite hot-red Flat Fish a desultory try and got one half-hearted strike I could not make much of a case for. So I cranked in and picked up my favorite light flyrod.

The fly from the previous night had been destroyed. I had to rebuild the body with dubbing, then try to fasten on a tiny brass head, for I’d finally lost the one that probably had made the fly so effective, or at least had mad it sink beneath the surface fast. Then—the bead loosely in place—I’d hunted for my trusty tube of Five-Minute Epoxy. Norma and I searched through the whole house twice before I discovered it slightly out of place on my worktable. It was right where it should have been. I added a tiny drop behind the heat at the end of the body and slid the bead over it. Then I put the fly on its side (sleeping) to dry. I gave it much more than the requisite five minutes.

Now I cast to the weedbed and tried to resume my retrieve from the pervious night. Nothing happened, cast after cast. I thought of the lily pads at the top of the island. (The island was created when the boggy head of the lake was dredged, long before my time and that of most residents.) The tip of the island is where the most knowledgeable spinyray fishers anchor and float out their worms by the hour. It seemed a reasonable place to begin and, remember, it was good the night before.

The crappie hit like crazy. I’d hook and land one, miss one, hook one and swing it in for release, and cast again. At one point I noticed that I had landed three small crappie in a row. My next cast touched nothing. I cast again and the fly was grabbed as it sunk, even before I started my retrieve. Four fish in five casts! It doesn’t get much better than this. And the one I missed served to remind me that it isn’t always so easy. In an hour I must have landed 30-40 crappie, and lost just as many more. But none were as large as the first one from the night before. It hands in my memory, big as a dessert plate.

Fish and Wildlife have finally made the trout plant. It is April 8^th. Last year the plant was made more than three weeks earlier. The officials seem imprecise and lackadaisical about much, this being only a part of the problem. (No toilet paper in the restroom of the public access directly opposite us being another, more serious issue. We might call it the Tissue Issue.)

The plant was made about nine-thirty in the morning. I was looking our the window, scanning for ducks. A funnel on the back of a truck was shooting water (and trout!) into the lake. It did not take long and was soon over. Not many lake denizens could have noticed it happening, perhaps only I. Paul Wittenberger, who incidentally is the new Lake Monitor, the previous one having recently resigned, was out on the lake in his river driftboat with Heide Reynolds from the country surface-water utility, training him, something that wasn’t done for me, except for what Anton reluctantly passed on, as he passed over the bucket and tools. So in a way I envy Paul, getting genuine scientific training, but not much. It is a good experience for a water freak, which he and Anton and I indubitably are. Paul is also a new lake resident and the job of Lake Monitor (notice I keep on capitalizing it, even though it is no longer I) is a good one to break in a caring person with.

I told Paul about the plant, and his ears went up. Me and my big mouth. Later I will tell Anton, I guess, but I haven’t seen him yet today..

Trout of course are for kids. They aren’t serious stuff, awesome fish, like steelhead are, and giant bass. But there is a kid in each of us long-time flyfishers, and we each respond, or ought to respond, however feebly, to the lure of trout. Feeble our response, I mean, not our respective physical condition.

The book has arrived from the printer! What wonderful news. This is Country/City: A Year At The River, and can now be italicized, for it is a printed work, not just a Ms. making the rounds of uninterested agents and the editors for whom agents serve as readers and first-line screeners to weed out the worst of what gets submitted by accomplished writers and those who fashion themselves writers but often are inept. No, it is a good solid book of 288 tightly-packed pages, and the shipment was of 1053 quality paperbacks. One-hundred gold-stamped black leather copies will arrive in a week’s time, along with 250 blue cloth copies; the latter two editions are to be sold as limited signed books, the leather one with a fly sewn in. The details of how to insert the flies has yet to be worked out and I’ve tied none of them so far. I’ve done this before and it is time consuming but fun, fun in an odd way. We’ll mange handily, having done this with my first two books published by Frank Amato, with his daughter doing the sewing work on little folding invitation cards I presume at home, evenings, according to some piecework arrangement with her father.

The book is a hefty piece of goods and has a wonderful smell to it. The smell is new book. I crinkle open the pages and stick my nose inside and breath deep. One doesn’t really have to do this, for the good smell comes rising out of the book as soon as it is cracked open. Do all books smell like this, or only mine?

There is a slight degree of shame in that the book is self-published and I will not try to excuse myself by naming all the famous authors who have done so for various personal reasons. It is not as though I am not capable of commercially publishing a book, for I have done so, twice, but made little money, either time. No, it is more an exercise in production control, with the hopes of earning a little more for my efforts.

Additionally my second book with Amato proved a huge disappointment in its appearance. At the last minute, just before it went to press, he decided to issue it as a paperback. We had planned, all along, for it to be a hardback, like the first. What a comedown for me as a writer. We writers all hope to be take seriously in what we have to say, and what better way than for our publishers to bring us out with cloth boards, as expensive as they are to do today. (Perhaps always.) The converse is also true: if the publisher sees you and your work as being (only) of paperback quality, your potential audience, your readers, will see you that way, too. So you and your book start out hopping on your left foot, so to speak. You are handicapped in the hope that more people—perhaps undiscriminating ones—will purchase you because you are, well, so cheap.

Amato also reduced the type size, the inking, the margins, so much that, as I’ve said elsewhere, the telephone directory looks spacious in comparison. Hyperbole, of course, but such sarcasm often will hit the mark better than dry, measured cadences. To top off the visual affront, he chose a fly plate of mine for the cover. It was the poorest of the lot and I tried to tell him so; this was no false modesty, for he had many in the sixteen-page signature to choose from. But he was cheerfully adamant. The flies had been tied with “found” materials from my beach walks as an exercise (I’m not sure of what, perhaps excessive economy) and included by me in the book as a last-minute substitution for two fly plates tied by expert Steve Gobin, which were not forthcoming, not exactly. To make matters worse—and this is not the false modesty form of protestation, believe me—the flies were tied just before I got my first bifocals and close-up reading glasses, and I could see the flies soon afterwards for what they truly were—slovenly tied rough objects. In short I was ashamed of them, and had wrote a disclaimer in the book for them.

These are all minor things, I am aware, and of import only to the writer. But when you try to do good work. . . .

The book sold about as well as the first one, which was average for flyfishing books; neither were well marketed, for Amato spends nothing on advertising and pushes them in his magazines only. He targets fishing stores. The how-to-do-it aspect is foremost. If his books ever end up in legitimate bookstores (and my first one did), it is largely by accident, a fluke. In fact, when I showed Amato the Ms. of Country/City, he said, “A book like this belongs in a bookstore.”

Where else, I thought? I had not realized until that late moment that he thought of his own books as belonging elsewhere. And where was that? Well, he once expressed joy a learning Chubby and Tubby, formerly a military-surplus chain of stores, now featured Amato publications—get his—displayed in wire racks. And he was delighted when Cosco started carrying some titles.

All of this serves as background for my decision to publish the book myself in a small edition. The cover is lovely—I designed it myself, copying a layout from Copper Canyon Press and altering it only slightly, and my friend the artist, Loren Smith, who illustrated both my earlier books, truly outdid himself with a cover drawing from a photo of mine of the Stilly at the riprap Hazel in late spring, the trees newly leafed, a snowless Mt. Higgins looming in the distance. The fact that the drawing is from a photo taken nearly 20 years ago is irrelevant, well, at least to me. Today’s fishers will be confused as to what they are looking at, the river there having changed its course so much. It flows against the opposite bank on the cover and there is a great silty bar today where the trees overhang the cutback prettily, my departed friend Arnold Timm casting his fly eternally toward what is no longer available.

My book margins are generous but not excessive; the type is 10.5 Palantino, and the leading is but half a point more; there is no hyphenation and the line justification is good, thanks to Microsoft Word. All this I know, for I set the type for it myself and selected it. This is another benefit of being your own editor/publisher, not to mention CEO of the publishing company, Kingfisher Press.

There are disappointments as well. These come in the form of typographical errors and mistakes of an editorial kind. All are mine, for I am ultimately responsible. Tracy Miedema, my next door neighbor, asked to edit and I happily consented. She wanted, she said, the experience and to be able to add it to her resume. She had done a lot of amateur editing for friends—sorority sisters for class papers and term reports in college—and believed herself to be a natural. She is, but she is an amateur still and needs the training an entry-level job would give her, for at least a year or two. She doesn’t know copy-editing marks or those used by proof readers. These could well be picked up through diligent application of one’s first job, this one. So I bought her at her request a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, the editor’s bible, but she continued to use Post-its and her own form of markup. That was okay, and I understood, and soon got used to it. But she had a 1-1/2 year old baby to tend, all the while she read, though doubtlessly the baby slept some time. I think one can’t edit well and also attend to the needs of a baby. One will suffer, and it won’t be the baby.

A lot of typos crept in and went unnoticed by Tracy and by me, who had read it over so many times I could no longer see it and it made no sense to me. All mistakes are my responsibility, and one especially. My editor’s name is misspelled on the dedication page, where I thank and name her. There must be a perverse deity who presides over such things. How can a young editor possibly show a book to a prospective employer in which her own name is incorrectly spelled? Impossible. What does this say about her editorial abilities?

In the last proof seen by Tracy, her name was spelled correctly: Miedema. (It is an odd, Dutch spelling.) But in the book it comes out “Mediema,” which is how I originally must have spelled it, for I mispronounced it up until mid-book, just this way, when it was corrected by a mutual friend. I had thought him wrong. The word is pronounced phonetically just as it is spelled, with the I having the sound of the I in machine, which is actually a short e sound, the same as in Latin and French, for what this is worth.

How did such an error squiggle in at the last minute? I must have picked up an earlier proof and keyboarded in a change in the paragraph high above, which was the concluding paragraph of the Preface. Now the preface pages are printed in lowercase Roman type, e.g. iii, v, x, etc. This is to set them off from the Arabic numerals of the text. Microsoft Word had trouble recognizing the page numbers when I came to printing out the book and I had to use a work around. This may have produced the error and caused me to pick up an earlier version. So I made the correction above and did not look below, where the name was misspelled, as of old. My fault, but this does not help things. The mistake is there in ink on all 1300 copies of the book.

There is so much to check so late in the game of making a book ready for the press. And then there were but two of us. The printer offers no proofing. Weariness is no excuse, for we “all grow weary,” even Old Man River, as in the song. It is the normal human state, rivers aside.

The other mistakes are mine, too, though I leaned heavily on Tracy. It wouldn’t be fair to say that she let me down. (But now I’ve said it.) Every time I pick up the book, I seem to spot another. But I will gladly share the blame with my proofreader—to give her her true functional name and job description. She should have caught most of these, if not all of them. She did catch so many of them. But this is why professional printers and editorial offices have set procedures of editing and proofing. Mistakes do take place, and it is important to reduce them to a rarity. It is why more hands are hired at considerable expense.

And here I failed. I lacked money and procedure. I’d give Tracy a “B” grade; when I’m feeling more charitable I up it to a B+. When one works hard at a job one loves—writing, editorial, printing—there comes a time when one is tempted to relax and bestow the ultimate reward for hard work: “well done.” It is invariable wrong and the reward misplaced.

The writer gets groggy and sleep does not refresh his mind and sharpen his attention. Both wear down with repetition and boredom. There is something deadly about reading over and over one’s rantings, one’s ramblings. The mind cries out for variety and change. One wants to read somebody else, please—somebody who is very good. We all have our arch favorites to escape to.

This book—“Ketchum: A Year At The Lake,” or whatever it may eventually be called during the course of this year, or in the time after it has passed—is the natural extension and complement to Country/City: A Year At The River. It is obvious to me, but it might not be immediately apparent, though to some relative stranger it might not be so, and a word from me might be necessary. But the point isn’t worth belaboring. It is only an incidental point, one that should be noted in passing, then passed rapidly on by.

The earlier book has sections that are good, I am sure, plus others that are not so, are mediocre by any standard, even my own lax ones. I’ve tried to purge most of these, oh, so many. They’ve gone into my deep discard pile. My computer has a purge file called the recycle bin. It is popularly called the trash. It contains all the files you delete because you think you will have no further use for them. Before the computer sent them to the recycling bin, it asked me if I really, truly, wanted to delete them. “Yes,” I cried out in anguish, but my computer didn’t believe me. It put them aside in a special garbage-collection file. To get rid of it, and all the files within, I must once again tell the computer to dump them. It will ask me the same dumb questions. This time it’s for good—though I’ve been told there are companies and government institutions that have ways of resurrecting them from old, discarded computers, if the price is right or you are suspected of having committed some crime.

But I think the deleted material from earlier drafts of Country/City may still be located without outside aid, if not in Microsoft Word doc files in those of Word Perfect, which I used extensively before being persuaded by my operating system to switch over. If some future scholar has enough idle time, and my old computers haven’t been trampled by fleeing wild elephants brought on by the new millennium, this worthless material could be breathed into new life, the scholar be given his Ph.D. degree in punishing the past, and the world be subject to more insignificant trivia of mine.

But it seems a good book and even I, given enough time between reading bouts, continue to enjoy it, or at least its best parts, in spite of the typos it embarrassingly contains, and shall continue to contain; for I have no plans to correct and reprint it, or even to issue a second edition as it is.

Norma has twisted her leg badly. It happened yesterday, while I was out on the lake in the early evening hours, trying to catch a trout. She was getting ready to put the dogs to bed (normally my job) and had put one on the leash, figuring as I do that the second dog will follow, or at least not roam very far. Biff is most powerful, while Kate is most devious and clever; fast, too. Biff was on the leash. He leads well and does not pull so hard as his sister. Anyway, Kate turned and dashed into the garden. Biff whirled on his leash lead and followed. Norma was twisted to the side and her left leg was wrenched to the side. It “was about bent double, in the wrong direction,” she told me later. Down she went, on our thick grass, bruising her hip additionally.

The leg, her left, stiffened up during the evening while we watched Yo-Yo Ma play Bach on National Public Television. She could hardly hobble off to bed afterwards. She didn’t tell me about all the Advil she took and only later about how it made her stomach queasy. In the morning the swelling had gone down some, but the pain had set in. She has spent the day in my blue leather chair, which has an elevating footstool I never use. It has found its purpose. All day she has sat reading under a heavy wrap, rising only to get us some food, which she insists on doing and won’t leave it to me. She declines being taken to the doctor, which would mean, this being a Saturday afternoon, the walk-in clinic or urgent care part of an emergency room, either in Arlington or Mt. Vernon. And so we wait to see if the leg will heal on its own.

The dogs are muscular and strong. It is about all I can do to handle them both at once—and they are only half-grown. They are, I’d have to say, about half-trained. They are huge puppies. They know what I want them to do—well, sort of—but are easily distracted, especially by each other. All they want to do is play rough.

Their play is violent. It seems a wild animal’s apprenticeship for fighting and killing. They pull their punches with each other, of course, and don’t really bite as hard as it looks, but it would fool many. This kind of serious play is physically necessary, I suppose, though most young dogs are sold solo into families and don’t get to do it. Thus they don’t develop musculature so fully as my dogs. Another way of putting this is that they become more civilized or tamed. They take their place in a new world order, that of humans. They become like children, their owners like parents.

My dogs have some of this quality, but only a little bit. They remain wild, dependent upon each other for orientation, amusement, companionship, especially the last named. There is an upside to this, for they can be penned in together and never get lonely and only partly deserted by humans on foot or in a departing vehicle (which is by far the worse, judging by the howl).

The downside is that they never ever finally attach themselves fully to their owners and become surrogate children. Their first allegiance is to each other. It will always be so.

The most I can do is regularly separate them and hope for some further bonding to myself. With this in mind I opened up the back of the Explorer on Thursday afternoon and Biff jumped right in. His first such effort. Off we went to the Mixer Pool on the Skagit in search of a wild spring steelhead. It is a pleasant walk in of exactly one mile over an abandoned overgrown railroad bed. (I used to be able to drive it and once clocked its distance. I’ve written about this trip in my chapter, “Sam’s Story,” in Steelhead Water) Fresh alders and willows have partly overgrown the old bed, now a graveled private road, and make it a pretty trip, and a most pleasant one. After accomplishing our mile, Biff and I cut down the bank and crossed the wide, stony riverbar until we came to the water’s edge. It is a formidable river and rushes by. There was nobody fishing it and no jet boat anchored in the main run, or pulling plugs through it.

Four times Biff believed he could swim out through the heavy flow to where I stood casting. Four times I shouted discouragement at him and four times he turned back to the beach; it was more the grip of the current that dissuaded him than the shouts from me. We hooked no fish, but, hey, so what? What a job to be fishing again the way I love most—alone, except for a dog.

There is always the potential for disputes with neighbors, no matter how much land you may have. It can never be enough. The extreme opposite must be living in a tenement, with people above, below you, and on each side, the walls nearly paper-thin. Everybody must have a dog as an extension of his or her inalienable rights, not as a citizen of this country, America (in case you, like me, tend to forget it), but of this bumbling world. Dogs yip, at the least; they bark their shrill penetrating alarms, whatever the hour, day or night. And tenants play their radios, their CDs, their boomboxes in more inalienable fashion, believing their music is taste extreme and exemplary. You are unfortunate if you don’t immediately recognize it as being so and aren’t instantly grateful.

Should you live on one of those fabled spreads in Texas known fondly as a ranch (not an estate, understand, which would never do, not in populist America) the dispute potential remains, though less acute. People do not fence most of such a spread, which often runs to hundreds of acres; ;instead they rely on rangeland common law, which acknowledges that all adjacent landowners know and respect the boundaries and each other’s right of private domain. A vehicle, usually a pickup truck, will cross some invisible line on a dusty country road, and vehicle and driver are supposed to recognize from signs small and mysterious that they are no longer on their own land but somebody else’s. Often, given enough land to be involved, this works out fine, and not much is involved in matters of trespass, for no property is at stake or there for the taking, even if somebody wanted rangeland scrub, which they don’t, not in small quantities.

Yet disputes result. One could say it is inherent in man to quarrel and hold grudges afterwards. (Nothing, by the way, is heavier to hold over a long period of time than a grudge, and time does nothing to diminish the weight, the burden. Having stated both extremes as a way of setting up my strawman of the day, hence to knock him down, let me add that this was not my intention, only a byproduct of the fact that my rental neighbors, John and Tracy Miedema, have confronted me over the pups running through their small, intensively farmed, beach-front her garden. This is a fact I won’t challenge. And the dogs have chewed Tracy’s shoepacks, which she leaves outside on the stoop, and John’s mudder soccer shoes, an old pair, reserved for rainy days on the field. I have immediately had them repaired (at Stinker’s, of course) and paid for same.

Before you chuckle (I’d prefer it to be up your sleeve, but any old way is in order), let me point out that such situations and the occasions that brought them about are serious, even if not comprising matters of “high seriousness.” Ergo, we have not spoken for some thirty days and studiously avoid encountering each other. (It is wondrous what four people can accomplish if they put all four minds on it.) Worldwide, such avoidances must have occur by the billions, and show no signs of diminishing in modern times. I would say that they are much more common than their opposite, good relations. But when you thought you were friends (can neighbors ever genuinely be friends, when there is never any opportunity of escaping each other’s scrutiny?) , and now you are no longer friends, nor friendly (and there is a difference, a big one), it is sad. It points to the wholly ephemeral nature of human relationships and their inevitable transition. How rare it is to have a friend, or friends, of whom you can say, “This person is my friend, no matter what—no matter how ill they may use me or how significant the slight. Rare? Impossible.

How easy it is in the wink of a moment to let slip that nearly buried grievance and permit a harsh word to escape into the air. That word, friend, is binding. It is permanent, unerasable. At the moment it may seem but a small, foul annoyance—say, like a fart in a warm crowded room—but it lingers (unfartlike) indefinitely, poisoning the air and the human relationship. Ours with our rental neighbors will continue, even if we manage to patch it up on the surface and resume a half-cheery, “Hello, how are you?”

The bad atmosphere with our neighbors continues and there are extenuating circumstances, as well. Tracy asked to edit my book; she said she wanted the experience for her resume and, being pregnant again and with a daughter younger than two years in constant need of care, she had nothing better to do with her spare time. I was most grateful. An English major back in college, she told me she used to edit and proof-read her sorority sisters’s papers for classes and term projects. She was good at it and her friends were pleased. She became somewhat famous for it.

I took her up on her offer, of course. We were friends and I had need. I complimented her on her diligence. I bought her The Chicago Manual of Style when she said she needed it, and it cost about $50; and I gave her number 3 of my limited-signed edition of Steelhead Water, all sold out, with a fly tipped in, and Loren’s signature added, when she said she’d like a copy of the book, which she’d read. Earlier I’d given her about a dozen books from my library by authors she asked to read; most were duplicates. In season I’d given her and John fresh steelhead and trout, and she’d given us surplus herbs from her garden. It was a nice, reciprocal arrangement, I thought, and cost nobody nothing. It was more a form of thoughtfulness than any system of barter. Or so I thought.

I now think she expected to be paid for her editorial assistance and was hoping all along I’d give her something for it. I didn’t. Perhaps I didn’t understand until much later. We had plans for some kind of reciprocal, friendly gesture down the line: we owed her one. I knew they were planning on buying a house and did not have much money. Perhaps a donation towards a down payment, when they found a house and were closing the deal and would be moving away. This was in the front of my mind. But the house they liked (I found it and told them about it) did not come through because of extensive work requirements needed for the loan. So they will not be moving away, after all. Money gifts have a way of being offensive if not timed just right, and the situation produced may be terminal. The gifts contain heaps of elements from which resentment can be made and unwanted obligation. They can be insulting: You dare to offer us money, as though we can’t provided for ourselves or are your employees? How dare you. There are additional elements of in loco parentis involved because we are so much older and wealthier than them. Nobody likes to be condescended to, or seemingly so. And gifts of money are high on the list of ways to do it. That is why we hoped our gift would be made at the time they moved away. It would be easier for hem to accept, too.

Likewise, if you don’t contract for a job and to be employed, there is nothing for anybody to go by. Uncertainty hangs in the air. If payment is made, it may seem in the nature of a tip. (Tracy has worked recently as a waitress; John now is an apprentice in his father’s electrical contracting business.) Egos are at stake. And pride. Since there is so great an age difference, there is a barrier to understanding, values held in common, and principles. In the absence of these bonds, whatever were we? Friendly neighbors. It was mostly our fault. We pushed a friendship on them that no doubt was received as intrusive.

Now, in sad continuation of the dispute, comes the following: the book is printed and contains numerous typographical errors. All are my fault. Yet Tracy’s job was to catch them; her unpaid job. (Question: if she wasn’t paid for her work, is she still responsible for catching them?) One of the typos is the misspelling of her last name. My God, how could that have happened? It was spelled correctly on the last proof, for I’ve checked it. Well an old misspelling from an earlier proof—my fault, clearly—was allowed to creep in. “Mediema” for “Miedema.” True, all the letters are present and accounted for. Only the order is wrong. And it is my fault, without a doubt. It has its absurd, ridiculous side: imagine an editor overlooking the misspelling of her own name! What kind of an editor can she be? Why should I (a future editor, speaking) give her a job? Why indeed.

It is an unusual name, but this is no excuse. It is how I spelled and pronounced her name before a mutual friend corrected me. An earlier proof had it spelled incorrectly, but I caught it. And on the last proof it was spelled wrong; I looked to see. I had made a correction in a paragraph high above in the Preface and had not caught it. The proof was called up because of page numbering problems involved with Microsoft Word and I didn’t want to trigger them again. And I incorporated the earlier error in the proofs that had been checked and cleared. Tracy never saw them.

The good news is that only Tracy and her family will ever know the name is misspelled. But that is too many. To her it will seem an insult, and on the heels of the dogs-in-the-garden episode may seem intentional. Thus I did it to get even with them. Or else I am a bastard, a s.o.b, and have always been.

In self-justification I can only say that in the past 30-some days the hyper-active dogs of mine have never been in their yard, let alone their treasured herb garden. I have gone to extreme care to prevent it—which is what a neighbor ought to do, under the conditions. The dogs have not visited our gardens, either, which is a good thing and the roses and perennials have benefited. But in spite of these positive events, the air remains poisoned, the neighbors (and ourselves, in response) rancorous, and I deeply regret it.

This might be called the Saga of the Lost Flat Fish, for I am always writing minor sagas in a minor key. My favorite lure, the hot orange F-5 Flat Fish, formerly manufactured by the Helin Company in the mid-West, now made by Worden’s Yakima Bait Company in my state, is gone, I fear, to its final resting place, after many a near miss. And this will be somewhere impenetrable on land, not in water, a grave that would be more apt. Let me explain. It lies deep in a tangle of dead and green blackberry canes two-hundred feet away from where I left the lure in the bottom of my rowboat. Whatever took it there—and that is the great mystery—is probably there, too, dying or dead, with its pair of tiny treble hooks lodged in its mouth. Ugh. It is an ugly situation and one wholly unpredictable. I mean, the damn things has lain in the bottom of my boat for days, inert and posing no threat to anything. It was no menace and meant no harm except to fish that might want to attack it underwater while wriggling mightily.

It has been with me for decades and caught, I suppose, several hundred trout, not to mention (though now I have) beaucoup perch, black crappie, and bass. One of its tiny hooks on one of the trebles is missing and on the other treble one hook is weakened and on its last legs, so to speak, often gaping and letting a fish go, as though capable of making independent, catch-and-release decisions on its own. Sometimes this is not appreciated, or rather was, since lure and hooks are none gone. The offset hooking devise is no longer obtainable in the stores and will be sorely missed. The impregnated plastic of the butt end of the plug has been worn away to a gray lackluster from the teeth of many rainbow trout clomping on it, including a myriad that got away. It is, or rather was, my old dependable lure, cap O, cap D, and when fishing was deadly slow I generally brought out it and no other and gave the lake my last desperate try. Yes, it let me down, but not so often.

Gone, gone. And where did it go and—more importantly—how and why? I’ll get to that, but beware, my answer can only be provisional, a wild surmise. Much that concerns us belongs to the great unknown. (Cap G and cap U tastefully withheld, this time.)

And while I make light of it, or affect a mock-epic tone, falsely heroic, my heart is sad at the loss—important admittedly only to me.

Flat Fish were formerly made out of wood. They were the best. They are next to unobtainable today, unless you are fortunate in locating one in a used fishing-tackle shop, such as Plug Ugly in LaConner; I found four there, all with the famed offset hooking I covet, but the hooks on some were badly rusted. No matter. I snapped them up at a dollar apiece. Or was it two dollars each? Whatever, a find and a bargain. But none proved so good as the early model plastic one I had bought new. This I demonstrated in field work. (Technical paper forthcoming.)

The ones I bought at Plug Ugly are bigger and wiggle more, making them less, rather than more, effective. This may be largely in my head, I am aware. Maybe I didn’t give them a long enough try; maybe I tried them, rowed a few hundred yards, and when the strike was not forthcoming angrily snipped them off the leader and tried the next new one. Or one of the tried-and-true. Now I have greater reason to try them out, since the Loved One is gone.

I said it went into the tense tangle of Himalayan blackberry. Who, or rather what, as they case may be, took it there, I have no idea. If Tipper, Anton’s family’s adopted feral cat, doesn’t show up, or shows up with a bit of what looks like orange peel in the corner of its mouth, I will have my answer. (Didn’t happen.) Or one of the other neighborhood cats, also nearly wild, since they only take food at night, when it is set out for them and nobody is in attendance. This makes them less tame than the raccoons, since they will at least hang around at night, under the porch photofloods, and let you watch them eat it. Or so I am told, for we are not feeders and don’t get to watch this new form of indoor sport, since it must be done through glass, or as we say, in vitro.

It may have been one of our prized wood duck visitors. Is sickens me to think so. In the morning mist, a breeding pair regularly visits our beach, our lawn, the blueberry bushes, looking for a tasty morsel. I’ve seen the hen discretely pick up something with the tip of her beak, toss that pretty head back, and swallow it whole. A garden slug, I think.

The fact that the creature carrying my plug disappeared into an impenetrable thicket may be a clue, or else it indicates absolutely nothing. It may be what is called a false clue, leading the reader (or writer) to form one of those wonderful conclusions based on the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes, that made sense only to him, a devise well lampooned by the late Peter Sellers. Such a solid chain of reasoning may lead rational man into . . . absurdity.

Our life is already made up of enough of these factual inaccuracies as to be burdened to the break point by yet another.

Viz., a blackbird must have taken it for they are the most abundant species present and would explain the line-of-sight path toward and into the thicket. The birds are nest-building—a bit tardily, I think, but better late than never, at least for the world’s population of the pretty songsters. Of course it might well have been the popularly despised crow, a known scavenger of the first order, a large intelligent bird, crafty and fearless, who calls down his raucous curses on all intruders, large and small, and filling the air with alarums.

Truth is, I shall never know, and my weak but fertile mind will ever be in need of assistance in finding the right answer. It will take a rare, unpredictable event to ever produce a solid answer, and such an event will also return my dear Flat Fish to me, I hope, either by itself or else lodged in the mouth of some, poor, dead, foolish creature. Pray it is not in the beak of my favorite foraging mother wood duck.

Is competition the governing principle of life, or is it some byproduct of a deeper principle at work, that has remained psychologically slighted by those who determination motivations and, at least up till now, is never given its due? I mean, does competition explain, say, why women are only superficially kind to each other, in most instances, and will drop such behavior when a desirable male happens by, as is reported to be the case so often that one must almost doubt it and join with the legions of women who argue against it in the name of Sisterhood today so vehemently that it must be true, and shamefully so, or else they would protest it as a governing agent so strongly. Thus everything that is true has an equally true motivation opposite and opposed.

Men in sports may seem to be cooperating when in effect they are only paying teamwork lip service because it is imperative and provides the only mechanism by which real, physical man-to-man competition may take place in a public setting, that is, the arena. Scotty Pippen must score points and fee the ball to Michael Jordan, for instance, or else Michael won’t fee Scotty balls, and both men’s point production will fall off and their team will lose. Nobody wants to be associated with a losing team. (There are many, all the same, which proves how strongly competition moves men to sports in which they and their teams will fail.) In stands to logic that most teams lose and are comprised of losers. To put up with the pain and the shame, how badly they must want the outside chance of winning.

This is no doubt a bad analogy and will lead nowhere useful. But elements of pride and respect in all life are dominant. Is this because they come first and competition is only a means of refining and amplifying pride and respect, or is the reverse more true: competition is the only means by which pride and respect can evolved and be commonly recognized by all those who acknowledge there is a game, it is important, and this is how it should be played?

Men—boys, ore often—fight and kill each other today on the street because they believe they are not respected, or respected enough. How sad. The opposite of respect is disrespect, shortened to the slang term, dis. Dis is perceived or erroneously thought to be spotted by subtle outward signs, rather than by some over act or insult, such as the phrase “Your mother.” What follows this slur is to be inferred. It is “your mother” something something, words and acts filthy and obscene. Either you are said to have an incestuous relationship with her, or else the person issuing the disrespect citations claims he has had one.

This is interesting because it indicates motherhood is still venerated and is perhaps the only thing left to certain elements of society that is deemed worthy of respect. Which means nothing really is, except money, fame, and sports. One’s mother is still holy? She is like the Virgin Mary. Only different. It is a matter of degree only. Dig?

The term mother fucker (excuse me, but you have hear it before) is used so often, so repeatedly, that it has become meaningless. It no longer indicates precisely the greatest taboo of our (and all other) society, mother/son incest, but only a general term of disregard and disapproval. It is a watered-down epithet, once precise and mercilessly telling, the ultimate insult, the one beyond retrieval and redemption. Now it only means “some guy,” or else in massive irony in black street language, a person you are fond of, when spoken softly, with a smile. “You mother fucker!” a boy says sweetly to his friend. It becomes a term of endearment in its special context. But when it is used outright it has lost its punch, its terrible bite. Like the word “fucking” itself it has become a stand-alone modifier, next to meaningless.

The following sentence illustrates my point: “Tell that fucking mother fucker to go fuck himself.” This is a sign of mild disapproval, some places, and depending on who says it about whom is not grounds for a fistfight, or if a fight results, it is not to the death. It is no grounds for a duel. Yet some places it remains fighting words, words you might very well take to your grave. Or the one who disrespectfully uttered it to his.

Context is all. Perhaps it always has been and this is nothing new. There is much ambiguity of situation and ambivalence of feeling in what we say and what we do. And this is ever changing.

“And what if I don’t?” The grin is returned, shoulders squared as in a faceoff, hands on hips, the irony compounding. No weapon is in sight, yet the language of posture clearly indicates a challenge awaiting a response. What shall it be?

Does this all stem from competition? We are getting pretty close to the heart of the matter, but it heart is elusive, in spite of being near dead-center in a person’s chest, and only slightly to the left, like most of our politics today. It is a wonder how much physical activity—the building of cities, for instance, and all that infrastructure now collapsing—gets accomplished, if competition governs all of us. So much cooperation and teamwork is evident around us. Perhaps it represents the opposite side of the coin on which competition forms the face, and which is our common currency, like it or not. We must get along or die. The bad news is, people are being killed all the time by those who do not understand what is involved, not even a little, and mistake the nature of the beast that drives them.

All great literature is regional in scope. Of course much that is not great or not literature is regional, as well. This only means that regionalism abounds. It is where we all start out; it is where most of us end up, as well. We belong to a certain small part of the world and it shapes us, for better or for worse. The writer writes out of what he knows best. This is the very small world in which he lives or lived. Time takes us back to our beginnings. It is what we write about, no matter where we may live. Hardy’s Dorsetshire, Proust’s Combray, Joyce’s Dublin, Faulkner’s Mississippi, Hemingway’s Upper Michigan. It obsesses us, it eats at our heart. At the same time it sustains us and builds us up. Without it we would be nothing, citizens of a featureless plain. With it we have matters of substance to write about that are both particular and unique. They cannot be other than what they are. In each case they are different.

Often we are ashamed of our beginnings and wish they were different. This would make us different, too. Maybe what we seek is to be other than what we are, by birth and by rearing. As we age we come to realize that this wish is impossible to fulfill. We are what we are, immutable. We can hone ourselves, but what we work with—our iron, our zinc, our lead—is what we are. It cannot be otherwise. It is best to acknowledge what we are, our regionalism, and make the best of it. This decision is liberating. It is what sets us free, as it were, from the force of gravity holding us down. We soar.

In Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man, Joyce as a child tries to locate himself in the cosmos in order to define his identity. He does this in a classroom situation by writing in the front of his geography book “himself, his name, and where he was.

Thus Joyce’s alterego describes himself and thereby takes his place in the pantheon of persons on the planet at that particular moment in time. It is an instance of generalizing from the particular to the general—the most general of all being the universe, which is without beginning and end, much like time itself and eternity. This is not un-Catholic in nature and perfectly fitting to the substance and tone of the book.

Another might define himself in the opposite order, zooming in from the universe (uncapitalize in modern parlance) and coming to rest on a particular person at a very fixed point in geography. It might read, in the instance of myself: the universe, the earth (not world; we are too biologically and environmentally connected today), Western Hemisphere, the United States of America, State of Washington, County of Snohomish, township of Stanwood, Lake Ketchum, lot 5.

Somehow this lacks the poetry of Joyce and Fleming but is, I insist, just as exact or more precise. (It could be done by quadrant, township, section, quarter section, and quarter of the quarter section as expressed by the compass, e.g. NW corner or the NE corner section blank, etc., but this is even less poetic and leaves nothing to the circling imagination and no place for it to light.

One might add to the Lot 5 designation of the short plat of Lake Ketchum some lineal measurements of the property, such as 12 feet in from the East boundary and 352 feet South from the edge of the right-of-way at the road of 317^th Place NE, and this would place me pretty close to the table holding my computer and keyboard as I am hunched facing the lake, writing this. And I should then feel complete and relaxed in my knowledge of who I am and where I am presently located on this 22^nd day of April in the year of our Lord, 1998, with the century pressing down to a close some 20 months hence.

All else that would be needed is a complete physical description of that deteriorating person carrying lifelong my name, mole by mole, wart by wart, freckle by freckle, and a post-mortem diagnosis of the state of my organs, but I will leave this to the physician doing my autopsy, and let us hope some kind authority will prevent him from committing such a desecration of my private person, for no useful information could be obtained for the world in general.

Sign of the season: the meadows dotted with calves, the lumps of their mothers rooted by each. The trees bearing every shade of gold and green, the leaves perfect yet, a Pointillist’s dream.

I might as well admit it here, if no where else: my life is a shambles. It is due to an enveloping addiction to . . . baseball. And not even very good, playoff baseball, but early season Mariner (Seattle) baseball, which so far this year is atrocious, loser’s baseball. And the time it takes out of my life! A game lasts nearly four hours. The local CBS affiliate bid for and got the contract to broadcast nearly every game just before the network awarded them back the affiliation and there was no way they could get out of the agreement; consequently they must broadcast the primetime network shows on a delayed basis, say, on Saturday afternoon. The network doesn’t like this, but there is no satisfactory alternative. Therefore the games come at us daily, or near daily, and there is nothing we addicts can do to escape out fate. We watch, mesmerized.

It is a dull game, admittedly. The players can take the field so often without physical hardship simply because most of the time none of them is doing anything except, say, the pitcher and the catcher. Everybody else is watching, waiting his turn. It is either at bat or for the ball to come in his general direction in the field, out or in. So he chews his quid of tobacco or Double-Bubble and tries to look interested. I mean, he can’t open up a paperback book and start to read it for the ball just might take a notion to head for him and he would have to try to catch it. And it just wouldn’t look right, out there on the greensward.

Once, as a young writer starting out on a freelance career, I worked for a while with a famous New York City literary agency, Paul Reynolds, agent to the stars, the greats, and my assigned agent was a Malcolm Reiss, who soon went on to work more suitable to his particular talents, such a selling cars. He wanted me to write a book for male teenagers about baseball, and I knew little about it, only what a boy picks up through a kind of weird osmosis while growing up, and he wanted something “different,” so I wrote it from the point of view of the baseball. This was a unique, but unsaleable, idea, even though I think it would make a good movie today, abetted by all the special effects that computers now bring to the screen.

Now I amuse myself with sitting alongside my wife in my livingroom, as though we had bleacher seats at a life game. She has never been to one and therefore is lacking in a few earthy rudiments of the sport acquired only by having one’s ticket torn in half and tramping up the ramp to the arena and having to find one’s lettered and numbered seats. She has missed having beer spilled on her or catching a bag of peanuts thrown by a vendor who operates under the principle that everybody attending a baseball game can catch a simple bag of peanuts a shade bigger than a ball, especially when no spin is put on it.

Neither does she know how to complete a score card, whose difficulty is right up there with completing one’s income tax. Nor does she number the players on the defensive team and identify a put-out on her card with their numbers, so hours, days, even years later, she can bring back the relay and the participating players, and thereby resurrect from dead memory a flood of associated details lost to those who do not keep scorecards. And when I tell her about this, she thinks it is some kind of male put-on and doesn’t really exist except in fraternal collusion. The more I try to explain, the more firmly she believes it to be part of the plot.

In the time I waste each evening watching the Mariners generally lose I could do any one of the following: view two excellent movies on a premium channel. Read a smallish book. Row out on the lake and not catch anything on my trolled or flung fly. All of these seem in retrospect, after yet another loss, to be superior activities, and some of them are actually healthy, either mentally or physically.

There is nothing healthy about watching other people play baseball, however well or poorly. The net effect is always the same. The game goes down in dubious history and becomes another long-term statistic. It has real, practical value to nobody. Yet, senses dulled, a meal digesting slowly in my gut, I continue to watch, complain, and feel an overwhelming sense of nagging guilt.

If you want to get a fisherman’s ire, ask him if he’s caught anything on a given evening, as the sun sinks into the Western conifers in a blaze of orange. He’ll either have to truthfully admit he hasn’t, and indirectly admit that his skills and luck aren’t sufficient, or else lie, as so many do, and make up some ego-bolstering number of fish caught. In either case he will resent your asking.

This is one reason why I am against fishing clubs and clubs in general. Often at a meeting they’ll go round the room detailing their catch statistics since last time; this is an agenda item with some clubs. Naturally nobody wants to admit he is inept (better to say you didn’t get out, due to the press of business or family matters—only illness is acceptable for the latter), so the guy makes up some favorable tale. Nobody believes it, of course, because most are known liars, or else know in their heart of hearts that they themselves frequently do not tell the truth. One lie spawns another and pretty soon what you have in a club is a voluntary association of known liars.

I am thinking of one individual in particular and how he was perhaps the bad apple in the barrel. I’ll give him the same name as myself to avoid any possible mis-identification or wrong name association with an innocent party. (If we’re all innocent, let’s have a party!) “Bob: then is an old-timer and member of a certain famous fly club. He always catches fish—two or three steelhead, with maybe one lost off the hook, in his routine daily score, even though he may have been under the intense scrutiny of others the live-long day. At the end of a day spent under the microscope, as it were, he will report three fish hooked, two brought successfully to the beach, plus all supporting data, though he is always reticent about naming where and when. So he can’t be specifically doubted or (more to the point) challenged. And in these seasons of catch-and-release fishing, nobody has to provide the proof of the pudding anymore in the form of a dead fish. It is the perfect situation for liars and clubs of fishers comprised of such people. You’d think catch and release was invented by them for this purpose and not for conservation of the resource.

I am being too harsh; I generally am. But here is a token offering to the outside world, and to thoughtless fellow fishers, as well. Don’t ask about my success, or that of another fisher. It is not a friendly query, no matter how sweetly said. Cut the guy some slack, as we say now. If he has had any luck worth mentioning, he will mention it voluntarily, eagerly, you can be certain, for to fish and tell is inherent in the sport, or whatever it is, though a fisher is apt to be cagey about the classic elements, what, where, and how.

He is sure to tell you and the other fishers everything there is to tell, ad absurd, except what you really need to know to catch them, too.

Each year about this time I must learn to be quick again in the art of slapping mosquitoes (and those giant, non-biting look-alikes), and have missed lately about seven in a row, a high percentage of which I should have got if I was any good still.

I’d forgotten how pleasant it can be up at the river, and now—with two young dogs preceding me down the beach or trail—it is twice, no, three times, as pleasant. Because we live in relative opulence at the lake, and because more significantly the river has run full of clay for a couple of years now, unremittingly, I guess I’d emptied my mind of all that simple joy I used to experience and consigned it to a bygone time, one not to be recaptured. But now I’ve got some of it back again and am sublimely grateful.

The river has started to clear, and that simple fact justified an exclamation mark at the end of this sentence! We had thought it was impossible in any near future, and all of us old fishers had been overcome by chronic gloom, for what good is a river if it is not prettily clear and therefore fishable? It is better, much superior, to have a beautiful river devoid of fish than a muddy river with many fish buried out of touch in its murky depths; with clarity one can always hope for a fish or two, and one can delight in the sight of stones beneath all that swift transparency. A bright river brightens the day it runs through.

At the lake we all live in close juxtaposition, regardless of how deep our lots are; most (ours is) are about sixty feet in width, though several hundred feet in depth. Width is the true measure of isolation. We are all close than we’d like to be. While up at the river I have 150 feet of riverfront, a depth of more than that, and an acre of backland to act as a buffer. On my downstream side in Owens’s seventy-five feet of frontage, but no occupant is in evidence this year. And the next seventy-five feet has weekenders only, so far.

Upstream is Gifford’s 150 feet, like mine, but I think he secretly hates the place and the river, and comes here as a respite from life in the city and dutifully to see that his grass is cut, for he hires a local boy to do it, then of course must make the inspection before he pays him, or whatever. Rarely does Gifford overnight in his semi-permanently installed travel trailer.

And rarely have I lately. Yesterday afternoon I drove up to the river with the dogs, after first striving to reconstruct my list of necessities from before and not missing anything serious. Let me see: video tapes, books, magazines (overlooked this time, but not next), writing pad (this), a change of clothes for tomorrow, etc. (Best not overlook that etc.; F.S. Fitzgerald misspelled the abbreviation al of his life, it consistently coming out “ect.” year after year. In German, spelled only slightly differently, it means something quite different.)

The dogs were the occasion. How would they react to such freedom expressed over so wide an area of irresponsibility? Well, the fishing part went well, at least for them: for me, I caught nothing (again). I took them to the Oso water, first the Spreader Hole and Flat Water, my old stomping grounds. They loved the place, as I thought they would, and only occasionally did one attempt to swim out and join me in the heavy current. I turned each of them away and back to shore with either a wave of my hand or a push from it, usually the latter. They ranged up and down the beach, playing roughly with each other and investigating smells and odd places of debris accumulation, but none very far away. They found, high on the beach, the bones of some creature and Biff claimed what might have been a deer’s legbone and trotted off with it in their eternal game of “I’ve got something and you don’t.”

So what, I thought; why rescue it? It can’t do either of them much harm at this stage of the game. A bone is mostly calcium at this point, and being this old the marrow must be about gone.

It was nearing six and time for their usual dinner of kibble when we left. The Deer Creek Riffle was empty of fishers for a change and I wanted to give this sadly limited pool an early try with the dogs. To reach it from the good side we had to park at an old bridge abutment and follow along a posted fence line, negotiate a gate that was wired shut, cross a wide overgrown grassy field that fifteen yeas ago Sam and I first crossed together, and wend our way over a path that was trampled smooth and only starting to become invaded by this year’s new growth.

We came out on the bar and I remembered how is June of that bygone year, with Norma and Garth and Sam seated on the far shore I hooked an acrobatic wild steelhead and on the third jump, click!, Sam had figured it out that me on the far side, fish in the middle, and him where he was parked on the beach were all connected as by a silver thread, much like a monofilament line, all linked irrevocably together and involved, and he was late and had better join in the fracas before it was too late and all over. So he plunged into the water and began swimming about with that frantic, powerful, head-held-high dogpaddle of his, first this way, then that, aiming for where last the leaping fish was seen and not knowing he was playing a belated, losing game of catch-up. When finally I slid the fish ashore, triumphant, Sam was in mid-river, his snout raised high, paws churning thunderously, trying to anticipate the fish’s next jump.

Next time he’d head for the beach and wait out the outcome of the battle on dry land beside me. Smart dog.

This time though the dogs amused themselves, as one says, no end, when it goes on long enough, meaning they will do it until one drops, and then the other will quickly join him, or her, as the case may be, in sandy nap.

We returned to the river mobile (“stationary,” it ought to be called) and a late dinner. I feared they would have a nervous appetite, eat little, perhaps throw up a small meal, but I was wrong, they were different dogs, and they ate heartily. Immediately afterwards they crashed on their sides, indicating they were plenty warm. I washed my dishes and began to read, keeping an eye on sleeping them, for I feared they would go into too-deep a sleep. It got no shallower with time so, mildly alarmed, I rousted them about nine and offered them the back of the Explorer for the night, having prepared it for them by divesting it of most of anything they might consider interesting or edible, that is, chewable. They leaped in. I don’t think they thought I was about to drive them home, but perhaps.

I watched a movie on tape and turned in about midnight, my new time, about an hour later than in the recent pre-dog past. I slept well in a bed I still like best, although Norma maintains it was worn out more than ten years ago and prompted the purchase of new ones for the house, that is, the lake. I will continue to dispute this.

It is important that dogs enclosed in a vehicle, even for the night, be (1) not chained, especially not by their chokers, for one or both could strangle in the night, and (2) given plenty of fresh air. I opened a few inches both rear side windows and then, fearing it might still not be air enough, flipped up the long window of the liftgate. It is narrow and four or more feet off the ground. Plenty of room for air to enter.

About dawn (as I reconstruct this from the evidence) first one dog exited the Explorer through this high window, then the other dog. First thing I knew about the event was when I heard myriad pad prints thudding across the long, echoing deck. Wearily I got to my feet. It was raining lightly. I opened the front door and was greeted by two soaking wet dogs eagerly jumping up on me and my naked pajamas. “No, no,: I told them, fending them off with both outstretched paws, I mean hands. I left them outside, unleashed, in the rain and the country, and resumed my final fifty minutes more of light sleep that is my critical imperative totaling eight hours. Then I grubbily rose.

I dressed first of all, then admitted them, greeting them in my own modest way with outstretched towel and smothering them in it, one after the other. You grab them by first the head and seemingly smother them in the towel, one by one, working along the spine towards the rear with the enveloping towel till you come to the tail, which you dry as though it were a rope, grabbing it by the root, as it were, and drawing it tightly in the direction of the tail’s tip, where you run out of dog and towel. You do this once or twice, then quit in futility and give the dog’s wet back an additional pummeling (as at the carwash) with the part of the towel that seems driest, but after two dogs and only one towel very little of its area will meet this requirement, so you quit the task.

We ate, all three of us together, and then went out to inspect the damage to the Explorer. They had trashed it. It was not as bad as it looked, though. Most of the mess was from a nearly new box of nose tissues savaged and distributed crudely but widely around the driver’s area, which they had invaded by jumping over the back of the seat. They’d eaten a pencil—deemed delicious, judging by how often they do this, always spitting out the metal eraser holder. (Shards of pink-still eraser routinely show up in their scat.) They’d uncapped a small plastic bottle of fluid bought to restore the Explorer’s new car smell, ha-ha, for it doesn’t work. My plastic drinking-water jug was found unpunctured in a new location.

Next time I’ll do it differently. (This is always my vow.) I’ll tip the front seats forward so they can’t be approached, climbed over, or utilized in any manner. And, oh yes, I’ll close that rear window through which they’d exited in the dawn’s early mist. Otherwise the river experiment went excellently, and I am eager to repeat it with only minor variations on an old theme.

Good news! Our neighbors and I have made peace. I think we both wanted to, because we like each other and recognize among the four of us that it is rare to have neighbors who you truly like and respect and have things in common with. Of course the better you know each other, the greater the potential for disputes are, which was my premise in one of these essays not far back. And the extent of anger is bigger when you are vulnerable to someone and he or she can hurt you. If struck, you want to strike back. But lurking affection may make you pull your punches, which is what we four did.

They have a right, after all, to grow their herb garden without it being periodically overturned by unruly dogs, and he who has such dogs has a responsibility to shield his neighbors from the onslaught of such dogs. That is my burden, and today it seems formidable. To tell the truth I’ve been avoiding them. A month has gone by without any contact among us, which is highly unusual. I have seen them, down by the lake, tending their damn garden, and have changed my plans about going down there at the same time, but last night I wanted to go fishing in my boat and there they were. I breezed past, and we waved and exchanged a word or two coolly. But on my return, John was still weeding and picking up slugs (bare-handedly) and tossing them far out into the lake—his way of ridding the garden of them. He spoke first and seemed excessively friendly; I responded in kind, being naturally garrulous. And soon we were chatting away as if nothing had happened.

The next night Tracy was there when I returned to my dock. The conversation lengthened out. I suggested to Tracy that we get together at her convenience the next day, since the book had arrived and I had not found an opportunity to give her her copy. “Give me a call,” she said. “I expect to be at home most of the day.” She is entering her eighth month of pregnancy and not venturing out so much as before. So I did, brought the book over, and we had a good chat about it. The name misspelling she was more than nice about; it happens often in her life, it being such an unusual word, but to have it happen in a book, well, it is pretty terrible and that is the word to describe how I feel about it. I gave her the paperback with the name patch on it, and from her face I gathered she would rather have the book with the misspelling. Since I intend to give her a leather-bound copy, too, I will not attempt a patch and left the remainder of the gum-back labels with her to do with as she wishes. We discussed a few of the other typos I discovered without reading very far into the book and tried to figure out where they had come from. One was probably mine, the others harder to nail down.

And then the next day the hardcover books arrived while I was out, shopping. Eagerly I broke them open. The blue cloth looked good, but very much like a textbook, as I thought it might; the black leather ones were very handsome. I saw Tracy working in her garden, her daughter Camille by her side, and called out to her, “Hey, the hardcovers have arrived.” And I raced over to hand her one.

“Leave it on the picnic table, will you?” she asked, her hands being dirty from the soil. I did. And I presume she retrieved it a bit later, for after a hour had passed I checked and found the two of them gone, and to book gone, too.

Last year we had a bloom of unusual weed along with our perennial duckweed, a darkish small-leafed version called Mexican water fern, which has no visible resemblance to the ferns that grow around here. Well, the ducks did not eat it all. It fulfilled its life cycle and died in massive quantities, sinking to the bottom of the lake. Now it has surfaced in ugly clots of varying size. It must have to do with water temperature and inversion. The stuff spots the surface and drifts freely, looking like pieces of Astroturf that have gone through a digester. When the wind streams in from the West through a kind of natural funnel in the trees, the stuff collects and drifts down to the East end of the lake, where the canal and the island are, and densely litters the surface. It catch on one’s oars and fishing line, if you like to troll, as I sometimes do. Eventually it washes in to shore down by Jack Donato’s spread (three houses: his, a caretaker’s, and one for his many children, when the come to visit) and disintegrates on the beach. Jack’s is of imported sand and the caretaker (I refer to him as Jack’s “slave,” though the man has an outside job and serves as caretaker in his slack time in order to reduce the rent) rakes it up and burns it. Thus its life cycle is complete and it is vaporized to smoke and moisture carried away by the air.

I’ve chatted with the slave a little and find he is a proud man who enjoys this kind of work. In the evening he is always at it. Jack, who is sedentary and always has a glass of watered Scotch in his hand, a cigar in the other, walks around and directs his handyman’s duties. Right now he is moving the imported sand around in a wheelbarrow (big, heavy job) and then raking it smooth. I have a hunch Jack is planning a party and wants his beach immaculate. He has six or eight various small craft inverted on his long beach and I presume they will all be put to use by his children and grandchildren, come traditional Opening Day. This is an old custom here, and makes no sense now that the lake is open year-round, but goes back to when it participated in the seasonal opener, along with many of the other lakes now open as this one is, throughout the winter.

“Catch any fish?” asks the slave, looking up, then quickly looking down before he gets my answer. I am busily reeling in a small black crappie caught on a new brass-headed fly cast into the lily pads.

“Once in a while,” I reply laconically. I catch another, and—momentarily between tasks and moving along—he looks up and sees a fish splash. It is attached to my leader.

“Oh, there you have one. Are there any bass in the lake?” I reply that there used to me a million tiny ones and a very few huge ones that only Eric Balser seems to be able to catch. And of course rainbow trout. The lake has just been planted with trout, but nobody seems to be able to catch them yet.

He is no longer interested in the subject. He wheels his barrow away and my boat drifts out of earshot. A breeze come up to riffle the lake’s surface and the evening has grown dim, nearly dark. There are bright warm orange lights on in many of the windows and their reflections are caught on the lake’s corrugations and glow ripply orange, too. All else is inky and shimmery. The conifers on shore are black upon black. You can just make them out. Shaggy, deep, beautiful.

The trout have begun to hit! Oh, it’s still not red hot, but at least there is some surface action, and this is the way a lowland lake is supposed to be, late in April. People are catching a few every which way. Anton and his little boy, Keaton, fish worms from his dock and, amid the tiny perch, are now catching rainbows. And the people in the rowboats (why do they call them this, when nearly everybody’s boat except us three steelhead flyfishers, Anton, Paul, and myself, propel out various boats only and solely by oars?) are catching fish on spinning tackle and Mepps spinners, trolled spoons, and probably on Flat Fish. And I am now picking some up on flies, at dusk, but not many. Not like last year.

On the Saturday of the traditional opener our lake is oddly dotted with boats. Maybe the others decided to come here because they thought it might not be as crowded as the others and would serve as a sleeper. Well, they were wrong, or else there were too many fishers with the same good idea. If too many have a good idea, it automatically becomes a bad idea.

Across the lake from us is Clara, who lives with another woman, a widow herself, and has grandchildren visiting; she admits it is the only time she uncorks her row boat and goes out on the lake. With her is a young girl with long hair; at first she fishes by herself, but then her grandmother goes out on the lake with her, at twilight. Two teenage boys fishing spinners tell me they have seven trout, but have been fishing all day for them. They are proud and tired. A limit for them is five apiece. I hook a nice, splashy trout at the same instant that one of them hooks one, and we land ours nearly together. I then catch a crappie. They take another trout, then another. The last one is big and they circle the boat with it a long time before lifting it over the side.

“That makes ten, doesn’t it?” I ask, as I see them add it to the stringer. They nod. I know what that nod means. They don’t want to quit fishing, but must, especially since they have been closely observed by an adult, namely, me. Clara circles by with her granddaughter and says something to them. She’s missed the show, all except for the last fish, which she misidentifies vocally as a perch.

She still won’t believe them, believe us. “Show them your stringer,” I tell them. I saw it a moment ago when they added the big trout to it and it was hefty. One of them lifts it. Heavy.

“Oh, my,” sighs Clara. I suspect she and her granddaughter have caught nothing because I’ve seen them trolling a bobber, which is no way to fish and unproductive besides.

It is getting late and the lights are popping on along our curve of the lake. The cedars are already black, while the sky holds a light blue tone still. Gradually the sky closes. The lights are often golden yellow but are again orange tonight. It is a particularly hospitable color, in my book.

Hey, this place is beginning to resemble a carnival. All we need now is the traveling rides and concession stands, the popcorn caramel balls and the spunout cotton candy. A circus—virtual or the corporeal thing—would be nice, too.

As a teenager, I used to drift out to resort lakes in late spring, looking for girls and trout. I was of a mixed mind and often found myself in their mixed company. Fish or flirt? (I use the euphemism, of course.) But it was really the lake that drew me there. My state abounds in small lakes—between 20 and 100 surface acres in size, often bordered by marshes that limit building activity and allow large wetland expanses that appeal greatly to the eye, even a young one. There were homes on these lakes and I used to envy their owners and imagine if I had such a place I would do nothing much except fish, fish my heart out. And now I am one of those lucky many.

Often the lake had a resort, the resort a pavilion, the pavilion a jukebox or (wonder of wonders) a weekend dance band. Girls came to the lake in twos or threes, rarely alone, but when alone surrounded by a miasma of promiscuity. Such girls were lonely and alone, and alone meant “easy,” or so went rumor; we believed it because we wanted to. They were available, we thought. But this scared us. We were attracted to them, but we tended to stay away. Most of all we feared rejection. The girls in pairs and threesomes were much more likely to reject us and find us inadequate in the opinion of their friends. Or so we thought. But if we were with a buddy, or two buddies, and we paired up nicely, or thirdly, then girls in groups proved accessible, and who knew what was possible? The girl alone might reject us, true, but it would be a secret between the two of us. Or she might dance with us, have a cigarette with us, allow us a kiss or a grope off the floor, and even go home with us.

Not often did we go home with girls we met at a lake pavilion. We always thought we would, but rarely did. At the most, there might be three of us guys, three weird, whispering girls, and a lot of driving around in somebody’s car, often traveling many miles into the countryside, perhaps to another lake, where it was thought more was happening, going on, with one of us, guys or girls being dropped off, to be picked up later, and phonecalls in the night, most mysterious, and perhaps as we got older beer to be bought in half cases.

It is called romance, and we were full of it, and it was evoked by the names of lakes—Cottage, Paradise, Goodwin, Wilderness, Pine. . . . And the place names associated with them—Shady Beach, Norm’s Resort, Nile Country Club.

Fish and girls. Boats and bathing suits. Music echoing through the trees and over water. “The night that I told you,/Those little white lies. . . .” “And you see Laura, on a train that is passing through. . . . She gave your very first kiss to you. And she’s only a dream.”

Everyone should be young once, and a lake ought to factor into it. But once only. Once is plenty. Once is enough for a lifetime.

There is a contagious good spirits on a lake in spring. Everybody participates, everybody benefits. It lifts the collective spirit up. It is good for the soul. The very air rings with bonhomie. You don’t have to be outside to participate in it, but it helps; the good feeling comes in right through the window glass, along with the sunshine.

Kids are a huge part of it. Kids abound on lakes in spring, in summer. Until they learn how to swim they are bundled each time out in bright orange lifejackets; thus they all look fat. They set out in paddleboats, two or three of the same sex usually, crammed comfortably together. They are in bathing suits, but not yet in the water, for it is too cold for swimming. In a few more weeks the bold, the hardy, will dare it—dive in and splash around for brief moments before emerging slightly blue and shivering, gasping, brightly proud of their young fierceness.

O, I remember it, too. So well. Right down to the gooseflesh and bone-rattling tremors brought on by the cold.

Rhododendrons and azaleas bursting out everywhere in a blaze of color, toward the road (in its deep shadows) and down by the lake (where the conspicuous sun beats down nearly all day), looking like the sky blooms from those silent but most impressive fireworks from the Fourth of July, or some other civil celebration.

Ours is still the Opening Day of Lowland Lakes, a regional occasion, to be sure, but one with correspondences, I am certain, throughout the country. It is not awfully different in appearance from the start of the boating season, for small flotillas are in evidence on all small lakes today. These are my overriding concern lately. On grand lakes, great lakes, it is different in scope and in its particulars. I have to imagine it from what I’ve observed in the past, since I am no longer a participant, even from shore. On these lakes powerboats are ceremoniously launched; it is impossible to launch them any other way, in fact, since a lot of labor and mechanical effort is involved. Even on our smallish lakes people bring large boats and back their trailers deep enough in the water to flat their various vessels. Then the craft is back-cranked into the lake and made secure by a rope. The vehicle and trailer are moved away from the launch area by the kind of skillful backing up that I’ve never learned how to do, and which I admire inordinately. Often many rigs are lined up, waiting to launch. Then they are moved off to a parking area, which may be some distance away and involve a walk. At departure time, the sun low in the Western sky or completely eaten up, the process is reverse. It is not unlike the arrival and departure of ferries, though on a multiple scale and none of them near so grand.

Rick Bowser is a pharmacist who has a fine home on the West end of the lake, near the outlet. (The outlet is gated, not so nobody can enter but so that the outlet doesn’t get clogged by drifting debris, which will jam it just as surely as though beavers were at work and cause the lake to rise in its banks and flood to a minor degree all of our homes and require extensive remedial work. Rick has guest this special day and the occasion is a throwback to when the lake was closed to fishing all winter and opened up with many of the others (they still do, those that have spawning areas for their trout and the fish must be protected until they have successfully completed their life’s mission) on the third Saturday in April. A few years ago this was prudently changed from the third Sunday in April, perhaps because once an inattentive bureaucrat set the opener for Easter Sunday, and the wives and the induced children protested mightily, while I suspect many of the husbands and fathers secretly rejoiced.

Saturdays are better because they give diehard an extra day to fish on a weekend. Nobody knows why openers were originally scheduled for Sunday (the Lord’s Day) and couldn’t get the time off on Saturday to fish. So it might have been a concession to them. Who knows? Nowadays, with staggered work weeks and flextime implemented many places, along with the 4/40 work schedule, things are more flexible. Why, many doctors and dentist work a three-day week. Times are different. Most people are freed to have a solid two-day weekend, even if it occurs in the middle of the week. Many prefer it that way because the lack of crowds on their days off.

Anyway Rick had guests. He has children in abundance, in evidence, and so have his friends who come to visit. The kids fished from his dock, which has stationary rod holders sprouting from every post support, while the adults—the men, anyway—went out for some serious trolling in Rick’s duck-hunting boat, painted a mottled camouflage brown. Rick rowed, while the others strung out long monofilament lines with various lures wiggling and wobbling behind.

The kids, bored with long bouts of inaction, trailed off to find more exciting things to do. Their rods were abandoned, freshly baited, in the holders. This is, incidentally, illegal, but landowners, myself included, occasionally or regularly commit what we consider to be an indiscretion; we believe it to be one of our riparian rights, and perhaps one made in repayment from the gods of the lake for our scrupulous attention to the lake’s need for grooming and debris retrieval, all the rest of the ear.

Need I add that Rick serves on the prestigious Lake Ketchum Water Board and gives to the lake and its association its due in terms of hours spent in dreary meetings and all the disharmony that attends them?

Two guys fishing in the lily pads in a red Achilles raft designed for rougher water, or rivers, were becalmed by fishing inaction when I passed them, rowing gently against a tiny chop that had just sprung up. A short orange Fiberglas rod in its holder on Rick’s dock began to bob frantically and a nice trout surfaced, splashing. Nobody home. The rod bent nearly double, as the fish headed for the bottom again. The rod maintained its exciting curve and its tip occasionally vibrated with life. Rick and male friends were circling the East end of the lake and were about as far away as they cold be and still be on the lake. The kids were out of sight still. What to do? I rowed on by. The tout was probably deeply hooked and couldn’t be lost. It would soon quiet down and wait for Rick’s return. It had no choice.

The sigh was too much for the red Achilles. The men rowed over and one climbed out and onto the dock. He grabbed the rod and reeled in a large trout. I admired, and slightly envied, yes, its fight. They put the fish down on the dock and admired it. By then, however, my craft and I had moved far down the curve of the lake’s surface and were out of sight. I rowed on. Soon I saw the brown duckboat heading my way. We drew within hailing distance of each other.

“They just landed a fish of yours. That orange fiberglass rod—it’s one of yours?”

“Well, there was a nice trout bouncing around on it. The guys went onto your dock,” said the tattler, “and landed it. I don’t know what they did with it.”

“You might ask them. Or maybe they left it there for you, dead. The way I figure,” said this figurer, “they owe you half a fish. Or maybe the whole fish.”

We passed on by, into the gathering twilight, as we call it. It was close to getting full dark.

As for me, I caught one scrappy trout, one limp perch of no size, and as a bonus one medium-sized crappie. All were released. They fell victim—if you could call such a meager catch that—to a tiny brass-headed green scud, newly lied by me and carefully debarbed ahead of time.

I returned (along with the rest of the pack) to a late dinner and one of the Mariner (appropriately named, this night, for all of us) baseball games that has grown compulsive for my wife and me.

Trivia, you say? Of course. Did you expect fifteen rounds of three minutes each, with a minute’s rest between each? Bell-to-bell action, with a lot of punches both pulled and thrown? A clear outcome, if only in the form of a split-decision? Knockdowns and mandatory eight counts? A cutman active between rounds, with his stick and coagulant paste? Search elsewhere, friend.

This morning, for instance, sitting on my deck, twenty feet above ground level, my dogs softly snoring in the only shade available, which lies behind me, close to the house, I like to tell myself I am on the Riviera. You say I have never been to the Riveria and have no first-hand knowledge of what it is like, experiencing a late-April morning there? I say, Foo; Foo On You, as the inimitable Smoky Stover used to put it. I have seen countless movies in which the Riviera was prominently featured. And I’ve read—among other books on the subject—Tender Is The Night, which I assure you the real night is not.

I reply to your spurious charges that it is better, far better, to have experienced the Riviera the way I have, over the years, at my leisure, than the showoffy way you may have, on a whirlwind tour, arriving late at night, wakening early to but a glimpse of a cloudy sky and the sea’s corrugated surface, lead-gray, before being hustled away by an obnoxious and chastising tour guide for the train to Naples. And all those dreary old churches, with their grubby pictures of haloed saints.

I have my Riviera and I assure you this morning it is twinkling. True, I can see clear across it to the far shore. So okay, it is really the near shore, but we salts refer to any shore other than our own as being far. It is a good hard row across. Tell me, World Traveler, did you ever row out on your Riviera? Or in Naples, chauffeur your own gondola? So think twice when you come to censure me. I perform both activities almost daily, come spring, come summer. Often I do in fall and winter, too.

All the seasons here are mine. Oh, do not envy me. (Okay; go ahead and envy me a little.) My days, like yours, follow on the heels of one another, like a pack of dogs on a woodland trail. We lie mostly in our minds, if we truly live anywhere at all. There is a small variety in our sameness, the sameness we all share, here on earth, if our life is calm and we are lucky. It is to cherish. I love mine, my life, here on the Riviera of the North that at the moment I do not have to share with anybody else, for no boats dot the lake and no cars are churlishly parked in the public access. I ask for no more privacy.

It is a time of great fecundity and abundance. Tracy is eight months pregnant and looks great, wearing a proud shine, and I do not dare to tell her than my private opinion of such things is that she has been duped by nature and pregnancy is a biological scam. You may think it is private sex but it’s not. We are all manipulated by a higher order involving perpetuation of the species. We do not know why we do what we do but only do it.

She would angrily respond, “Oh, I know all that. But I don’t care. I enjoy it.” And she would not speak the rest—that as a man I am envious of there being no opportunity for me to father (I presume that, given the opportunity, I am still capable of producing living sperm) much of anything and she is right. Purchasing two young dogs does not put me on a biological par with my neighbors on either side, both of whom have or soon will have two children, while I only have my pair of unruly dogs.

Taking them down to the wetland this morning to relieve themselves and to work off a little energy accumulated during the night, I come across the sky-blue halfshell of a robin’s egg. So the season has produced already a new crop of worm-eaters? Good, good. The wood ducks who leave their nests only in morning and evening, and not so briefly, either, to chugalug garden slugs and bits of fresh greenery surrounding out blueberry bushes, will soon kick their brood out of the tree-high nest and will be seen herding them along the weedy shore. Invisibly the muskrats will be adding new tunnels to those still functioning in my Styrofoam dock floats, providing quarters for their mousy young. And blackbirds and starlings will have achieved the supreme act of coming close to cloning themselves as it is possible, with no science and Petri dish to help them out.

All in all, it is wondrous, and gives me multiple situations in which to wonder. For instance, why is there this sun beaming down, and so much water, and the process of photosynthesis so active now, and the three of them functioning so well together that all life is made easy and possible?

I know how it works, the general processes, but I don’t know why, and never expect to.

The lake’s surface is ever different, though often so similar that nobody with eyes and anything more important to do than I is likely to notice it. And what is it like today, O close observer of insignificant details? (You’d think from the way I talk and write that nobody who came before me has noticed these obvious things, the way I must set them down.)

Remember tinfoil? In shiny sheets? It used to be around, everywhere. Today it has been replaced with sticky plastic wrap. (All hail, Plastic Wrap!) Anyway, you find yourself a sheet of the stuff, if you can, and you wad it all up into a ball as tightly as you can. Keep compressing it till it is the size of a golfball, then strive to make it half that size. Okay? Now unroll it, being careful not to tear it at the edges, where it is most susceptible. Smooth it back to its original square configuration. Press it flat with the palms of both hands on a good surface, say, a bread board. Lean hard on it. Pull lightly at all four corners to achieve this desired effect, but be careful.

Now go get an iron, you know, the kind you use for making a man’s shirt socially presentable. Plug it in, turn it to the setting for cotton. But before its little red light goes out, unplug it. It is warm enough. Run the iron back and forth over the tinfoil square lightly. (You tear it and you’ve damaged the lake’s surface from an environmental standpoint and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Folks will send a pack of lawyers on your tail.) Now iron the sheet a bit more firmly.

Look flat? Good. Carry it to a table where it can be lit from a distance by a white 100-watt ceiling bulb. Make sure one of the edges lies in shadow. (Two edges is even better.) Now look at the sheet from a 45-degree angle.

Guy rows by about, say, noon, and hooks a fish out from my dock. (How dare he?) He is trolling, I note from inside, on my way from my computer to the outside. I hasten in his direction and walk out on my dock about the time the fish comes in splashing and he deftly lands it; I don’t notice how: it is either with a scoop of his net or by two fingers expertly pinching together on the fish’s lower lip. This is, by the way, a favorite spinyray technique.

“Yes,” he agrees, then proceeds to tell me that he caught it, and some others, trolling a worm. I’ve never heard of this before, not unless the worm is preceded in life by a spinner blade or a series of spinners. He holds up a large, fat, speckled fish, and I whistle appreciatively. Thus encouraged, he holds up another nearly as big. Whistle number two.

“Crappie,” he replies (note the singular). He means the resident black crappie in which the lake abounds, but—oh my—not of such size.

Later, while dragging my fly around near the other end of the lake, where the fish seem to congregate this year (but not last), I see him anchored among the lily pads, casting out his worm and letting it sink on a slack line of its own weight. It is a technique I saw John The Perch Man utilize skillfully more than a year ago, when I first came here, and it so impressed me that I went out and aped him and caught me seven fat perch in about forty minutes time. This year and last, however, the perch are stunted, replacing the dwarf largemouth bass that were all over the lake, that first year, and such a nuisance. How different the years are, in terms of their fish populations.

Last year I caught about 350 rainbows, releasing a good many of these; this year I’ve caught very few trout on either fly or bait. I can’t duplicate the previous year. Those few trout were al caught on flies, however. I don’t think I’ll emulate the successful crappie fisher, however. Norma doesn’t like to eat any of the spinyrays, and when it comes to salmonids greatly prefers steelhead to trout, though she’ll eat a meal or two of trout, spring and autumn.

Steelhead are in short supply everywhere today, and it is not often a fish—and only hatchery steelhead-are to be caught and kept for the table.

I will continue flyfishing for small crappie and trout, most evenings, while this pleasant spring continues, thinking steelhead and crappie the size of today’s worm fisher’s—crappie big enough to suggest bass.

Newspapers, and how to tear them, is my topic for today, and before you turn away in utter boredom and disgust, let me add that it is an art I’ve nearly mastered and will happily pass on to you, if you’ll just hold still long enough. No charge. It has taken me years to perfect. No, perfect is the wrong word (again). To attain provisional mastery over through much practice, for no one really perfects the art of newspaper tearing, only grows shades better at it.

It is best to tear a newspaper along a metal straightedge, but who’s got one, when the newspaper in hand is crying out to be torn, oh please? My first experience at doing this was exactingly as a copy boy at the good, gray Seattle Times. (Today these serfs are called copy aides, which is gender free, gender neutral, or more amateurishly copy person, or editorial assistant. Then we all answered to the bark, “Boy!”, knowing it was one of us who was being summonsed to fetch some trivial thing, such as the latest edition or to change a typewriter (what is this?) ribbon for an editorial writer whose work was growing pale behind his glass-walled private office, where he (there were not she editorial writers) thought his deep thoughts and put them into carefully chosen words for all the world, this regional part of it, anyway, to admire and benefit from.

Copy boys (perhaps calling the young women among us this repeatedly effected their self-esteem adversely and explains why so many of them wanted to compete with us for the attention of the few comely women the paper provided) brought up a bundle of each edition and distributed them around the executive offices, most of which were empty of occupants, hour after hour, day after day. Some of these execs were never experienced in the flesh and we came to know them solely by their pictures along the deeply carpeted hallowed hallway leading to and by their offices. The depth of the carpet was purportedly to muffle noise of advancing footsteps, which seems silly now, since there was nobody around but us to hear them, and we were doing not much of anything.

The prospect of their tangibility was revealed by lingering cigar smoke in the corners of the echoing offices and in the pile of the hallway carpet.

We kept two copies of each edition for ourselves and took turns clipping the local newsstories by our reporters for the Morgue, where such stuff was entombed eternally by grim bespectacled women called erroneously librarians. We were permitted to make critical determinations of clipworthiness, but woe to whomever missed a story and consigned it and the reporter’s efforts to oblivion.

Here is how we clipped a paper. We spread out the newspaper to full unfolded width on one end of the vast varnished surface of the copyboys’ desk, around which we all sat when not doing something menial deemed more vital by those empowered to shout the word, “Boy!” and took a steel-edged ruler, or pica pole, as they are called, and placed it neatly along the downward side of the newspaper column, then, when visually assured of correct alignment, we tore the page with a crisp, abrupt motion the full length of the page. It made a satisfying ripping sound, as if thin cotton cloth were being torn for dusting purposes. Performed once again as deftly on the opposite column side, a full long column was produced. We next tore the column according to its width, generally narrow though sometimes two-columns wide; though it was but a short tear, it was more difficult, more demanding. And this is why.

Paper has a grain and it runs lengthwise To tear with the grain is deceptively easy. It rips along like an old bed sheet. Even with the aid of a rule there is a good chance the newspaper will fly off in some wild direction of its own, exerting its will, its independence from the long grain, and try to see ho far it can depart from the guidance of the sharp edge. Often it is an astonishing distance—astonishing anyway to people who don’t tear very often or very much.

Without a sharp-edged ruler, to tear widthwise is fraught with peril. (Try it yourself if you don’t believe me; mimic the lengthwise tear, if you dare. This is appropriately called the Dare Tear.) You will assuredly tear into the meat of the column, as the tear effort strikes and follows the long grain. Then you will have two irregular columns of varying, uneven widths and will have to resort to a roll of transparent tape to make them whole again, or seemingly so.
Of course you can resort to scissors, if you can find a pair, but those of us in the game—and game it truly is, if you broadly define your sport—consider this cheating. There is no law against it, true, but it is not sport proper. It requires no skill or manual dexterity, no keen sense of timing. I mean, all you do is stupidly snip away.

Long habituated to the reading of newspapers, I usually find some bit of wit or information I deem necessary to preserve for some indefinite time—that is, snip—though I rarely find myself consulting it later, and so the damn things pile up, yellow, gather dust and foxing spots, and get lost, so that if ever I have a real need to reread it, it is as much lost as if I’d never torn it out.

I usually tear lengthwise without outside aid, taking pride in how I can feel the longitudinal grain with the tips of my fingers; I tear slowly, to be sure, but surely. It takes me about six seconds to execute each long tear. I delight in how my tears run prettily parallel to the column borders. It always makes me smile when I do it right. If my tear starts to go astray, amuck, I quickly stop tearing in mid-tear, retreat an inch or two, and commence a new tear from the point where the original tear became, shall we say, disoriented, or errant. It is pleasing to see your tear go back on course and continue along its planned course.

Widthwise it is a far different matter. Amateur tearers often wisely resort to scissors here. But they are generally a long ways off (still) and in your heart-of-hearts you know this is cheating. So you bunch up the newsprint (sorry, here) and tear in tiny amounts, topping each individual tear before it runs crazily into the column’s heart. Often several tears in a row will do this, so your tear along the width becomes scalloped. It is raggedy and disgraceful. I wish there were some workaround, but I don’t know of one.

If you should come up with one for the aberrant tear along the width of a newspaper column, please contact me, day or night. Yes, you may phone collect.

I am the Lawnmower Man. (To be sung to the tune of the Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.) I push a manual Classic Reel Mower, obtainable from L.L. Bean and other sources for about $110. Only on two consecutive mowings about a year ago have I used one of those obnoxious gasoline-fed mowers, and I disliked them intensely. No mas! Know what? Most of the nation’s dedicated environmentalists look the other way, when it comes time to cut the grass, and fire up the old power mower; if you have a conspicuously proud lawn the effort of hand-cutting it, that is, cutting it with a person-propelled, reel-type mower is overwhelming. The ozone layer, the carbon monoxide index, much else that is deemed healthy and good, all go by the wayside. The old gasoline-burner once more gets stroked into life. The gnarly roar fills the lake’s air. The sky receives its cloud of noxious gray smoke. Life goes on. My, how good the grass looks afterwards, neatly banded in pale green where the wheels were.

Tracy, on one side of us, Anton on the other, briefly let me try their power mowers. It was a new experience, hauling away on the pullcord, adjusting the choke, tweaking the throttle, pushing some little buttons and knobs I know not what they do but as I am instructed in the dark by others as when to poke them. There is a trick to handling them, but I never learned it, or rather didn’t learn the trick well enough to make it work when the going got tough—and believe me it got tough quickly. I managed, each time out, to cut the greensward before, nearly exhausted from fighting the will of the contraption to be contrary, I wheeled it back to its owner, its motor as silent as though somebody had shot it.

“Very nice,” I murmured, my voice halfway between blatant insincerity and an outright lie. I mean, how can you say to a generous neighbor, “I think you ought to sink the damn thing in the lake”? Well, you can’t, no matter how much you’d like to for kindness begets returned kindness, no matter how you feel. Besides, you’ve got to live longside the guy into the future.

I vowed to find and buy a reel-type mower to replace the old Sears Craftman that had ill-served my purposes for the past fifteen years. I mean, the thing was no good from the start. No matter how readjusted, it produced a lawn that looked like it had been grazed by drunken sheep.

I should say some kind words about former push-type, ergonomically designed reel mowers from the past, a past that we shared. I am not nostalgic about them. They are not as numerous as the secondhand cars I’ve owned, but come close in terms of perfidious behavior and ultimate betrayal. I had them sharpened and adjusted by elderly men who worked at their homes and claimed to be professionals; afterwards the mowers cut about the same as before. I could detect a slight difference: usually they pushed harder, even though freshly oiled and greased. This is because the blades were brought closer to what is called the strikebar, in hopes of delivering a cleaner cut, no matter what the price. The mower required at least twice the previous manual effort to move it ahead. It was as though the beast had dug in its toes.

The strikebar-tightening problem has occurred two or three times in the past and usually motivated me to buy a new (often a new used) mower, since the $20-30 dollars I had paid the pro had not only not solved my problem but enhanced it. Each new mower started out fine, as if on first-ate good behavior, and it was not until we had been out together, so to speak, several times that its obnoxious personality began by degrees to exert itself and I could see it for what it was. Its behavior became more recalcitrant the more time we spent in each other’s company. I’d say it grew angry with me and disappointed, too.

After trying the two powermowers of neighbors I came to two decisions. One, I must reduce the size of my beach-front lawn by about a third. Two, I must obtain a state-of-the-art reel type mower.

I found it, or what professed to be the answer, in the back pages of the L. L. Bean catalog for summer 1997. I ordered it out. It arrived quickly, in response to my toll-free phonecall, and just in time, for my lawn was edging skyward alarmingly. I think it was early April, but it might have been as early as mid-March.

I try, you see, to put off first cutting for as long as I can, while Anton and Bruce King on the far side of him actually seem to vie in the arena of lawncare. Bruce hires a man and the man’s wife to come and crop the grass before it has evidenced any new growth; he can hardly wait to get on the phone and order the pair over to do their work. Afterwards, it is all you can do to see what got cut and where, and I might doubt that anything at all got done, if I couldn’t see the fresh wheel tracks pressed into the grass.

Anton, in turn, fires up his Toro—seven-hundred dollars worth of advanced mechanical engineering bought on Christmas clearance, he tells me, and I know the company brags that it must start on the first or second pull of its lanyard. (And what if it doesn’t? Do they send you a box of chocolates as consolation? Surely they won’t take back the mower at its original, full, discounted price? You’d only have to buy another make or model. Maybe the offer you their sincere sympathy that it didn’t start, say, until the twentieth pull, with you sweatily exhausted and hovering over it. That sounds more like it.)

Anton cuts at a prudent diagonal in order to protect the slope of his lawn from having its roots sheared off. Bruce’s people’s cut seems to vary from week to week as to where the machine is pointed, but I am no expert on these matters and only note the odd pair feverishly at work again, him riding (always), her scampering around with various tools in hand, all of them powered by (you guessed it) small gasoline-motivated engines.

On the other side of us, John, the oldest Future Farmers of America member, cuts his “pasture” only when his crop of dandelions have bloomed out, gone to seed, and been wind-dispersed to my lawn, where they instantly root. That is, his “field” is ripe and he can put off its harvest no longer. Until she became largely pregnant again, Tracy cut it. So, most always, I cut third, and it moves clockwise around the lake, coming to John last and him skipping the onerous duty several times in a row. I think he knows what he is doing.

When it is my turn to cut, I do it proudly, with the most environmentally sensitive instrument that can be found commercially. The fact that I put it off as long as I can (but not as long as John can) proves that I am environmentally sensitive. Why, my delay actually does the earth a big favor.

We reduced the lawn by a third (Norma did mostly) by digging up some of the lawn on both sides of the beach walk and covering over what lay in the middle with a shiny black plastic barrier which permits not light or water to penetrate. This effectively kills without chemicals every living thing beneath. Over the plastic she spread fresh bark chips. Later, she cut through the plastic here and there and on the East side planted roses for me, on the West side a number of shrubs of the heather type. All have done well. This, their second year, the roses are coming on densely and while not producing any blooms yet are conspicuously budded with their promise. In between the new beds grass remains and I must mow it.

With my new mower it is not a difficult job and from the day the UPS truck arrived with the big box from Bean, Inc., I’ve actually enjoyed the work and workout I’ve gotten from cutting it , not the easiest way, but my way. All the hype from the L. L. Bean catalog that seduced me in the first place is true, even if some of it is only figuratively true. It is, I already know, “people powered,” even though I am the only “people” powering mine. It is “earth friendly,” I suppose, but not so kind if you are a tall blade of grass. (A short blade is safe enough, I’ve found.) It brags, “No fumes, emissions, or exhaust to pollute the environment” and “safer, more reliable, and quieter.” I can’t quarrel with any of this, unless it is to point out that a reel-type mower is only as “reliable” as he who intends to push it. And that person may choose to procrastinate. I can understand how this may be.

The catalog copywriter now goes too far, perhaps carried away with his own wonderful voice pounding in his ears. I agree that “pushing a mower is great exercise” (I would substitute good for great), but what follows is: “and burns as many calories per hour as low-impact aerobics (yes!), tennis (no), or downhill skiing (hell, no). These last activities are much more vigorous, even if gone at ineptly, as I do. Perhaps even more vigorous, the way I play them, though. Or else I cut grass more leisurely than do the others and do not attempt a full, uphill gallop.

The claim “easy to maneuver in tight places” evokes parking a small foreign sedan but I must agree, though I’ve never really tried to maneuver or park one along a curb or in a closed-cell garage, where you must spiral upwards like a snailshell until dizzy and after your business search tier after tier for your car, if you are inclined like me to forget your tier and slot number.

“Does not rip or tear,” the catalog claims, and I must agree, though this says nothing about the operator, who the mower is dependent upon for locomotion and guidance. As for “gentle on shrubs or grass,” I might recommend not trying to cut shrubs with your mower. I’ve nicked a few in passing, and the power did not seem to appreciate this brief encounter and choked up on a branch, causing me to pitch forward and nearly go down, when the wheels locked. I had to back up, spin the wheels and blades backwards with my foot, and forced to dislodge the bit of shrub that had been ungently ingested.

Yet I love my mower, in spite of the hype that attends it, like so many undeserving things today. I love its’ “adjustable cutting height (1/2 to 2-1/2 inches)” and eighteen-inch width; it’s “five-blade steel-cutting mechanism”; its economy, efficiency, and the fact that “it requires little or no maintenance.”

I wonder what “little” means in this context. I know well enough what “no” is; it is my usual method of maintenance. “Little’ may mean a little oil on the axle would be appreciated yearly. With me, it will be lucky to get any, ever. But I expect my mower to keep performing without complaint. I think it will.

Up at the river I’ve used a push-type mower for twenty-five years. It was given us by Norma’s father, dead about that long a time. Every time I grip its wooden handle—weekly now, throughout mid-summer—the memory of that fine, kind man comes trudging back to me through the palms of my hands. I am cutting grass as Walter did, manually, the only way it ought to be cut, if you believe yourself to be anything other than a wimp or weakling. I would have it no other way.

Of course the grassy part of our river property is small and cutting it provides only a moderate workout. It includes the circular drive—where the tires of our cars have not pummeled the earth devoid of grass—and a deeply shaded area in front and slightly downstream from what I call our Immobile. It is lush meadow grass—a pure accident because it is apparently a distant echo of what grew there after the first logging by Pope and Talbot nearly 100 years ago. Next it was a meadow, a pasture fit for only grazing. It didn’t get replanted with trees simply because nobody did that, back when. The land was expected to grow back great trees under some far-fetched concept of “natural generation.” It meant that there were Doug fir and hemlock seeds already in the ground from dropped and dispersed cones prior to the felling; air, water, sunshine, and photosynthesis would do the rest, and it did, given enough time and understory recession till the sparse seedling grew tall through the canopy of wild shrubs, alders, and cottonwoods. The worst enemy was the shade provided by the spreading bigleafed maple.

The trees on the back two-thirds of our property, away from the river, sited on the steep slope, are examples of what will develop when nature is left to do its best, unaided. My trees are staunch survivors and could have been grown to their height and width in half this time, with modern monocultural methods. (But I am glad they were, else they’d have been cut down and sent to the mill forty years ago, and I’d have tall, skinny third-growth, all the same species, all the same height, instead of the wonderful diversity of conifers and hardwoods I have there now.

The riverside portion became grazing land, a sometimes wetland grazing field that only rarely flooded in winter but stayed damp (all right, wet) much of the year. Alders sprung up in the clearing and were neglected by dairy farmers who cut only a few down for firewood. Gradually the alder succession crop (or forest) replaced the old one of conifers, few of which grew back, or were permitted to, and the copious alders were tolerated as a weed, easily cut down in its time, and of little value except for providing heat.

This is now my front lawn—ancient meadow returning from annual seed and thick leaf mulch, all growing beneath perhaps its second or third alder canopy. Throw in a few black cottonwoods, vine maples, and bigleafs, and you’ve got yourself a pretty woodland site. But it will become overgrown with blackberry concertina and salmonberry thickets, given the ghost of a chance. So annually we must whack this stuff back or it will soon engulf us and become impenetrable. It is not easy or pleasant work.

Meanwhile in the encouraged area the grass grows abundantly. It is not the stuff of normal lawns but a special rich tall stock, and when the land near the river grows wetter it is replaced by tulles—sedges and rushes, skunk cabbage, and what we call bamboo, which it isn’t, being only another pernicious introduced weed, not from Europe this time, but from more mysterious Asia.

So I cut the grass; I cut all that will scythe with an ancient reel-type mower. Its cutting width must be less than a foot; the new one’s is fifteen inches. It is a tall, silly-looking thing, an imitation of a lawnmower, a Rube Goldberg contraption that to look at it oughtn’t work but does, marvelously well, or else I’d have replaced it years ago. The roller was made as a replacement and turned on a lathe by Walter, no doubt, who was good at making new parts that didn’t resemble the old ones one bit. They worked as well or better, though. The roller was held in place with a couple of stubby machine screws, lock washers, and nuts. In all this time they have never loosened up and indicated through wobbling the need for tightening. They have proved trustworthy in a world where little else has.

Walter kept the blades sharp in his lifetime and the machine came to me, my hands, shortly before his death, when he succumbed to the lure of one of the power mowers he despised in his heart. But he loved all machinery, including it. He’d worked as a maintenance machinist at Boeing the back half of his life and had a reputation—there, at home, around the neighborhood—as a Mr. Fixit. If a part was needed and a spare couldn’t be located in a store, he’d set about making one. It might look funny, but it worked. Usually it was more trouble-free than the original part and lasted much longer than he did.

My lawnmower is a construct of just such replacement parts melded into a single entity. Thus there is no other like it in the world. This knowledge too is always at my fingertips as I cut my river grass. If somebody had the gall to ask me, “Say, what kind of lawnmower is that?” I’d answer him over the clatter of its blades, not stopping for politeness’ sake, “It’s a Walter.”

Ah, but he wouldn’t know why, and while his gasoline-powered Toro (“We guarantee it will start in two pulls,” or else) goes into the shop, one more time, to get its gizmo replaced or tweaked professionally, my Walter merrily crops on and lets the grass lie where it falls, for it accommodates no catcher—and that is another appeal, for it develops into a delicious mulch.

This year, as a special reward for long fidelity and service, I squirted some Three-In-One oil into the guts of its bearings and wheels, wherever there were hungry slots asking for it. In gratitude my Walter pushed forward with half the effort it took before I had so anointed it, though I could see no difference in the cut of the grass, which must be adjudged as medium-well cut, now that I’ve got my light-weight L. L. Bean Classic Reel Mower with which to compare it.

My Walter weight nearly three times as much. Part of that must be the burden of memory which it bears.

Today is the day the pups give up their reproductive organs and become incapable of replicating themselves into a certain future, a procedure the breeder/veterinarian has urged me to do since they were three months old. They are now five. My near world must breathe a collective sigh, for they are rowdy physical terrors and have sped through everybody’s garden at least once, scattering greenery on either side. Their progeny would be no quieter, no less offensive.

They are so close, so interdependent, that it would be my bad luck to have them mate with each other, while I was not paying attention to Kate coming into her first heat. Lab litters run 10-20 pups. I can picture this many small, anxious black pups, all with tendencies for nosebleeds and assorted other genetic physical deformities too grotesque to contemplate. Therefore, Biff and Kate become neuter today, though I am advised I will note no great behavioral change, but can only hope for them to be toned down, say, ten percent.

It would help a lot. And is this coincidental, or do I fee a sympathetic twinge in my own groin?

So how did it go? Well, he was done first, and it is a simpler, less debilitating procedure, with only tiny slits made in his undescended scrotum to remove two tiny testicles. When I called to ask how there were doing I was told he was up, barking. With her it was more complicated, and since it was, and she was done by the doc second, she was still groggy from the anesthetic and limp as a wet rag. We took them in to the clinic—much like laundry promised for the same day, say, shirts—at ten in the morning, and they were ready for pickup at four, though we could have had them an hour earlier. I wanted them to have as long as possible in recovery.

Dr. Rodin (who is their real father, in my book, since I bought them from him, on a two-for-one sale) carried out Kate to my Explorer, while Biff wobbled surely out and clambered in. Both slept all the way home, some twenty miles. She was not to be watered or fed, and he both of those only a little, though he is and was then chronically hungry and demanded food. We eased him a little of both. Kate slept. I had a stomach-calming medicine I was to give her at six and eight; I shot in via syringe into the corner of the mouth promptly the first time, but seeing her as calm, sleepy, and unvomiting, declined the second dose. You feel a little funny not doing what the doctor prescribed with a child, wife, or pet, while happily refusing for yourself.

We let them sleep inside, their first night back. Naturally they trashed the place, leaving litter everywhere, including three tiny dark wet circles on the familiar rug and s pathetic pile of shit in front of the TV. It was less than par and forgivable, under the circumstances, though as of old my shoulders and my lips tensed grimly at the morning sight.

Today they lounge around the place, minor basketcases. They require, ever since last night, constant petting and assurance. I am happy to provide these, at least for the first ten minutes, each occasion. When Kate droops her skinny little head on my knee, my eyes well up and I think that I caused this to be done to her and shouldn’t have done it. But I have saved her from a future of ungrateful puppies—mongrels, no doubt.

Motherhood is not so much a blessing as a biological scam determined to keep our corner of the race going. Listen up, Tracy.

The Oregon juncos are gone from the feeders, along with most of the other winter birds, but an occasional rosy finch makes a bright appearance upstairs, along with a demanding small brown squirrel that sits up on its haunches devouring seed. Unlike the imported gray squirrels in Seattle, these seem a shade wilder and more natural, and so we tolerate them better and are actually mildly pleased to see them, or one of them, as the case may be. It is impossible without marking them, as a field biologist would do, to tell one from another. If only one, this guy is porking out.

Downstairs the red winged blackbirds have developed a taste for the same commercial birdseed and flash in and out in front of my writing desk, casting a brief black pall on the glass and a brilliant flash of red, yellow, and orange from their wing as they bank, wheel, and alight on the feeding posts. I think from their flight pattern they are carrying food back to their nests not far away.

What I ought to do is time them going back and from that averaged-out data I could get a fix on just how far away the nests are. Or, more simply, I could just watch them and see where it is they fly off to. I think it is to the blackberry thicket just West of Bruce King’s house—the same place my favorite orange Flat Fish disappeared to, perhaps the same way.

Bass are beginning to spawn in the lake. It is early May, and usually they don’t start until later in the month, according to my authorities, Wydoski and Whitney, but last year I thought I remembered what appeared to be spawning activity as early as march; it may have only been the bass’ preference for swimming near shore in shallow water. Last week, Carrie, Anton’s wife, showed me a fresh redd, and she and their three-year-old Keaton and I saw the scrubbed gravel nest and a pair of bass swimming around just off its edges, very much like steelhead do. They won’t actually move onto the nest and lay eggs until dark or near dark, I think. I walked over to john and Tracy’s, where I had seen bass a year ago, and immediately spotted a solitary fish swimming around and I presume feeding. He was poking at underwater vegetation with his snout and seemingly taking into his mouth small pieces of it, or what lives on it—larva, snails, etc. And I can only guess it is a he.

The bass didn’t look awfully different from a large trout or small steelhead. Same general silhouette. It seemed odd to see a lake fish so clearly, so undisturbed, in shallow water; usually lake fish are spotted only by their feeding rises. The bass, however, often give themselves away with a big splash near shore, where the water is only one or two feet deep. Of course a frightened bullfrog will make his noisy getaway with a similar loud splash, so it is hard to tell just what it is you just frightened.

The redds are big—two to four feet across and nearly the same length. Beneath its coat of algae and organic matter is sand and gravel. This is what the bass want, along with plenty of sunlight to warm the water and hasten incubation.

Anton, John, and I have a proprietary feeling about our bass and would not think of fishing for them. (Okay, I’ll own up to making a few wan casts for them last year with a steelhead waking fly, which behaves like a popper, but soon quit in self-disgust. I have to admit, it was an attractively big fish.) This year, though, I get nervous when I see bass fishers approaching in their special boats my water, and that of John and Anton’s. They quite correctly cast close to shore and retrieve their lures quickly, noisily, deftly. My source again, W&W, tell me that it is the male (oddly) who builds the nest and, later, stays near it to guard the fry from predators. This role reversal is interesting, at least to me. Where is she? Off getting a makeover?

The males are now and later pugnacious, and this is what bass anglers come here for and spend their long hours (often without success) casting toward shore, and popping and darting and wriggling their various lures These often are the same type that catch crappie so successfully—crankbaits they are called, lures with a whirling spinner blade on one wire and a fluorescent chartreuse vinyl skirt over a treble hook on the other wire, which runs at right angles to the first one. All the accomplished bass fishers use this rig at least some of the time at this lake.

Bass are mature enough to spawn in their third year. They may live to be ten or older, but not often. A bass that has been born in the lake and fed for a year will be 2.8 inches long; a nine-year-old bass in a Western Washington lake will be only 16.3 inches long, on the average. So ours must be smaller and younger fish. In Eastern Washington, where the sun is hot, the water much warmer, and the feed abundant, the bass will grow fast and larger. Banks lake produced an eleven pounder in 1977, but I’m sure there are much bigger ones.

I’ve heard of an eight pounder from Ketchum, this year and last. Perhaps it was the same fish? Eric Balser caught and released both. Few others get them. How old is such a fish?

The Dorsey Short Plat is the name of a proposed housing development not far away. It is not on the lake but adjacent. We are enjoying it as much as we can, bitter-sweet, knowing it soon will be gone and new homes will cover the woodland area. Many fields and young forests are being shorn and short platted, with homes springing up surprisingly fast and frequently. I didn’t think the market here was so hot, the way some of the lakefront houses have been listed for many moths and even a couple of years. Now in Seattle and Southern Snohomish County there is a definite sellers’ market, with homes appreciating at a rate quoted as eight percent per month. This is astounding and surely can’t continue at such velocity. Or can it?

The growth rate here is much less, yet houses are popping up everywhere in quantities of two or more. Often a circular drive is built into a cleared area and usually in pairs home rise quickly from poured foundations. Most are well under two-hundred thousand dollars in cost. In Seattle that would buy you only a rundown bungalow in a dilapidated section of the city. And less than two years ago we got less than that amount for well-maintained home of thirty-one years.

So does the Dorsey Short Plat. For one thing, it is large. It fills a vast wooded area between our ridge—it is called View Ridge, but what isn’t, everywhere?--and another smaller short plat where we used to walk our young dogs, up until recently, when it got too developed, is called View Ridge II. Curiously our lake’s name is misspelled by the same paper in a billboard advertising that their sprouting homes are “near” the lake and its public access; “public” I am sad to report, is correctly spelled, and has all of its consonants.

Dorsey is laced with trees; along its edges they are deciduous, but more deeply into the woods are tall conifers, with a sparse conifer-type understory and little undergrowth. At one time the state department of transportation used part of it as a local site for obtaining and storing road gravel. Or so it looks, with the remnants of such activity abandoned and overgrown, including a proprietary warning sign naming the department and stating No Trespassing, long ago riddled with rifle and shotgun slugs into near illegibility.

Many old storage lockers and ancient electronics equipment was dumped here, leaving the place looking today like one of those jungle clearings where long ago a plane went down. Ferns, pigabacca, and salal poke up out of the metal waste and serve to dress it up unconvincingly. Clearings ghostily reveal what is left of themselves, and where the trails are wide and inviting, indicating that not many years ago they were not only drivable but driven, there are large deadfall trees across them, barring access other than by foot, and the unleashed dogs must hop over them, and so must I.

It is one of the few places I can let my dogs run untethered, unfettered. The fear is, either a car circling the lake fast will hit one of the, or both, or else they will chase each other through somebody’s yard and garden. Is this why we live in the country? Well, no, but the read availability of the undeveloped Dorsey Short Plat surely is, and when it is gone, and places like it built up, we will have to find another such place, and they are few.

When we moved to the lake we had a notion of what life here would be like. It is both better and worse than we had imagined. All of us are penned much closer together than I, or we, had thought we’d be. But there are other perks and pleasures that make up for it. Unfortunately today I am in no frame of mind to start to tick them off on my fingertips.

The trout are beginning to take flies out on the lake, at last! For the record, this is May sixth. They prefer it cast and stripped back with an irregular retrieve just under the surface, but will strike less often and very hard a trolled fly, pulling the rod nearly out of the boat and into the lake on the take, and jumping, running (well, sort of), and splashing impressively. My best fly is a small olive scud again, with a dubbing body and a gold wire rib to keep the dubbing from being torn away by the fish’s teeth. A small brass bead at the head adds glitter and causes the fly to sink quickly. Often fish will take it on the descent, with no action added at all.

Perch and crappie grab this fly, and other patterns, when cast toward the lily pads, allowed to sink for a variable quick count (this varies from day to day), and stripped generally slowly back in. Usually the take is very soft and is sensed rather than felt; you strike back hard at nearly nothing at all and some of the time the rod comes up tight against a fish, and you can sometimes see it flash right and left beneath the surface before it burst through in a splash. Quite fun.

Yesterday, a trout in the morning plus two before dinner, along with assorted spinyrays, including the largest perch in a couple of years; ordinarily they are depressingly small. Also, a host of medium-sized black crappie. The fishing is good enough at present to attract skilled anglers who come here expressly for it, such as Mike Kinney and Eric Balser. I’d have thought they’d go somewhere where it is better. Perhaps here it is as good as it needs to be now. It is, I know, enough to keep me temporarily interested.

Of course this is my favorite lake now, and it is also my favorite time of the year, I’d say, that is, before the summer steelhead start running.

Two days ago, while mooching a fly on the far side of the lake in late morning, I saw a dark gray van parked at the public access and two men in drab uniforms industriously scampering around, filling large white plastic sacks with what they found on the ground. A third man loosely observed them, but stood by the edge of the lake looking out at it and admiring it. The supervisor.

“Who are you good folks and what are you doing to the lake?” or some such jovial, archaic blather.

We had a little trouble hearing each other over the ambient noise that fills the air most places, even at a small lake like ours. He identified himself as the man in charge of the crew. They were from “detention,” he said, a sanitized word if I’ve ever heard one. They were prisoners from the county jail, and through an agreement with the State Fish and Wildlife Department were systematically visiting and cleaning up refuse and litter from the area’s lake public accesses. It is an effort long overdue and badly needed; what better use could the labor of these people be used for? I commended them and asked where a letter of appreciation might be directed. He told me, but it was an obscure reporting chain, and I quickly got lost in its particulars. A letter to region four of Fish and Wildlife ought to find the right people and do the job nicely.

Last night I called Hans Berg’s widow, Joanne, to tell her the good news, but got instead one of his four long-haired daughters. (They are all married, I believe, and only there visiting, but it is where they all grew up.) Hans died Christmas morning from cancer and had long been bitter about living next door to the public place and, there being nobody else to do it, having to police the place and carry away empty bottles and such things as non-biodegradable used condoms. Without him the trash would accumulate nearly indefinitely.

“They said they’d come every two weeks, throughout the summer,” I told the daughter, who at first was as disbelieving as I was, then, recognizing it was no kind of put on, became just as euphoric as I.

“I don’t promise anything, remember,” I cautioned, “but this is what they told me yesterday. I think your father would have been happy and relieved at the news.”

A loon on the lake, this morning before breakfast! It is another birding first. They are relatively rare, secretive birds, and I’ve only seen one once or twice before, on vast Lake Washington—clearly on its way from one sheltered place to another. They look a bit like a male common merganser, at least with their dark head and general silhouette, but that thatched back, nearly checkered, in black and white, is a dead giveaway. What a beautiful, graceful bird. Ours would surface, then dive again, and spend about three-quarters of its time cruising low on the surface. It was out in the middle of the lake and evidenced no secretiveness at all. Of course open water serves to protect.

The morning before an osprey circled the lake and developed an oval flight pattern over the Western end of the lake, dipping low over the small bay there and then lifting up over land, skirting a big cedar, banking sharply on extended wing, and returning to the lake. Only once did it plunge for a fish, which it missed. After a few more repetitions, the bird wheeled down the lake and came to roost high up on a big red cedar opposite us; I wouldn’t have known it was there if I hadn’t seen it light, and then it was easy for my eyes to return to the pale vague shape up so high. Only binoculars revealed it to be the large bird. Without them, my eyes would have gone right on by, but having sighted the osprey upon its landing it was easy enough to home in on it again.

It remained in the cedar for ten minutes or more before leaving it in a glide and taking flight with powerful strokes of its wings. It headed West again, leaving the lake, no doubt hungry still.

Last night, just before dinner, with only one other person fishing the lake (a man with his young, lifejacketed son, trolling popgear behind a motor), I caught three nice trout. I released the first, after a good fight, but kept the second (a foot long) and the third, a couple inches smaller. Norma will have them for dinner tonight.

While she was cooking last night’s dinner, I strolled out onto the deck to talk to two men obviously fishing for bass, a little worried about their skill and knowledge, and the fate of the bass along our near shoreline.

They had caught two already, in what I would judge to be less than two hours of careful fishing. They were fishing Rapalla lures, they told me, casting them to within a few inches of shore and reeling them in slowly. Already they had taken two, one of them about five pounds.

“But we release all the bass we catch in this lake,” one of them told me. It was his boat, I gathered, and he appeared to be the most proficient; also the most loquacious. “They have a muddy taste. Besides, we don’t really like to eat bass, only to catch them.” He grinned.

They had already passed Bruce’s and Anton’s bass redds and were approaching my water and, next, John’s, where I knew a nice bass lived. I feared for them, but not so much as before the men told me they didn’t keep their bass. The second guy got a strike at my beach, but missed the fish. The first man told me he could see a couple of redds forming that I had missed. When they pointed out to me the missed strike, I said, “That must be Old Fred,” naming our pet bass on the spot.

Bass fishing looms as a potential. These guys tell me that it is a good bass lake. I know next to nothing about such fishing, but listen well, whenever I get a chance. Slowly my knowledge is accumulating, and one of these days, or one of these years, I may put it all together and become a bass fisher.

Later the same morning, while fishing for my usual seafood plate (one trout, one perch, one crappie, though more are certainly welcome and will be released), I heard an outboard motor start up at the public launch. Now, this is forbidden on our small lake by order of ordinance. The boat cruised knowingly about the far end of the lake and I presumed its occupants were fishing, but as I started out from my dock Norma cautioned me, saying that it looked as though the boat was taking lake measurements and might be from Allied Aquatics, the company contracted to “treat” the lake this spring. Also she added, as the lake association’s vice president (ta-da) that they were authorized to use an outboard motor and were, in fact, the only ones who were. This is one of many things I didn’t know.

I started fishing and as I approached the canal saw Paul Wittenberger emerge, rowing hard, in his steelhead driftboat, which he uses to fish from on the lake. He called out to me, “I’m going to get the boat number of those folks with the motor.” I told him what Norma told me. He is the new lake monitor, I mean, Lake Monitor, having assumed that duty from me upon my asking him to. It is quite informal and meaningless, though we Lake Monitors take our duties very seriously. Good thing, too, for we are the only ones who do.

I could hear Paul conversing with the pair in the boat, a man and a woman; lakes are quiet, especially in the morning on an overcast day. After a moment, he advised them to talk to me. They started their motor and zoomed over; people with motors disdain the use of oars, even if they happen to have an emergency pair.

“Hey,” I called out, “don’t cut my line. I‘ve got about 80 feet out.”

“I’ll row over,” I told them, starting to reel in first. Just then a trout hit and I had to play him gently till he was close enough to shake off. Paul and them and I formed a loose little lake triangle.

They were taking some kind of measurements and were not eager to discuss matters with us, perhaps because they were busy and had come all the way from Olympia, where their headquarters are. The man in charge was a Doug Somebody, who I had talked to before on the phone; he had also come to our annual meeting last year, the one in which we had collectively decided to treat the lake this year, after many years of not doing so while the study was going on. I asked Doug about permits, since there was some question at the annual meeting about them being able to get them. He assured me they had. “We can’t use Diquat,” he said, “but we can use copper. But we aren’t sure whether we are going to treat the lake.”

This surprised me. I’d thought we’d contracted with him to do the work, provided the permits came through, and they were tricky, with various chemicals coming on to the forbidden list from year to year and others coming off of it. He spoke, however, as though it was to his option and he was still studying and considering whether or not to do it.

We parted and I continued on with my fishing. It was a mediocre morning and I hooked not many fish. Later while Norma and I were out walking the dogs we found a stuffer in our mailbox. It was from Allied Aquatics and was a legal requirement imposed by the Department of Ecology. In other words, they had to give us the notification.

It was called Herbicide Application—Public Notice, and said that they were authorized to use Aquathol K, Copper compounds, and Sonar, which has active ingredient fluridone, whatever that is. It would be applied along the shoreline to a varying distance. There were some prohibitions for the Aquathol K, which is dipotassium salt of enthothall. Hmm. No swimming for eight days, not fish consumption for three days, no domestic use for 35 days and no use of water for irrigation or agricultural purposes for 14 days. I presume the last named is because it will kill all your plants. Hmmm again.

And finally: Treatment may take place within five days of this date. The date is June 5. It is further qualified with “on or about” this date.

Well, the people voted to treat (that is, poison limitedly) their lake, and I for one frankly would like to see what happens. My dear fish ought not to be killed and much of the noxious weed that covers, or nearly covers, the lake in mid-summer should be reduced, making the lake more attractive. It has been so long since this has been done that only the longtime residents have observed it, and we new people must take their word for it.

Hans Berg told me he used to regularly swim the width of the lake, his house to mine. I suppose it was how he started his day. I, a poor swimmer, am a water freak, but the prospect of a lake that resembles a clean, mountain lake is most appealing. At the same time I am aware that a lowland lake in Washington is historically clouded and often peat-colored from natural tannin.

Since all of our fish except the planted trout are spinyrays or scrapfish, it will be interesting to see if there is any fish kill, or if the removal of the aquatic plants will effect fish reproduction, this year or next.

The solitary loon has hung around all day, and when the pair from Allied Aquatics was motoring around the lake noisily, as they informed me was their right to do on any restricted lake in the state, the loon protested in a wonderfully plaintive voice. The loon spoke for me, as well. It is a different sound from the woman-being-murdered scream I’ve associated with loons on other lakes in the past. It is a romantic, haunting, slightly mournful sound. I want the loon to hang around, find a mate, and issue its lovely, sad sound into an indefinite future.

“Burls Wanted,” read the ad in The Nickel News. This struck me as unusual. The only burls I knew of were Milton and Ives, one a first name, the other a second. But of course this is not what the advertiser meant. He was not looking for a folksinger or a comic, so telling him that both were dead would not help his case, nor mine.

The burl-wanter went on, “We buy burls, caps, slabs, ells, blocks, cluster logs, whole burls. Figured logs. Old or fresh cut! [His exclamation mark, not mine.] Maple, myrtle, madrona, yellow cedar, yew, oak burls only.” And what would he pay? Ten cents to eighty cents a pound. I guess it was only the finest burl (whatever that is) that would bring top dollar, or rather eight-tenths of one.

I had no burls to sell, none that I knew of, so I did not call the long-distance number, but instead sat back on my burl, or rather my desk chair, and pondered the plight of the burl-wanter. But not for long. Shortly my mind turned to other matters (see below) and I forgot, or nearly put out of mind, the needs of this dim, distant person who was so specific about what he would take and what he might pay.

Last year, a bit earlier in the season than this, Norma made a beautiful cedar wood duck house and fastened it to a pressure-treated post; we erected it under a large hemlock about forty feet from the lake. Promptly a breeding pair of starlings moved in and soon there were chirps from inside and the two adults were flying back and forth with nourishing flotsam they had just liberated. This is not at all what we intended.

We sought expert advice. Down the lake lived Dana Base, the wildlife biologist with fish and game, whose pet project was wood ducks and their nesting. He told me, “Kill them! Take down the nest, empty it out, and stomp the baby birds.” This was not to my liking, not what I was asking to hear. So instead of following the expert, we did what most people do under similar circumstances: we did what we would have done if there had been no woodsy expert to ask. We let the brood grow to fledglings and leave the nest. Then we uprooted, so to speak, the wood duck nest and turned its opening face down on the ground. Even so, the parents circled it, screaming, wanting to use it again for a second brood. Then, after a few days of this, they went elsewhere.

Starlings are a harmful bird for which wildlife biologist have found no useful purpose. What they mainly do is attack and destroy the young of other birds deemed more worthy. Nobody can make a case for the starlings and in their usual large numbers they certainly produce birdshit in abundance. I remember back in Michigan in the fall, as a boy, all the shotgun shells littering the residential streets where dutiful men shot the birds out of the trees by the hundreds. Instead of starling shit lying on the ground, it was the colorful carcasses of shotgun shells. Nobody bothered to pick them up and—in today’s terms—they were non-biodegradable. I suppose eventually they were raked up along with the fallen leaves and most of them carted away.

But then those were in unrestricted burning days, and only the cardboard part of the shell would ignite. The stamped metal rim and firing pin—brass, I think—would remain nearly indefinitely, looking a lot like lost pennies.

This year—late, late—we were motivated to erect again the wood duck box when the birds became cozy with us unexpectedly. Not only could they be found every morning, dining on slugs in the blueberry patch, and waddling in mated pairs all over the lawn, picking at whatever interested them gastronomically, but they took to flying onto our deck and helping themselves to the birdseed Norma put out there. This was a delight to us. But so shy a bird, they would go sweeping off and away every time we approached the windows outside of which they were starting to feed, so we never really got to know them the way we had hoped to, and only observed their departure and, less often, their approach and sudden veering off when they saw us inside.

No amount of quietude on our part convinced them we would not harm them and they could feed contentedly on what we had provided them—along with two brown flying squirrels, the Oregon juncos, the Stellar jays, the odd rufous-sided trohee, and the Western tanager.

So encouraged by their sudden boldness, Norma decided they liked us and would respond favorably to a home provided for them so near to what they were daily seeking. So—late, late—we erected the box again, this time down near the water’s edge, shaded slightly by a small hemlock. It is, of course, too much a civilized place for them, but it is the best we can offer here, the wildness they are always seeking far, far away.

We watched. Daily the wood ducks visited us, our land, both morning and evening, and sometimes at mid-day. They were on the nest, of course, the hen taking a brief respite from her sitting, the male still her companion and protector. We saw them mosey around the wet ground near the nest, but not enter it. The following day a mallard hen came paddling down the edge of the lake with her new brood tucked safely behind her in the lee of her wake, all of them bunched and so tight they were uncountable; they seemed a single solid golden-brown unit.

How fast they moved. I could not walk at such a pace on dry land. It must be five-miles-an-hour, at least. The ducklings were held in a kind of still-water trough that formed behind her, and perhaps some of her forward motion was transmitted to the trough and helped propel them, for it hardly seemed they were capable of such locomotion by themselves, even balled as they were. They must be getting some kind of help by way of a dim, obscure law of physics known only to ducks.

So, if there were now new mallard ducklings, could the young of the wood duck be far behind? It seemed unlikely.

Still we watched the newly erected box, hopefully. And we were rewarded, but not the way we had intended. On Mother’s Day, our son honored us with a six-hour visit, which in itself is unusual. It was all very nice and pleasant, and we sat side by side for hours, talking about matters we had not talked about before, or not recently.

“Aren’t those swallows flying in and out of your wood duck box?” he asked at one point.

Could not be, we thought and perhaps said. The swallows were only flying near in their constant search for insects on which they constantly feed. Still, there seemed to be a lot of swallows, coming and going, and winging alarmingly close to the opening in the box. The next day, yesterday, it became obvious. The swallows were using the box, darting in and out. They were nest building. Now, swallows are preferable to starlings, every day of the week, but swallows are a far cry from greatly coveted wood ducks. There is so much room inside that the swallows will probably constructed apartment dwellings, layer on layer.

It is not what we intended, true, but I have a hunch it is what we will settle for.

My favorite river, the Wenatchee, was closed early last autumn season in order to protect steelhead and salmon runs that are in short supply (or thought to be in short supply, since nobody really knows), and so our usual fishing season ended early. Now the regulations for the coming two years proclaim the river closed to steelhead fishing. The river closes even to trout fishing (minimal, now that it is no longer planted with hatchery fish) at the end of August, a hot time there; some steelhead are in the river, but you will have to convince the wildlife agents you are fishing for the river’s few trout, rather than for steelhead. This I and my friends can do, through collective deceit and trickery. But it will be a short, hot season, and one not really worth pursuing.

So yesterday I took the pups and drove 150 miles or so to the Peterson’s orchards outside of Cashmere, my fall stomping grounds for the past 14 years. My purpose was to retrieve my tent trailer, stored there over the winter in hopes that, in spite of the early closure last year, there might be a season this year. It was but a dream. When I saw the new regulations, the fact was driven home to me without ambiguity. The Wenatchee is closed in what might prove to be permanently. The wonderful fishing has ended. It is time to break camp for the last time. Say goodbye to old friends, stare at the river one more time (in near flood, by the way), shake hands with my old hosts, hitch up, and drive mournfully away.

Partings, even permanent partings among dear long-time friends, are bitter-sweet, which is to say they have their up side. The pups scrambled around their new, temporary terrain, investigating smells and strange foliage, meeting Larry’s two old yellow Lab bitches, my friends and fishing companions, along with departed Sam, for so many years. They too are aging greatly, and one of them, Katie, is so fat and lame that she can hardly move. And the other dog, Tug, has a bad case of arthritis, fore and aft, in her hips, her muzzle as white as my beard. This is not how I remember her, and it is always a shock seeing a dog you feel affectionate about nearing her designated end. Neither dog will last more than a year or two.

Larry’s dad, Lawrence, has turned 80; a year ago they celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary. The orchard prospers. They are well on their way to being rich. The children are nearly grown and near that age where they go off either to college or jobs and don’t really ever return, only pay brief, uncomfortable visits to the old homestead, dutiful and bored.

But the river still flows. Beneath the flood-swollen current lie buried rocks I know as well as my own hand, its creases and calluses. Now, the river can obscure itself with watery abundance until it becomes nondescript, strange, swollen, but it cannot hide its essential configuration, what its bedrock determines to be its course, and that can be known and comprehended deep in the bones of those of us who know the river intimately through wading in more quiet times its riffles and deepening pools. So a river is never ever forgotten. Once experienced it remains in memory inviolate, immutable, perhaps literally incorrect in some particulars, but never wrong in its spirit, its substance.

My greatest fishing pleasure has always been to go afield with my dogs (as though I were a hunter?), and find a good pool with nobody in it, and catch a good-sized fish, with only my dogs in curious attendance. Well, it happened yesterday at one of my favorite holes—the confluence of Deer Creek and the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, my long-time favorite river.

We had hauled the tent trailer to the river property, where it is stored, and I was delighted to see that the river had cleared nicely from snow runoff and was highly fishable. So Norma, the dogs, and I piled in the Explorer and took off for Oso. Nobody was in the hole at the creek mouth, so dogs and I hiked in, while Norma stayed in the vehicle with a newspaper and a book to read, as of old. She wasn’t there long. Less than an hour.

We skirted the posted area and negotiated our way through a loosely wired gate, then crossing a meadow of unmown grass. I remembered how Sam, fourteen years ago, had delighted in running full speed through grasses taller than he; these dogs enjoyed it less but enjoyed it enough, chasing each other, nearly invisible, trackable only by the parting wave of grasses.

I lost a fly on a snag cross the river, while the pups amused themselves on the near shoreline, eating, I believe, mud, for the first time. Then they tried to drag a sunken limb ashore. When I hooked the fish, they were busy with something else and didn’t notice what I was doing, which was probably just as well. As the big fish neared the beach and my first attempt at beaching him, they came close, but failed to get excited. In fact, they only paid close attention when the fish was stranded with his head out of the water. I whipped out my camera and blazed away, soon running out of film. One of the last pictures was of both dogs sniffing the fish. Then I wrenched out the hook and set the fish free. It slowly swam off. We three watched.

There seemed little point in fishing further or trying for an encore. So we left, returning through the tall field and surprising Norma, deep in her book. I wore that triumphant grin that (unlike fishing stories) can’t be successfully faked. The fish, an unspawned winter male in good condition, but well colored, must have weighed seventeen pounds, or more.

The dogs are initiated to the sport, to steelhead as a living creature. Their excitement at the fight will come later. It always has, with my dogs.

The kind of day I like, with the clouds low and close, and at last a soft rain falling, almost a mist, the lake as calm as it ever gets, with nary a ripple anywhere, the many conifers reflected perfectly and darkening the water most attractively. Norma gone into Seattle to exercise a gift certificate she got for Mother’s Day at Swanson’s, a posh nursery, where she will buy the full amount and, if I know her well, something more to bring back home and quickly transplant into the middle bed, which holds heather and is a bit sparse, here and there.

I and my dogs are spending a late morning at the keyboard and tying fresh steelhead flies, since I lost one yesterday and destroyed another, getting it out of the fish’s mouth, prior to release. Also, many pauses to romp on the floor with the dog and planning an after-lunch hike down through the Dorsey Short Plat. A New Yorker to finish before then, with a page marker at the weekly short story and another at the movie review.

Soon I will be at the halfway point in writing this book, a companion to my twenty-year old, Country/City: A Year At The River. I am on page 129, but these are double-column pages and in true page count this must be about 200. The sections now number 150, and this seems to signify something special to me, hence this note. My plan is to let it sit and age a while, then cut back extraneous passages (such as this) and make it into a tighter manuscript, if not a tight one.

Meanwhile the bright-winged blackbirds are chasing away the crows from their nests, where presumably their nestlings are; they will challenge all birds, including eagles and ospreys. What they do is hector them unmercifully, till they consent to go away.

A man in a electric-powered rowboat anchors out in front of my dock, which I believe gives me certain riparian rights of approaching him and forcing (if need be) a conversation upon him. He is casting with a level-wind reel toward shore and retrieving very slowly. I walk down the grass toward him, leaving the dogs anxiously peering out the glass slider; it was Biff who had alerted me that the man was there with a cautionary woof.

We talk a bit and I feel I am forcing the conversation on him, while at the same time he is glad to have somebody to talk to, out in a boat for a long time, by himself. He volunteers that the fishing has been slow today. I can tell from watching him that he knows what he is doing. I only seem to talk to those fishers who do.

He is fishing a wiggle-tail lure with plastic forward feelers. These things have a name, but I would have to look it up. It is one of a family of such lures. As does Eric, usually, he casts it out on a stout rod and lets it sink and spend a lot of time inert, or seemingly so, on the bottom. Then he cranks it is a bit and lets it lie still some more. Each cast takes a length of time, but it is purposeful time and from a bass-catching standpoint a proven way of attracting a strike.

He uses his electric troll to move slowly from here to there and drops an anchor over the side to keep himself in careful position, though there is no wind at all and very little current. The single anchor, I determine, is a coffee can that has been filled with cement and a wire attaching loop inserted before the stuff has hardened. It is probably better than the sash weights Anton and I both use, though I have only dropped mine over the side once, and this was last year, when I set out to prove I could catch perch on worms. Or was it two years ago, nearly? Long ago, really, in terms of what has gone on since.

I am storing up, you see, vital bass-fishing data for the time—if it ever comes—when I will tackle bass seriously. It takes a certain mind-set and incredible patience, evidently, and I am not ready to make such a commitment, not with trout in the lake and steelhead in the rivers. But if we have a lake this year clear of duckweed and Mexican water fern, there ought to be bass fishing in the mid-summer evening, when the trout are all gone or else turned dour, and that might be a nice additive to this lake of mine, and the many pleasures that it produces.

At the grocery store today, to pick up a loaf of bread on my way home from doing something else (peddling books), I see a young, carrot-haired woman marking baking goods with a mechanical stamp, and inquire of her why one seven-grained loaf of bread (22-1/2 oz.) costs $2.29, while another costs a full dollar less.

“Two different bakeries,” she explains, which is not exactly the answer I was looking for. Then I notice her bare forearms disappearing into short sleeves. Besides being rather muscular and formidable, they are heavily tattooed. I can’t make out the pattern, the picture, but there are at least two on each arm, and none is small.

I decide to leave the matter right there and select the cheaper loaf, which you might say is our house loaf. I pay the guy in the checkout lane and toddle out to my car, still pondering why and the conditions under which she chose to be tattooed. I tell Norma my sad little tale and she says,

“I can almost understand tattoos.” She can? “What I can’t comprehend is body piercing.”

Baseball continues to maintain its vise grip on our lives. Our team, the Mariners, has played thirty games to date, losing exactly half of them. Why, its the same as if they hadn’t played one; at least it is statistically. Our professional basketball team was eliminated in the second round of playoffs by the Los Angeles Lakers, with Shaq O’Neal, who seems uncontainable. So our life as fans is cut in half, which theoretically leaves more time for the participatory, really important things in life. Now, if I only knew what they were.

Reading, I suppose. And that other, which with without reading couldn’t take place. I am referring to the act of writing. Some wag once said, “Nobody reads books anymore. They are too busy writing them.”

Which in its own odd way may be true. I am speaking only for myself, you understand.

There seem to be two general attitudes in regard to property, that is, the ownership of real estate. I’ve noticed that often people acquire a piece of country land such as riverfront and immediately fence and post it. “Keep Out,” “No Trespassing,” “Beware of Dog,” etc. Since they have paid a pretty price for the property, they want nobody to share it, including fisherpersons. They’ll back up their rights of ownership with a gun, if need be, and call the sheriff, at least at first, before they learn that there is nothing really enforceable, unless damage civil or criminal can be proved. So they resort to bluff.

I’ve argued my point of view with enough people to realize that it is not widely held. It comes down to this, these factors: what you don’t know won’t hurt you; the land is in custodialship, wherein your responsibilities to it greatly outweigh what you consider to be your rights. And if the land is not really yours but everybody’s, every innocent party who wishes to use it harmlessly, say, to cross on foot in order to reach a riverbank or edge of a lake, then you shouldn’t try to prohibit people from crossing it quickly, for good purpose.

During the editing of my book, Country/City: A Year At The River, my neighbor Tracy Miedema mightily protested every mention of what I believe to be the fisherperson’s right to cross property in order to reach what is called public water. Not owning any land herself, but wanting to, she has (in my less than humble opinion) an inflated idea of what is involved in land ownership. This puts her in the first category when it come to attitude. I’ve noticed that the people with the strongest sense of their rights to be protected from the trespass of outsiders, even those they recognize and know, is from either renters or the children of people who own land but own none themselves. They are the barking dogs, so to speak. Some have fangs and bite.

As a property owner and fisherperson, my concept of my rights is somewhat diluted. Nobody should come on to my property with the intend of doing damage. So when somebody cut the vine maple trees on my river property, I protested mightily. They were looking for firewood and didn’t know so little as that green wood won’t burn. These were the same people, incidentally, who broke into a shed and stole George Schlotman’s kindling, for Christ’s sake. Anything for a beach fire. The fact that they were teenagers and drunk doesn’t help their case.

Now if somebody wants to cross my property to reach the river and some free public fishing, do so. I shan’t, can’t, protest. All I ask is that you walk quickly and be on my land as short a time as is humanly possible. It is what I do, in turn. And if I am not occupying the property at the moment, so much the better; then whatever lingering feeling of resentment and “rights” of ownership are not triggered. What I don’t know can’t hurt me.

Of course if you leave trails of footprints or castoff waste, your presence will be noted and resisted. The trick is to cross invisibly and leave nothing behind as evidence of your trespass, including prints of your soles and heels in the sand or mud. I am expert at doing this.

I found an old, battered sign down on the Dorsey Short Plat, obviously long discarded and lying on the ground. It proclaims “No Trespassing” on two lines. I was tempted to “liberate” it from its site and take some sharp tool to it. I would trim it to read, “Trespassing.” Then I would post it on my river property in clear, bewildering sight. People would ask themselves, “Does the sign mean I am free to wander around on this guy’s land, to my heart’s content?” No, it doesn’t, and that is why I will not swipe and post it. There must be some succinct words to display to tell people they are free (especially in my absence) to cross my property to reach the river, etc., so long as they do it with dispatch. But when you do this, you are expected to stay well away from all my buildings (not so many, really) and not linger in any one place.

An extension of this second general principle is this: I have an old outhouse. The door is not locked and there is paper (albeit damp paper) on the roll inside the door. The place is none too clean and the crapper is nearly full. If you need to use it, sitting down, feel free. It is better in my opinion to offer the world your outhouse than to deny it, as my former neighbor Schlotman did, with a padlock.

Never in twenty-five years has anybody abused the outhouse privilege. Or to my knowledge the inherent (as I would have it) right to innocent trespass.

It is how I reach many exciting fishing holes from which I regularly catch steelhead and other anadromous fish. The fact that I generally let them go afterwards ought not reduce the strength of my argument, I think.

My brother and I, after many years of denying each other’s existence and maintaining no contact, have achieved provisional, wary communication over the Internet’s e-mail system, and are bringing each other up to date and exchanging information. It feels good. I have a hunch, however, that our communication will be limited and not extend much farther. That is all right, too.

It began when I sent him a birthday greeting. It was May 12^th, and I remembered it, for it was the same day and year as the British coronation,1937. He sent me a greeting the same day. We had not communicated for several years, and it seemed an odd coincidence to both of us that we should independently send messages within hours of each other. He has the type of diabetes that can be controlled mainly by diet, though he is part of a study of such patients, forming a control group; I don’t know the particulars. He told me he had his thyroid gland removed a couple of years ago, when his doctor noticed that his neck was slightly swollen on one side. (So that is why they press on the side of your neck when they give you a physical?) A needle biopsy proved inconclusive, so they decided to remove the gland, which proved benign. Now he takes an inexpensive—his word for it—pill each day to make up for what the gland contributed to his general health. And he must eat a special diet, which is sensitive to sugar, I suppose.

I, at present, have no medical news to communicate to him. We have no wish to see each other. We invited him to our open house at the lake, less than a year ago, and he declined because he would feel “uncomfortable” among all the strangers, our friends. I understood, but wondered if we avoided all contact with people not well known to us before hand if we might not go anywhere, meet nobody?

He has felt uncomfortable around me for years. A minister, we have basic disagreements on fundamentals, and most of his social activities take place in a church environment. I put up with a few of these in the long-ago past, but found that his need for me was as part of family support in situations that took place at his church, or another one of the same faith, and this was too much for me. Outside of church, and these formal occasions, he had no need, no use, for me.

This is undoubtedly a subjective, perhaps even mildly paranoid, interpretation of him and his actions, and he has a similar one of me and mine. So we avoid each other, now that our parents are dead and there are no mandatory family situations including our father and, lastly, our mother. I think we tried to please them while they were alive and slightly feared them and their ill opinion. I suspect many families are intimidated in just such a manner. Anyway, we have made contact, it was not unpleasant, information was exchanged, and we have gone back to our separate individual existence. It is the way both of us want it.

Our family is probably typical in regard to internal disharmony. It occurs much more often than the media would like us to believe. But by degrees people are recognizing the inherent disfunctionality of the American family. You don’t have to read and reread Eugene O’Neill to know this. But it helps. And if you do, you will feel your problems are minor ones in comparison.

What a delight it is to fish with a dog again, let alone two of them! The pups and I have been making exploratory, early season sorties to the river, investigating the changes in old holes and sadly noting the demise of favorite old ones, ones in which in the past I’ve had great success. The story of this river is one of steady diminishment, I’m afraid. Pools and runs are disappearing, without the appearance of new ones to take their place; instead, there are many braided channels and deep pools filled in with clay or silt.

One of these is the Mill Drift. The Mill is long gone, but its pond remains, choked with weeds and rusted machinery. The landowner is living out his long life in a hand-to-mouth existence; we spotted him yesterday and he cheerily waved, while the driver of his ancient car glared at me, since I had violated knowingly his No Trespass sign. I mean, how do you stop going into an old, favorite fishing hole, even though it has a rusted, half-hid sign being overcome by degrees by this year’s greenery? Well, you don’t, not if you are on a nodding acquaintance with its owner and have come here, oh, for thirty years.

The hole is terrible now. It is long and deep, but the bottom is filled with soft material, with nary a rock or boulder to tick my fly’s broad sweep and hold the hind of a lurking fish. I mean, in the past it has been bad, with only a few places where rocks and stones help promise. Now, there is no reason for a steelhead to tarry, and none do, not in a predictable manner, anyway.

But it is a pleasant place to visit. After going through it, the pups playing on the beach, all the while, we ventured directly downstream, and saw how the long run up against the old railroad riprap has been changed into a series of tiny pools below the braided channel, none of them fishable; meanwhile, the river has changed banks and is undercutting the woods behind, moving away from the riprap and leaving it dry and deserted. How many pleasant memories I have of this place.

One June I caught the hatchery run coming upstream on a high water and hooked in a few minutes four of five fine strong fish, losing them all. But another time, under similar circumstances, I hooked and landed four, including one really big fish, and lost only the fifth, which did not in the least matter. The pool shallowed as summer came on, but the little wild Deer Creek steelhead would hold along the riprap and could be seduced with small flies gently placed. A fish or two hooked on a short warm evening was always a likelihood and the run provided me with little competition and frequent success. Gone now; gone perhaps forever.

Earlier the dogs and I had made a try at the Deer Creek Riffle, where I’ve hook fish the last two times out. The water was an inch or two higher, and while I could cross from the North side, and the dogs could, too, heading back would be difficult (I tried it alone and made it, but returned) for the dogs, and so we walked out through the posted field, now in deep grass, and crossed the bridge on a leash in order to reach the Explorer without trouble from speeding cars.

Pictures arrived in the mail today from the photofinisher and there they were, the big fish from last week, plus the two rather sizable dogs examining it with eyes and noses. A nice memento as a print and an indicator of the dogs’ considerable growth, late in May, in the first year of their birth.

Fishermen in small boats with electric trolls have pretty much deserted the lake now, towards the end of May, and I have it to myself. It is interesting, the amount of activity that takes place late in April, before, during, and after opening day of most other lakes. People come here before the general opener to hone their skills, I guess, and get in shape for the true opener. But on that day itself, they still come here in droves. Now they slack off, or nearly disappear, but there are plenty of fish left. Not enough, evidently, to continue to interest them. This is largely to my benefit.

Yesterday I made three sorties into the lake, using for a change my electric troll. I don’t really need it, but having it, and seeing others use theirs so much, I decided to bring it out and give it a workout. The battery holds a big charge and permits hours of slow trolling, with enough electricity in store for a speedy return to port. (You see how quickly I pick up the vocabulary?) I set out for less than an hour’s fishing, late in the morning, and caught myself a nice trout; this years small plant is up to nearly twelve inches and plenty feisty. They hit hard and splash and jump and take out small amounts of line up until the net. The net is best to release them, I’ve found, since they don’t have to be handled. The hook can be quickly reversed and the net emptied, itself upside down. Splash and the fish is back in the lake.

I ventured out again in early afternoon, but caught only a couple of small perch—fish which bang on the fly or lure often but are not so frequently hooked and brought to the boat. I release all my fish now. The trout have acquired a muddy taste, I am informed, and we are not really crazy about eating them, anyway. You catch one trout, kill it for a meal, then immediately are faced with catching and killing another for a meal for one, say. That second trout can be hard to hook. The first may get refrigerated for a couple of days or, worse, frozen. They pile up and do not get thawed.

The second time out, coming back to my dock, playing with the motor, I hooked a heavy fish and it came in reluctantly. Often it plunged deep and would not show, taking out a fair amount of line. Finally I got it to the net. I thought, Channel Cat? That might be a good name for the bewhiskered devil, but it was only an ordinary brown bullhead, a member of the catfish family. It must have weighed three pounds.

The fish was hooked directly in front of our place. Norma was busy in the flower garden. “Hey,” I called out, “look at this.” I held up the net, which was fully occupied. “Feel like a catfish dinner?” She shrugged, which I took as a sign of uninterest. So I slipped the Flat Fish debarbed hook out of the mustached jaws and reversed the net. The fish reentered the water with a big splash.

In the evening I got no results from a trolled fly nor from my yellow spotted F-2 Flat Fish. I switched to a bead-headed scud and began fishing around the lily pads. The fish were not frequent, but I managed to catch a dozen of more black crappies, persisting into what another might call dark. Three of the crappies were good sized, and one of them medium big, I’d say. Over a pound, anyway.

It was a warm, pleasant evening and the lake was marred by not a single boat, with the exception of mine. Just the way I like it.

Good news on the book front. Sales of Country/City have been slow to date. That is putting a kind edge on it. But I sent a mailer off to Just Good Books, in Belgrade, Montana, a firm that is folksy but does a broad, mail-order business and publishes a fine catalog, and this morning Tom Pappas called with a big order. He wants 10 leather (with fly tipped in) and 10 limited signed, plus an inscribed paperback for his partner Harold Johnson, in Wichita, Kansas. They will use the cover of the paperback for their catalog, I presume.

The order totals over $1500 retail. Of course I must discount considerably to them—47%. But that is business, and I still will make good money. I still have to tie and sew and tipped in 10 flies.

“Red Angus,” said the young woman, with the hair lopped off above the shoulder. She was attractive and friendly, and I was on my best behavior. I can be pretty nice, when I set my mind on it, and I did now, for a lot was at stake.

Her property is at the end of the Monte Road, up on the river, and I had fished down there years ago, sometime with luck, often without, and for the past several seasons had not gone there because, the last time out, the hole had been full of peagravel and though I caught a late winter-run steelhead in a most unlikely spot I did not enjoy fishing the run and was in no hurry to go back. But today, with the river below Deer Creek high and, for once, clear, clear enough, I decided to do a little poking around at old fishing holes of mine, for many of them are filled with silt and slippery with clay, and rarely will hold fish, if ever.

The dogs and I’d fished (1) the Deer Creek Riffle, (2) the Dead-Boy Rock Pool, but it was late in the winter season and probably too early in the start of the summer one, and had no pulls. It was past five P.M. and we were on our way home. Why not stop off and see if we could get in to the run?

How many new homes had been built in the past few years, I noted. All had acreage. I came to the end of the road, where a dirt road wanders in to the beach and saw a series of closed gates, each one with a latch. There were a couple of weathered No Trespassing signs and, right at the first gate, one that read: “What part of no trespassing don’t you understand?”

Nonetheless I decided to persist. Nobody appeared to be at home. Some copper colored cows were grazing in a far off meadow. I paid them no attention, since they weren’t close enough to pose a problem for the dogs or for me. What I wanted to do was make contact with the owner of the property and signs and weasel permission to enter and go fishing. But there were no vehicles or signs of people. I turned around in the driveway and retraced by route. About a third of the way back to Highway 530, a good mile, I was passed by a car and a truck. The truck turned in after a short distance, entering a drive to my right, as I watched in my rearvision mirror. The car continued on and seemed to reach the end of the road before turning left. I thought it might be the owner of the farm at the end of the road, and turned around in a not unfriendly driveway and once more retraced my route.

At the road’s end and the driveway of the farm there was no more sign of life than there had been before. But then I saw the back of a woman at the edge of the garden. No vehicle was in sight. Perhaps she had parked it in the closed garage; an electric eye opener had let her in and she had quickly exited, leaving the place exactly as before. Well, not quite, for her presence had betrayed a change.

I dismounted my Explorer and approached. “May I talk to you?” I asked, rather stiltedly.

“I used to fish here, years ago. I have a place up on the Whitman Road and I would like to fish here again, but your signs are rather formidable. . .” I began. “Would it be possible to get permission to walk in?”

I thought I had misunderstood her, or else she was replying a second time to the same question the identical way. So I more or less repeated myself.

“Sure. It’s okay. You can drive in. Be sure to close the gates behind you, though.”

“Lady, I’d cut your grass,” I said, gesturing at the 75 acres or more of pasture reaching out to the scrim of trees indicating the river’s highwater line.

“Thanks you so much. I’ll be sure to lock each gate. I have another request. I have a couple of young Lab pups. Can I take them in with me in the car, or will they have to stay inside.”

It was perfect; I couldn’t have written a better script. It was then that we introduced each other. She and her husband were in construction and had lived there two years. They raised cows as a hobby. There were sure a lot of them for hobby dairy farming, I thought. Three dozen or more. It was then that she told me what they were. Red Angus.

Red Angus cows are to Black Angus what cinnamon teal are to blue-winged teal. I looked again. The cows looked like they had been dipped, but in what I could not say. Raspberry liqueur is as close as I can come to describing the color and the effect.

We entered the series of steel gates, dismount before each, unlatching it, swinging it back out of the way, walking back to the Explorer, driving ahead, dismounting again, swinging the gate back closed, latching it, walking to the car, climbing on board, closing the door, driving ahead, and the same thing all over again. But only twice, for we halted at the third gate and parked outside it, not going through it until I was suited up again and the unleashed dogs were with me, oddly quiet and investigating the ground thoroughly with twin noses.

We reached the river after crossing a vast sandy area as of old. There were no signs of human habitation, just sand, brush, trees, and clean moving water. A good half mile of low-bank access reached out, left and right. I decided to start in the exact middle, fish my way through what was left of the old pool (deep in the long-ago past, then full of the small gravels where I’d taken my fish within recent memory), head downstream as far as the bar continued before disappearing in a swift run, and finally head back upstream and past the middle point and investigate the upper run, which began in a swift riffle and where I took Trey Combs and Walt Johnson, back in 1990, or thereabouts, and Walt thought the pool too sandy-bottomed to hold fish.

He was right and he may be still. It was late when I finished up a perfunctory fishing of it, after more slowly threading my way through the lower rest. It was pretty but doubtful water, and I lost no flies on snags or boulders—a bad sign, for that is where steelhead and salmon like to hang about.

We walked out late. The dogs had played vigorously, all the while I’d fished. We were hungry and tuckered. We reached the Explorer and I changed out of my fishing clothes, including waders and boots. The dogs watched, then entered the vehicle when I bade them to.

The drive home from where the Monte Road meets Highway 530 took 29 minutes. That’s not long, but I was heavy on the pedal, all the way. It seems a wonderful find, even if fish do not hang around there much and only in high water, which may be the case. A godsend is the word I’m looking for. The pups loved it and so did I. I have a strong hunch we will be back, and soon.

Today we have the annual meeting of the Lake Ketchum Improvement Association. Ta-da! Not much to improve, this year. Oh, we had to review the findings of Allied Aquatics, Inc., who had done the water sampling a couple of weeks ago, put notices in all of our mailboxes, and were planning on “treating” the lake to reduce the amount of pondweed, which threatens to cover the lake--literally. People who have lived on the lake much longer than we tell horror tales about the lake being covered, shore to shore, with dense duckweed, so much so that at least once a visitor had walked out on a dock and stepped right off onto the water, thinking it was solid greenery such as you might encounter in a mountain meadow. And even last year, when neighbor John threw slugs out of his garden onto the lake’s green surface they . . . hung there, suspended. In effect they floated.

This year, so far, it’s not so bad, but the green stuff is piling up along shore, and everybody is in favor of poisoning, er, treating the lake. Norma and I have never seen it done. But, at the meeting today, the man, Doug, reporting back on his sampling, indicated that the lake had strong concentrations of copper, evidently from years ago, when copper sulfate was used to kill the weed, and current regulations won’t permit more use of herbicides containing copper when concentrations are this high—three or four times the minimum allowed.

So we must use Sonar, or nothing. There is another product, but it is experimental and its trial use will have to be approved, and that will take too long and our weeds will be comprehensive before it is approved, if it is. So we have only one choice, and a choice of one is not truly a choice but only an approval or disapproval. We votes unanimously to have the man, Doug, treat our lake in the next couple of weeks with Sonar. It may take more than one application. The cost? Up to but not more than $13,000.

What will it do? It will kill the awful elodea—for this year and next, perhaps longer. It will kill, er, control, the duckweed and the Mexican waterfern for just this year. It will not kill the algae, which may exploded if the nutrients the other weeds took up are left in the water. And it will briefly affect any flora it comes in touch with, including lily pads. This may included any cultivated shore plants such as iris, reeds, rushes, cattails, etc.

First they will turn white; the elodea will, too, along with the floating surface weed. Then the color will change slowly to red. The weed will sink to the lake’s bottom. The water will clear and become more pleasant for boating, fishing, and swimming. Property values for the houses for sale around the lake, hopefully, will rise, and it will be easier for them to sell. Or such is the amassed fervent wish.

It will be interesting to wait and see what the lake looks like in summer, under such different conditions.

Other business was completed with fair dispatch. All the officers were reelected, including Norma as vice president. (Ta-da, again.) I moved that the Lake Monitor (always capitalized, you will notice) be a de facto member of the water board, which numbers three. Considerable discussion resulted. Paul Wittenberger was not there; he is the current Lake Monitor. So instead of the motion being approved, there was a conflict with the bylaws and we had to settle for a motion that the Lake Monitor and the Water Commissioner, or whatever he is called officially, “cooperate” in matters involving the lake and its level, etc.

It was about all I could hope for accomplishing, with this peculiar, inbred organization. Nobody serving as officer except Norma is under seventy years of age.

Well, it’s over for another year, and as usual at our annual meeting I talked too much, asked too many questions, and volunteered too much from my meager hoard. But that is how I am. And we only have to endure each other, the association’s president and I, only once a year, and it is now behind us. There may be an autumn meeting, but only if we get a grant to improve the lake’s quality comprehensively, in terms of the study. The chances of getting the grant is highly political and the word is we have small chance. Winners will be announced by the Department of Ecology on June 1^st. That’s only a week away.

Also, a rollcall of those departed (died) during the past year was read by the president, Mona. There were quite a few, but perhaps not so many, considering the advanced years of most of the lake’s residents. Doris Oldenberg, directly across the lake, was one. And of course Hans Berg. This being Memorial Day Weekend, it was only appropriate to read their names aloud. Many people here have been friends for decades.

One aspect of the lake is that, one element of it, anyway, is coming to resemble an old people’s home. I’m not ready for that—though some would disagree.

Last year at this time, I was catching rainbow trout like crazy off my dock. This year, nary a one. My catch a year ago was gluttonous—much like the questionable old characters from a century ago detailed in Charles Elliot Goodspeed’s great book, Angling in America It was something to be ashamed of, though I released most of my trout. Still, there are about forty, moldering in the freezer. They are no longer fit for consumption and must be thrown away.

I have a hunch this is how it is with many fish caught here and elsewhere. Last night about dinner time, a crow lit in our beach-side hemlock, something long and shiny in its bill. Norma saw it first and called me. Trout, I thought. The bird conveniently flew down from the tree and landed on a spur of the lawn. He dropped the fish and flew a short distance off. I dashed out and inspected the fish. A trout, all right; one of about nine inches, which is small for our fish presently. It had not been dead long, but had one of those grotesque open-mouth postures that signify a long, unpleasant death. It might have been caught by one of Saturday’s fishers, then jettisoned at the boat landing as not comprising enough of a fish to grease up a pan for.

An occasion small dead perch now washes up on the beach. Funny, but they don’t remain there long. One of the area’s feral cats will come along and detect it. Gone.

In the community garden dumpsite at the road’s end, 317^th, I saw a small black crappie corpse. It no doubt had been caught and release by some fisher, but had not survived, and washed up on Bob Donahoe’s beach, where Tidy Bob disposed of it, along with his other yard waste and grass cuttings.

There are still a few diehard fishers arriving at the boat launch and setting out in small boats for a day’s fishing. All have electric motors (as do I, in copycat fashion), but the lake is so small that it is hardly any effort to row from one end to another, or to circle it, with dispatch. I have my motor and sixty pound battery in my boat now, I wonder why. I set out rowing and usually stick to oar power. I can control the boat’s speed and, consequently, the action of my Flat Fish troll so much better, or so I think. The trollers who fish under power seem to catch fish, too, I’ve noticed. Perhaps it is the aesthetics I am concerned with.

Aren’t I always? The number of fish I catch doesn’t really matter. Though it is nice to go out and catch something. It is the variety and the unusualness of the activity that appeals to me greatly.

A lake and its fishing is respite from river fishing. But river fishing, I must admit, is really “where it is at.”

I know myself to be a writer of small talent, who has pushed that talent about as far as I can. But how much worse it would be to have a great talent and not utilize it, or a larger talent and waste it, or a big talent and destroy myself, my life, because of it. For life is all, I am beginning to think.

A woman I went to college with, her and her husband, have read my books and might be called supportive fans. They are literary persons, which makes them both critical and sympathetic. We correspond fairly frequently by email. Anyway, she is reading Country/City, and sending me friendly notations, but at the same time she admits to not feeling well and having been ill lately. When I wrote, Never mind the dumb book, how is your health? she wrote back today to say that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will soon have a lumpectomy, followed by radiation.

I wrote back something fairly cheery and optimistic; her situation could be worse, in regard to the breast cancer and proscribed treatment. She took this well. Her husband, Ken, whom I was in school with, and he was even a short-lived student of mine in Modern British Lit, going on to teach for a full career at Seattle U. himself in its English Department, wrote back warmly, and we got into deep religious and personal matters. They are Catholics, but live in the same tough world as we do, and have a not dissimilar outlook. Funny how things like this go. Illness brings people together, if it is possible to do so.

Over the long Memorial Day weekend we got a series of emails from my brother about the severe illness (spinal meningitis) of his eight-month-old granddaughter, a child I never met, whose parent I don’t know. We got somehow tied into an email loop that forwards carbon copies to a whole of people, involving them in the hourly details of events in lives of people presumed close. The fact that we aren’t, aren’t close at all, makes the situation most absurd; one can’t be unsympathetic about the illness of one so young, at the same time we are about as close to them as to the people we read about daily in the newspapers, who also suffer from great calamities.

So we become involved in the lives of others, whether we will ourselves to be, or not.

Yesterday came a phonecall from Vancouver, B.C. It was my old fishing friend Bob Taylor. He wants to buy one of the new books. He has been supportive in the past and has no college but is a book lover and prides himself on his friends who are literary, or writers, and have published books. In the past he has ordered limited signed editions of mine, ones with flies in them, and in the case of the second book I happily gave a low number and retained a higher number second volume for myself. (Author always gets and keeps number one of such limited signed books.)

Bob said he would like one of the cloth copies ($50) because he can’t really afford a leather edition( $100), and I don’t blame him any. The exchange rate between here and Canada is bad, from his standpoint. Also, he’d like a fly. So I’ve decided not only to send him one of the limited leather ones, but number two of that edition. It has a fly tipped in, and since he is a good tier himself, I’ve made sure it is a good one.

The leather ones cost me only $1.75 more than the blue cloth, but nobody knows that. It was a special deal. Bob has been so supportive and a friend for so many years, though we’ve had our differences during many of those years, that I am happy to do so, and I think he will be nicely surprised.

Also in the mail today comes an order for Janna Gage for a paperback. She is distantly related to Norma and has bought and made a great fuss over my past books. A long letter was included. She will read the book, for sure. And the library in which she works (Mt. Vernon) will order a copy—hardcover, I hope, for both our sakes.

It is more important to me to be read, even if I’m not owned, than to have somebody buy a copy and put it unread up on his favored bookshelf. But it is nice to be bought, whichever way it works out. We still have a basement room full of books. Accordingly, we are beginning to send out flyers to bookstores and even discounters. Tentatively, sort of feeling our way, and looking for feedback.

Verna, the old friend with cancer, is making mention in her email about where she is in the book, the scenes, the episodes, and this is rewarding to me, to learn that at least somebody is reading and enjoying it, limited talent that I am and will be.

One can only do his best. I sometimes think fraternally of athletic players who do not make it to the pro leagues, and must slink away and live out lives of relative obscurity. We are all destined for oblivion. And these players have considerable talent, only not quite enough, in each of their specialties and their departments.

The kind of day in the Pacific Northwest that writers claim they love—hard rain falling nearly all day and nothing to do but read and write. It is why we live here. But when a warm, sunny day returns, we all guiltily take to the country and our favorite outdoor thing to do.

That is also why we choose to live here. Mark Helprin and Johanthan Raban are but two. They have lived all over the world, but have come here to settle down and to work. We long-time residents are supported, then, in our original resolution.

Why don’t we come up with an euphemism for that dreaded word that begins with a C? I don’t even want to write it down. Let’s call it “hit by a pickup truck”? Thus, Jack Leahy got hit by a pickup truck in 1985 and his wife, then years later. Many seem to have been taken away by just such an accident.

There are only three things you may write about. First is of course yourself. Who knows yourself better? There is a school of philosophy (home schooling?) that maintains all you can know about is yourself. This is called Solipsism. It is very popular now. Maybe it always has been. What you have to work with, in this school, is what has happened or is happening to you. Usually this is pretty bland porridge. Your job as writer is to make it interesting. This I try to do, since it is primarily where I am.

The second thing you may write about is somebody else’s life. Generally this is somebody you deem much more interesting, such as an ax murderer, some political luminary, a writer who drew from a life much more interesting than your own, or somebody you wish to emulate, but of course you can’t. So you enter into this real life and for the duration of your research and writing make it your own. Why, sometimes you actually believe you are this person and take on his or her mannerisms and airs.

The third thing you may write about is the life of somebody who has never existed but (you, at least) wish he or she did, and strive to draw breath as that mysterious and wonderful person. Or terribly awful and fascinating person. This is called fiction, and most of world literature, alas, is made up of just such imaginings. The writers who are really good at it create a semi-believable world in which a host of delightful or wonderfully sinister or misguided persons mill and mix in a series of adventures too condensed and heightened to be taken for real, yet we do, the story and the writing is so powerful.

Now, I’ve tried my hand at fictive writing, all my life, and triumphed over the form by selling a short story to Esquire—the old Esquire, that is, before it became so shallow and trendy. I take great pride in that tiny feat, for which they paid me $900. A Xerox of that check, immediately cashed and spent, hangs unframed on my library wall, signifying as both Shakespeare and William Faulkner after him said, nothing.

I have, perhaps wrongly, chosen the first direction for the remainder of my writing. Nobody can accuse me, however, of writing about something I know nothing about. While this is undoubtedly true, it is also a sign of consummate laziness. I mean, how much research do you have to do on your favorite subject? You can make it all up (non-fiction, that is) and nobody will be the wiser. Only you yourself will know the truth of the situation, and we lie to ourselves all the time, anyway, so who will ever know?

The dogs continue to delight me on this, the third day of unrelenting rain. An inch to and inch and a half has fallen each day, starting with Memorial Day. Now, I can remember rain, a lot of rain, but never this much, all at once. The rivers must be flooding, but who is going out to look at them, if he has any choice in the matter? Not I.

A badly swollen river is a sad thing to contemplate. There are those, I suppose, who delight in such abundance and waste. Not me. A flooding river frightens me and fills my ears with its terrible thunder. You can hear nothing else and walking or driving over a bridge is a scary experience, the swollen river roaring only a few feet beneath you, full of fury and violence.

Larry Peterson tells me that, over on the Wenatchee, swollen every spring with snow runoff, the rafters delight is running the river; these are the commercial guys, who are licensed but not regulated. Fish and Wildlife tells them that if they go out on the river under these conditions their commercial licenses will be immediately lifted. The reason is that the river is running too fast for anybody to rescue them, when they go over. And go over they will.

Already the Wenatchee has reaches that can’t be rafted legally (or prudently) even under low water conditions. This is up in Tumwater Canyon. There are chutes there, observable from the State Highway 2, that are continuous white water and a long steep drop. Nobody could survive such a run in the sense of emerging unscathed. Yet young, foolish daredevils occasionally attempt it. A few make the run and stay in the their rafts or kayaks. Others mange to get to shore, bruised and battered, usually without their craft, which goes pummeling downstream, topsy-turvy. Shards and shreds of rafts and canoes are found washed up in quiet waters miles downstream. My friend and host, Larry Peterson, often displays these wrecks proudly along the edge of his public access.

Anyway, the dogs (the subject of this entry) are weathering the weather well. Young dogs need exercise, but can get along without it. When Kate (Garth and Norma spell it “Cate,” and say it is short for Catlin, which I don’t even know how to pronounce; perhaps I shall take up their unique spelling) yips in the night, she is usually telling Biff something—to wake up and play some—it is not because she hasn’t been exercised in the past twenty-four hours. It is something else, perhaps some internal disorder such as humans get. But then she is a chronic light sleeper and wakes at the least sound and seems quick to go on the defensive. She is much smaller than her brother and, as time goes by, and it does, the size difference seems to increase. He is heavy, slow, inclined to sleep deeply. He eats maybe three times what she does, and shits accordingly.

Both are keen to birds, songbirds. Does this portend they are hunting dogs? Hardly. They would retrieve better if they were separated and I could work with each of them with the other out of sight, out of mind. But this is next to impossible. So I will content myself with friendly, fun-loving dogs that will not heel or leash well, and will retrieve things, sure, but not usually bring them to my hand, with a tendency to continue their lifelong (it seems) game of keep away with each other.

A woman named Kelly Ruhoff, who turned out to be the 40-year-old daughter of my former neighbor up at the river, George Schlotman, called up and wanted to interview me for an article for the special outdoor advertising supplement to the Stanwood News. I agreed, but only because I’d interviewed so many flyfishing luminaries in my day that I could hardly say no. What goes around comes around, etc. She wanted to come out to the house and see the creature in its native environment. Okay, I said; it is a nice house and I am proud of living here, and she might carry home wondrous tales of grand living to my former neighbor, who would be appropriately envious. Besides, it was a whole lot better than having to go to some office for the interview to be conducted.

This was a month ago. Kelly arrived with her story already written in her mind. This is often the case and I have been guilty of the minor crime myself. She was going to write about this famous husband-and-wife flyfishing team, you see. Quickly I disillusioned her. Norma does not fish. Kelly asked why not? Norma quickly responded that it was because I was too competitive. Me, competitive? A whole new slant was cast on my character, and by my wife, too. Norma added that it was the same reason she no longer would play bridge with me. What is wrong, I wondered, with playing cards with somebody with this incredible memory who was able to replay each hand over again from the course of a long evening, and point out to her where we (not she) went wrong? It is really a kind of compliment to play with someone like me. You can learn a lot, no matter how unpleasant it may seem at the moment. That is the kind of pain that quickly and profitably passes.

Later, a flyfishing friend correctly pointed out that some women mistake intensity for competitiveness. I nodded rapidly, up and down. Exactly the case.

Kelly prowled around our house, asking her impertinent questions, taking a picture of me at the flytying vise, casting from my dock, and rummaged through an ancient stack of photos of mine, picking and choosing from among them which to spirit off with her for the newspaper’s possible use, as though they were proffered chocolates from a box. Graciously I let her take away whatever she wanted. Some were personally priceless.

So yesterday the article appeared. It was long, full of minor inaccuracies that nobody else would notice. It was favorable, flattering—what is called a puff piece. The telephone started ringing shortly after the advertising supplement was deposited, unasked for, in everybody’s mailbox in the vicinity, which is large. First was an 83-year old man who lives about three miles from here. He is a fisher, too! Big surprise there. He doesn’t flyfish, however. He manufactures a thing called a gangtroll, which is a series of spinners that work in conjunction, and usually a worm is trailed behind the rig. He fishes Lake MacMurray, which I admire visually but have never gotten around to fishing. He has never fished nearby Ketchum. He’s always been interested in flyfishing but has never gotten around to attempting it; perhaps I would care to teach him something about it!

Crassly I said that if he hadn’t found time to look into it, in all his 83 years, I doubted whether he would now. He took this well; in fact, anything I said made him chuckle appreciatively, or reflexively. Since the fifth game in the Chicago/Indiana basketball semi-final playoffs was starting, I rung off with an appropriate apology. The last thing I heard was his fond chuckle.

This morning, before I was out of bed and eating my immediate breakfast, the phone rang again. Norma grabbed it. It was a young person, this time, and he knew of a wonderful fly, could describe it, and wondered if I would like to tie one for him? She took his phone number and said—ha, ha—I would call him back. I probably will.

The third call—out of sequence, actually, since it came in first, but in a way should come last—was from the mother of my son’s wife. She is his mother-in-law, but I’m not quite sure what she is to me, aside from being a nice, chatty, salt-of-the-earth person. She’d seen the article and that had sparked her to call us up. It was a shame we weren’t home, she said, on the answering machine. Also, she’d gotten the flier about my new book. Congratulations. “Congratulations?” We’d published it ourselves. To her it was akin to a birth announcement, but no gift was in order. It was simply an announcement. What we were after, of course, was for her and her husband to buy the damn thing. It is interesting.

It is interesting, but of course nobody reads anymore. They either watch TV or else are busy writing books of their own, which nobody will get around to reading. I understand. It is largely how I am myself.

Two copies of the book are on consignment in the local bookstore, Snow Goose. It is in case anybody reads the article and wants to buy the book. I doubt whether this will happen. Snow Goose doubts it, too. That is why they didn’t buy the books outright. They wanted and needed a monetary escape clause.

Or maybe it was only because I’d told them, in preparation, that they book wasn’t really published yet, but I told the reporter the book would be available at Snow Goose. And they were just trying to help me out.

They mentioned at the time that they would like to arrange a book signing, when it was officially published in August. We have now moved that date up till June 1. I told them I enjoyed signings and might put on a little show to draw people in, such as tying flies, or some other kind of flying demonstration.

Ah, me. How demeaning it is to be a local curiosity, a very minor character in a rural environment. Robbins called this “another roadside attraction.” It is a lot like the guy alongside the highway who will show you his half-dead rattlesnake for fifty cents. Has it in a little turnstile pen, between two barriers, one of them glass, the other chickenwire.

A book distributor in Renton, Partners/West, is interested in handling my new book and is sending me a contract. “How many books in one of your boxes?” he asks over the phone. I have no idea, but I should. Later I go to count them. The number, however, is written on the box label, along with the title and author’s name. The number inside is 38; 38 paperbacks fill the box. Also it is heavy. We decide to weigh it. First we way me on the bathroom scales. (Nevermind the number and that I immediately decide to cut out the evening snack.) Then we weigh be holding the heavy box. Simple subtraction indicates the box weighs close to forty pounds. Now we must find out how much UPS ground shipment is to Renton.

At the discount Partners/West gets (55%, the max), they will have to pay shipping and for any returns. Laurie at Frank Amato Publications says they are nice to deal with, pay promptly (that would be nice; Amato himself is notorious for not doing so), order modestly, and rarely have returns. All of which is good news.

Each morning after breakfast and dressing and my ablutions, I must go and unpen the dogs. They have been enclosed for, oh, some fifteen hours usually, something they take to well, for they keep each other eternal company, which is the main reason we bought two of the buggers (as I often call them). I take them out to relieve themselves down at the street end, where I have hidden in the brush a broken shovel.

Biff shits the copiously, often twice. This is only fitting, since he eats thrice what she does. Often she holds back; I suspect it is she who has soiled the pen, or soiled it most, since she sleeps the least is tends to wander around at night, looking at the moon and is ever on the outlook for cats and other nocturnal visitors. He sleeps heavily and is disinclined to shift his position even, while in drugged sleep. (No, I don’t drug them to keep them quiet; it is merely a figure of speech.)

After they have played some and relieved themselves, fore and aft, I walk them to the basement office and feed them. Usually they want fifteen minutes of hard play before their appetite returns. Then they gorge. Exhausted, they nap, but before they do they often need to be shitted again. This time it is in the backyard, down by the lake. Then they become house dogs briefly. It is the favorite activity.

If it is a warm, sunny day, such as today, after the departure of the plentiful rains, they will want to lie out in the sunshine, which prettily bespots the upper deck with bright yellow. When Norma can spell me for a few minutes, I go out into the yard, armed with narrow spade, huge bucket of the type five gallons of paint comes in, with bail and handle, and a special tool that came with the shit digester Norma bought and doesn’t seem to work. The tool is invaluable, for it performs sort of a dustpan function, and it is onto which this devise that I scrape and shovel the many turds in the pen and now in the backyard, lakeside.

My big bucket full, I depart for the wetland dump where everybody deposits his compost and much else that is not biodegradable, no matter how much time you give it. I try to distribute the contents of my bucket over the broadest possible area and as far from everybody’s property as possible. I introduce variety and determined lack of consistency and routine where I throw what’s in the bucket as far as its short handle will permit. You might say I narrowly broadcast the contents of the bucket as far as I am able. It takes a certain amount of skill, plus practice, to do the job well.

Constant, daily practice ensures that I hone this skill. I might modestly say that I have developed it about as far as anybody might or can. My average throw goes from seven to twelve feet. Often with the side of my shoe I give the product a thin coating of grass clippings from a yard not my own but readily available from the community source.

Then I am free to resume my day. Humbly, I might add. It is the only course available to me, after such a beginning.

Fishing has slowed and the torrential rains have had something to do with it. But the fishing normally slows greatly at this time of the year. With the rivers full of runoff, I will probably pursue lake fishing a bit longer, even though it grows poor. Last night, out for forty minutes of late fun, the basketball game having grown ludicrous and the rain slacking to the point of almost stopping, I caught some of the tiniest black crappies of the season. The strikes were few and pathetic. I think they were small perch. But rowing in for my dock, I big trout struck my bead-headed fly and fought strongly, valiantly. I decided to play it from the reel, like a steelhead, since I was near to my dock and didn’t intend to fish any further tonight.

The trout pulled line off my reel several times—an impressive amount, for a fish that would have to be less than a foot in length. I decided to net it, which would enable me to release it more easily and with less damage to the fish. I let it tire, reached for the net, drew the fish near to me—and it came off the hook. I laughed aloud, which is my usual response to losing a fish I had intended to let go.

As long as the lake continues to produce the odd, interesting fish, I shall keep fishing it in short frequent stints. However, the amount of surface and sub-surface weed is accumulating rapidly, and this makes both trolling and casting a fly or a lure difficult, for more often the hook comes back in trailing weed. You can tell this has happened while you are fishing, or you suspect it has, from the heavy pull on the line and the lack of wiggling action transmitted by the Flat Fish, out behind the boat.

Often it is these conditions and not the lack of fish response that dictates when angler stop fishing the lake and turn to other pursuits. River fishing is one of them. I’m sorry.

It should be noted that over the Memorial Day Weekend, children and grandchildren of the new occupants across the lake were seen dipping in and out of the lake and sometimes observed some distance from shore. They were swimming.

How cold the water is still. But the young will brave it on a dare, anxious to add to their hoard of new experiences. And the old, such as myself, can feel the ancient memory in the chill in their bones, though the experience was so very long ago. It won’t quite ever go away.

When you read, nothing else happens, or is supposed to happen. All is still. It is time gone from your life. Lost. Yet the time spent reading (and I have done very little of it, lately, and am only now returning to it) is undoubtedly valuable. It is an important addition to life, and I envy in no way those who don’t, or can’t, subsist on a diet of such soul food as reading provides.

As the man said, or is rumored to have said: “We bought a book once, but nobody read it, so we never bought another.” This evokes The Book of the Month Club, which panders to non-readers but those who like to have a handsome shelf or two of books for visitors to see. I am thinking particularly of those wonderful unread sets of Churchill and Will Durant. Scott O’Donnell, a river guide, admits to not being able to read satisfyingly, which is surely related to his fractured attention span, which all of us have noted. And Neighbor Anton contemptuously speaks of books (including my own, which he has not even dipped into) and his lack of need for them in his life. “If I ever need one, I can usually borrow it,” he tells me, not realizing or caring (if he realizes it) that what he says is a direct slap in the face to a writer and inveterate reader.

It indicates an appreciation of what is immediate and directly applicable to the necessities of life.

Yesterday a whole bunch of books came in the mail from two different dealers. Included were two Russell Chathams (I’ve really got to know his stuff better, since he is a famous friend of Sylbert, McGuane, and Jim Harrison. I’ve thought his paintings vague and muddy, but now think I may be dead wrong, for his illustrations in his books and in the newly arrived Harrison book of poems, The Theory and Practice of Rivers (a title which I envy greatly, by the way), which is beautifully illustrated by Chatham in soft pencil. Some of the drawings are better than others, or rather more to my liking, including one of a loon’s head. (Another loon reproduction is included in one of his own books.)

Sylbert gave Chatham a copy of my book, Steelhead and The Floating Line, and Chatham responded, “nice little book,” which pissed me off. I am only now recovering from it. It was not faint praise but a comment in passing. Therefore I retract my remark about his paintings being vague and muddy. They are quite nice and resembled nightfall on bodies of water seen through squinted eyes. I can reproduce the effect at will, given the right atmospherics.

But now for so-called quality paperback books. They look so nice, unread. Harrison’s slender volume of poems (all are from Clark City Press, incidentally) came sealed in plastic wrap. I now see why. Read most carefully and never placed pages down on a table to mark where it was put down, it nonetheless resembles a peeled banana. It will never be induced to return to its original flat slim self.

Also in one of the boxes is a Gary Snyder. It is Mountains and Rivers Without End, a title which you might quite correctly presume appeals greatly to me. Snyder is of the beat school that has now become a part of mid-century American literature, for good and for bad. There is much the feel of his contemporaries in the volume—Kerouac and Ginsberg, especially. They trod the same ground, had much the same thoughts, and expressed themselves uncritically in much the same kitchen sink, stream of consciousness, nothing is too trivial for inclusion manner. Alas, it does not hold up well, and one is quickly filled with yawns.

How much more I can stand reading (I am briefly halted on page 28; the book runs 164 pages.) I cannot say for certain, but I have a strong hunch it will not be much farther. It was the same with Kerouac’s Some of The Dharma, written in part as an instruction manual for Ginsberg in the precepts of Zen Buddhism, and full of didactic snippets; it makes a useful anthology for anybody so interested, but today there are fewer so inclined and most of them, I suspect, are between 16 and 22 year of age. It is like one of those childhood illnesses, terrible while it lasts, that soon passes and leaves you immune (I hope) for the remainder of your life.

I’ve always thought prefaces to books were written at the request of writers (perhaps publishers) who wanted a big name to introduce their doubtful work and add credibility to it. Thus, Russell Chatham’s book, Dark Waters, a collection of his essays, articles, and stories, is prefaced by Nick Lyons. And what else can the prefacer do except fawn over the work to follow? He can hardly speak disparagingly of it.

In Chatham’s stories I detect a large area of insincerity. He is a painter, and makes his living painting, but in his early days says he wrote fishing stories “for money.” I, who have done so, too, think he would have starved, if this were true. Surely the little money one gets from fishing stories is useful—even helpful. But one can’t live on it, and the implication is that he could and did.

Some of the stories are clearly fabulous, that is, untrue. But it is up to the reader to determine what is a tall tale, what is not. Often the two elements come mixed in unclear proportions. You could almost say they were dehydrated: all you do is add water. Not unsuitable for fishing stories.

There are hunting stories and I suspect they ring more true, but I am not one to say, for I do not hunt and am generally opposed to hunting on principal. The principal is, you kill things, usually with a gun. A gun gives a disproportionate chance of winning to the hunter, for the quarry is unarmed, just innocent animals and birds, wandering around in the woods, looking for their next meal.

Chatham is a gourmet cook and gourmand. Nothing he loves more than an orgy of food and drink. So does his friend, Jim Harrison, whose poems and novels I greatly admire. Both freely admit to the use of what they call recreational drugs. Ugh. But then ugh to those endless meals of rich food, washed down (literally) with expensive wines and liqueurs. Not for this boy, and not for most folks.

There is an annoying tone of gross self-indulgence in Chatham’s writing. “Look how much I can eat and drink,” he says. Harrison, too. Sometimes the amount of drugs and drink that go along with a night’s gorging is awesome. He wants you to know that it is. Both men are hugely overweight. It only follows.

I am anxious to see some of Chatham’s paintings. Jack Nicholson and Dick Sylbert collect them. There is a book, 100 Paintings, which costs over $100, or a dollar a painting. We are going to see if we can get it on interlibrary loan. It probably won’t be available that way, and one will have to seek it out in some large store. If it is as good as I hope it is, it would be worth buying.

Meanwhile, I’m about halfway through his collected fishing and hunting stories. Maybe I’ll have changed my opinion of him by the time I reach the end. He can write well, when he is not indulging himself, but much of the time he is indulging himself, as with his eating, drinking, and drug use. And much of his stuff feels dated. It may be because of the similes and allusions he uses, which are deeply rooted in a particularly distinct period of Americana, the Sixties and Seventies. In a way it is like watching a TV serial that makes reference to, say, The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling’s distinct voice, or to Lucille Ball as Lucy. Or Gilligan’s Island. It is a wonder that these dead items are still able to evoke memories or have any significance to people too young to have been alive when they were current and popular.

Maybe that’s it. Chatham’s writing appeals to those interested in a world already imbedded in amber. Jimmy Buffet, Tom McGuane, Margot Kidder, that woman named Ashley. All part of a vanished America, though some have lived on to late middle age. Trouble is, those who have not died from drug overdoses or suicide in the wake of major mental breakdowns have grown fat and lazy from satiety, that is, the surfeit of the good life America provides.

In today’ email comes the following. It isn’t often a writer gets such reassurance from a reader, albeit a long-time friend:

“I must not forget to tell you how very, very much I enjoyed the book. I think it was a kind of therapy to have it in hand while waiting for the operation, and then knowing it would be there when I came home. I was able to drop right into it and leave hospitals and nasty illnesses behind.
Reading about the natural world instead of thinking of drainage tubes, blisters and cold, clinical, stainless steel machines with blinking lights was exactly what was needed. However, the book is much more than therapy for a middle aged female slug!

First, of course, was knowing the author and
his family - a kind of window on the time when we had little contact due to families, careers, elderly parents, etc. But there was the focus on the natural world which I don't get much of anymore. And, of course, the balance between city and country life. The latter is something I miss. I can't live in the country exclusively, but I do need to dip into it now and
again. You have the river, I had the mountains east of Granite Falls which I miss already. Ah well, one makes choices. Anyway, it was marvelous, the book that is, and I was sorry when it ended. Thanks for writing such a good one.

It needs a larger audience than I am afraid it will get. I suppose you've contacted the U. Bookstore about being on their local authors list. Well—I'm getting a bit tired and I still want that walk so I must stop. Thanks again. I hope this has made sense; I'm still a little goofy.
Fondly, V.”

Around the edge of the lake are clots of green algae, very much the consistency of what you see floating on the top of French onion soup, if its any good. I study the slimy stuff to see if there is any of the deadly blue-green algae, but am not sure I can identify it correctly if I spot it. Funny but the duckweed (or Mexican water fern, perhaps) I feared seems to have disappeared; a couple of weeks ago it was forming along the shore as though the water were peppered with the stuff. It would come together at odd places in the lake and move like a cloud, this way and that. Down by the island it seemed most dense; this is how it had been in the past. It would gather there and when there was enough of the stuff to be almost solid spread out in a northerly direction and begin to eat up the shoreline. But it is all seemingly gone. I say “seemingly” because the stuff has a way of appearing again overnight in copious quantities. For now, though, it seems gone.

This is about the time that the team from Allied Aquatics is pledged to come and “treat” the lake, which is the more kindly word for spreading a pesticide over its surface—Sonar, this year—in order to kill the weeds, both above the water and beneath it. He couldn’t have done it already because the law requires he place in each of our mailboxes a notice like the preparatory one he put there, a month or more ago, announcing his actions before he takes them. His target date was around June 5^th; this is the fourth, and unless he has changed his schedule for some good reason—rain, water height, wind forecasts, etc.—we ought to get our notices and he should start work. But the tiny surface weed seems to have disappeared.

The trout seem to be hitting so seldom that it is hardly worth going out in the boat and targeting them. Instead, I occasionally go out just before dark, troll a fly or Flat Fish briefly, then head for the lily pads, which I flyfish with a small olive beadhead.

Some nights they are either hitting or else my hands have remembered the subtle feel of their strike and managed to strike back and hook some. Night before last, when the wind was down and the lake had calmed, I fished the pads over by the house opposite us with all the night lights. (There is another such house down at the East end of the lake, where the yurt is, but its lights are yellow and Christmasy.) The black crappie hit like crazy, and for a while I would solidly hook one nearly every cast. Trouble was, all were small. They are a pretty little fish and splash around a lot, but all pretty much of a size, and that is six or seven inches. Always there is the hope of a big one.

One such night I asked Anton how many tiny ones I had to catch before I earned a big one. He pointed out how, a few nights ago, he fished next door to his place and caught but one, and it was huge. This was not the answer I wanted, for it is not true and a bit braggadocio.

There are also small perch to be had. I don’t want them. They are even smaller, this year, than the average crappie, and fight not nearly so well. But they are part of the lake’s biodiversity (a hip word, that) and to a certain way of thinking its richness and appeal. I think I would prefer the lake to be a trout lake purely, such as Riley is. Yet we would be lacking something important, if that were the case.

Ketchum is just what it is, a spinyray lake, with an annual stocking of legal trout. It must be appreciated for what it is and not strongly wished to be something different. It has its own charms, and not everybody is keen to them. I guess the purpose of this book is to observe and state them as best I can, and in my own way pay tribute to what living here is like. I believe it is worth writing about.

A gray day, moles for the first time in our lawn leave mounds of sand, poppies blooming red and orange and, over at Tracy’s, pink/orange, a subtle color, as though faded, but as of yet unfading.

On the North end of the lot, in deep shade, spring is held back, oh, a month. There the big red rhododendrons have not yet dropped, though are bagging some, and many azaleas are fresh and bright, standing alert. But down by the lake, the blooms have fallen to the ground and are trodden.

On the deck the wisteria’s pale blue blooms are gone, the tendrils shooting out and climbing skyward. Already this year I have cut them back severely once. I will do this again and again.

Norma reports a female wood duck at the tray feeder on the upper deck. She has seen the bird wing by, veer off, return, land briefly on or near the rail. The paradox is, the ducks are so shy that we will never be able to observe them, I fear, from within the house; the slightest sign or movement from us and off they will go, or rather she will go. Never has Norma sighted a splendid male so near. Always it is the hen, and we suspect always the same one.

The sight of a wood duck . . . roosting always astonishes me, its prehensile feet holding it in precarious position so naturally, so astonishingly. Would that every duck could do it, but then the woody would not be so unusual, unique, alone in the kingdom of earth- and water-bound birds. Here is one that not only can but willingly will perch on whatever handy object there is waiting to be clasped. Bowser’s children’s swing set is ideal, with its A-frame construction and a pipelike bar running along the top. Several duck boxes are nearby, and it is only a short flight or hop away.

Watching the perch fishers last night from my rowboat, I saw a gray-bearded man and a large red-headed woman catch many tiny perch, with I suppose the odd small crappie mixed in. They were fishing over at my favorite lily pad bed for hours, casting out skinny tip-type bobbers very near to shore. For a while there, the man was hooking a little perch about every twenty seconds; he was deft and setting the hook and so was she. She struck back like a steelheader. Quickly they both reeled their fish in; I think the bobber was responsible for much of the small bend in their rods. Quickly too they disgorged their hook of their fish, baited up, and cast again. They were either using maggots or pieces of nightcrawler. A moment’s pause and they struck again, and usually there was a little continuing splash that appeared a yard behind the trailing bobber.

What they did with all their fish I have no idea. Many time the perch and crappie fishers will drop their fish in a five-gallon bucket—the kind with a bail that house paint comes in, if you buy it in quantity.

The ultimate disposal of so many small, bony fish offers many avenues. You can tediously fillet them, uncleaned, and pile up the slivers of meat for either freezing or immediate deep frying. Or, if it’s late at night and you are arm-weary from setting the hook so many times, you can freeze them for an indefinite freezer that never quite arrives. Or you can plant them in the rose garden in a day or two, and in the future attribute whatever blooms you get to the fertilizer aspect, whether or not it is true.

Coming in at early dark to watch the Seattle Mariners lose yet another game on dish TV, I spotted Anton and his young son Keaton fishing off his dock. Last year at this time it is exactly what I did. I hovered over the oars for a long moment talking to him, talking about the condition of the Stilly, the river we both like to flyfish for summer-run steelhead. (I quickly converted him last summer, and now he is even more thoroughly hooked than I.) He put a piece of Powerbait on his hook and, dabbling it, hooked a nice trout. It was gut-hooked and couldn’t be successfully released and expected to live, so they killed it. Anton loves to cook and eat fish. He makes a special occasion out of it.

My fishing was slow, but I managed to catch half a dozen crappie and several perch on flies, including one perch that evoked memories of the average perch of two years ago. I halted the boat within hailing distance of Anton and son, and chatted desultorily with them while I continued to fish. This was the only lily pad bed not heavily hit by the worm fishers, all afternoon, and it gave me another half dozen crappie. Most were small—this year’s average size, but one could be mentally stretched to medium. Then I went in for a ham dinner.

The Mariners lost again, as I had predicted. It is wonderful in how many ways they can do it.

The lake is of course a microcosm; what isn’t? Like a checkerboard, young people having babies alternate with old couples hanging onto the ghost. At our annual meeting of the lake improvement association (gad!), which was on Memorial Day Weekend, a rollcall of the recently departed was read. I think there were four. Doris Ottenberg, who lived directly across the lake from us, was one. I remembered her dimly. It was from the annual meeting two years ago. She and I had politely disagreed over some agenda item, and she had been cool, unfriendly, ever since. Now I can see that possibly she was feeling poorly—this never gives people a charitable outlook, I know from personal experience. That day, in back, a baby cried incessantly, giving the meeting a bizarre character, since often nobody could hear anything that was said.

Doris, dead. Well, so goes it. There are various other oldsters living on the lake, and some of them are incredibly aged, in their mid-eighties or older. They go on and on, but not indefinitely, I guess. Not, it stops eventually and I suppose they look back and reflect with alarm on how short life actually is. Or is it? I go back a long, long way now, when I think of my Chicago days, and even my schooldays in Seattle. My fiftieth reunion of high school graduation is coming in August and I’ve decided, after not much reflection, not to attend the three-day gala. A list was recently sent me of those already pledged to be there, and I recognized but three names and could not put a boyish or girlish face on any of them. One, a girl named Delores, I had a date with once; she lived on 28^th West, I remember, and wore a favorite sweater that badly needed washing, if get my drift, or else she a complete laving in the Lifeboy soap that was everybody’s solution to such a problem

A guy named Drew Miller. He went to college with me and became a class officer; how appropriate and in keeping that he is now one of the ringmasters of this upcoming circus. But none of the guys who joined my fraternity or Theta Chi, the other one we divided ourselves happily between. No Dale Keller, Jim Klobucher, Mike Sheets, Dick Elander. Their feeling about the event is no doubt like mine, though predictably different. High school is long past, and we survived it and its deadly imprint. We went on to become very different people. Why remind ourselves of the selves we were and successfully transcended.

But back to my microcosm. Lake Ketchum is much smaller than W. C. William’s Patterson, New Jersey, but larger I think than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It will do, however. Any small enough place will suffice for analytical purposes, or simply for purposes of description.

“The young in one anther’s arms, those dying generations.” Yeats said that, or something near enough to be (instantly and incorrectly) memorable. The wonderful thing about water, be it a lake of a river, is that it is always changing and, thus, ever stays the same. It is constant, dependable, in its mutability. One living near a lake or a river, or both, is eternally aware of this enduring quality and partakes of it, even if he or she doesn’t want to. This is called “against one’s will.” It should not be so. One should embrace the fact that watery life goes on and we don’t.

The lake is wearing a ruffle this morning, a gray one, with the sun buttering everything that is green (as though it were toast) and bringing a twinkle to the water’s surface. Along the vinyl-clad cyclone fencing near the common road, Norma’s yellow rose from a year ago is in full prolific bloom. The bright red one opposite, also from that time, that we thought had died, has grown nicely and shows a single crimson blossom starting to unfurl. I plan to pick it for a bud vase and watch its opening up, but probably won’t, and it will be all for the better.

The unpicked rose is the one that matters most. I don’t know why this is so, but it is.

Meanwhile my dogs are sleeping. Yesterday, while I was fishing the Deer Creek Riffle most briefly, Cate came out of the woods with what was left of a dead male steelhead, a spawned-out winter run, judging from the color of the head; the rest was dark skin and bones. Proudly she bore it up and down the cobbles. Both dogs had eaten of it and got sick to their stomachs. Cate had a bone in her throat and had panicked. When I attempted to dislodge it, she bit me with her big back molars, but I was prepared for this, having covered my hand first with a sizable bit of jowls, upper and lower, so she bit herself first and relinquished her hold just enough so I could escape my punished hand.

She made a most piteous spectacle of herself, trying to yawn and cough up the bone that was evidently in her throat, and I thought for a long moment that I would have to make her cross the river, get in the car, and rush her to the vet but, lo, she managed to dislodge it finally, and all was calm. Both dogs threw up what they ate.

The fear is the salmon disease, as it is called. It is really a bacteria that results from a tapeworm which itself is the product of a fluke. Dogs often die from it. My dog book says it takes five to nine days to incubate, and dogs run a high fever, don’t eat, often have diarrhea, become badly dehydrated, then at the end run a minus temperature. The it is too late and they are gone.

I’ve seen three dogs through it successfully. I’ve been lucky. All partook of dead salmon. But steelhead are just as likely carriers. I must watch my pups carefully and have noted the dates on Norma’s wall calendar. What you do is look for loss of appetite, listlessness, dry nose. They must drink water and empty their bowels. If a day passes and they do not improve, they must be rushed to the vet and given antibiotics—penicillin works.

A busy Saturday morning, with many people our in small boats fishing, Allied Aquatics arrived with one of those weird boats never seen around here, with a huge fan in back to propel it through weed-strewn water, the likes of which are not found this side of Florida. It made a terrific racket and nearly blew everybody off the water and us landlubbers off his lawn. What a day to pick to treat the lake.

The chemical is Sonar, also known as Floridone. Purportedly it is harmless to everything except pondweeds and whatever you are growing along the edge of the lake. First Doug Dorling, the owner, flew (literally speaking) round the edges of the lake, beaching his boat and traveling by foot from lot to lot, posting notices. He stapled them on everybody’s dock and the notice asked that they not be removed for two days. Naturally people started tearing them down at once. John and Tracy were among the first, for they are vehemently opposed to all kinds of pesticides, as are we, but only in principle. We went along with the group and voted for the second time to go ahead and treat the lake. What won us over, Norma and me, was the descriptions of a clear lake offered by longtime residents. Imagine a lake that looks clear enough to drink (better not) and invites swimming. That, anyway, is how they remember it. I have a hunch it was not quite so idyllic.

There were a whole bunch of black guys in fluorescent red floattubes out this morning—perhaps a club. It is the type of craft used by flyfishers and, I thought, their private domain, but here were these guys fishing worms and jigs. And then there were a couple of big bass boats, with two motors, one fore, one aft, the electric one for trolling, the big gasoline powered one that must weigh a hundred pounds, for covering big watery distances fast. I guess the big one is too heavy to keep taking off and on, so they leave it on, weighing down the boat that is already so large and heavy it requires a special submergible trailer. Today, however, they were all outmanned (if that is the right word) by the propeller-driven craft.

It had a big tank midcraft, with a hose running out of it and into the water. I think the propeller also worked the pump in the tank that emitted the Sonar in regulated doses. The boat kept to a couple of yards off our docks and went round and round the lake, spending a fair amount of time down by the island, where the water is shallow and most stagnant and in need of weed treatment.

The notice in part read: “Use Precaution Irrigating [in block capitals]. Treated water may be used for Swimming and Fish Consumptive [their caps, making these activities proper nouns, as if they weren’t already] immediately after treatment.” And then there were the phone numbers, one his, one the state Department of Ecology’s, to call for “more information.” They would no doubt be answered mechanically and whatever messages left over the weekend possibly responded to next week. Or never.

The dogs waited impatiently for their morning swim; it came in mid-afternoon. I’d gotten a big order again from Montana for the leather edition of my book and I had to tie flies to tip in. I’ve been tying Skunk on Alec Jackson’s silver Spey hooks, very pretty, and giving the wing two colors, black over white, the white being Arctic fox, the black being dyed calf. The silver rib of black chenille goes very nicely with the hook’s color.

At first the tying went slowly and poorly. I’m long out of practice. But then my skill level went up a shade or two and the typing went faster and better. Finally I had eleven of them done. Now I had to sew them into cards, which for me is a maddening operation. I had them done about two in the afternoon, ready for Norma to glue them into the inside front cover. While she did this, I made out a shipping notice and the start of an invoice on the computer; we can’t complete the invoice until we know how much the UPS charge will be. The customer pays it.

And then it was time to swim the dogs. The sun was shining and the temperature was about seventy, ideal for this activity. I changed into shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. The dogs hit the water hard. John and Tracy were working in the garden. I told John that if the dogs lived, I would try swimming myself tomorrow.

He said it was a little like the royal tester. I mean, taster. I noticed that the grandkids of the new people across the lake were already splashing around in the water. I expect them to be dead by midnight.

Is it my imagination that—after throwing the dummy for the dogs, time after time—I’m developing a rash on the backs of my hands? No, it must be psychosomatic. Knowing as much doesn’t reduce the itch any, I’ve noticed.

Sunday, a day after they treated the lake, I rake up green algae along the shore. It looks no different from before the poisoning; that is, there is no evidence of what has happened. But there is a singular absence of duckweed and what my grass rake brings in is simply thick, heavy clots of green scum. I lift it high on the rushes and grasses growing there and drop it heavily on top, hoping that its density will smother and kill them, and I will have a clean beach again. At the same time I’m not sure I want one. I mean, there is the idea of a clean, sandy beach as being desirable, while at the same time I feel that a beach ought to be natural, that is, with vegetation growing thickly along the shore. Besides, Norma has planted wild irises there. They did not bloom this year, but ought to next, she figures. The bulbs are from Magnuson Park in Seattle.

Near dark, Eric Balser appears in his slender green scull-like boat; it now is powered by an electric troll, I’ve noticed. A step up from last year. To fish for bass, he still moves along as stealthily as an Indian, using a paddle because, once he told me, oars make too much noise in their locks and scare the bass. I’m sure he is right. He takes infinite care and exhibits great patience. Each cast is made precisely, allowed to sink to the bottom, the line brought up tight, taut, and the bouncing retrieve started. There are many dead pauses during the course of a single cast and retrieve, while his plastic lizard or worm is allowed to sink to the bottom. Then it starts moving again, its long tail wriggling enticingly. He must hit the unseen bass almost on the nose for it to take. He is fishing blindly, of course. But he knows the lake and its bottom. Generally, but not always, he is casting into the lily pads, close to shore. He casts, he waits, he retrieves. Then he casts again.

The next night he is back. He fishes until well after dark but, ah, there is a full moon, though on Sunday it is scudded with clouds on a broken sky. Still, there is enough illumination for him to see quite well. The second night, Monday, the sky is clearer and the moon more of an aid.

He encounters Anton, my neighbor, sometime later in the week and gives him a report, which Anton passes on to me Wednesday night, when he passes me in his canoe while I am fishing, pretending it is for trout but really it is for crappie. Eric clobbered the bass. He caught many, including numerous two to three pounders. Funny how he is the only one who has such luck here. It is he who gives the lake its reputation for being a good bass lake. The others who appear to me skillful enough for interrogation purposes only catch one or two, after many hours of diligent casting.

It is Eric whom I will one day, I think, emulate, when I develop the knowledge and the skills and the patience to become a good bass fisher. Anton says he has only caught one decent sized bass in all his years fishing the lake for other species. A fluke, a pure accident. And last year I caught what has to be called a small one, about eleven inches, accidentally, too, while fishing off my dock for whatever.

The time will come, I am certain. I will have to set out specifically with special bass gear and fish only for them. And I will have to be prepared for hours of inaction, days of failure. Well, I’ve been there before, fishing for steelhead, and even fishing unsuccessfully for trout.

Tracy, my next door neighbor to the East, is more than nine months pregnant. That is, she is overdue. The baby Turned a week or so ago, but has not dropped. I don’t know much how these things work. I suppose they will have to induce labor soon or else do a C-section. Naturally they are on pins and needles.

Tracy is about twenty-eight and this is her second child. Her daughter, Camille, will be two in July. Tracy seems pretty active, considering how big she is, how advanced in her pregnancy, and works in the garden, all bent over or on her knees, and drives their Volkswagen bus back and forth to the grocery store. She and I had a falling out shortly after she finished editing my book, and we haven’t had a good, long chat since then. We have, in fact, been avoiding each other, or I have been avoiding her, since she “told me off,” as we used to call it. She angrily recited, in the no man’s land of our backyards, on the lakeside, a list of grievances and ways I had insulted her, or condescended to her, over the past nearly two years. I heard her out, astonished. What a memory! How many things I’d forgotten, things uttered in response to her telling me things I thought in confidence. Her statement, my reaction, her buried offense. All came tumbling out.

She sees nobody but her husband, John, when he returns from work as an electrician’s apprentice for his father, who owns an electrical contracting business. Her young child is at that troublesome age where she has learned she can say no to what her mother tells her to do. In other words, Camille is contesting her mother’s dominance and trying to establish her own personality. She does this at first in a purely negative sense. Sometimes this is called “the terrible twos,” but it can take place anytime in the neighborhood of two. So Tracy must remain calm and patient, while her own pregnancy advances uncomfortably, with no diversions except a husband who comes home tired and hungry, and perhaps frustrated in his own way, having to work for somebody and do what he is told.

So she exploded at me, one bright late morning in May, I guess it was, over some chance remark. I had said that, spring vacation for teachers being at hand, Anton’s wife, Carrie, had to go to the hospital for some serious surgery, and Anton, who had planned to fish much or part of his vacation, instead had to take care of their two kids. I think I used the ill-advised word, “babysit them.” The phrase has no special connotations for me but does for others, I guess. And I was speaking from a purely masculine point of view about Anton’s change of plans; fishing is much more important to him than it is to me. You could say that I am a writer who fishes for relaxation and for subject matter for his writing. Anton lives to fish, but must work as a gym teacher in a high school. I think I’ve put matters in their right perspective. So I was being empathetic, perhaps excessively sympathetically, when I thoughtlessly told Tracy that Anton had to change his plans and take care of their kids for two straight weeks, perhaps longer.

So she blew up, and she mockingly started, “Poor Anton, he has to babysit his two children, oh, poor Anton, what an imposition,” etc. I said, no, I didn’t mean it that way, that he was quite willingly assuming the extra duties (normally they trade off taking care of their kids, with the little boy, Keaton, being somewhat of a trial, still troubled by his version of the terrible twos. Anton hadn’t complained; I was just merely stating his disappointment. But my attitude, one more time, was the problem and she had had enough. She began to recite a bunch of individual instances going back to when we had first moved in, instances I had entirely forgot. And—what a memory? She even had my words correct. What she was wrong about, in my less than humble opinion, was the context. She had said something about the nature of her life and I had leaped ahead with one of my usual commentaries.

For instance: she and John had married earlier, younger, than Norma and I, and we had not wanted to have children, not at all, and had considered ourselves “lucky” for her not to become pregnant until we had been married for five years. She say this as negative criticism of herself and John’s wanting to have children right away. I hadn’t meant it as such; I was simply pointing out the differences in our two couple’s attitudes toward marriage and childbearing. But people, in usual conversations, often don’t complete their thoughts or their sentences. They utter one thought or sentence, and then the other person reacts and states his or her opinion, and the first person picks it up, and the conversation flows on from there in a series of fragments, none complete in themselves. So the area of misunderstanding is vast, and nobody gets to say—at least to the full extent—what he means.

I had also said, she recalled, that “they were over a barrel,” in terms of John’s employability, since he had gone to half a dozen colleges, studying many things of great interest to him (botany, Beowulf, agriculture), but not picking up a degree. Left without saying was that jobs were hard enough to get with a degree or two. And also left without saying was how lucky (that bad word again) John was to have a father with a business that would employ him and, when he became a journeyman, pay him a good living wage. Had I such a job waiting for me (father’s don’t say no to sons needing work, especially when their new wife is pregnant with his grandchild, no, not ever) when Norma was pregnant, I wouldn’t have had to go to work at Boeing, a job I hated more than anything and could not wait until I could quit it.

There is nearly forty years age difference between us, and I think Tracy represented the daughter I never had, her daughter the granddaughter I will never have, and I tried too hard to make them surrogates, which is fiercely unfair, but happens. And her reaction, especially when we kept referring them to houses in their price range, after they had told us they wanted to buy, not rent, and earn some equity, was exactly the kind of things parents do to their children, and they were already being subjected to such pressure from two sets of parents already. Who needs a third?

So I deserved it, but did I also deserve such vehemence? I don’t think so, but then there was the pent-up pressure of Camille resisting her mother’s direction, and no avenue for Tracy to blow off steam, except at me, when I said the wrong thing and the right moment. Trouble is, once said, angry words cannot be recalled or forgotten, and they stand and form an impossible barrier between individuals, especially people who had been close, share some common interests (literature, certain writers, editing), and had a natural affection for each other. Or so I had thought. Perhaps the affection there was only on my part, and had never been there on hers. So she had suffered me patiently, painfully, and if this is so, I was foolish, if not to say a fool.

Meanwhile John and I have developed a polite accommodating relationship, one quite suitable for neighbors. Tracy and I don’t speak, not unless others are present and the speaking situation is unavoidable. It has gone on like this for a couple of months or longer, and has all the necessary elements in place to continue in like manner into an indefinite future.

I guess you could say it is a tolerable situation. But I miss the old one, even though I am afraid I was overbearing in terms of books lent or given, and all the hatchery steelhead and trout I gave them. I guess you can get hooked on giving people things and the pleasure it brings. To you, if not to them.

The lake and the surrounding greenery are buttered with the newly emergent sun, hidden the past several days. Every time the sun comes out now the day grows instantly hot. The pups suffer from heat as much as I do. But being on a lake or on a river, there is always the instant relief that comes (to them, not to me) from plunging in, time and again. I envy them this, but not enough to do so myself, since I am a poor swimmer, with a tendency to sink like a stone. This takes away all the fun.

Norma’s rose bed, planted largely for my benefit, bless her, is in prolific bloom, all the pinks and reds and golden yellows and whites deliciously mixed together in a huge living bouquet. There are so many small blooms that Norma will pick a handful of various colors and carry them into the house, where they will last a week almost in one of her many small vases. These are stationed mostly around the kitchen counter whose reverse side serves as our dining table. It is the kind of thing commonly called a breakfast bar, but a shade more elegant. Meanwhile the sun beats in the windows and in our backs while we are eating.

There is so much heat generated through those windows that, starting in February, would you believe it, we are able to heat the house without resort to the electric baseboard heating system spread throughout the house. Heat from the front radiates to all the other rooms except our bedroom, where we keep the door closed, the windows generally open, to maintain it as cool as possible, even in winter. Well, not during the worst days of winter, certainly, but those are few, around here.

On Mondays, while Norma does volunteer work for Snohomish County on dispute resolution, if it is not raining, I usually take the dogs to the river and cut the grass with Walter’s old mower, then cut down as many of the sedges as I am able to with the electric Weedwhacker from Toro. This leaves the property in minimal good care.

It takes me an hour and a half, and I work up a good lather, unless it is cool, with the wind blowing, in which case I still get a lot of exercise and a necessary workout. I look forward to it. And if the river is in any kind of decent shape, I reward myself and my companions, the pups, with a short fishing trip.

They are good company, though they tend to tear up a pool and render it unfishable for hours. So be it. But a couple of days ago, Norma with me, with us, we brought one of the ten-foot tethering cables with us; it has a snap on each end. With this I anchored the dogs to, first, a tree down near the crossing to the Deer Creek Riffle and, later, to a beached log at the new pool Anton and I both fish this year, though separately, at the Boulder Creek Public Access, a beautiful meadowlike clearing where one can park and walk the quarter-mile trail in to what is perhaps this year the most attractive pool on the river. Though I knew it from past years, it was Anton, on his annual spring float, who spotted its vast improvement and the fact that, as he says, it will hold steelhead throughout the summer for the simple fact that there is nowhere else, nowhere better, for them to go. He is right, I think, and I am beneficiary, though I have not hooked a fish in two short visits there. The last one was with tethered dogs, so I had a chance to fish through it quickly before they approached it, splashed around in it, and frightened any fish that happened to be there and in a taking mood.

The tether worked and I will probably cart it around with me to certain easily-disturbed pools in the future, if I wish to have any decent chance of hooking a fish. We’ll see.

Thank God for remaindered books, for without them many of us wouldn’t be able to afford to buy the books that interest us most, including individual works by our favorite authors. I am reading Norman Mailer on Picasso—actually the artist’s younger years, which are probably more eventful and interesting to read about. As usual, Mailer does a fine job, as only he can approach and define his subject. The book originally cost $35, but mine was but $6, and it is still a first edition, indicating a huge first printing, many of which didn’t sell. Probably a Book of the Month Club selection, too.

The book is fully illustrated, with many unfamiliar drawings and signatures of color work.

Mailer’s approach is purely his, including long extracts from the journal of his first mistress, Fernande. I believe her diary exists only in French and is long out of print. So the translation, and seeing her life through her own narcissistic eyes is important in providing another point of view on Picasso from one who knew him, well, intimately. She also served as his model—and models, then and now, were frequently the mistresses of artists in a form of serial monogamy that often didn’t last for very long.

The book made me anxious to go back and find (Powell’s used book store in Portland, Oregon?) his book on Henry Miller, Genius and Lust, and possibly his on Marilyn Monroe, which I ignore when it first came out, since so many books on Marilyn and her death were being published. I may have missed something significant in both instances. I have read most all Mailer has written (copious, lengthy) and Miller, too, so it would only be fitting.

Having read two poetry books of Jim Harrison lately, and enjoying both, I checked his fiction and found I don’t have one of his early works, Wolf, which has a subtitle, which I’ve lost. He is the one member of the Montana Mafioso who I value most.

An email from our friends, Ken and Verna Maclean, who were college chums, or rather in our circle in the English department’s graduate school and who later we picked up on again, about retirement time, and began a communication with, largely over the Internet. Both have just read my book, Country/City, and have had kind things to say about it. In fact, self-centered as it may be, it might be very useful to me to get their response to some rather particular things about it, for Norma and I are trying to market it now and are having an uneven response from individuals and a few bookstores. I guess this is normal, but it is perplexing when it happens and makes you revise in mid-course your marketing strategy.

Verna has a small malignant lump removed from one breast, and evidently some muscular tissue was cut into, for she reports having no stitches to remove but much soreness and having to do sets of exercises which included leaning against a wall with the operated on arm and shoulder.

At the end of the month she will start radiation and has been told it will leave her tired. But it is preferable to chemotherapy, which leaves you nauseated. My feeling is, and I shall tell her this in my next email, is that they truly got it all, and the radiation is “just for good measure.” A kind of insurance. And I believe this.

Norma, the dogs, and I have been making afternoon trips to the Stilly and fishing Bryson’s hole, aka the public access. It is a pleasant ten-minute walk in through the trees over a good path that will only get better with time and usage. It takes me about forty minutes to thoroughly fish the pool through once. Then it is ten minutes out again, for a total of one hour.

Since the pool is high in the river, it is above most of the dirty water sources and should remain clear and fishable all summer, come what may. Anton first spotted it on one of his floats and saw its tremendous possibilities; it is one of the few places in the river with sufficient depth and boulder bottom to give fish the cover and protection they seek. So far, no reported fish, but then the word is that there are few fish in the upper river, and the lack of crowds would indicate even fewer in the lower river, that is, below Deer Creek.

We tried to go into the long hole at the end of the Monty Road, but the landowner was cool and had locked his gate, and when we asked for the key told us he wasn’t giving it out any more because somebody two weeks ago had abused the privilege and left a gate unlocked, and about fifty of his red Angus steers got out and had to be rounded up. So we, with his permission, crawled under the first gate and started in with the dogs on twin leads, but when we got to the cattle thought better of it and turned back. The steers were eyeing the dogs, the dogs the steers (woof, woof), and it looked like a situation ripe with confrontation.

I must return by myself and try for the second time this hole that is private and holds great promise, at least early in the year. And this is what this is.

The lake—in a forty minute fish through, just before dark—is giving me fifteen or twenty crappie and a few perch. It is a pleasant diversion with the fly, but grows monotonous. My thoughts turn increasingly to the big bass. I’m not quite ready for them. Soon, perhaps. They are occupying my thoughts, anyhow.

Out from my dock, on the left side and in very shallow water (10-12 inches), is a redd. Off to the right even farther is another. Regularly I see a small fish on the edge of the scrubbed gravel patch, but no signs of her nesting. No male, no additional females, as I presume she is. Day after day.

The fish has a large adipose and looks brown or beige. I thought, perhaps a bullhead or sculpin. Talking to my neighbor Anton, one evening, I brought the matter up. “A bluegill or sunfish, probably,” he said. He is right. It is a bluegill: bluegills have an orange patch down near their vent and it distinguishes them from other sunfish. But the handsome bright blue color is utterly missing, or else is neutralized by the lake’s browntoned water and the silt on the bottom.

Consulting Wydoski and Whitney’s Inland Fishes of Washington, my perennial text, I find I must correct my surmises. The fish I see is probably a male. The male builds and guards the nest, which may be visited by several females over the spring and summer. (You might say it is a bachelor pad.) The fish mature when two to three years old, but are usually only three or four inches long then. Wow, how small! The water temperature must be warm (67 degrees F.) before spawning activity will take place. Ketchum is presently in this range or slightly warmer. A single female may produce anywhere from two thousand to fifty thousand eggs. As the season progresses, more eggs are laid. When the tiny fry hatch out, the steadfast male guards them for a number of day, until they can fend for themselves. The fish feed on zooplankton and, later, insects. This explains why I can sometimes catch them on flies. Also, the male is territorial and fierce for his size. He will attack and try to drive away all intruders. But he is small and has a diminutive mouth. His fierceness is all bluff.

John Miedema next door has taken up flyfishing for them—as have Anton and I in previous years. John’s fly outfit is not well balanced and he must make many falsecasts to work out a usable length of line. But he does, and he has caught, he says, bluegills, along with some of the lake’s small crappie. One night he broke off one of the large crappie. I can see how this might happen with a frayed leader.

So far the lake is showing no visible signs of being treated with Sonar. I mean, I detect no whiteness of dying foliage, either in the lake or along the shore. The lily pads look about as usual and are not reduced any, which is to my liking, since they harbor so much insect life and provide shade and shelter to the fry of hatching spinyrays.

It is wonderful how so many of the lake’s residents, particularly the younger ones, have a sound understanding of biology and botany, and comprehend the interrelationship of flora, insects, and fish. It is pleasant for everyone to be able to spot fish along the shore, as they commence reproducing themselves and as the clouds of fry emerge. An occasional trout is still caught, but not enough of them to merit targeting.

The bass, though, they are something. Last night, after Utah beat the Bulls in game five of the NBA playoffs, forcing a sixth game, I was going to fish for them with the black plastic lizards Eric Balser gave me, last year, some of which I bought later in olive, but then we started watching the Mariners play Oakland and, wow, they were winning, and Jamie Moyer was pitching a shutout, so I lingered in my chair, as the sun sank, and then the phone rang, and it was my son calling from Seattle to ask if I had enjoyed the basketball game as much as he, and I had, and Norma had, and we chatted on, as darkness overcame the lake and land, and I was content to remain where I was and not to fish, and thus the evening ended pleasantly and tranquil.

The next night, however, I set out to fish for bass, only a strong wind prevailed for most of the late evening, and instead I held the boat steady with the motor and cast for crappie along the far shore, and was rewarded with a beautiful bluegill, which fought well and I released . . . tenderly is the best word, for I was so grateful, after having learned more about them. Probably it was a protective male guarding the nest and trying to chase away the intruder, namely, my fly.

I caught a goodly number of crappie and some small perch before the wind and water calmed down. Then, near full dark, I picked up my bass rod and plastic lizard and eased into the cove where Paul lives on his small canal. I had difficulty casting with only a light weight on but could not see well enough to add another small sinker. (I have since remedied the situation, in daylight.) It got darker, and I was troubled by backlashes, but I kept casting until finally I had no idea of where my lure was landing, for I could see no splash. I think a good half the time it was landing high in the shore weeds, which are tough and tangly. I had to pull hard to free it. And I hooked absolutely nothing, no bass. So at last I turned for home, backing out of the cove in reverse and swinging around and then opening up the motor to position four and speeding through the open water until I saw the floodlights Norma had turned on for me.

Easing back on the throttle, I reversed the boat and backed in toward the dock, not cutting the power until I was nearly to the wood. The boat nicely settled into the dock, I grabbed it, took up the bow line in my hand, and stepped off onto the wood. I tied up and walked briskly toward the lights and, it being so dark and late, Norma seemed especially glad to see me landed safely, I suppose, and we sat down to a late dinner that had been waiting.

I will surely return to the bass fishing again soon. It is too much of a challenge not to.

A check in the mail today for $845 or so from Just Good Books, the first real money we’ve gotten for the book we are selling. Immediately I emailed them thanks for their promptness and asked them to email me, or phone, when the second shipment arrived, since it was to a different address, a P.O. box, and USP won’t deliver there, so I had to send it Parcel Post, uninsured.

It is the uninsured aspect that worries me slightly, since the order was for ten more limited signed leather books, with flies tipped in. I could replace them, I suppose, but at a big loss in money and time tying and sewing the damn flies into the inside front cover.

I sit in a glade in the Dorsey Shot Plat, a patch of dappled light off to my right, my butt on a downed hemlock that provides a wonderful woodsy seat, while the dogs play with an old Neblett’s orange soda can they found in the duff. Overhead racing cumulus clouds dim the sun’s buttery luminosity. The ground is covered with tall sword fern and wandering salal. All is peaceful, bland, benign.

A day much like the start of autumn, cool, very windy. In fact, out for a walk, little Haley from next door asks, “Mother, is it autumn?” We all nod in sympathy, for it seems like we have lost a season, for summer is not yet here. Carrie wheels her three-wheeled stroller, in case Keaton gets tired on the two-mile walk around the lake and needs to ride (it is this or else be carried); along for the walk is Carrie’s father, Bud, and her mother, who’s name I do not know, a quiet self-contained woman, who walks with her daughter, the two confiding in low whispers that seem most natural.

The dogs tug strongly on their double lead, as they always do, but perhaps even more so, now that there are people with us, especially children, that always seem to excite the dogs. They want to jump up on them, competing for petting and hugs, and instead bowl them over. They are dangerous to any child under eleven or twelve, children big enough to take the onslaught and not be pummeled under by it. And this is what leads us to the Dorsey Short Plat today; it is too cool for them to go swimming the lake and dry off again before their bed time.

Anton went to the river early this morning, his favorite time, which is what the dogs and I had intended to do this afternoon and early evening, but his report was that the river had “gone out,” that is, risen and colored up badly, and there would be no more fishing until tomorrow. So—with a feeling of relief—dogs and I put off our fishing trip, with the hope that the weather Tuesday will be better.

Paul Wittenberger, this year’s Lake Monitor (and note that I still capitalize it, deservingly), reports that the lake is much clearer than it was a year ago. I am without my Secci dish, which I gave to him when we transferred over the function, but I must agree, just on sub-surface observation, which is what is involved. He says the depth of clarity has exceeded one meter, and I am surprised. He says most of the time it is 0.8 or 0.9 meters, which is two or three tenths of a meter better than a year ago. To get a reading over a meter, well, it indicates a vast improvement of our lake which is not only eutrophic but setting new records for phosphorous pollution, far and wide. Maybe we are on course to resuming the extent of clarity of other Snohomish County tannin lakes. Let’s hope so.

It is not the result of the lake treatment by herbicide, I think. No, it is happening on its own accord, and the amount of surface week—duckweed or Mexican water fern, or both—seems the same as before the treatment, ten days ago. And there is still no sign of whitening of vegetation along the edges.

While talk to Paul about the new relationship between the Lake Monitor and the nefarious Water Board, he and a girl friend caught a number of small perch and crappie on his two-weight Orvis wand. One of the crappie was good-sized and gave the rod a deep bend. He is quite passionate about his exclusive flyfishing. He asked about the Stilly, and I quoted Anton, in turn quoting Russ Miller, and Paul . . . exploded. It seems they have had a number of run-ins over the years and he is vehemently not Russ’s friend. I had to listen, mildly protesting from time to time, to Paul’s outburst, and when it would not subside walked back into the house, with a wave over my shoulder.

Russ often incites such response in fellow fishers. We mentioned the infamous Gordy Young Episode from many years ago, which took place when two fly clubs had a friendly outing together and it turned rancorous. Or Russ and Gordy did. They are two people who annoy and offend many, and it was only natural that they square off. Russ has now had a badly needed hip replacement, while Gordy (a bantam of a man, noisy and obnoxious) is in the same retirement home that my parents were in, Exeter House.

Let’s hope he can stay out of its infirmary. It is a fate I would not wish on anybody, no matter how badly I disliked such a person. Nurse Ratchet (from Ken Kesey’s One Few Over The Coo-coo’s Nest) presided at my mother’s time. She died there, my mother did. She was often badly neglected. Individual patients were denied personal TV sets, and passed their last days, months, years, in isolation, while meanwhile, down the hall, the nurses watched and controlled the remote for the TV in the common room.

When my mother was able to be wheeled down the hall to the common room, for a smoke and a watch, some nurse was always walking into the room and changing the channel in mid-program, my mother reported, while she was still able to note and remember such things. Simply awful. And the patients (inmates?) paid a small personal fortune for such negligent care. It ran to two or three thousand a month, and this was old money, you understand.

Norma’s sister, Marilyn, and her husband drop by on a Sunday afternoon, out for a drive in their new Ford van, wanting to put some mileage on it. We are out for a walk with the dogs, but hail them and tell them to go right into our unlocked house and make themselves at home: we’ll be back in ten or fifteen minutes. We hurry the dogs. Our afternoon is free, since our son phoned and said an emergency at work means he has to reformat the company’s huge hard drive from a tape back up he had providently installed, and would miss game six of the basketball playoffs, which he intended to watch with us. So we have no plans.

It is a pleasant visit. We see them less often than once a year but get along fine and are at ease with each other. And now I remember: Sunday afternoon is traditionally the time for such unannounced visits. It used to be, you could drop in on people then and be welcomed. In fact, people used to let out the word that they’d be “at home” on Sunday afternoon, after church (church?), and they used to have extra food on hand, just for such visitors.

Marilyn must have been motivated by this long-forgotten guideline, and we responded according to the same one we in turn had forgotten, that said it would be okay, and no offense, no faux pas.

A journal such as this often seems out of time, if not of place, and needs to be put into historical perspective. All right. I had mentioned Signs of The Times, which will appear, now and then. Perhaps it is better to signify the times with some real data. President Clinton has long been under investigation by a special prosecutor over a land-promotion scandal called—remember?—Whitewater. But the investigation widened and included a woman named Paula Jones who, when Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, claimed he had a state trooper arrange a meeting with the Governor, who dropped his pants and suggested that she get right to work on his member, which, she said, was distinct and could be identified by something other than its small size. And later a White House aide, one Monica Lewinsky, was audiotaped bragging to a fellow employee that she had bestowed the very same favor on the President consensually.

To date, nothing has come of this. At this very moment, gasp, the special prosecutor who is conducting the grand jury looking into Whitewater and various perjury testimony matters is himself accused of leaking grand-jury information to the press. It is purportedly unethical but not illegal, though the White House professes that it is the latter, as well.

And there we are, at this very moment in time, while meanwhile the sky over Lake Ketchum grows dramatically dark with the advance of night, and the water is iron-blue, broken with a crinkled pattern of corrugation from what is left of today’s windstorm.

The following is an email message sent to the Macleans yesterday, which I’ve decided to insert here because it may explain a bit about Country/City, which we are now busily marketing:

The book was written some 22 years ago, just after I left the UW. Over the years I've pared it down and pretty much reduced it by half. It seemed to me to have some value outside of self-expression, so I decided to risk self-publication on it, though I'd sent it to nobody but Frank Amato, who didn't want it, since it wasn't how-to fishing. He said it belonged in bookstores, which made me reflect that most of his books didn't get there, for various reasons, discounts being only one. And then being able to set all the type in MS Word saved me $660. Having worked as a writer, an editor, and a bit as a publisher, with somebody else providing the money, it was a challenge to see if we could sell books in a tough market. I'm not sure we can.

We've tried marketing it to (1) individuals who bought the first two books and friends, (2) commercial bookstores in Washington and N. Oregon, (3) flyfishing stores. Results are not yet in. We got a big ($1400) order from a place called Just Good Books in Livingston, MT, for the leather signed ones with a fly tipped in. This will recapture about a fifth of our costs. I hope to break even, but probably won't. We financed it with $10,000, which we could afford to lose. Also, we figured we could stop with this one book, if the situation warranted it, and not have any overhead (except a new color printer) loss or closeout costs. But it we sold some books, well, we might proceed with two more, one by me and one by somebody else.

Seeing the world from a publisher's point of view is very different, and I can understand how the say no to so many offers. After all it is the publisher who puts his money (and staff) behind a book and its considerable promotion. Reception for all three books has been excellent from U Bookstore; but Elliot Bay has pretty much ignored me. And it is interesting to see who your friends are, though it is easy to become slightly paranoid. The truth seems to be, few people read anymore. Only former English majors who have retained the vice and maybe shut ins.

The book seemed to me so solid and retained its (perhaps narcissistic) interest, over the years, that I thought it might have some redeeming value. Still do. Am working on a reprise in the form of a year at the lake, which is very different, but still, I'm afraid, the same old Arnold. And I guess there is the thing at the back of my mind of making my life seem to have had any value. It is why we all write, especially at our ages. One wants to live on in something other than our children's memories and financial legacy.

I am disappointed (and I'm sure you've noted and been kind enough not to mention) all the typos. I thought we had licked them all, but there they are, every time I crack open the damn thing. My "editor" was babysitting a one-year old, and worked hard enough but they persisted. On the job training is not the best way of editing a Ms. The errors, though, are my responsibility. I was so tired of reading it over and over that I finally abandoned it to her. A mistake.

Anyway, there it is, out in the world, at last. It is taking its tiny first steps, and as with all of us the great world is not much interested.

“All his life, Lawrence had the habit of picturing himself as an animal or bird,” writes Brenda Maddox, in her biography, D. H. Lawrence, The Story of a Marriage, page 29. The remarks strikes me as delicious and worthy of recording, so I do, right here. It is also a bit ludicrous.

Maddox wrote the excellent book Nora, The Real Life of Molly Boom, which I really enjoyed. Her point is contained in the title: Nora was very close to being Molly Bloom, as James Joyce best understood her. So I am looking forward to this more than 600 page book. So far, pretty good.

Maddox is interested in the nature of marriage, especially between creative people. Well, so am I. It does not always portend well. There is a lot of dynamic give-and-take. One takes more than the other, almost always. With Lawrence and his Frieda, there was a fair amount of promiscuity, at least on her side. He seems to have taken it well, considering. I am especially interested in their last years before his death in Taos, New Mexico. He had tuberculosis and went there for the dry air. He lived only to be forty-four. In those few years, he wrote so much, and painted as well. Maddox doesn’t think he was much of a painter. Others may disagree. If you love Lawrence, and many do, you will love his paintings. They were influenced, I’d guess, by Cezanne. Well, who wasn’t?

Last night, in the last few minutes before full dark, I went out to test a pair of new F-2 Flat Fish I’d bought at Ted’s, earlier in the day, and caught nothing on them, and on flies, no perch, no crappie, but I did hook and land a one pound large mouth bass. Hooray. I cast a fly into the lily pads and he broke water upon seeing it, followed it a couple of feet, and took it cleanly. He fought well and I thought he might be a trout. But no, he was thick and green, with a large lower lip; I should have though of picking him up by the lower lip, like the expert bass fishers do (in part to avoid the spines of his dorsal and adipose fin rays, which can stab and infect), but didn’t, not in time, and when I released him, after a moment’s hesitation of keeping him for Norma to eat, I saw how easy it would be to grasp with thumb and forefinger. Too late.

The bass are reported to taste muddy. Besides, all of the real bass fishers release their catch in this lake. Kent Alger at Ted’s Sports Center, tells me that people ought to catch out and kill all the small crappie, therefore reducing their numbers and making the fewer individuals of the species able to grow larger with the same food supply. Kinney does this. But I momentarily cringed. Small as most of them are, the crappie are a delight, though I must admit their smallness and their great number detract from their specialness.

Kevin at Ted’s was the one who ordered over the phone from Norma a dozen of the paperbacks. I decided to deliver them in person, since I badly owed them a visit and they are my source of a good selection of Flat Fish. They are really a fine, multi-purpose store, with a good flyfishing department, and I’ve known Mike Chamberlin for years. He is the owner. Once there was a Ted, Mike’s partner, but he left the business, which was only part-time for him. I think he also worked at Boeing. Anyway, Ted has owned it for years and has kept the name the same out of respect and homage, I believe, to his former partner.

While chatting with him, he bought five more books—four of the blue cloth hardcovers, limited signed, and one of the leather-bound edition, with the fly tipped in, for a young man who works there and likes my stuff. I was to specially inscribe it to him, this Ryan Petzold, who I never knowingly met. He really likes my writing, Ted said. Ted and the store have been very supportive of my books, and I appreciate it, though most of its employees fish jigs at Fortson and the Deer Creek riffle. This puts me in a quandary.

Later, Don Smith at Flysmith bought five books and a replacement copy of Steelhead and The Floating Line. He didn’t remember seeing our flyer for the new book and said his wife, Karen, usually opens the mail and throws out that kind of stuff. Hmmm. Maybe I will have to make personal calls to get sales. Sure worked yesterday.

The lily pads are dying—the leaves look like October, all yellow and scummy brown. And, concurrently, the crappie and perch fishing in among the lily pads is almost non-existent. A coincidence? I think not. What will happen to all the small fish, now that they have no cover, no shelter, no sources of insects and zooplankton? They will die, that’s what.

Small islands of floating greenery dot the lake today. A Saturday, the visiting boaters weave in and out of them, hardly noticing. Along the shore and touching it lie clots of pale green algae—wads, you might call them. It was only a week ago that I raked them into shore and laid them out evenly over the rushes and sedges that grow there unchecked. Now that mass has turned chocolate brown and dried to a hard finish. The dogs pick up pieces of it and run off, chasing each other. To them it is a proud possession, one to be kept to his or her self, not to be shared.

The lake remains pretty, though. The lush time of the year is at hand. The greenery is full and not yet blighted by insects and the persistent sun. Today, late, we went up to the river and I cut with the weedwhacker the tall sedges on the river side; they, mixed with natural grasses, present an impenetrable wall between us and the river, too high to see over. So I must cut them back. They are thick and tough, and eat up the nylon string of the whacker, inch by inch.

As a respite I donned plastic waders over my shorts, added my wading shoes, wading staff, and billed cap, and crossed on a long diagonal, picking my way carefully, the dogs charging ahead and cross in front of me, frolicking like otters or seals. When I got to the far shore, below and down from Claussen’s, I cut a trail up the bank to the old railroad grade, now the county walking trail. To do this I brought along my pocket loppers. It was slow and hot, opening up the steep climb where no trail has ever existed. Once I brushed a tall nettle and got stung for my carelessness; a moment later I packed my prickly arm with wet muck from the hillside and, instantly, the sting went away, or mostly away. I reached the trail and dogs, thoroughly soaked to the tops of their little black heads, and I forged ahead, studying the morphology of the river bottom and current and sand deposits and location of boulders until we had a pretty good idea of what would fish later and what would not. The river carried too much blue clay to be appealing and so I did not fish.

We found a couple of big strawberries on the deck, in the planter, that the slugs had not reduced to shells, and later, back at the lake, had them, one each, on our ice cream for a special treat.

Somehow-hand picked strawberries from plants you’ve raised yourself, for more than a decade, taste sweeter than the ones that come from the store. It’s no illusion, either.

A pretty day, one in the low 70s, no hotter, with the sun out most of the time and high, thin clouds keeping the temperature low. We are coming into the time of the year, I remember, when it can be immobilizingly hot. This year, to date, we have been blessed with cool days and nights to match.

The high from catching a steelhead lasts about eighteen hours, I‘ve found. A wild, crazy Deer Creek summer run high lasts no longer, but is more intense and exciting while it lasts the same amount of time. This happened to me today, a gray Tuesday, with the tired dogs resting in the car, about noon. The fish took on my third cast, near the top of the run, and was immediately all over the pool, running far upstream and across, then upstream and to my side, and finally down the middle of the river to just below me, where the deep hole is. It was bright silver and about six pounds. I knew I had to release it (and wanted to), so when it came near the beach for the first time I grabbed the line and pointed the rod straight at the fish; it rushed away, the line grew tight, and then the fish was free. I reeled in and saw that the leader had not broken but instead the fly had pulled free. So I even got my fly back. (I lost it later in the day, returning to the same place and hooking a snag.)

Later, fishing the Flats, a man hooked a fish above me. It took him far downstream and I had to repeatedly call the dogs and try to hold them. He called me by name, but I didn’t remember him. Later, when he released the fish, I took a couple of pictures of him with his camera, on request. The fish was a fresh Chinook salmon of about fifteen pounds. Beautiful.

He was a fish biologist, or student, named Web. We had talked before, he said. Then I remembered him as a protégé of Curt Kraemer. He had written his thesis on the Deer Creek steelhead and had quoted liberally from my book, Steelhead Water. Imagine that—enough of an authority so a student would quote from me for a scholarly paper!

The dogs were troublesome and I tried to hold them by running my belt through their chokers, but the new chokers were so large and loose they could slip their heads, one after the other, free and escape. So now they know what a live fish is like. From now on they will a problem with every fish I hook. And others hook.

A few checks have come in for books bought last week reducing our printing debt. Perhaps a quarter of it is paid for. That’s a long way from turning a profit. But it’s a nice start.

The brochures and the mailings evidently were a big mistake. People don’t buy books this way, or not this book. Besides the cost of the color printer, there was all the first-class postage, at thirty-two cents each item. It adds up. The few who bought, with a couple of exceptions, would have bought without the brochures. And response of the bookstores has been nil. The buy through distributors primarily. Scott Books in Mt. Vernon says they buy all their books “electronically,” whatever that means. Norma thinks via fax and I thought possibly over the Internet. But the big distributors in the area don’t have Web sites and most of them are only a year or two old.

I guess their is no escape from paying the 55% discount they require. It reduces our profit margin down considerably, that extra 15%.

Microsoft on a big tear, as the appeals court reverses the circuit court verdict on bundling its browser and its operating system, saying it is legal to do so; the stock rebounded from a depressed state 4-15/16 today, and we made a bundle. There is no other way of putting it, gross as it sounds. Well, money is gross. The stock closed at just over 100. We’ve been there before. It is about the price where it used to split.

More noticed stapled to our dock on Sunday, with a powerboat circulating the lake and afterwards giving it another weed treatment. This was on Father’s Day, a specious holiday, and Garth gave us a long visit, working on my computer for a long spell, installing a second parallel port so I can have two printers, plus a ZIP drive all working at once. Or rather concurrently. Or rather is series. Hmmm. Parallel ports that work in series? Sounds like bad electricity..

Previously we walked the dogs, he and I, and then I introduced him to dummy throwing into the lake, with Biff and then Cate taking turns bringing them back, no matter how far they are thrown. Garth thought it was possible to throw them too far for the dogs to handle. “Try,” I urged. After river work, the lake is duck soup to the dogs. A bad image, but true.

Whom do I admire? That’s a tough one. Not many. Maybe the guy who plays the piccolo in John Philips Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever.

My dogs love books. I do not mean that they can read, nor that they enjoy being read to (which they might, but I haven’t tried it yet). I mean they love books to play with. Of course they will play with most everything. They are seven months of age. While fishing the Flats, they frolicked on the beach and generally got into trouble when I wasn’t watching them; this was often, for when I’m fishing I’m not paying attention to much of anything else, even my dogs.

I should add that Ken Macleod’s son in law has set up a summer camp just off the beach, under some ancient cedars, and he and his children spend many drizzly days inside or outside of their Coleman tent trailer, which is very much like ours, so I can understand their compressed living arrangement during wet periods; they are frequent now. I don’t remember the guy, but let’s call him Herb. Herb is a high school teacher and reads a lot, which is commendable. He left a thick, paperbound book somewhere near his vacant trailer and the dogs found it. First thing I knew they were fighting over it on the beach.

To do this, one dog takes basically half the book, front or back, and the other dog gloms on to the other half and they indulge in a tug of war over its contents. The glued spine of a paperback book is much tougher than I thought. It took them a while before the book separated. I looked aside: a writer, I can’t stand to see a book (like one of mine) so destroyed. When I dared to look back later, dogs and books were gone. Separated, you might say.

It is possible they ate it, but I think its contents were scattered to the winds—considerable that day.

Books have had worse fates, and I don’t mean back in Hitler’s day. Once, while in the Army, out in the woods, digging holes for telephone poles, I of course had a paperback book to keep me company during idle moments. It was Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. A matter of bowel necessity overtook me, far from any public facility (or for that matter any private one I might have begged use of). So, having already read the beginning, I began systematic destruction of the book to suit my needs.

Consider for a moment (will you?) the alder, a prolific and pretty tree of this geographic area. Long considered a weed, at least by loggers, or a source of easy, cheap firewood, it has been despised by many and nearly all. I’ve always loved the tree and thought it handsome, even though it is common. Commonness ought not to have anything to do with whether or not a thing is beautiful, but alas it does. The tree does not have colorful leaves or blossoms, fall or spring. But it has a lightly colored attractive bark and catkins early in the year. The bark looks as it does because it houses a lichen and a moss that give it a mottled effect. The tree has the miraculous ability to take nitrogen from the air and fertilize itself. When it drops its leaves in fall, or dies after about forty years and falls to the ground, the absorbed nitrogen goes back into the soil and fertilizes the growth of other species, such as the softwoods that badly need the nutrients but can’t provide them. And since alders generally are one generation and don’t succeed each other, they pave the way for species deemed more valuable by the timber industry. Yet during that forty years they repress the early growth of firs and hemlocks, but not so much as other species, such as bigleaf maples.

Because they will grow nearly everywhere in the humid West, they are looked down on because of their abundance. This is unfair. Familiarity breeds contempt once again. Much of the value of the tree remains hidden, that is, takes place underground, unseen, unappreciated. Its roots react with a bacteria called actinomycete and a mycorrihizal fungus to “fix” nitrogen so that it can be used as a food source. Thus alders will immediately rise from burned areas or those destroyed by cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

The tree is fecund. A tree may produce over five million seeds from tiny cones fertilized by the catkins; a single pound of such seeds can grow 600,000 or more trees. In late winter, before any other signs of spring appear, the alder woods glow rich wine colored. The landscape brightens early. The wood normally is straight-grained and splits easily with an ax; a wedge and sledge is not usually needed. When cut the wood “bleeds” bright orange. Its name probably comes from this characteristic: red alder. As the wood ages, it pales. Its subtle grain works well for making furniture and when stained will pass for other more expensive and exotic woods. This forms a new industry and one the Native American tribes were quick to develop to help replace their lost fisheries income. They also have medicinal uses for its seeped bark, which produces salicin and helps reduce the effects of rheumatic fever.

I just enjoy having it around my river property. At the lake, however, it doesn’t seem to fit in, and in my graveled drive way some of the prolific seeds from trees hundreds of yards away sprout, from year to year, and I have to pull them to be rid of them in unwanted areas. It pains me to have to do this, and I am inclined to let them grow until they have leafed several times; then, reluctantly, I pull them. Each time I marvel at the intricacy of their highly developed root system. And now—after reading William Dietrich’s fine article on the alder in The Seattle Time’s Pacific Northwest magazine, June 21, 1998, entitled “The Cinderella Tree”—I have a better understanding of how the roots work, and will cringe even more when I must pull it up.

Up at the river still, it grows to full maturity. Once I counted my trees, when I had only half an acre, and found to my surprise I had 133 of them. Now they are maturing and starting to die. But on my new acre up there, many more are in an early stage, and there are even some small slender ones that Norma wisely planted, a couple of years ago. They are doing fine, thank you.

Watching the Mariners finally beat a team last night on the tube, San Diego, on a balmy night, with a few street scenes of dreamy palm trees, I remembered my brief visit there, oh, nearly 20 years ago, and thought: if only San Diego had steelhead, what a wonderful place to live.

The idea of lake as microcosm continues to haunt me and to demonstrate its validity by example. On a walk around the lake (two miles, but who’s counting distances?) we saw that the Berg property has been sold. Hans Berg died on Christmas Day, and his wife has been living on in the old house, frequently visited by some of her six daughters and those who are married their husbands and in some instances their children, Hans and Joanne’s grandchildren. In fact, as Hans was dying, the sight of Joanne holding one of her grandchildren was a scene that—if presented in a novel—might be deemed too much. But it was real and ennobling.

So . . . . We were looking at the two lots the Bergs own across the South Lake Ketchum Drive from their house and noticed that the lawn at the front of one lot was recently turned over by a backhoe. As we were studying this, and wondering to each other what was the occasion, Joanne came out to greet us. Now, we don’t know her very well, but she is a friendly sort, and so are we, and friendly sorts (at least at our lake) have a way of finding each other and finding each other out. She was quick to explain.

Their septic tank occupies one lot, their drainfield the other, and both have to be granted easements if the property is sold separately, which it will be, so they had to install some drainfield improvements before county approval. This was pretty close to what Norma had imagined. But this was not the news. Joanne, a blond, pink-faced woman of 52, who looks like 60, told us that she has cancer. Like Hans, but a different variety. This is advanced cancer of the pancreas and liver. Wow. They did exploratory surgery a month ago and found the tumor too large to remove, so they sewed her back up. She had a lot of pain and had trouble eating and keeping down food. Chemo will start next week, in faraway Seattle, but I recognize that it is largely palliative and incurable. It may reduce the size of the tumor and make her more comfortable. The tradeoff is that the chemo brings problems and discomforts of its own. There is no way to know in advance which is worse, not until you experience it.

“How ironic it is, isn’t it?” she said, beaming. I’ve learned that when women smile excessively, it is not always or hardly ever because they find the conversation, the situation, amusing. No, it is more of a grimace, or a disguise of one’s true feeling, which must be one of near panic and despair. “Hans,” she continued, “dying of cancer over Christmas and just a month or so later my being diagnosed with cancer, as well. It makes you think, it does. Maybe my fate is to join Hans in heaven.” Maybe it is. If there is a heaven and if folks are joined there.

She has sold the house for about five thousand dollars less than her asking price, the purchaser coming up five thousand and she coming down, and they being only ten thousand dollars apart initially. It is the kind of arrangement that can’t help but work out mutually beneficially if both parties are acting in good faith, which they were.

She told us that she is planning on building a new house on Camano Island. Hmm. Cancer of the pancreas is terminal and the life expectancy is six months to a year. It takes nearly that long to build a house. If Joanne is telling the truth, and not some cheery version of it, she will not live to occupy the house, or probably to see its completion. She will probably end up living with a daughter, perhaps one of the unmarried ones, and making frequent trips back and forth to the hospital, as Hans did, before he horribly toughed it out and died at home in bed.

And the microcosmic aspects of it? Well, Tracy two weeks ago gave birth to her second daughter. We come and we go. The earth is constantly replenishing itself, but when the process strikes home, it is disturbing; one does not very well take to seeing oneself as just a phase in the cyclic life process. No, one is unique and expects to live forever. Each of us has this feeling, even though we have had friends departed many years ago, far before their presumed allotted time measured by actuarial tables

Hans at sixty-six, Joanne at fifty-two. It doesn’t seem right, but then death never seems right unless the person it happens to is very old. What this age is depends on where one is on his life cycle. To me now, it is in the mid-eighties. I think it used to be about where I am now.

The Fourth of July is coming on strong and will be here in less than a week. It is the dogs’ first Fourth and they are already experiencing fireworks. The lake is a resounding pocket, surrounded by hills and trees, and acts as a baffle for explosions large and small. What we here now, and at all hours of the day or night, especially the night, is some pretty large stuff being fired off. Of course the Tulalip Indian Reservation is only twenty miles off, and it is clear to anybody with ears that tribal individuals have their stands open and business is good.

I’ve never been much interested in fireworks, in either buying any or shooting them off myself. I remember as a boy in Chicago my father and his close college chum, Lee Cross, having fireworks, and myself and Lee’s son, Lee Junior, watching as our fathers ignited zebra crackers with a punk and them exploding around our feet, but at a prescribed safe distance. And as a teenager, acquiring some somehow and shooting them off with other boys, and one going off in a guy’s hand near my right ear, which may have been the start of my hearing loss in that ear. Anyway, me ear rang for many days afterwards, and the problem got further aggravated while in the army on the firing range.

I remember more good fishing at the Pocket and Elbow Hole on several long ago Fourths, when it was so hot I (who hate the heat and can’t function in it) went ahead and went out at midday and dusk, and caught like crazy the little wild acrobatic Deer Creek steelhead, and paid the price.

Biff reminds me of Sam. He’s not as big, so far, but soon will be, and larger, for he is only seven months old now and weighs more than 85 pounds; Sam topped off at 93, but may have weighed a little more than that, when overweight, before Norma cut him down to lean dog meal.

Biff will be a better dog, I suspect. (Sorry, Sam, up there in Dog Heaven, but it can be factually substantiated.) As is the case with all large dogs, and this particular breed, he is slow to mature, but is maturing nicely, and only a week ago showed certain signs of retrieving to hand. He’s not there yet, and probably won’t be for a year. It’s not really important to me. I’m not a hunter, or a fastidious obedience trainer. No, the dogs hamper each other in training by being so playful with each other at all times, and are never out of each other’s sight; the few times they have been, they seem hopelessly lost and disoriented.

Biff behaves in the water much like Sam, but is competitively a retriever with a dummy, and both dogs will swim off an incredible distance to bring back a dummy. Sam never would, and I lost some to the current; on a lake, it was often somebody else’s dog that brought back my far-flung dummy, while Sam impassively watched. He also swims into my fishing hole, just as Sam did, and will probably worry a fish as Sam did, too. So be it. I don’t mind. (If I had, I wouldn’t have bought another of the same breed, let alone two of them.)

He wades through heavy water, just as Sam did, and the sight tugs at my heart, for Sam was incorrigible in many of his departments, but I loved him dearly and we were close companions for nearly fourteen years. But he was a large pain in the rear end, as well, and was pigheaded in many ways. And he would bark in the car for enormous distances—135 miles to Wenatchee, and three and a half hours, non-stop. These dogs, both of them, do not bark in the car, not unless they see another dog. They ride easily and usually go right to sleep for the entire ride. It is most pleasant and as though they are not really with us. But then we arrive and they snap into life again.

Biff slobbers a lot, and his thick saliva ends up on everything, resembling a snail’s trail. It is gooey and slimy, both. I mop it up with a Kleenex and must always remind myself that it is used and not to be reused by me. But I’m sure I’ve violated this rule unknowingly. Ugh.

Both dogs have very white beautiful teeth, but then their teeth are only a few months old. They chew continually, or at least he does. She will chew only some of the time. Both dogs sleep a lot, are very active in between exercise periods, and lately bark at night. We are hoping this is a phase, and will soon be over. But it may not be, and we and our neighbors will have to learn how to endure it.

My dentist, this morning, said he was up reading until two A.M. What, I asked? Oh, some stupid book whose title he either didn’t want to say, or else forgot. He admits to reading two or three books a day, but buys used ones because new ones are so expensive. On and on he goes, while his pick (called an explorer, just like my car) probes my teeth for soft spots that will indicate cavities. To drill out and fill a cavity will cost me $150 or more, depending on how many surfaces are involved and the complexity of the operation. The pitfall he finds below and under a crown will be “fun” to fix. His word for it. It involves something called string. Ah, yes, I remember string well; it is that awful stuff they tie around the base of the tooth and push down, down, so that more of the root is exposed so they can either take an impression for a crown or else drill down deeper, if you have exposed roots, like me.

He can’t afford to buy books, he tells me, that cost 20 or 30 dollars. Nor can I, but he can more than I, I think. So he seeks out used book stores. I tell him my new book can be bought at Snow Goose Bookstore, along with my two earlier books. He seems singularly unimpressed, even though he is a Stanwood booster and a member of Kiwanis, etc., as is I suppose the owner of Snow Goose. This makes them brothers, or something in business akin. Will he go to the bookstore and look up my books and, just maybe, buy one or more? I doubt it. Too expensive.

The cleaning and exam and bitewing X-rays cost $122, with my senior citizen ten percent discount. I look at my watch. I was in the chair forty-five minutes and with my dentist, Jack, for about ten minutes, during which most of that time he chatted about world affairs and how he once caught a fish when his backcast hit the water behind him.

People will fight fiercely to protect what they believe to be theirs, whether it is or not. This involves a sense of property. These remarks were occasioned by driving back and forth between Lake Ketchum and Arlington to reach our river property. Pilchuck Creek winds along the Highway 532 route and the roadway crosses it at one point. A public access is there. It is popular and heavily used. What people do is colonize a portion of the beach, downstream and up, and set up daycamp. The carry in portable picnic tables, umbrella stands, umbrellas, coolers, grills, charcoal, all the rest, and stake out what they consider to be a right of domain. Often they have a dog, and after an outing or two the dog realizes its owners wish that this spot or place be deemed “theirs,” and the dog defends it with yips, barks, and often clenched teeth.

It means, Keep off. Stay away. This is ours. It is much the same thing as barbed wire and no trespassing signs, but of course you can’t erect these on public land. So this is the next best thing.

It is, apparently, what people do who don’t have property of their own but the desire remains strong, and may support my rather Nazi contention that the people who feel strongest about the rights of landowners are those who don’t own any land. And that with ownership comes (or should come, if all goes right) a sense of stewardship and benevolence. It is what is inherent in the phrase, noblesse oblige.

If a man owns land, he ought to be aware of the needs of others to cross it, say, to reach public land, such as a river bank. He might designate an area along its edge for a path and ask fishers to proceed along it with dispatch. This way they will not cross his property near his house or where he may be using his land. If he then sees a person in waders, or a man and woman with children, he might wave at them from his distance as they move along the trail and they would know it was all right for them to be there. The only problem is, a few people will leave gates open when he has livestock or else will deposit litter. When this happens, up go the no trespassing signs, three-strand barbed wire gets tightly strung, and gates become locked. All the benevolence is gone in a single instance. I’ve seen it happen, time and again.

Nonetheless, I still believe in the principle of wise and generous use of one’s land. I found a No Trespassing sign somewhere and kept it. No, it’s not up. What I had in mind was cutting off the No with some strong scissors and erecting it on a tree near my property’s edge. It would serve as a welcome and a surprise, especially so in this age of a strong sense of property rights, especially among those who at present own no property.

Early afternoon and the dogs and I go down to the lake shore and first one bullfrog, then another, become frightened and leap off into the thick algal scum, where they land with a loud splash. The dogs lift their heads, alerted, but do not see anything. I, peering closely, and knowing what I am looking for, see only one frog, the top of its head, its huge, bugged eyes, peering dumbly ahead, in among the brown/green algae, and just about the same color.

Some trout must have been planted in the lake since I last fished, for I caught two scrappy ones last night, a big surprise, and the fish were smaller than the hatchery plant of a couple of months ago, which must now be over twelve inches and approaching a pound. These little guys were nine or nine and a half inches long and had a fresher look about them, as though straight from the hatchery tanks. Nonetheless they were welcome.

They hit my new bright orange and black spotted F-2 Flat Fish. The hook was barbed and I had trouble releasing the first rainbow, and when I managed to (I am sad to report) it sunk belly up toward the bottom. I made a quick swipe with the long-handled landing net but missed—the fish was already sunk too deep. I fear it died. So I carefully debarbed the hook and soon caught another, which came off easily and I am sure was not much injured. It should survive.

The lily pads are retreating, turning yellow and their leaves curling back. The flyfishing for crappie and perch has slowed and become challenging. I can still catch some, but it is more difficult and I end up, after an hour’s fishing, with fewer than earlier in the season, which is okay. The good new is, the crappie that haven’t been caught out are larger and fight better.

The third of July, it is raining hard, but Doug Doyle from Allied Aquatics is back on the lake, posting notices to everybody’s dock with his gasoline-powered launch, and presently is circling the lake again, dispensing Sonar, in hope of killing off the remaining duckweed and Mexican water fern.

The motor is unusual and sends a large, curling wake the lake’s full width—something we’ve not experienced before, because the rest of us are limited to electric trolls, which make no noise, no wake to speak of.

This is the year they had no firework displays in the Pacific Northwest because the fuses went out just as fast as they could light them off their punks as the hard relentless rains continued to fall. (Just kidding, or rather wishful thinking, though I suppose I would miss the shows over Lake Ketchum if they failed to have them, and it is only the loud booms and crackles of strings of Zebras that I want to be rid of, permanently.

Somewhere before last night’s excursion, a bass angler circling the lake made an errant cast and his Rapalla lure landed in my boat, where the line snagged on an oarlock. Either he didn’t see where it landed, or else he didn’t want to approach my anchored boat and fiddle inside of it, for he broke off the $5 lure and I discovered and claimed it when I set out from shore. So now my collection of bass lures numbers one, and has cost me nothing to date.

“The appreciator is the owner,” writes Russell Chatham, in the autobiographical afterword to his book, One-Hundred Paintings. He says it is an old saying. Well, I’ve never heard it before, and it strikes home and relates to what I’ve written above about property and ownership. It may help explain why I freely use the wetland at one of the inlets to the lake, for its true owner visits infrequently in his motorhome (can’t build in a wetland, you see) and has his land loosely posted: “No trespassing without owner’s permission.” Fair enough, but this owner is never around to give his permission, so what is a boy to do? And to be honest, the few times he has been overnighting in his Pace Arrow, I’ve kept myself and my dogs away.

I never leave a mess. Sure, the dogs poop there, but I have a broken shovel tucked away in the undergrowth, with which I broadly disperse the turds to deep Himalayan blackberry thickets. And they biodegrade much faster than the garden waste my neighbors deposit nearby, some of which (tree limbs, for instance) will last for years.

As for Chatham’s paintings, which I’ve earlier dismissed as muddy and unfocused, well, I like them better, especially the late ones, which are quite nice and I could live with quite well. And I retain a mild burn from the fact that mutual friend Dick Sylbert sent Chatham, who is also a fishing writer, a copy of my book, Steelhead and The Floating Line, which he acknowledge with “a nice little book” remark, which made me bristle. (Sylbert sent it because it has a line drawing of him in it, the him meaning Sylbert. Never underestimate the self-aggrandizement factor, especially with somebody who has spent most of his life in Hollywood.)

I like them enough, in fact, to want to paint. Of course I have no talent. Do you need talent to paint? One would thinks so. But if one is self-disciplined enough, and abstract enough, one can work away at it without much talent, as so many others have done.

I’ve recently thought I’d like to give up writing for good when I hit seventy, if I do. Put it all aside and take up something quite different. Painting? Hmmm. I look out the window today at the mist and rain, almost like winter, though it is the third of July, and I see my palette, at least my palette for today. It is silver and pewter and muted green, edged with something very near to black, but not black because everything is grayed so there is no true black, only some close version of it.

There are those who flyfish from a pram standing up and those who sit down. I am one of the sit downers. There may be some who consider this feminine and has correspondences to using the toilet; I am not one of these and am perfectly confident, thank you, in my masculinity. I simply prefer casting from a sitting position and can reach out quite a length of line, all that is necessary, I think, and with a fair amount of accuracy.

I fished the Sage nine footer for a four-weight line this morning, the Fifth, and rediscovered that it is a powerful rod, plenty strong enough for steelhead. This means it is too stiff for panfish and probably for happy trout fishing. But it delivers a double tapered line of the correct weight a long, long distance, even while shortening the fulcrum and sitting down. But I prefer my cheapy nine foot Pfleuger for a five weight. It is nice and slow and soft, and a small fish doubles it up handsomely. So I will go back to fishing it on the lake, even though the third world people who wrapped the guides did a poor job and water gets under the thread and discolors it. Soon the threads will soften and break, and the rod will have to be rewrapped (probably by me). And I don’t want to have to do it. So I’ll probably keep fishing it until the guides fall off. And then I’ll fasten them back on with masking tape.

Like Canada geese? Many people do, but people from Seattle are sick and tired of geese and their droppings, which are poisoning lakes and making them unsafe for swimming. This is a case of overabundance of a species breeding more than contempt; it breeds outright hatred.

We have four on the lake and so far they seem to be discreet and rather shy, keeping to themselves and the middle of the lake, where they cruise in flotilla formation and mind their own goosey business.

I particularly like their white chin straps, which make them look vaguely like a squadron of fighter pilots, sans their planes but still in formation, bunched, all facing the same direction, all with the same uniform look.

Perhaps they will become a nuisance and soon. But I hope not. In small numbers their appearance has something of a rarity to it, and they seem unique.

Small towns have a powerful sense of their own dim past and cherish their history, perhaps excessively. Here in the American West, anything approaching one-hundred years in age is subject to wonder and veneration. Stanwood is no exception. The local newspaper goes back nearly half that length of time and delights, around the Fourth of July, running memorabilia, including pictures of the grim-seeming previous owner hunched over his press, or at work on the edition at his littered desk. You can almost smell the ink and hear the heavy clank of machinery.

This was Harry Dence who, along with co-owner Ray Horn, edited and published the paper from 1939 to 1958, when they sold it to Cliff Danielson. The men are similar looking, with close-cropped hair and spectacles. Dence might be the older of the two, with gray at the sides of his thinning hair, while Horn sports an extreme crewcut. He wears suspenders, white shirt, and necktie, and his shirt pocket bristles with small implements of his trade. He sits proudly at his Linotype Machine, his hands hovering over the keys ready to cast type in line slugs of lead. This is serious work, his expression seems to say; meanwhile Harry Dence, the senior of the pair, stands protect over him while he works, one hand holding the previous edition, the other resting paternally on Horn’s left shoulder. He does not wear braces but a belt, one presumes, and a white shirt with conservative dark tie. His benevolence is unmistakable, also his grimness.

This may be misleading, for long-time employee Agnes Molstad, who wrote a column from her home in the Victoria community Northeast of Stanwood, remembers him as providing “a fun atmosphere” in the office.

Dence looks not only grim but perhaps feeble. Well, he was nearing retirement, after nearly twenty years of newspaper business. It is hard work, precise work, repetitive work. Not often was there real news to report, and reporters and stringers had to “make news,” that is, go out and find something to write about. Only rarely was there a murder to fill its pages and but once a major fire that gutted the Twin Cities food packing plant and burned it to the ground. It was quickly rebuilt and operating again, offering employment to many who had been on its earlier payroll.

A former pressman refers to Horn as largely a typesetter. It was Dence who ran the paper and sold it, in due course, to Cliff Danielson in 1958. He lived in Cedarholm, just outside of Stanwood, and went to the city’s public schools. His previous newspaper experience was on the Whidby Island paper. During World War II he served as a tailgunner on a Boeing B-17 and was shot down over Brussels. When he bought the paper, along with a consortium of other owners, he was returning to his roots, his Swedish/Norwegian roots, and the land he had called home since he was a boy. Why, he had even served on the Stanwood City Council while working on the Whidby paper, and a year after buying the paper and assuming the job as publisher he was elected to another term on the city council. He married a local dental assistant and they had four children, two boys and two girls.

The present publisher, Dave Pinkham, writes often for his papers, which is a publisher’s prerogative; John Dean, associate publisher and editor, does too. Both are proud of the paper’s long history under a string of different editors and names. To celebrate the paper’s one-hundred years of existence, a series of commemorative events were planned, one of which was reprinting an edition from one-hundred years ago, August 20, 1998; it was the oldest copy of the paper they could find and wish they had some editions from the previous ten years, when the paper was published as The Stillaguamish News. It lasted only a year. Reborn as The Post, it lived another year. Then a depression struck the area and nobody could afford to found a newspaper until 1897, when The Press was born. A paper from the following year is the oldest they could find to celebrate the paper’s founding.

It was a period so different from ours it is nearly impossible to imagine oneself living back then, in a time of dirt roads, horses and buggies, and patent medicine cures for all kind of ills—sicknesses which tell us in detail what it must have been like to be alive then. It was not at all pleasant, judging by the ads in the paper. Medicine was in its comparative infancy and involved prescribing “powders” and liquid medicines whose value must be seen today as doubtful. Also, there were no “truth in advertising” laws and any fanciful claim could be made for a product, and was, often to disastrous effect. Opium, cocaine, laudanum, and morphine could be bought to alleviate symptoms, and doctors freely prescribed such narcotics for the relief of pain. Addiction took place, and there were doctors who specialized in treating it.

Among the patent medicines was Cascarets Candy Cathartic, which could be bought from all druggists for 10, 25, and 50 cents. It was advertised to “cure constipation” and “regulate the liver.” I suppose it was recommended by Dr. M. L. Adams, who advertised that he gave “special attention to the treatment of Catarrh and the Electrical Treatment of Chronic and Nervous Diseases.” One wonders what these were and whether he was an early day psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Probably not, or else only in the sense that he randomly administered electroshock.

Dr. W. B. Walling was a “Surgeon Detnist [stet],” who gave particular attention to the “preservation of the Natural Teeth.” This means, I take it, he did not make his living off extractions and fitting the day’s crude false teeth. K. Knudson sold watches, clocks, and jewelry, but also carried a “full line of drugs and patent medicines,” in addition to stationery, confectionery, and cigars.

A huge illustrated ad proclaimed, “Consumption Can Be Cured. The Doctor Slocum System Has Proven Beyond Any Doubt Its Positive Power Over the Dread Disease. Exterminating the Curse of Ages. By Special Arrangement with the Doctor, Three Free Bottles Will be Sent to All Readers of This Paper.” The ad goes on to add, it “is a comprehensive and complete system of treatment, which attacks every vulnerable point of the disease and completely vanquishes it.” “It cures and cures forever, Weak Lungs, Coughs, Bronchitis, Catarrh, Consumption and all other throat and lung diseases by absolutely obliterating the cause.”

The Editor, with his considerable weight of authority and persuasion, adds that the system is “Medicine reduced to an Exact Science by the World’s most Famous Physician.” Do we have any lingering doubts about the product’s efficacy? Not I. The Editor goes on, “We advise all sufferers to accept this philanthropic offer [tree free bottles of varying sizes] at once.” And of course, “When writing the Doctor please mention this paper.” The Doctor is tucked away safe in Chicago and does a mail-order business. I wouldn’t think of doing otherwise. “All letters receive immediate and careful attention.” I’ll bet they do.

Was the stuff addictive or slightly less habit forming? Was this the equivalent of the free nickel bag of heroin? Three bottles ought to be enough to ensure repeat business.
At what price?

And then there was Epilepticide. Whatever it was, it came in a bottle, and the first one, young doper, was free. “If you suffer from epilepsy, epileleptic spells, fits, St. Vitus’ Dance, Falling Sickness, Vertigo, etc., have children or relatives that do so, or know people that are afflicted, Epliepticide will cure them. It has cured thousands, “where everything else has failed. It is produced by the May Laboratory, headed (of course) by Wm. H. May, M.D., in New York City. Probably a forerunner of the May(o) Clinic. Again the Editor of the paper recommends it and the mention of his paper in your order or request for the initial free bottle. The Editor adds, it “is an Unfailing Cure for any and all of the frightful forms of Epilepsy and allied nervous diseases.”

Right below this testament is the filler, “According to Nilsson, the zoologist, the weight of the Greenland whale is 100 tons, or 224,000 pounds, or equal to that of 88 elephants or 440 bears.” Depends on the elephants or bears you know, I suppose, whether or not you will believe this,

Catarrh and Consumption can also be cured by Cutler’s Carolate of Iodine and is guaranteed. It costs a dollar, a whole lot of money then, when other quack cures were going for a nickel or a dime they too were guaranteed to work.

All in early Stanwood was not drugs for sale, but a lot were. How sick everybody must have been! Piso’s Cure was a cough syrup, but it would cure consumption—“if used in time.” “Tastes good,” the ad promised. A lot of consumption going around, it was the dread disease of the time, and nobody dared mention it by its awful name.

You could buy Syrup of Figs. It didn’t promise to cure anything, or say that it tasted good. Now, if you liked figs, I suppose you might try it. If not, you might buys some Walter Baker & Co.’s Cocoa or some Elastic Starch, even if you didn’t need starch, because you were promised a flower picture (lilacs, pansies, marguerites, wild American poppies, and iris) inside and the box itself was something you would want to preserve because of its “richness of color and artistic merit.”

Everybody can use some starch, particularly if it is elastic and costs but a dime a box. You are advised to accept no substitute. I sure wouldn’t.

If you are more of a gambler, you might consider speculating in wheat, or rather, Wheat. You can buy and sell Wheat on margin, out of Chicago, on its board of trade. “Fortunes have been made on a small beginning by trading in futures. It is a business and “a free reference book” will be sent to you by the proprietors, Downing , Hopkins, and Co. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you are doing. They will take your money and do it for you.

L.R. Venable will sell you cedar, spruce and fir lumber that is kiln dried and suitable for floors, ceiling, and siding. A man named Snow will obtain patents and trade marks for you for a moderate fee. All you’ve got to do is send your model, drawing, or photo with a full description. They will advise whether or not your invention is patentable for free. The fee is not due until the patent is accepted. Since Snow is in Washington D.C., he can save you time and money, since without him you will be at a big disadvantage, living so far away from the source of all good things.

If you don’t like Mr. Snow, try Scientific American, a magazine, sure, but also dispensing free opinions on your idea or invention. You can trust them, they say. They will send you a Handbook on Patents at no cost to you. The firm of Munn & Co. is their agent, and once the patent is granted, the magazine will publish a free special notice of your success.

Of particular interest to me is an ad by Geo. J. Ketchum, Resident Agent for the Stanwood Land Company, W. R. Stockbridge President and General Manager. It was he who my lake was named after, and so I hold him in particular esteem, for otherwise it would be named something else, like Wobegone or Deer. Ketchum always had an Indian sound to me, though not much like any Indian of the Pacific Northwest, admittedly—perhaps one out of the Adirondacks. I recall that he lived on the lake and the people of Stanwood drew their water supply from here. A hundred years ago you could drink the water most anywhere in America and not get sick.

George Ketchum was also an agent for the sale of bicycles. Hence the pejorative, “Get a wheel!” to people on foot, or caught not riding a horse. Perhaps George also ran the repair shop advertised in the ad above the land company’s on the paper’s front page. The two were run one over the other in the favored spot. It would be too much to say that George was a Renaissance Man, though he must have been a jack of many trades. Perhaps he rode one of his bikes the five miles from his Stanwood land office to his home on the lake. I would like to think so.

S.A. Thompson was a dealer in general merchandise, that is, he ran an all-purpose store and paid the highest prices, he advertised, for farm produce, particularly butter and eggs. You could buy milk there, too, milk from cows owned by Benn Willard, proprietor of the Stanwood Dairy. If you had dirty laundry and did not do your own washing, there was no one in Stanwood to do it for you, but you could send it to Seattle’s Model Steam Laundry. Just leave it at the Press Office. “Basket leaves every Sunday.” I gather that this means on the steamer. It may have been the Champaign, which took the Skagit River Route, leaving Seattle every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and returning from Stanwood every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. It landed at City Dock, Seattle, whose phone number was Main 87. Can you remember that?

After leaving Stanwood, the steamer called at places called Fir, Skagit City, Mt. Vernon, and Avon. Only Mt. Vernon exists as a legitimate place name today. The others can be dimly identified by locale. My wife, who was born in Mt. Vernon and attended grade school there, know where Fir is because it is the site of Fir Island, where two channels of the Skagit form and skirt a big bit of high ground, not coming together until they reach Puget Sound. She has relatives on her mother’s side who homesteaded there, high on a bluff overlooking the South end of the San Juan Islands. The view is terrific. Some of her nieces and cousins still live there. But gradually the considerable property is being broken up and sold to those outside the family.

Skagit City was right at the mouth, she tells me, where Fishtown is today, an assortment of floating shacks without water or, in some instances, electricity, formerly lived in my artists and writers. I prefer the latter name and quote the other only for historical veracity. Skagit City is gone, gone. Nobody has any idea of what Avon was. No, it wasn’t the home of the Avon Lady. Nobody wore makeup, back then.

She would have starved, even if women recognized her and knew what she was up to.

In the “Town and Country” section of the paper there is more news of the luminaries who are mentioned as contact sources in the ads. For instance, W. R. Stockaridge was “up from Everett” on Sunday. Perhaps to visit his agent, Geo. Ketchum, for George is also mentioned. He has “taken the agency for the Cleveland bicycle. See the sample ladies wheel in his window.” A wheel is synecdochal for the whole infernal contraption, the bicycle. So George has a storefront, with a window, in which there is a woman’s bicycle.

Women wore long skirts, necessitating no steel tube between seat and handlebars to prevent them from swinging their legs (forgive me!) and trailing skirts across the pedal area. So women, unable to vote, were permitted by society to ride a “wheel.” For those without horses and unable to afford a horseless carriage, the bicycle was the alternative to walking long distances, say, from the lake not yet named after the bicycle merchant and land purveyor to the billowing town. It is the same distance we regularly drive almost daily in our personal transportation vehicle, the car. It takes me about eight minutes and I always think it will be longer, arriving at the dentist., for instance, always five minutes early. This is amusing to Dr. Jack’s staff, who must think I am eager to be worked on.

It is only bad planning and a great desire not to be late, anywhere, after half a life time of doing exactly that.

I think Dr. Jack Randall and George Ketchum are something alike; at least my mind sees them as being so. Both are Stanwood boosters and if there was a Rotary Club or Kiwanis, back then, George would have been its president. Jack is short, squat, bright, active. He is a talker. He could have been a great salesman, rather than a good, conscientious dentist. Though neither of them chose to live in the confines of Stanwood, it is where they conducted their respective businesses and where their literal hearts lay, though nightly they put their bodies to rest in the country.

I’ve learned that buying books is a very personal form of expression and not everybody does it. My neighbor Anton, the nouveau flyfisher, says if he ever needs a book, he borrows it, and refuses to subscribe to a newspaper. I think at work he reads what ever is lying around, and if nothing is there he easily does without. It is a form of intrinsic stinginess, perhaps, but then it may be simply that reading offers him no pleasure, no real information.

On the other side of me live John and Tracy. They are nuts about books and collect them avidly, even though they live in a tiny rental cabin with one bedroom and have two young children. Books fill up the available space and there is usually room for more. They even have two of mine on their bulging shelves that they have either begged or wheedled. I don’t mind a bit. And my dentist, Jack, is an admitted compulsive reader who will stay up half the night with a used book he bought at a great bargain in his haunt of bookstores, loathing to pay full price.

And so do I. I am of two minds on the subject and am aware of the conflict. I buy nice clean remainders through the mail, books from which the authors get not a cent of royalty. I am still reading Brenda Maddox’s excellent D. H. Lawrence, The Story of a Marriage, a thick hardcover which retailed for $30. I got it for a tenth as much. She got nothing, for all her hard work.

At the same time I am reluctant to give away promotional copies of my new book, Country/City. I want everybody to buy it from me and pay the full price, and am furious at having to deal with book wholesalers, who demand 55% off the top and that, additionally, the publisher pay freight—expensive UPS ground rates that ensure careful handling and less damage in transit.

I admit to being a bit hypocritical. I want to eat my pie and still have it for the future. I am stingy, stingy as Anton, in his different way. Does this mean I am anal retentive? Funny but I am not the constipated type, either physically or psychologically. Or at least I think I’m not.

My former publisher, Frank Amato, is not all that complicated a person. He is a businessman, and they are not hard to figure out. They want to make a profit. What sells, what doesn’t? That is the question. They make mistakes and study the past, their past. What has worked, what hasn’t?

Advertising is the big bugaboo. There are really no satisfactory demographics to measure its effectiveness. It is why the TV commercials keep shouting their brand name at you, in hopes that through repetition you will be imprinted to buy their product. They are afraid to stop shouting because their competition won’t. The beer companies keep saying Bud and Miller’s over and over. How much of that 12-ounce can is the cost of advertising? Plenty.

My books have sold 2600 and 2200 copies, respectively, the hardcover coming first and selling best, but of course it has been out two years longer than the bright paperback. That is not a hell of a lot of books, admittedly, but for “pure” fishing books, it’s not bad, considering the average sale is reported to be 1500-1800 copies. Nobody gets rich, and the cost of photography and production layout is such that you can spend days, weeks, even months, and not recoup any of it. How sad. I am fortunate to have Loren Smith to illustrate all three of my books and often feel that I’ve rooked him, since he made more off the first one and practically nothing off of the last one. But he is a kind, talented soul, and we both like to see a handsome book produced, a tasteful one, one nicely laid out and, yes, well illustrated.

Frank published 3500 copies of the first book, a grandiose 5000 copies of the second one. He has 850 copies left of the first and beau coup of the second. In August, he has advertised in his three trade magazines, he will hold his first-ever warehouse sale, with terrific markdowns? Oh, yeah? Will my books be among them? You can bet your sweet patootie. Will he sell to me ahead of time, barely, for the same price? We’ll see. Will he pay the author’s royalty on any of these sales? You got to be kidding?

I, as a nuevo-publisher, printed but 1250 copies of Country/City, a even thousand of them in paper. It is because I didn’t want to get stuck with a basement full of one book—one I’d read countless times before. How many Frank must have, if he has so many left of mine. We are presently at the point of sending out boxes of returnable books to, ugh, distributors. They are a pernicious breed, yet essential to life in America as we know it. Death and taxes and wholesalers. A bane. It is at this point that I can truly say that C/C is published—though we’ve had it on hand for private sales and sales of the limited edition for a couple of months.

We have learned two important facts of life to date. Bookstores buy almost exclusively from distributors, who perform a lot of vital services for the bookstores, such as inventory control, ease of ordering, simplified invoicing and payment. Debbie at Scott’s in Mt. Vernon says their store orders all of its books “electronically,” whatever that means. It probably indicates over the telephone or by FAX. Now, why couldn’t she have said that?

The other important thing we learned from our expensive four-color brochure and first-class mailing is that people and stores don’t order books this way. It is a waste of expensive paper, colored ink, and postage. Oh, a few will buy. Most like to go into a store and fondle the book first. A Canadian associate, a retired newspaper writer, says he won’t buy it until he’s read it and seen that it is any good. That puts him in the same category as Neighbor Anton. He’ll borrow a copy, presumably from Bob Taylor, who buys my limited signeds religiously. Then, I suspect, he’ll never get around to making the purchase.

I—cheapskate that I am—have been known to buy an author’s book at full retail price just so he gets his royalty. True, I’ve only done this a few times, and generally with people I know or whom I know to be young writers, with their first book out, and feel empathetic towards them.

Usually I prefer to find my books on a remainder table or in some clearinghouse catalog.

Now, that’s merchandising, though the writer gets nothing, and the publisher next to that.

The dogs have developed a penchant for raspberries. First it was the blackcaps found down at the end of the road, where the wetland begins. I was pasturing them one morning, when I noticed they had their wet black noses in the bushes and were slurping away. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I had to look twice, three times. Sure enough, they were sucking off the berries, the ripe ones, and leaving on the vine the ones that were still green. And so their taste for sugar (I presume that is what it is) began.

Now when Norma goes out to pick our red raspberries, up at the river, the dogs go with her, and she is luck if she gets half as many as they do. To harvest our fair share, she has to lock them inside, where they whine and scratch at the door. They want to be outside, where the berries are. And we are just coming into the blackberry season!

It is good to be living on a lake in July; good for the dogs. I can take them down to the water’s edge and throw the hot-orange retrieving dummy for them, and they know just what to do. It took next to no training. Each dogs has his, or her, own swimming style. Biff is powerful and initially rises high up over the water, he is stroking so strongly. Gradually he sinks down to swimming level, which results in a lower silhouette and more efficient propulsion. Now, Cate hits the water almost as fast, but because she is smaller, more sleek, her stroke starts moving her forward faster, and she cuts through the water like a knife. She is beautiful to watch because of this.

Biff, however, will jump off the dock. I almost said dive. It is a kind of dive, though, and he must go under fully, unless he pancakes his jump and lands so that his eyes don’t go under. There is such a huge splash at his ninety pounds that the water droplets obscure my vision (and his). So I can’t truly tell. After his jump, his forward thrust is lowered slightly from what it is, launching from shore, and soon he has submerged to efficient swimming level. It is a very powerful stroke he has, but his bulk cuts down on his propulsion. I’m sure that, in a race, Cate would beat him, but I try to avoid this situation, since they are so terribly competitive anyway.

I retrieve them one at a time. The other one stays tethered on a steel ten-foot cable to a stake. The tethered dog know this and usually sits, intently looking forward, watching the other guy, undistractable. When the retrieving dog returns to shore with the dummy lightly held in its lips, the other dog may lunge forward to try to grab the dummy, and if I am not alert enough to prevent this the retrieving dogs may bring it to the tethered dog, and they will each grab hold of the end and start to wrestle for possession.

It is then that I intervene and take the dummy in hand. I switch the cable from one dog to the other, and set off for the shoreline with the fresh dog, while the other drips and shakes. Then I repeat the throw. I try to make it about a hundred feet from shore and restrain the dog until the dummy hits the water. It takes a firm hand on the choker, I’ll tell you.

Over and over we play this game on sunny days, in warm weather or cool. Then I take the dogs to the upper deck, where they are fenced in about fifteen feet from ground level. There they bake dry, and when it gets too hot for them, and they too dry, they seek the shady portion of the deck; as afternoon presses on, there is more shade to accommodate them. There they lie and bask and doze and sleep. It is a great form of exercise for them, and for me to stay relatively dry I must wear shorts and scandals.

Today is such a day and, though the dogs have had a long walk down a country lane before noon, they’ve had no rigorous exercise. I must now don shorts and sandals. Now, where did I leave that throwing dummy?

There is much one chooses not to write about in a watery journal such as this. There is a whole background and substrate to one’s life that never gets mentioned. For instance, I am indeed fortunate in not having to work For The Man, as young people put it today (or yesterday: I’m not much up-to-date) and having a good income. A soaring stock market is responsible for a good part of that money, or potential money, since it only exists on paper until one sells. Microsoft is a large part of my holdings. Everybody who has bought and held Microsoft has done extremely well. The trick is, or rather was, not to sell early or on small profits. The stock keeps increasing in value, often splitting and then taking off for the sky again.

This has given me the opportunity to write. Alas, I’m not a first-rate talent, or even a second-rate one, but the realm of literature contains many who produced one or two really good books during their lifetime, and I hope to be one of them. It requires unstinting hard work, most of it to naught. I have not made much money from my writing. In fact, in a single day on the stock market I’ve probably made the grand total from all the sales of my writing to date, including two, or is it now three, books. Sad, sad, but only if one wants to take it that way.

It is best to take it with a couple-three grains of salt. It is another case of the glass being half full, rather than 50 percent empty. The perks of such a life are nice, and I enjoy them inordinately.

At my station in life, ahem, sixty-seven years of age and (keep it to yourself, will you?) barely a millionaire, a man does not have a dog. He has dogs. Hence my two black Labs. He doesn’t live on a lake or a river; he has an abode on each. This sounds vainglorious. It is only my odd way of expressing cosmic gratitude at my well-being. It is a good life, being a writer and living on water, independent, seeing others only when and if I want to, writing what I want to, after having to write or edit what other people wanted me to and paid me for, much of my life. And now—belatedly—I have three book under my belt, with maybe one or two more drafted and waiting for—shall we say?—editorial improvement. Of course a great deal of what I’ve written lies in storage. Reams and reams of the stuff.

A Monday, I may or may not go fishing. It is my choice. The sun is shining on my lake—it is mine when nobody else is out on it in a boat, fishing or rowing on it. On the other hand, I may read instead, having written my bit for the day, and competing my fledgling publishing business on the phone and via the Post Office before lunch.

I walked the dogs down the country lane at the end of 76^th Avenue, where it becomes private property and a firelane link to the country road to the North, where Snohomish becomes Skagit county. It passes a pond, with ducks, a fenced pasture, with horses, and a big greensward where rabbits run: Norma and I have seen several, but the dogs have missed them all, and only come across their fading scent. They would chase the rabbits, I am sure. Neither is fast enough to catch one.

Then I returned to the lake, ate a quick lunch, and performed the throwing dummy bit for the dogs, down by the lake’s edge, starting with Cate this time, and ending up with Biff, giving each of them about six long retrieves out through the green algae to the clear, weedless water and back again. Wet and tired and steaming in the sun, I left them enclosed in the upper deck and went up to the river for a quick fish-through of the Elbow Hole, where I touched one fish briefly in fast water and hooked what must have been a searun cutthroat on my strip, a fish that splashed hard but came off about halfway in. On the way back to the Explorer, I passed Anton on the shingle, and we exchanged a few words. He had fished the claybank hole at Hazel at daybreak and was now off for an evening’s fishing, after having cut his grass and done yardwork through the main part of the day.

Last part of the evening spent watching the Mariners beat the Texas Rangers the way they did of old—by six runs, with two homers by Edgar and lots of hits by everybody else. And then the day closed down and it was bedtime and—except for some barking at a intruding animal about three A.M.—sleep was calm and deep and refreshing.

Rain. There are two boats out in the rain, fishing bass. One man is very adept at working his electric troll and casting. He sits close to the control and alternates two rods. One is a spinning rod, with a plastic worm at the end, it appears, and he casts it not as close to the shoreline as I would, were he I, and the other a bait-casting rod with level-wind reel to which is attached a silver spoon or the Daredevil type. It is heavy and he must reel fast for it not to hang up on the bottom. This, in my opinion, gives it a hurried, unattractive action. The weight makes for easy casting, though.

The action of the plastic worm I do not yet understand. I think it floats when at rest, though it is rarely at rest. Retrieved slowly, it tends to dive and its long tail is the attractive part—if you are a bass. It can be fished near the surface or wriggling along the bottom, depending on how it is hooked up. Surely there are books on the subject, just as there are on the applications to flyfishing. I should probably hunt down one and buy it, or, as people must do with my books, go to the library and look for it, and if it isn’t there put in a request through interlibrary loan.

Bass fishers have great tackleboxes with trays full of lures, many of them plastic. These are called, I believe, crankbaits. I have become acquainted with them through fishing-tackle catalogs and dreaming over their pages. Now flyfishers hold bass lure fishers in low esteemed, but I don’t. The world of fishing in multifarious and exceedingly complex. It is interesting only to the extent that opportunities to practice different aspects of it offer themselves through convenient bodies of water. Thus, since my lake contains bass, including some big ones, there is that appeal. I’ve only caught a few, most of them very small. To hook a big one and land it is another challenge, and to me, right now, it seems difficult—much harder, say, than taking another steelhead on a dry fly.

We have been going up[ to the river at mid-week and overnighting once or twice. Usually I’ve gotten a fish immediately, then either not fished or fished without results for the next day or two. Odd, this. I took a Deer Creek fish, my third, in the riffle, catching it between jig fishers briefly, then leaving when I see one of them, or another ordinary fisher, coming down the beach. Then I proceeded on to the Elbow, which is showing itself to be shallow and full of sand. I touched nothing. Anton says the fish showing down below are kings, as he calls them, and has seen many Chinooks up river, no doubt the result of Indian trapping of early-return natives and hatching out their progeny.

Coming out of the Elbow and approaching the crossing back to my car I spotted Curt Kraemer waiting for me. We talked briefly, well, somewhat at length. I complained about the jig fishers and told him I’d seen a dead steelhead at the pool below. He told me he had spotted several and was on the verge of shutting down the hole at the mouth of Deer Creek, as he had two years ago. I told him I didn’t blame him, but there must be some middle ground between shutting it down entirely and letting the jig fishermen perform predation ofn the wild run, all the daylight hours.

He had not supported me when I submitted a revised definition to the department, redefining flyfishing so as not to permit this deadly form of lure fishing and to revise the selective-fisheries section to allow it on such classified waters. The department thanked me for my input but would not do it. I said to Curt that I had no respect for the department because of this and many other such decisions over the years.

Pursuant (never used the word before; hope it is right) to this matter, the following day I saw Tom and Brian, two jig fishers plugged into the hole at the mouth and, not suiting up or carrying a rod, I went down to talk to them. I asked them to consider policing their own ranks and coming up with some means of reducing their incidental killing of these fine fish and reducing the3ir fishing pressure, making a couple of recommendations, such as fishing only on alternate days or using light leaders and popping their fish off, after the fish’s initial run. I said, most of the river fishers hated their guts. This they already know. I said I wanted to be positive and come up with a plan to keep the river open—I’ve had good luck in this hole recently and hate to see it close, but will not protest it and see it with a sigh of relief because of the fish killing now starting. The morning water temperature at the mouth, Curt tells me, is 64 degrees. It will get warmer.

They boys said they will think it over. But I think it is already too late for any modification behavior for this year and the frenzy to keep hooking this magnificent fish will overwhelm any conservation efforts them might briefly consider.

I lost a full day’s writing of this journal while up at the river because of a glitch that took place when I came home and tried to open it from a floppy disc. Such waste, and all my fault because I should have known better and saved it to the hard drive, up at the river, which I didn’t because I thought I’d just be carrying it home and needed no back up. So one gets sloppy over time, gets away with it, and then must pay the price, eventually.

Rain and high humidity and quite warm, breathless and uncomfortable. But that day was followed by bright sunshine and hot, the air drying some and the sky clearing overnight, a Thursday. I found it too hot to fish or to do outdoor work, so we returned home to a hot house. Well, not so hot as it was up at the river.

The lake is always cool, with a breeze. The lake is bright blue and ruffled nicely. Must stop now in order to swim the dogs and wade a bit myself in shorts and sandals.

Cate jumped off the dock for the first time, in order to retrieve the throwing dummy. Biff has done this for a long time, but I’ve had to nudge Care, that is, push her off, after which she swam mightily for the orange object on her horizon. And I did this once today. But the second time I tried it, she didn’t hesitate and drove right in. And her next time, the same thing.

The argument that because we are a democracy we are a classless society. Ha! We aren’t and many are glad that we aren’t. Or—to put it another way—class distinctions manifest themselves all the time and it is largely because people think in terms of class an behave accordingly. Now that I have identified myself as a Nazi, let me try to explain. I hope to come off no worse than a member of the landed gentry—the kind of person one is always happily watching and emulating on Masterpiece Theater.

Jack Donato owns three pieces of property down at the East end of the lake. One he lives in, ever since her retired from the time-clock company he owns and his son—in good Sicilian tradition—now runs. The other two—one on each side of him—he rents out, one to a part-time caretaker, the other to members of his family, who mostly likely overnight there on family occasions and pay him no rent, of course.

When I am fishing in the last hour before dark, Jack and his wife Diane are often out on their deck having a drink (I think he drinks quietly throughout the day—probably well-watered Scotch; I’ve seen the type) and enjoying the sunset. The hired man, who works “out,” is busy earning his partial rental payment, pottering around the garden, raking algae or weed from the shore and shallows, pruning, filtering the imported sandy beach, etc. Last night, out late, it was evident from the lack of lights in Jack’s house that he was gone, but the caretaker was busy in Jack’s absence. He stood on the dock, talking to the fishers parading by in their boats, and his manner was entirely different from ever before—from when Jack and Diane were home. Then he was much constrained, working steadily. Now he was broadly welcoming to the stream of watery visitors, chatty, slightly condescending, telling them (as he a couple of times told me) about his good fishing in some lake fifty or a hundred miles from here, in years past.

He watches the fishers but does not fish himself, not that I have observed, anyway. Last night, though, he was the lord of the manor. Forgive me the stilted phrase, but there is no other way to describe his manner. It is the manner of the manor, you might say. His voice was entirely different. It was ten or twenty decibels louder, and there was a gracious tone to it, one that was not displeasing. Even the way he held his rake was different. It wasn’t so much a tool as an implement, one extraneous to the task at hand. It was as thought there were really no task at hand. He was out for an evening’s pleasure and enjoyment.

The place was his now, and those of us in passing prams and trailered boats under power were his guests. He was behaving as he thought Jack might or did, but there were differences, and they were not subtle ones. I think one side of his mind will be more comfortable when Jack and Diane return—I think there is a family gathering scheduled for Sunday, and this is why the caretaker was working so hard earlier—and the place must be in near-perfect order when the true lord of the manor returns home. And the caretaker will relax in his shoes, knowing he is back in his place, the work done, his rent earned, his mind secure in its knowledge of who he really is.

It is an interesting bit of geography that defines Lake Ketchum and environs. If you walk due West from our part of the lake, which is two-thirds of the distance to the East on the North end, after what corresponds to about an eighth of a mile, you come to the West end and a bit further the outlet, which is presently dry, it being summer and there being no spare water to rid the lake of. Ahead and to the West a couple of hundred feet is a drop off; beyond the drop off is a magnificent view of Puget Sound. To the South is Camano Island and Port Susan, which is the depository of all the silt brought downstream from the Stillaguamish River and its multiple slides on the North Fork, where I fish. Straight ahead and to the North lies Skagit Bay and a different watershed, that of the mighty Skagit River. It has vast tide flats which in season offer fine goose and duck hunting; above the tidal reach lie flatlands under heavy cultivation. The Skagit lands are famous for growing vegetables and tulip bulbs. The Stillaguamish flatlands are smaller but still impressive. They too are under full cultivation. The crops are similar.

The saltwater adjacent has a cooling effect, for which we are grateful at this time of the year. The weather is mild, and there is usually a good breeze blowing in from the southwest. It comes off the bay, but somehow it is funneled across the lake and we—facing South—are its beneficiaries. A Southern exposure such as ours keeps the house warm in winter without much supplementary heating. True, there are summer days, when it is hotter here than it might be with different geography, and we have to draw nearly opaque blinds against the sun to keep the heat out. But at night we open our screened windows and the cool night air brings down the internal temperature to the low sixties—all anybody could ask for.

Up at the river, where we have been spending a few mid-week days in July, it is ten degrees hotter, almost always, and it doesn’t cool off much at night. You’d think a river would be cooling, wouldn’t you, but it doesn’t seem to work this way, thirty miles inland.

It is three times as wet in winter, but much hotter all summer, with frequent early morning showers to keep the undergrowth lush. If you go down to the river—and please do!--you will find a firm upstream breeze blowing most all the time, and if you stand in the running water and turn your face and body to it it is markedly cooling. But moved even a few yards away, into the overgrown brush, and the breeze is stopped dead in its tracks. One has to hunt around for some thin passageways through the trees where the breeze is permitted to penetrate, and then sit there, facing the breeze, in order to obtained any cooling.

To put it a different way, we have an air conditioner installed up at the river, and most days I snap it on—to Norma’s consternation, for she likes it hot and her various medicines have thinned her blood to the point where she is always cold. Back at the lake, the air conditioner we inherited from the breakup of my mother’s apartment, many years ago, sits in basement storage, waiting for the very hot weather that will necessitate its use. So far it hasn’t come, and I have a hunch it never will.

A year or so ago I bought an electric troll for the boat that I gained as a bit of negotiation when we bought this house. I had to have a motor because everybody who came to the lake’s public access and launched his boat has one, hardly without exception. I felt I was missing something. You don’t know what you’re missing until you experience it and learn, first-hand, what it is, or if it is anything at all.

The motor is fun, along with its unbelievably heavy rechargeable battery. It requires a charging unit, which is a nifty piece of electrical equipment that takes a few hours or overnight to do its job. A well-charged battery will run a toll like mine for six or seven hours. But if you open it up, it will only run a couple of hours, which is still a lot and will cover a lot of ground, or rather water.

I just put mine away, perhaps for the year. I have not run the battery down once this year and when I circled the lake a couple of days ago, giving Norma her annual tour, it seemed plenty strong. To fish, I never use it. I’ve made my self use it, coming and going to favorite fishing sections of the lake, and I even tried fishing with it, both trolling and casting towards shore. I believe I do better using the oars. I have better control and the boat feels better balanced, with me in the exact center and no heavy battery or nearly as heavy motor dragging down the stern.

Last night I found a couple of shrunken lily pad beds (remember the lake treatments for weed?) that produced some black crappie. There aren’t as many of them due to the intensive fishery that’s been going on, but the ones that are left are a bit bigger. There is the appeal of the odd larger one. And small perch are always nailing my fly in the shallow water.

The perch vary considerably in size, from year to year. This year they are pretty small; two years ago of decent enough size to bring the confirmed perch fishers (such as John) here almost daily. This year was the year for crappie. Just before dark, off the shrunken pads were our wetland begins and we take our dogs there was a huge motorhome parked near the shoreline. It belongs to the owner’s father, I’ve learned. Anyway, just off from there I hooked and landed an odd spinyray of about a pound. It was strong enough to take out line several times on short runs and too big to lift with the rod over the side of the boat.

I held it up to what remained of the light and tried to identify it. I didn’t want to kill it only for identification purposes, so I released it. Today my identification book offers only a few clues to the mystery. It may be a rock bass, which is not common. Or it might be a big bluegill. Neither picture nor description seems just right, however. The fish had the shape of a black crappie, but not its coloring or its pretty speckles. It was a muddy brown and though it took out line it did not splash spectacularly, as a crappie of its size would have.

A little mystery is a good thing, I am convinced. The lake may have species that are rarely caught. That first year, I caught seven species and thought I had them all. Now here is a possible another, and long ago the lake had cutthroat. And Anton took a five and a half-inch rainbow this year, which could only be the result, we think, of natural spawning. And the two nine or nine and one-half inch rainbows I caught only a couple of weeks ago provide another enigma.

Now holdovers are understandable. They weren’t caught and killed, but continued to grow. Small trout, however, are not so easily explained. It is the small fish that house the mystery that is, at least for now, unexplainable.

Habits are what make life endurable, for without them our days would be raw and demanding. Put several habits together and you have a routine. Our Sunday morning routine rarely varies, and when it does you can bet something sinister has happened. We rise at the usual hour and breakfast is one of only two: it alternates religiously between pancakes and (for me only) two fried eggs, sunnyside up. Norma just eats pancakes. We precede this with our usual glass of orange juice and vitamin C capsule (1k mg.).

The second breakfast is baking powder biscuits, scrambled eggs, and for me (pig that I am) a rasher of ham, pretending to be bacon and coming closer to the Canadian style ham, heated in the microwave until the edges turn brown and begin to curl.

I have already gone to the mailbox and brought in the huge Sunday paper, which I have ceremoniously divided into its inserts, which I read first, and the entire rest of the paper, which is Norma’s domain. After breakfast—she drinks coffee with her meal, as do most people in restaurants, while I drink milk—we adjourn to favorite chairs, hers the upholstered one by the window, mine the blue leather one in the corner by another window, and read away for at least an hour. Then we go off to complete our matins.

Later, after the dogs have been pastured (our euphemism) and have joined us, I adjourn to the downstairs and take the unread part of the paper, the white part, and start to read it thoroughly from the front, as though somebody might give me a pop quiz on it later. I think my son reads it the same way. We could competitively give each other exams. Norma would fail them. She reads more light-heartedly and less competitively, compulsively. Yet deprive her of her Sunday paper, and she would be as helpless and devastated as me or our son.

A bass last night, about a pound, large mouth, and on a size 14 scud hook. Its head seemed enormous and there was no doubt as to what it was. It looked very different from the fish the other night that I thought might be a rock bass, if the lake has any in it. If not (ask Curt), I’m at a loss.

Earlier in the day, a hot one, I took the dogs to the Oso water, and we fished our way from the Deer Creek riffle to the Elbow hole. They frisked and played, all the early while, and found a dead summer steelhead highly decomposed and ate it, one the tiny head, the other what there was of the tail and skeletal remains. They chomped it right on down and were not sick afterwards; in the evening they ate a full meal. But we marked on the calendar the date, just in case they missed the salmon disease before and come down with a strange fever in five to ten days, the normal incubation period.

The dogs slowed down some at the Elbow and ended up after much swimming and playing flaked out in the sand in the sun. I had to wake them to leave. They slept all the way home in the car and after their dinner. I woke them again at bedtime and they slept through the night with no sounds or scuffling.

First time I’ve ever seen them near exhaustion. Proves, I guess, they are normal dogs and they have their physical limits.

We are presently getting Country/City out to distributors and reviewers. I drove the convertible to Stanwood this morning and mailed books and letters off to (1) Frank Amato, (2) Seth Norman, for Fly Rod and Reel, (3) Donn Fry, book editor of The Seattle Times. Also one to Fred Dustman, and old contact from the Wenatchee, who got our initial brochure but, bless him, just got around to sending in his check for a book order. And yesterday a small check for two at the storefront rate from Island Books, which is on Mercer Island.

Curt Kraemer, laid up with a hernia operation, is reading the book and quickly got to page 100. He says he likes it, but what else is he to say, since it was a gratis copy to a friend I knew was invalided. Soon I’m going to have to start calling on stores. I don’t much look forward to it.

How beautiful the lake is in mid-day beneath a blue sky, the light giving it a deep, inky quality broken only by a faint ripple from the ghost of a breeze. Most inviting—at least until you visit the water closely and see the great amounts of green algal scum, both on the surface and over the stones on the bottom, looking much like a fungal growth on a dead salmon.

When I swim the dogs, they break apart the algae and it pushes off to the sides; often the emerge with green mung bearding them or the orange throwing dummy. The water does not invite a swim, not unless you are a Labrador retriever.

Biff has a rash and Norma bought a large tub in which to bathe him. Disaster. He would not get in, and he is so big, she could not get him in and would not resort to calling me, so she ended up pushing him into my shower, and both emerged soaked and clean. The dogs are now drying in sunshine, after which Biff will get some medicated cream with Cortizone rubbed into his belly, groin, and armpit areas.

Norma always had to bathe Sam in summer for much the same reason, and we find Biff much like him in many of his recalcitrant ways. But I think he is more lovable and perhaps a better all-around dog.

“Ingrained behavior”—what is that? Nobody knows. It has to do with habit and routine, but goes much deeper, into the realm of compulsion. The popular term for this today is “genetically programmed,” but it is next to meaningless, for the genes are still mysterious, ultimately unfathomable, and the most one can say is that this gene or chromosome seems to be connected to such-and-such behavior, and altering it is a prospect filled with much controversy and terror.

Along our algae-ridden beach, deep with slime and soft, mush green things congregating nearly obscenely, can still be detected two pale, gravely ovals, each about the size of a bathtub. I’d detected bluegill redds long ago, but their spawning and rearing time must be way over. The male it is that guards the nest, and hangs around to make sure the hatching fry are protected from predators. Well, he is still there; the redd is in the same location and subject to daily abuse, for it is where my Labs launch themselves to retrieve the hot-orange throwing dummy.

When I throw it, Mr. Bluegill must hasten elsewhere and return only when the beach grows quiet again.

Ingrained behavior, surely. But what is that? It is what keeps him there, long after the children (such as they are) have fled the nest.

Similarly the killdeer (a bird, not a carnivore, as its name suggests) tries to lead everything alive away from the area with its pathetic, plaintive chirp-chirp, wounded bird routine. My dogs fall for it, every time. Ingrained behavior, genetically programmed for untold generations, is the reason. It is to guard and protect the generation to come. And in my dogs, the same programming makes them chase (1) cats, (2) squirrels, (3) by extension, all furry creatures that will run and allow themselves to be chased. And birds, of course, even the most inconsequential of birds. I mean, what dog would ever have thought to go in mad pursuit of this little bird—unless the bird itself suggested it.

In Silent Seasons, Russell Chatham writes in 1977 that all the writers in his anthology are “at large.” By this he means none of them are “employed other than by that desire to do work of our own choosing and our own choosing alone. We write, and I think I’m not presuming too much to speak for all, only what we want to write, kissing in the process not one single undeserved ass.” [Page xvi.] He adds that all of them “take fishing more or less seriously, none takes himself serious.” And a bit later says: Lastly, we all live in places where fishing or hunting don’t have to be expeditionary.” Wonderful word there. “It is this, perhaps, more than anything else, that we share and that molds our approach to the outdoors. I doubt if any one of us has any real appreciation of the term vacation.

“Speaking now for myself, I would consider a vacation from my everyday life a noxious ordeal, one undertaken only under extreme duress and insistence by friend or lover. I am exactly where I want to be not at all by accident. I take the fishing at hand in doses calculated to be an ideal measure in the fabric of the rest of my life. . . .”

He quotes his friend, Thomas McGuane: “I’m an artist because I don’t want to cooperate, and I want to bite the hand that feeds me.” Chatham agrees, adding: the writer frees himself, “becoming a very universal kind of rebel, a citizen with complete social mobility.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Written more than 20 years ago, it exists as a kind of manifesto. Though they were all transplanted Montanans, the credo is universal and broadly applicable to all of us who set out to exactly that, without putting it into words first. Or last.

The “loveliest phrase in the English language,” according to some famous English writer (perhaps E.M. Forester—sounds like him) is “summer afternoon.” Hmm. Not in my opinion. How about “winter morn?” Appeals much more to me. Outside, right now, the temperature is pressing ninety. No thanks. Of course, I’m not given a choice.

Dogs and I are interred in the basement, where it is cool. Soon they will have a swim in the lake, after which they will go out on the upper deck and dry off in the hot sun. Then they will be returned to the sanctity of the basement. I will join them. Meanwhile I write and read.

I am reading an article by the son of James Dicky, who says Dad was a son of a bitch. Thought as much. He sacrificed, says his son, his family to his art. His wife and he were alcoholics. He wrote Deliverance and it became a best seller; a year later it was made into a movie that became famous. His son writes, “And after that nothing good was the same.”

At Cicero, a crossing, there is a triangle of land that is not much good and is used to grow hay. Presently the hay has been harvested in the old fashioned manner and stands in tall stacks that resemble yurts. They are irregularly spaced and are—the sun falling on them and creating deep shadows in their lee—quite beautiful. They remind me of the English countryside.

What do I know about the English countryside? Well, I’m an untraveled American, but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch Masterpiece Theater. The fields now, here, resemble those of Yorkshire, Cornwall, Dorset, etc. They roll and are green, and off in the distance you can make out in the haze a hedgerow or possibly a rail fence. At this distance it is hard to tell and if you guess you may be wrong, wrong, wrong. And there is nothing but memory to check yourself against.

Elsewhere hay has been cut and racked, but the small stacks resemble nothing more than the ice from little plastic trays, you know, that you bend weirdly to release their grip, and then the tiny cubes fall out all over the table, low and rectangular and rounded at the corners.

Farmers now wrap their hay in white plastic. That is, it is baled is something like cylinders, then wrapped snugly—as though “for your protection,” as it says in motel bathrooms. I suppose it (the hay) is wrapped to keep it from getting wet and rotting. Nothing worse than rotten hay. The cows won’t eat it and it has no other use.

I love living in the country and the sudden, surprising smells. They are often overwhelming. The smell goes from no smell to one that almost strikes you down with its powerfulness. Usually they are bad stinks. It is what children would call them and they would be right.

Fishers are visited regularly by bouts of depression that are not chronic in the clinical sense of the word but powerful and mildly debilitating. It is partly because fishing is a waste of time and we all know it to be. Use-to-be, before the advent of catch-and release, we could always justify our trips with the vague need to bring home a fish “for the table.” It is how we got away with wasting so much time on river or lake. No more. The waste is pure and absolute. There is no escaping it or explaining it away with some tall tale that will justify our compulsion.

We fish to kill time. Hence the classic explanation attributed variously to old Indians, the Norse, and perhaps even the Old Testament that the days a fisher spends on lake or river are not subtracted from his lifetime but added to the end of it, allowing him to live even longer, and have more time to waste. Sheesh!

I have such a saying painted onto a slab of what looks to be artificial marble. It was given to be by—who else?—my dear wife. It is around here, some place. Oh yeah, I see it: it is being used as a paperweight, which it is, and is holding down the least of three heaps of working papers on my desk. It has one smooth edge and two irregular ones that intentionally make it look as though it were smashed and salvaged. My wife, who likes bargains and the idea of things never to be wasted, found herself oddly attracted to it and bought it because she likes to buy things and is always finding things she thinks I’ll like. But I really think it is because she hates to return home, laden with purchases, and have even half of them for herself. She is much more comfortable knowing that sixty or seventy percent of what she had to buy is intended for someone else.

But my subject is guilt and depression. Cheery subjects, what? Fishers believe they must waste time under the guise of doing something useful. It is ingrained in the American character, which is an oddity, an oddball, in nature. We simply can’t sit still in a chair (as Tough Shit Eliot told us to do) and let time pass unproductively. No, we have to be doing something, making something. And fishing is a great waste of time, we know in our black hearts, where the truth of things cannot be concealed, at least not for long.

Oh, yes: last night, after two heavy boats of bass fishers passed repeatedly along our shoreline, and everybody else’s, plus another boat full of dudes who looked like they knew a little about what they were doing, I took the rowboat out for the last fifty minutes of the day. The lake was beautiful, as it usually is, at the tag end of a hot, golden day, the sky blazing blue overhead up until the last bright moment, after which all turns a deep lovely black.

I had a lot of trouble getting hits where the boats had systematically plowed the water, but headed first for what is left of Bruce’s lily pads, managed to hook a seafood plate of small black crappie and yellow perch. Very colorful. I released them all and stayed until I could get no more hits or hooked fish. The next two sites were usually productive but tonight I could barely get a hit and landed not a one. I went down to Jack’s, and fished his shallow beach and the tip of the island; both areas are heavily clotted with green agal islands that seem to drift and make it impossible to reach the shoreline or even what is left of the inner lily pads.

A few crappie and perch came to my #14 golden bead-headed scud, but they were far and few between. It grew late and nearly dark. Then I had a follow and a hard hit. The fish would not jump, after the initial take, but fought strongly and was slow to come to the boat. It proved to be a large-mouth bass of about a pound. Maybe they are heavier, but I have no way of judging. They are a very different-looking fish and still a novelty to me. I had trouble finding the tiny hook in the enormous (relatively speaking, anyway) jaw but did and plucked it away with my fingertips.

It was only afterwards that I remembered that you can pick up a bass by its lower jaw, its lip, and it will be briefly

Two bass in two nights. It is tempting to draw some conclusion from my experience, such as placing any two dots on a graph or chart and connecting them with a line. The line is impressive, whether or not it means or indicates anything. A line relates one point to another point, and is much bigger in itself than either of the points. The line is solid, substantial.

It may mean nothing at all, and if I fish tonight in the respite from the day’s heat, which I may, a third bass would indicate a trend, certainly, but I am sure I will not hook and land a third bass, and all the mental mastication involved in my reasoning will be for naught, indicating nothing.

No third bass, in fact a flat evening, with one small black crappie hooked and landed at what is left of Bruce’s lily pads and a small perch, down by the end of the wetland, where I walk my dogs. Few strikes, calm lake, and I returned after half an hour to watch the Mariners lose yet another game.

A gray morning, with fog early and slow to clear, puts me in mind of the title of the only novel written by my creative writing teacher, Markham Harris: High Morning Fog. The title is accurate, for it isn’t cloud cover, and when it lifts the sky will be azure again.

Out in the gray center of the lake, marred by a faint chop, are the silhouettes of four large birds—ducks or geese. Well, we are home to four Canada geese, this summer. Only, there is something wrong, something different. Its not the same, somehow. I bring out the binocs and the birds prove to be . . . (the envelope, please): common loons! What a wonder! And so many of them at once.

They proceed due East, and often submerge as a unit, bobbing to the surface again, one, two, three, four. They look a bit like male common mergansers, but clearly aren’t, for I can see the speckled breasts and neck bands.

I am blessed with all the friends I shall ever want—perhaps a few more. Because I am old and have written books involving fishing, I am visited (literally) by people on an irregular basis under the guise I am short on acquaintances and, yes, friends. Wherever they get this idea I have no idea. But still they want to come up to me and hang about. Now I don’t want to be any more of a s.o.b. than I already am, by nature, and I will politely face you off and exchange a few words, in a sporting goods store or on a river bank.

Please let it go at that. And . . . just go. Go on about your business and leave me free to do the same, usually fish.

And because I write, and you know this, and your presume I am some sort of authority, which I’m not, only on writing, not on catching fish, when others fail, do not tell me you have read my book(s) and then when, brightening, I ask you something about the book, in the nature of a quiz, do not fall apart on me and quickly volunteer that you really haven’t, you just bought it, or saw it in a store. This will earn my enduring ire. But if you pass the test, and answer the leading question about the contents within the pages of my book, you have been admitted to something obscure and detailed. You aren’t a friend, but I will be friendly to you, if you do not hang around for long and show considerate signs of soon going away.

If you truly have bought a book and wish me to autograph it, I will be happy to do so; I will even write in it practically anything you want me to. I might even, inattentively, sign my name to a blank check you put in front of me.

If you say you bought my book, even read it, for God’s sake say something about the book, something intelligent and useful to me. I can learn from critical input, even at an advanced age. But do not, I repeat, do not, tell somebody you read my book and it is a piece of shit. Don’t do this for at least two reasons. One, my former friend may tell me what you said, not knowing that in the process he has stopped being a friend and you, you bastard, who were never one, will never be one and, in fact, will become Arch Enemy.

One of the most pleasant and exasperating experiences of my life was just after my first book on steelhead came out, and anglers made a trek to the Sauk and Skagit rivers, seeking good fishing, seeking me, seeking tips from me and my companionship. I was flattered and I was friendly in return. Generally, the farther you came, the more hospitable I was. Already these fine rivers, though, were altering their substrate, the great pools and riffles I had enjoyed only recently shrunk and filled with silt, disappearing or already gone.

Don’t blame me for this and don’t hold me responsible for the long distances you came, expecting as your right fishing equal to what the rivers had given me and I had written about. I did not lie, on my pages. I too was hurt and disappointed to see the river changed. But I knew that this is the nature of rivers and they will change drastically and quickly, and if you write about them you somehow encourage the speed with which the process takes place. You can count on it. So when you write about a pool, and name it, you practically dam it to extinction. But you do it all the same, hoping that new pools will materialize and prove to be as good as the old.

So, in closing, call me friend, smile, exchange a river pleasantry with me, and go your way. I and my pool-ruining black Labs will go ours, and you will be all the better off for it.

These are the Dog Days, and I have my own pair with which to accompany them. Late July, the temperature daily presses 90, and swimmers can be found anywhere there is water more than a few inches deep. This includes Lake Ketchum and the North Fork of the Stilly, where I have spent my summers fishing steelhead for about as long as I can remember. But nowadays I try to make it easy on myself. Ergo, I’ve been driving up just short of noon, parking in the deep shade of the firehall (formerly the school yard) at Oso, and meandering with my dogs, or sans them, down a dappled glade until I come out on the bright bank above the famed Manure Spreader Hole, a traditional haunt and now a critically important one, since the Elbow Hole has sadly bottomed out and the Deer Creek Riffle is so slow and sandy and bereft of fish that it has been abandoned by the float-and-jig fishers who have so dominated it since the start of the season and cause the deaths of a number of fine wild summer steelhead through not playing and releasing them carefully enough.

This leaves the Spreader Hole, which is just coming into its own, though I’ve heard only of a couple of widely scattered fish being taken there, so far. I fished it this noon, with my dogs badly trashing it and making it unproductive—though this is, I know, a poor excuse for my not hooking a fish. But it is the truth as I know it; the dogs quickly ruin the taking potential of a pool by exercising their God-given right to swim it whenever they wish, in spite of my physical and vocal protests urging them to have a heart and stop it.

The bottom of the Spreader for the first time in many years has a marvelous configuration of boulders and stones. The hole has a great rush of water running down its center, which has made it hard to fish before now, but the water is dropping daily and the pool’s attractions are becoming evident. It is arguably the most attractive pool in the entire fork and, so far, perhaps because it is not producing, it is not being fished hard, at least not at the time of day that I find myself fishing it, though at daybreak I am sure it is being hit by the regulars who know its history and have read its configuration as well as I. And it may be putting out fish then. It did, the other morning, for Phil O’Lone, who lives a hundred yards downstream.

A pool like this one is a joy to fish, though not without considerable difficulties. At the top, it is extremely narrow and deep, with an unfishable rush running down the middle and much slack on the far side in which no fly will ever sink to fishable depth. Then the hole widens and a downed cottonwood, bereft of leaves, lines the far riprapped shore, which is steep. Then by degrees the pool slows down and widens. It is still hard to fish, with the fly and line hanging on the far side too long, then whipping across and not sinking until they are in the slack water directly downstream from where I stand. At the top the pool is too deep and stony to wade, so I fish it from shore with a Spey rod, mending line as best I am able to and trying unsuccessfully for the most part to get my fly to sink

At the bottom the pool becomes progressively shallow and may soon fish best, or only, with the floating line and riffling fly. Good. In fact, already, there is a point where the sunk line seems to lose effectiveness and the efficacy of the floating line become immediately apparent; you fish wet beyond this point and you may hang up your fly on the bottom or, worse, line the fish.

No fish splashed this morning, which would be a sure sign that it holds sizable fish. We may be between runs, or the two runs (first of July and tenth of July) may be all there are, this year, and already have passed into the sanctuary water of Deer Creek. But most years (I have now 50 beneath my belt since I caught my first summer steelhead on a fly, as a boy of 17) there are more fish trickling up, and they will lie in the Spreader water until it is time to make the short run to the mouth of Deer Creek. The occasional fish should be takable there for another month or longer.

There are several things I try to do each year and are important to me to accomplish. One is to catch a wild Deer Creek summer steelhead; to date I have landed three, but that is three more than in some recent seasons. But it has been a slow year, at least for me.

Another is to catch a steelhead, any steelhead, on my 3-7/8 inch Hardy Perfect. I must do it every year, as I have in the past for, oh, twenty-five years or longer. I have. The third thing is to hook several fish on a dry or riffling fly on the surface. I have yet to do this, though I’ve barely tried, but the season is advancing and it is not too early, not by a large bit, to give it a good shot. It is a pleasant way to fish and may produce a fish at any time of the day, when wet fly is usually only successful at first light, or just before the sun sinks into the sea.

Norma saw the flotilla of loons later in the day, while I was gone with the dogs, fishing, and said they numbered six. They swam in formation, dove together, and popped back to the surface like corks. None of them had a fish, she reported, though I don’t think she watched all that closely.

Later, five of them were gone, and the straggler remained. As I write this, I think I saw him winging off to the West, low and fast.

As the century draws to a close, scholars and other literary nuts are reviewing and analyzing the past ninety-eight years and coming up with lists of the best of this or that. Recently a staid and sage committee of peers have agreed on the greatest four novels of this period. The first is Ulysses, by James Joyce. Number three is also by Joyce—his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. No one disputes this ranking, nor do I. Number two is The Great Gatsby. And four is Lolita. It comes out Joyce, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Nabokov. Two out of four ain’t bad. (Perhaps I’m wrong about Lolita and the fourth great book was Huxley’s Point Counter Point.)

Where is Faulkner, where Hemingway? Far back in the pack. Also-rans. Runners up, far back.

Lists are maddening and give the wrong impression of how things are, always. If one says, what is the greatest novel of our time, the answer well may be Ulysses, but it could be The Sound and The Fury or Light in August I could make a strong case for either. But I won’t dispute the call. It is a good one. And it ought to make us all humble.

There are hundreds of good novels, I guess, including those by Lawrence, Updike, Oates, Powell, Hartley, Snow, on and on. To have done a good novel seems to me a major accomplishment in a man or a woman’s life. Wish that I had.

Scene: a sun-blasted raspberry patch, tag end of the season, the leaves withered and freckled with rust. Last picking, and slim at that. This white-bearded aging man with plastic basket is plucking at waist-level some over-ripe berries, huge, along with a few shrunken dregs of berries that resemble raisins. Along the ground mosey his two black Lab dogs, now eight-months old. The dogs nose the berries, select only the ripest ones, high in sugar content, and delicately sup them off the vine. All three are intent. The man is as fast as both dogs together, for the dogs must sort out the green, never-to-ripen berries from the juicy ones, and this slows them down. Occasionally the serious dogs make a mistake and have to eject a green berry. They spit it out.

The man reaches out to pluck a huge ripe dark red berry, but touches it first with a fingertip unwillingly and it falls to the ground, in a clutter of leaves and dried stems. He can not locate it without going to his knees, which he is unwilling to do, and even if he did might be unable to locate the berry after a minute’s search.

Half a tiny basket is all he can harvest. That’s all right. Already this year he has eaten about all he can hold for the season. He has put them on his cereal in the morning, his vanilla ice cream the same night. As the season has progressed and the berries have piled up, he has even put raspberries on raspberries, until what ever lived beneath them was totally obscured.

Ah, but there is still raspberry jam in the refrigerator, from years past, and many more jars on the shelf in the storeroom, dank with mildew and deep and dark with its mushroom stench.

Ninety degrees about, and I go out as little as I have to, while Norma does all the major work except what involves the dogs. The dogs play the game of you-are-the-enemy-and- I-am going-to-kill-you so realistically that only she and I know they don’t mean it. Their teeth flash and they growl and snarl menacingly, as each goes after the other’s throat and they tumble to the ground, rolling over and over. Then momentarily bored (or sated: it is hard to tell the difference) they relax and walk around, shoulder to shoulder, nuzzling each other, sniffing ears, mouths, and nether parts, affectionately, disinterestedly.

I take them down to the water’s edge, beneath the heavy-handed sun that punishes from afar, sans mercy, and this time I have two throwing dummies—the soft fat goose-like one and the slender hard nubby one the like so much. They are a bit bewildered and wonder what I’m up to—what new nefarious plan I have in mind. It is double retrieving, and I got the idea yesterday, up at the river, throwing a heavy deadfall stick for them; Biff proves indefatigable. I finally put the stick clear across the river and into an eddy behind a big rock, where it floated in circles (as in Aguirra, Wrath of God). Four times Biff swam down the riffle, trying to find it, unable to, then returning, swimming hard upstream, a bit farther each time before he relaxed in the current and it swept him back to the bottom of the run, his eyes searching all the while for the stick.

Finally he got to the top of the run, where it lay idly floating, and he saw it, and from across the river I applauded him and shouted praise, as he grabbed it and began swimming back to me and I greeted him, patting him and gushing proudly.

It must have taken him three upstream swims before he located it and the important point is he never wavered in his determination to find it, never paused, and kept pursuing. This portends he will be an excellent retrieving dog—whether or not I have any good use for one. Cate will merely be a good one, for she does not have that dogged (excuse me) persistence.

So today, in all the heat, I left one dog tethered to his or her chain, and the other one briefly tethered, too, while I threw the dummy and told him it was his (or hers), then—the dogs eyes fixed unflinchingly on the dummy 125 feet away on the wavlets, I unsnapped the lead and told the dog softly to fetch. Then I did the other, using the other dummy. But I forgot their tremendous competitiveness and also their need to share. Soon one or the other veered off course and headed for the other dog with the first dummy in his mouth, and they swam in together with it, jointly holding it and paddling in tandem.

I tried throwing two dummies for one dog, the other restrained, and telling the one, Biff, to get the first-thrown one first, which he did, when I broke his eye contact with the second dummy, but when he got to it and started back he remembered the second and, still clutching the first, he headed for it. Then he tried to bring them both back in at the same time. He couldn’t. The best he could do was clutch the big one and push the smaller one ahead of him, but of course it soon slipped off to the side and he had to try to regather it, but at best all he could do was herd it toward shore. Since he was way East and out from John and Tracy’s dock, I ran over to it and out on it and coaxed him to come to me. He did, and I plucked the small retrieving dummy out of the water at the edge of the float, and Biff continued on to shore, carrying the fat dummy.

I didn’t try that again, but am working on a plan over the long future to get him keyed to first one, then the other, dummy and to bring them back to me in the order that I indicate. This is routine Lab training, right out of the textbook (by a man named Ritchards, I recall, perhaps incorrectly), and is useful if you ever become a duck or goose hunter.

It is unlikely I shall, though I am thinking about it again, as I did with Sam, a poor hunter and retriever, and no doubt Cate and Biff will never get past the play aspect of retrieving, which is just as well, for I know myself to be no real hunter. But perhaps I shall pretend, if it will make the dogs happy.

Besides, I’ve long had my eye on the side-by-side twelve-gauge shotgun named after Ernest Hemingway and originally sold by Cabela. I passed it up once being cleared out at around $125, and am now told its cost is several thousand dollars.

Dreaming, when it is too hot to do anything but read, watch baseball on television, and wait for the heat wave to pass.

Everybody seeks the water, when it is this hot; the Stilly North Fork is dotted with swimmers and splashers every place there is a deepening of the current. I don’t remember this so much in past years. There were either fewer swimmers or bigger pools in which for them to gather, and they were not so strung out, the river’s length.

Up at our place—we had an impromptu gathering, with my inviting Russ Ossenbach and his two sons up at the same time I’d agreed to meet with a man who will probably not buy the river property but wanted to see it on a guided tour—the river is shallow in the same places it used to have deep pockets, not deep enough to swim in but certainly deep enough for a person or two to submerge himself in, up to his chin. Across the river, on the far bank, the current is strong still and the water fairly deep. One can wade there and cross, then sit in the shade in the shallows, and wade back in and scrunch down, and there find water up to his chin.

We didn’t do this, but knowing it is a possibility definitely adds something substantial to the place, where it is five to ten degrees hotter than it ever is, here on the lake.

Told Russ where I hide a key, in case he and the boys ever want to come up. They live in a duplex at the edge of Mt. Vernon and have no cool place to retreat to, in such weather as we are now having. He is a generous person and has given me many flies, which must have cost him more than just the time to tie them. Upon leaving he gave me several more, including two popping lures for bass, very complicated and colorful; a weighted stonefly nymph, which I’ve never learned how to tie and can be very effective, even on steelhead; and three fine steelhead wakers, a little bigger than I usually use but very fine and nicely tied.

Alas, I can’t fish in weather this hot, and am unable or unwilling to rise early in the morning, as Anton does regularly. This hot evening he is going back to the pool upstream from Hazel, where he has hooked and landed fish earlier. He got one there last week at dark, he tells me. Now he is trying for another. I think he deserves them—though to be honest I am a bit envious.

Maybe I’ll try for bass this evening, since it is cooling down fast. It has a long way to go, however. My new rod is here, but my lures, lines, and new left-handed crank reel has not come from Cabella. In fact, it is over due.

My fiftieth high-school graduation reunion is at hand; I don’t think I’ll attend the gala events, though I might just show up for a photo session on the steps of old Queen Anne Hi, since converted to apartments for the elderly, which I suppose now include us. Maybe some of us are actually living there—where we went to high school half a century ago. Wouldn’t that be . . . bizarre?

Clyde Cherberg is in charge and the literature he has come up with to advertise the event is tasteful and informative. I remember him as a class officer, but not a jock. He is of the large Cherberg family of Queen Anne Hill, one of whom was the football coach, going on to coach Freshman ball at the University of Washington, then became Lieutenant Governor of the state, a position he held for decades, presiding over the State Legislature and not much else and speaking in ornate and exquisite rhetoric before any group that would have him sentences as balanced as Cicero’s. This was John. He used to hit grounders out to me for secon-team baseball,l when I fashioned myself a third baseman, and I’d catch them on my shins, my forehead, everywhere except in the oiled palm of my glove. Clyde was a nephew, I think, and probably class president. If he went on to the U., I don’t remember him. He is not a face, only a name, and if I bumped into him at the reunion he might be anybody, and so would I to him.

This is one reason why I’m not going to the big banquet and the champagne brunch the following day.

High school was a terrible time for many. I am among them. Not a jock, not popular, not narrowly famous for anything, an outsider to most happenings, it was the perfect background for a writer. The wound and the bow kind of thing, if you get my drift. I was glad it was over and have no urge to return to those days, not even in memory, surely not in vapid re-creation and mock celebration.

The list Clyde just sent me, on the heels of the gala, contain many more names that the first one. The first was bait, chum, and this one is the taking lure. I do down the list and make a short visit to Memory Lane. Most names draw a deserved blank. Who he? She? But there is Wally Barrow, high on the list; I think we were in scouts together. He was bespectacled, witty, quiet, sardonic. How important it was to be sardonic early. Also late, though not so prized. His wife is Josie, her maiden name Browne, with a regal e. Would I recognize him from his lingering image? Perhaps. Many guys show in the face and stance what they will look like decades later. Wally had an old-man look, even then, which he probably grew into—grew to fit. I picture him now looking like he did then but pudgier, more wrinkled, with less hair and probably turkey wattles. As are we all.

Barbro Carlson comes next. I remember her as a lovely white-blonde Swedish girl, buxom, fair, pink cheeked, in cashmere sweater uniform, her breasts on parade. In fact, high school for the girls was a parade of breasts clad in uplift pointy bras and tight sweaters. You wore them as tight as you could get away with, but too tight and you were considered loose. But you wanted to show, suggest, something.

I pursued her via telephone and we had a date or two in which nothing memorable happened. We were very young, sophomores probably, fifteen or an innocent sixteen, and so much of a gritty sexual nature would take place in the coming twelve or eighteen months so as to transform each of us into calculating, knowing, cruel monsters.

Barbro married an Ulbrickson, my roster tells me, and other Swede, but he won’t be coming to the banquet; she will be attending solo, as perhaps she is now going through life. Hmm again. What happened to Ulbrickson, who lacks a given name? Is she divorced from him, is he dead, or is he simply uninterested in attending, which is highly understandable, since this is not his high school reunion but hers?

One will have to attend to find out, and then still might not. I mean, how do you spot lovely Barbro? She is white haired (still), without a trace of yellow in it, and no doubt pudgy and rouged, her mouth painted red in the same old outline, her hair done up much the same way, but now a blue rinse is necessary to maintain the illusion. Illusion of what? Why, of her former beauty, which take it from me was considerable.

Next come our leader, Clyde, and his wife, Shirley. Naturally they will attend all events and no doubt chair and announced them from the linen-clad head table, complete with rostrum and mike. He will be wearing a conspicuous name tag and perhaps a carnation in something resembling a button hole. I picture him, faceless, in a Madras plaid sports coat, blue and gray and red, with white flannels.

Just what the hell do you wear to a banquet on Shilshoe Bay in mid-August? Is it best to under dress, rather than over? Shorts and colored T-shirt, slogan or not, will be inappropriate. But what is? Slacks and open-collar shirt. That ought to be the ticket for the event I am not planning on buying a ticket to. Oh, yes. They are $48 each. A couple will be just short of $100, and then the bar is no-host, which means you saddle up to the bar and pay for what you order. It could be an expensive evening, with food not to everybody’s taste, but then there is to be dancing, with I presume some sort of live music. That means a band.

What will they be playing, music from the Fifties? I mean, the Forties? That was the Swing Era. Good Lord, doesn’t anybody alive know how to play it? What do you do, jitterbug to it? I remember the Avalon, a slow dance, bodies pressed hard together for endless circlings of the floor. Sexual intercourse, after that, might well be an anticlimax, and I think (boys, anyhow) had orgasms on the dance floor, while their female companion sense something intense and unusual going on, down there, and had disturbing sensations herself, which she didn’t want to put a name to or examine mentally too closely. Those sensations both interested her greatly and offended her deeply. They were sweatily confusing, disturbing.

Are we to mimic those hot dances of our youth? With our lifetime companions or with others? Do people trade dances at such events? Is this what they expect? Is there to be a Return To Payton Place scheduled for us? Is this what we who attend are after? A kind of emotion recalled in tranquillity and made real again? A Freudian would say we want, and need, to return to the seat of our neurosis in order to repeat the traumatic event and, this time, come out on top of it. Do I want to stick my tongue down the throat of a sixty-seven-year-old Barbro Carlson-Ulbrickson and gag us both? Will this make something bad in my high-school past vanish in a poof and I’ll be well again? As if I ever was?

Going down the list which Clyde’s computer alphabetized with a couple of clicks of his word processor’s mouse, according to “student’s last name as listed (1948)” I see Dale Douglas. I remember their house, a fine one, right down the street from where my parents moved last before going into an apartment, then a retirement home. She was tall, gangly, not sexual, at least not to me, but she was bright and active, cheerful and pleasant, and I have the feeling life was good for her. I hope so. I might even recognize her, for she was physically unusual and probably looks much the same as then.

Dick Elander comes next. Ah, yes. He and I were Delts in college, and he went on to medical school and became an eye surgeon. He went into the Army in the Korean Army and, oddly, stayed in. He was a physician at West Point once, I vaguely remember, perhaps incorrectly, and at the Presidio of San Francisco, near the Golden Gate Bridge. I think he retired out of the Army and set up a private practice. No doubt he was very successful and made lots of money.

He married Lois and is still married to her, according to the roster. Lois and I dated, right up to the point when she and Dick became engaged, and I think for her I was her romantic sexual interlude before she settled down for the rest of her life to have children and be the wife of a physician. As for me, I was still in love with Cheryl and a soldier stationed in Seattle, and didn’t much care for her, but needed her, as she needed me in this brief intense interlude. She knew all along what she was doing and pursued me. I was flattered and needed someone. She was working in an office, rooming with a girl who was my father’s secretary, and when I made a date with the secretary and went to pick her up, it was Lois who let me know unmistakably that she was available to me. I was so needy I couldn’t turn her down.

She played the piano, and would play for me in the evening some Beethoven, before we went out on a date, and it was from this scene that I developed my fantasy of a woman in evening gown and long gloves who would play the Moonlight Sonata as me as her only audience, after which I would applaud softly to a nearly empty room and then the pianist would come over to where I sat on a pale sofa, sipping champagne out of just the right glassware, and softly fellate me.

Not then, not now. But I wonder how many children she and Dick had. Lois was the sister of a girl who married another fraternity brother (a lot of that going around, then), and this was Ken Walter, co-captain of crew, who went into the Naval Air Force in the Korean War and, while I was undergoing basic training in the Army was at Pensacola learning how to fly a plane. On a cloudless June day, when you could see for a hundred miles off to the vague haze of the Keys, he came in for an unobstructed landing—and landed the plane, as it were, six feet underground. He was killed immediately. Nobody could understand how it happened.

Ken was methodical, a little slow to react, sometimes, but strong, athletic. He bunked under me in a triple-decker bunk, and I remembered how he could snore. I’d have to bop him with my pillow across the face to make him turn over and stop. One time in that dorm, winter of 50, I believe, the temperature set a record low, and it was minus ten. Nobody could get warm enough.

But this is about Lois and Dick. Dick’s father was in the same nursing home as my mother, and he was very kind to her, after my father died. One Christmas I gave him a pair of leather gloves, in gratitude. I wrote Dick and Lois somewhere around them, telling them how grateful I was to the multiple kindnesses of his father.

No, I guess I won’t attend the banquet which they are. There too many old sadnesses and unkindnesses that linger from high school and after. Most of my old buddies—Jim Klobucher, Mike Sheets, Dale Keller—are not listed as attending. They would be a reason. But I see Dick Smith there—once we were good friends. He was handsome, a jock, and was high-school all-city this and that. The Dodgers offered him a contract, right out of high school (he hit something like .475 his senior year and played either center or left field, though I remember him as a great short stop), and he disappeared from the city. I heard he returned off-season and attended the U., but never saw him or ran into him. Our friendship had stopped several years earlier, when we had crushes on the same girl, a Marilyn Mason, or some such euphonious name, and she liked Dick, not me, but it ended all the same. I last heard he owned a restaurant on Queen Anne Hill, down from the counterbalance. Perhaps he bought it with his contract-signing bonus money.

He played farm-club ball but never, to the best of my knowledge, made the big leagues, either for the Dodgers (in NYC then) or anybody else. I wonder what happens to so many young men in such a situation? What happens to the rest of their lives? Are they crippled by hopes? Do they shrug and smile it off, and go on to complete themselves in some other realm, or in some spinoff activity, such as sporting good stores? I guess I could go and see, if I were really interested.

Dick is married to Betty. “Dick and Betty Smith.” How ordinary sounding. How can you avoid being ordinary, with such names as those? I hope they managed to, but am not curious enough to attend the banquet to find out. Yet if they, or he, goes to the school yard front steps at two in the afternoon to have his picture took, and adjourn afterwards to Hoyt’s Pub (formerly the site of the Queen Anne Theater, or Dink’s, as it was affectionately called—not by me, anyhow, for it is the first time I heard the name), at the base of the hill, I might see him and we would recognize each other’s name tags, and we would heartily shake hands, then not know what to say next, except to eagerly inquire what happened to you, in life, and listen each in turn to the other person’s version of a success story, either real or manufactured for the occasion.

And I might spot Ran Hennes, who I have seen in our mid-years, but not since then, and would assuredly recognize, and Art Gollofon, who I haven’t glimpsed since high school, and can’t remember for the life of me (not the case) what he looks like, except that his hair was black and his father used to take us fishing and to first-run Paramount Studio movie showings, for which he was the local distributor.

So what happens when fifty-year strangers suddenly encounter each other? A gasp, a chuckle, an embrace? More likely there will be a puzzled look and a fake remembrance, and the handshake will be provisional, tentative, unsure of itself. We will each be anxious to disengage, disappear. Or am I being customarily negative?

Jennifer James is an anthropologist (Ph.D.), sociologist, psychologist, cultural generalist, moralist, ethicist, etc. Also she writes a column for the Sunday Seattle Times. I always read it. Norma shuns it like the plague.

Jennifer has traveled to Cambridge, England, her original home and also the site of the famous university, where she is enrolled in a summer program for students of all ages. She is enjoying a return to her roots and all the various sightseeing opportunities, such as punting on the river Cam and visiting shoppes. Her hotel room is minute and heavily patterned in its wallpaper, bedspread, rug. It is a bit dense and confusing. But she is having a grand time, and I envy her a little.

She is attend a seminar on Art, Gender, and Revolution. Leave it to academe to come up with such a catchall title. Classes are small—about 15 to 18 students, much like our graduate-school seminars, as I remember them. Her prof is “classic, witty, brilliant “old school. He presents ethical theories and moral dilemmas. We are then encouraged to participate in an active dialogue and debate on the subject at hand. Some of the subjects so far have been: the nature of freedom, innate rights, euthanasia, suicide, abortion, in vitro fertilization, organ transplants, and animal rights. “Whew.

She goes on to say that they just discussed “the Boo-Hurrah (as in cheering) theory of morality. The basic premise is that moral statements or beliefs are not based on provable facts but are expressions of emotion. You and I might agree on the facts of a particular situation, i.e., euthanasia, but disagree on ‘feelings.’ No matter what facts someone might present on pain, brain death, measurable quality of life, living will, etc., someone else would still say, ‘I just feel it is wrong.’ Boo-Hurrah leaves no room for rational arguments, much like some American politics, because it is a dialogue based on the manipulation of emotions.”

Very interesting. This takes me back to my college days and the great excitement of a new subject, a new teacher, and a different point of view with which to examine the world about me (narrow, bored, Freshman-orientated, juvenile) from a perspective far different from the one I held at that time. What change, what disorientation, what psychic trauma. How disturbing in every way. It is a wonder we survived. Of course some did not. Universities don’t much care. Lots of individuals fall by the wayside, unnoticed, while those who excel go on, as through a series of funnels.

But Jennifer’s point is well taken. We argue and discussing things emotionally, not logically, not according to the facts of the situation. And hasn’t it always been so, only nobody admitted what was so obvious? It explains so much in way of human misunderstanding and disagreement. It is possible, for instance, to agree upon the so-called facts of a matter, but to have entirely different emotional attitudes on the subject. This may be why husband and wife, Norma and I, will harangue each other so, when we are in basic agreement: we have different emotional attitudes on the subject and are attempting to “persuade” each other of the correctness and superiority of our respective attitudes.

I am worse, more persistent, at this form of bullying, as might be expected. But I never knew why I did it. It is a form of intellectual contesting of the other person, that is, a form of debate. Facts do not matter, only the strength of one’s feeling.

At Cambridge Jennifer is met with some specific challenges. One is, can there be new virtues? Does a changing world call for new ones, or do the old ones—such as the Ten Commandments—just need reinterpretation?

Interesting again, perhaps because the world of ideas seems far away from me and my personal life, and the only contact I have with it is in my reading. But this is not the kind of stuff I ordinarily read, so I am grateful to Jennifer for bringing me in contact to ideas different from what I am used to encountering and not having to face.

It is that undergraduate unsettling experienced all over again, some fifty years later.

Dog-breeding is about as close as any of us get to applied genetics, and usually this is at second hand. I know it is in the case of me and my dogs. Dr. Tom Rodin, the vet, is in charge and I can see his ideas, his choices, in each of my dogs. Cate is much like her mother—svelte, affectionate, nervously alert, a licker. The father I’ve not seen, only in the mirror of his progeny, Biff. He is massive, slow to react, gentle, relatively calm. Now Tom’s bitch is pregnant again from a different sire. But the male is of the same time, assuredly. Our dogs’ father was—get this!--His Majesty of Mallard Lake, the bitch, Rodin’s Jennifer Sue. Such lineage! What bloodlines. We could have registered them for $8 each, but didn’t because Tom neutered them as part of our purchase price and there is no point if you aren’t going to breed them. Otherwise, it is just history, a part of their checkered past, and of no concern to anybody, not even us, their surrogate parents, who love them, some days deeply.

How different my dogs are physically; mentally, psychologically, they are much alike, starting in the womb but now heavily conditioned and environmental. I don’t think they know where one ends and the other begins.

Cate evidences some of the maternal instinct she will never get to work with directly; she cleans his muzzle, and whatever part of his anatomy she deems necessary. Animals, I understand, perform a lot of mutual grooming and monkeys are the best known example, even ridding each other and friends and acquaintances of tics and fleas with their prehensile front paws. And human mothers do a lot of physical fussing over their babies and young children. It seems a thoughtless activity but a very necessary one, and is often useful.

So one plays God when one breeds pets, even at second hand, that is, remotely. One accepts another’s genetic selection as one’s own. One defers, once again, to authority. So I will ever after maintain in my head an image of Biff and Cate’s sire, and see him in Biff, just as I can vision the bitch I have seen in her daughter, Cate. Since the one is so true, and close, I can only assume the other (Biff) is.

Yesterday I went bass fishing in earnest. I took the new casting rod and reel, armed with a new soft monfilament line that I had practiced successfully with, from the dock, down to the East end of the lake, where the canal is—it probably ought to be called a cove, a more attractive name—and cast my huge black lizard on its 3/0 weedless hook and weight toward what remains of the lily pads and to the edges of the green algal scum. It was interesting.

I am developing a touch of accuracy in my casting and had only one or two bad backlashes, which could have been avoided. They will happen—like excrement. When they do, you pick them out carefully, trying not to nick or damage the line, and spool it back on the reel firmly but not too tightly. It is important to put your thumb down, just as in some social situations one puts down one’s foot, at just the right moment in time. Often this is as short as a wink.

If not the spool keeps revolving but the line is not stopped and spins on the spool and creates what is unaffectionately called birdsnests. They are hopeless tangles that, if you pull on them, tighten into tight knots.

I am making too much of this. Most casts, there is no birdsnest—at worst only a few loose coils on the spool that can easily be backed off. Most times the cast goes out and stops where you intend it to, or pretty close. Then you tension the line, wait for the lure to sink to the bottom or just short of there, and begin your retrieve—which may be almost infinitely variable.

My lizard would attract strikes under certain conditions only. (Tomorrow it will be different, and I will have to relearn the right retrieves all over again, by trial and error, the usual method.) For instance, when the retrieve is topped in mid-retrieve and the lizard (or whatever) is allowed to sink, it must have a fluttering motion that is attractive, for a strike often follows. This is also true when retrieving a fly, weighted or not. Perhaps an undecided fish is following the lure, trying to make up its mind, or whatever, whether or not to strike, when all at once the fly or lure halts in its tracks and begins to sink down to another level, where maybe another fish will seize it, if the first does not. So the first. . . strikes, when it might not have, otherwise.

And then sometimes I got strikes in mid slow retrieve, bass (for it was they) that swim along with the lure and mouth it. Now they don’t really have lots of sharp teeth in their gum line, so what they (must) do is mastigate it, or swish it around in their mouths, prior to swallowing it. It must be a bass-thing to do. And so the fish follows with some of the fly or lure in its mouth being munched on, maintaining pretty nearly the same rate of speed as the fly or lure is being retrieved. The anger feels the weight and vibrations of the fish on the line, but not heavily enough to merit a strike back, or if he does give in and strike back there is no weight on the line and the fish, so to speak, goes away. It most likely won’t come back, not today.

Fishing this way, I experienced a number of strikes, some which stayed on the lure or weedless hook until the lure came to the surface, at which point the fish came off, but not before I saw it flash and sink back to the depths. They were small large-mouth bass, maybe nine to thirteen inches. And the hook was too large for them to mouth successfully.

Now I could go to a smaller hook and smaller plastic bait, I suppose, but I really don’t want to catch a bunch of small bass, and would subject myself to a hook pullout of a sizable bass, which I’ve had happen a couple of times already this year and proves a big disappointment. So, fishing big, I will only hook big bass, and the smaller ones will chew up my plastic baits but not get hooked. And those baits I will have to replace, from time to time. But they are not very expensive and will give me practice in hooking them up, which is fairly tricky and much like the distinct bevel cut with which one cuts up herring for salmon.

The tail of the plastic lizard and other assorted baits is soft and curled, and when the lure is retrieved through the water produces a tantalizing wiggle (or wriggle). There are also little feet, lizardlike, that vibrate and wriggle, too. So the whole things is most flexible and alive seeming. Some of my lizards are impregnated (sorry here, but I didn’t know this, when I bought them) with . . . scent. In other words, they stink in a manner that bass and panfish are thought to like. I don’t see how the smell can last for more than a few minutes fishing, after which the lure becomes like any other which costs less because it is not so treated. I mean, I’ve sniffed them when new, out of their mushy Ziplock bag, and—phew. I’ve fished them later, after use, and been unable to detect much smell—no smell other than the plastic, that is.

But I think yesterday the large number of bass I had strike was related to the scent contained in the lizard, which was new, fresh, since my earlier one had been hooked up improperly (beginner!) and torn to the point where it would not fish decently.

That number of fish hooked, however, was definitely encouraging and I shall be out again soon, perhaps using my electric motor to keep repositioning the boat and to zoom across the lake quicker than pulling on the heavy, noisy oars. Oars, says my mentor, Eric Balser, make noise and noise scares bass, who, for their size, are extremely susceptible to disturbance while they like fat and sassy, waiting for the occasional frog, lizard, crawdad, or duckling that gives them (much like the boa constrictor, or so I fashion, in my fertile mind’s eye) long-term sustenance.

Taxonomically the largemouth bass is Micropterus salmoides (Lacepede), according to my source, Wydosky and Whitney, yet again, whose description, a bit fatuously, begins, “As its common name implies, this bass has a large mouth. . . “ but goes on more interestingly to say that its maxillary extends beyond the center of the eye, “even in small specimens.” It adds that “small specimens have a distinct, dark lateral band.” This was noticeable two years ago in the multitudinous tiny bass that occupied the lake and kept hitting our flies and lures and bait before anything else could intercept them.

This bass is “tolerant” (wonderful word these fish biologists come up with to describe behavior) of warm water and shallow, weedy lakes, such as Ketchum. When the water warms to 80 degrees F., they stop feeding and become dormant, but at temperatures lower than this are sluggishly active. The lie under cover during the daylight hours but come out into open water and night to feed; this is why anglers like Eric Balser fish after nightfall, especially when the moon is full. They can see and the fish are active. Smaller fish tend to school and feed together, whereas older, bigger bass are solitary, lonely, standoffish, like old men. My authors say that largemouth bass (they spell it as one word and, for now, I shall as well) learn by conditioned response; you hook one and release it, and it remembers. It may be a long, long time before it is so foolish again.

This news is depressing, but then reports are Ketchum has a lot of bass in it of varying size and surely some of them have short memory lives. This I must believe, whether or not it is true.

But then a wag once defined faith as believing in something you know is untrue. The wag I heard quote this was author Paul Theroux.

I write books, books full of words, not short strings of words to run or wrap around pictures. If you buy a book of mine, be prepared to be plunged into a sea of words. Not many people today are mentally prepared for books that run on and on. They get spoon fed small meals of words—you might call them snacks. But I, I will bury you in words, though I do indeed like short sentences (sometimes) and short paragraphs and, in the essay form, short essays. You have to mix them up, however. The long with the short, the short with the very short. For if you don’t, you will lose that most fickle of subjects, the reader.

All this apropos of my efforts today to sell my new book by making visits to stores, much like a drummer of old. I actually carried a book or two in my grubby hand and (figuratively speaking) knocked on their front doors. Three flyfishing stores. I sold, or rather am envoicing, twelve books, one the middle book, one the fly-contained limited signed leather edition of C/C, all the others the paperback, with Loren’s fine drawing on the cover.

I was amazingly well received; all stores had in stock earlier books of mine, including Jimmy LeMert at Patrick’s, whom I had accused (rightly, I’m sure) of not carrying my stuff in the past. At Avid Angler, Kevin and I had a nice chat. He said he’d read my past two books and I believe him. (Not everybody reads the books that he buys.) And Allan Peterson at Swede’s had three copies of SW, which he asked me to sign, and I sold him four of the new book. Now, if I were to totally my time and profits, divide them out, I wouldn’t have made any money, not really. But this is the book business, and I learned through chatting with all three men the importance of buying through distributors. Distributors make life easy for stores that carry books and, I suppose by extension, other goods.

Jimmy and Kevin buy only from Anglers Book Supply, while Allan buys only from Adolph Rumpf because the higher his volume the larger his discount. My books from Rumpf cost several percentage points less than I can afford to sell them direct to such stores, and my discounting percentage requires buying larger numbers.

So I’ve learned how important the middle man is in book buying and how it may form an insurmountable hurdle to the small publisher who can’t afford to advertise in such expensive publications as Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, which are published by the same company. It may well prove that nobody can afford to publish books in small numbers and with a small advertising budget. But to publish in larger numbers practically guarantees being stuck with many thousands which will have to be remaindered at a big loss.

Most people look at remaindered books as a real bargain and wait until a book is dumped this way before buying. Of course the publisher and writer make nothing. The only consolation is that many more people will read you, when you make no money from the sales. Alas, alas.

The shape of my day? It is a thing to be sculpted, as though a piece of modeling clay. A Sunday, we begin with breakfast number one (as though this were a Denny’s special), namely, fried eggs and golden pancakes. Norma drinks coffee with hers, as though at a restaurant, but I, boyish, drink milk. This preceded by, of course, fresh frozen and mixed orange juice and a 1k mg. Vitamin C. tablet.

The Sunday paper has been retrieved on near-silent feet, but nonetheless the dogs have awakened in their kennel and follow me with their eyes. The walk is about 200 feet to the paper tube, 200 feet back, and they are waiting for me at the West kennel edge, muzzles pressed up against the steel diamond mesh. I give each nose a brush in passing, but try not to break strike or make of this a petting occasion.

I read the colorful inserts, plus Parade, Pacific, and the skinny two comic sections, one the Times, the other the P-I. She reads the white pages in an order known only to her. She interrupts my multicolored read to come over with the Scene section of the paper in which my book is listed under non-fiction Northwest authors. The blurb is short but accurate, listing me as a Snohomish County writer, when the book was written in their Seattle, but the rest about the North Fork is true enough. Also noted in this section is Steve Raymond’s’ flyfishing book, Rivers of My Heart, which I spontaneously have decided to ask them if they’d’ like a review [of]. He and I don’t get along infamously, but I could do a fair review, and should like to show him I can. It would mean a free book from Nick Lyons.

Then I do my morning ablutions and go to get the dogs. I crap them down at the streetend, at the edge of the wetland, and, returning, see that Bruce King, my next door neighbor plus one to the West, is fetching his morning paper, and I hail him and go down to talk about my dogs (namely, one, Biff) eating all the catfood he puts out for Anton and Carrie’s feral cat (and incidentally the army of raccoons who live nearby), and he tells me he already knows about it and is minimizing it. We chat about high school and high-school reunions, he being from the same school as I, but a couple of years earlier, and we find out we were also in fraternities at Washington that are next door to each other. We chat about jobs, families, and the time goes by; meanwhile the dogs disappear in tandem and, one time, come back soaking wet. They have been to the lake, unattended, and have taken a morning plunge. It must be a delightful thing to do, if you are a person or animal different from me. They go in and out of the water, every chance they get, these warm August days. It is Biff who goes in deepest and always takes a swim, short or long; Care just wets down to cool off.

Then it is back to the house to feed the dogs. I have to hold Biff back after a dish or two of kibble so that Cate will have half a chance of getting a full meal. This I do and he expects me to do, the porker. Then I resume reading the paper, having still the comics to wend my way through, plus the white sections, when Norma is done with them. She is, and I pick them up and set the VCR for Lolita, the new version, being broadcast tonight at six. To capture it on tape we will have to forgo the Mariners/Yankee baseball game, but, hey, that’s okay, we can’t help but lose and it has been pitiful of late watching the carnage take place.

She is off to the mall to buy me a pair of scandals to replace the ones Biff chewed the straps off of, my favorites. She has a host of other errands to attend to, including another big bag of dog kibble. It comes in 37.5 pound bags and costs not quite a dollar a pound. Beef and rice produces the best stool, and this makes our cleanup job easier.

It is back to the newspaper, surrounded literally by dogs, dogs fore and aft, and a leisurely read, while Rostopovich plays Bach on his cello. This is a nice contrast to Ma and Casals, which I also have and dote on. Just think, the temperaments of a Russsian, a Chinese, and a Spaniard. They are all playing a German. Talk about your one world. I mean, One World.

From there it proceeds in open format, today including reading a New Yorker almost entirely, water-retrieving the dogs, reading some more, taking the dogs for a walk in new plastic sandals Norma bought me to take the place of the old, vital ones the dogs chewed up. Last night I taped Air Force One, with Harrison Ford, and tonight the new Lolita, which promises to be a gem. And there is always writing to be done. See next entry.

Meanwhile, the lake is spangled with silver, boats sprinkling it, here and there, and there are the silly teenaged boys two lots down who describe themselves to Tracy as “the coolest teenagers in the world.” I responded, “It is uncool to deem yourself cool, and mutually exclusive,” or some pompous words to that effect. Canopied paddleboats bring to mind those Italian-inspired umbrellaed tables labeled Cinzanno, once the rage and pictures in ads, often imported for a trumped-up domestic occasion. Temperature in the low 80s, I’d guess.

All in all a very nice day, though a bit warm for this Northerner, who loves breezy cool days.

Open letter to a fan who wrote a warm, perceptive letter to me after reading C/C; she has, in fact, written to me after reading each of them, and is highly valued: Thank you so much for your kind and thoughtful letter about my new book. Writers may not know it at the time they are at work but their books are written expressly for those rare people like you, and word from them is, well, nourishing and sustaining. Without such messages we would no doubt quit the trade and turn to something else more rewarding, rewarding at least financially.

I also want to thank you for withholding negative comment on such things as typos, with which this book abounds. I’d like to think they are typos, rather than grammatical and usage mistakes that I don’t know better about. I can only say that I had worked over the Ms. So many times, and cut it more than in half, that I finally got to the point where I literally couldn’t see the words on the page any longer, and they all read blah-blah-blah to me. I turned the editing over to a nice young woman, an English major, with a one-year-old baby in close care, and she was very good at some things, such as extra word spaces that me and my word processor sometimes put in at sentence endings that are also line endings, and very bad at catching other things that when I read the book now, in snatches, leap out to my eye and are acutely embarrassing. No doubt a sharp reader such as yourself was jarred by them often. I have no good explanation other than what I just said; they are my fault.

However, the book design and layout, which I did, is okay, and the cover drawing Loren did from an old photo of mine is, I believe, first-rate. Set all the type right here, in MS Word and TT fonts. Saved myself $660 dollars doing that.

You have to be careful with the words of praise you use writing to a writer about his book, for he will memorize each and every one of them, then trot them out for assurance at odd moments of the day, or worse hit his critics over the head with them. Your choice of words “brave” and “endure” are probably wrong, but I shall cherish (and defend, if necessary) your use of them. It is good to know that one person believes the work was worth doing and may last, even if only in obscure, hard-to-find out-of-print edition by some future scholar.

The book, Janna, was written about 22 years ago and just wouldn’t go away. It hung around, I wrote many other things, and it lingered and asked to see print. Since I’ve worked as a staff writer, free-lance writer, production editor, publications editor, magazine editor, I think it was only natural that I try publishing for the trade. It has been interesting and I’ve learned a lot, some of it highly negative, but I’ve met some good people, and now see the book business as pretty tough and codified. The tie-in with distributors (who demand a very high discount) and bookstores is strong, and stores like Scott’s in Mt. Vernon buy almost exclusively through distributors, who do a lot of drudge work for them and make ordering, billing, and paying simple. People like simplicity and seek it.

It almost seems at this point that it is pointless to publish in small editions and to expect to break even. If you publish big, you have to have an advertising budget, and the money goes fast and is highly unaccountable. Nobody has ever proved that advertising actually produces sales, not even for Budweiser. Ads in Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly are expensive, and produce results; librarians are often lazy and order books recommended to them in the above publications, and do not read the books they order. They trust the recommendations of others, opinions that are often untrustworthy. And of the big publishers, such as Knopf, only ten percent of what they publish makes any real money, and it is this that carries the other books that lose money. And then advances are huge, in some instances, a very few, and they take away money that could be used for other things. Moreover it is extremely competitive.

C/C was published in a very small edition, 1240 copies, expressly so we wouldn’t get stuck with a lot of them. We won’t know until Christmas whether we will recoup our expenditure or how many copies of the book we will copies we will be stuck with. Your buying the book at full retail helps a lot, but then you know this.

I’m glad to hear which parts you liked especially; others might feel differently and like other parts, or else dislike the parts you did. I am confused only in one part of your letter as to what you mean by reading it in harmony with my writing of it but not having the patience. The book as presented is in the order I wrote it and it was a conscious choice to start near the summer solstice and end it one year later, not following the ordinary calendar, which is cliché. Or perhaps it is my fault, and in the preface I mentioned starting it when I was injured, but that was just before the book began, chronologically. I guess it doesn’t get mentioned until a bit later, and maybe that is confusing to the reader. It is probably my mistake. My intent was to know I injured myself but not to get to it until I brought it up. I forget how I did this, but when the book begins I am still limping around on the first of July and the injury preceded it by about a couple of weeks. I didn’t mention this until later because I was busy writing about what was going on around me. So it is my fault that the chronology is disturbed. If I hadn’t written the preface later, nobody would know and come across it in the order in which I wanted it known. But the preface—which I felt necessary to put a frame around the journal—is what puts the cart before the horse, so to speak, and is disturbing.

Anyway, regardless, the book is supposed to be read in the order presented, the structure coming through thematically; to be reordered by the reader and read any other way is, well, impossible, though the book can be jumped around in, out of order, and each of the essays read as thing unto itself. This is how I would advise somebody to reread it, if anybody ever does. It is how I reread it, but all I see is typos. And someday I just may start at the beginning. I may enjoy it, if I can overlook all the leaping mistakes.

P.S, About the book program at the library. If it is highly informal, I wouldn’t mind talking casually with people about the book, while I tied flies, or showed people with a spare vise how to tie along with me. The reason would be, not to be a nice guy, which I’m not especially, but to sell books. The library wouldn’t allow a stack of books to be sold for real money on its premises, would it? Norma outside on the sidewalk with a cardtable full, or out of the car trunk? I suppose I could send them to Scott’s.

The library never ordered a copy, by the way. The hardcover would be best for their purposes and would not fall apart upon second reading or require expensive rebinding.

Remember jumping jacks, and those chalk marks on the sidewalks? Whatever happened to them? Do little girls still play them? No sidewalks, here in the country.

My epitaph? (Not again?) He did the best he could, with his rather small talent.

I awake to the dog symphony. One dog or pair of dogs, perhaps across the lake at Jane’s, starts it, sounding like woodwinds, oboes at a great distance, and next door one of the mutts picks it up. Muted brass. The sound races around the lake, echoing, resounding, reverberating, with strange new voices added in, a veritable chorus of barks and howls.

Our dogs alert themselves to the music. They are old enough now, at eight-plus months, to be territorial and know how to play the game of barks and howls. First Cate, many moments later (for he is slow to awake and may be tucked inside the rebuilt commodious doghouse) Biff joins in his basso profundo. Deep, slow, sonorous it goes out.

Do I detect a pause in the other dogs’s musical voices as his solo instrument is added? He is allowed his short aria, then the others chime in and disappear to the East, as dogs known and unknown join in their two cents worth.

Awake to woodpecker rattling his gourd, crows exchanging raucous accusations. Before first light there is the honk-honk-honk of Canadas in flight, moving from one of the smaller ponds where they’ve overnighted to our relative open water, where they will spend the day suspended in mid-lake, as though afraid of what the shoreline might offer. It can only be barking dogs, half of which would fear the geese, the other half of which would stand in lock-kneed fascination until remembering the geese will flush, which is a lot of fun and an eternal challenge.

The men—two, that is—have come to install the fence posts today for the five-foot high cyclone extension, turning the whole treed front yard into a dog pen. Woe to the rhododendrons and azaleas. These hot late-summer days are coolest there on the North side of the house, under the towering Western red cedars and hemlocks, the breeze wafting in among them.

At this time of the year, early August, I always tell Norma that I can detect autumn in the air. Perhaps it is only that certain slant of light, but my skin quickens to a new coolness in the morning air. It will be gone by noon and summer will return with its usual vengeance.

Halfway through the baseball game, with the score tied with Boston, and dark near, the lake was so attractive that I quickly donned long pants, flannel shirt, and sweater, and took the boat out for a quick try for bass. As usual it proved disappointing, but at the start of the cove I got a couple of good hits as my lizard lay on the bottom, and one medium-sized bass followed it all the way in, swirling and missing (intentionally?) as it came to the surface, right by the boat.

For these few strikes do we neophyte bassers keep up our pursuit. The reward that hangs on the horizon like a new moon is a large-mouth of some substance—say, six pounds. It is like the dream of heaven, or some dim future salvation, but of course on a minor scale and in a minor key.

I gave my son a scanner for Christmas; it was at the top of his want list. Busy with computers at work, he doesn’t have time to use it to transfer his magazine and newspaper clippings into digital form, so he kindly brought it out to the lake for me to use in preparing the brochure for my book and for any incidental uses I may find. This was months ago.

I have been using it to scan some of my old black and white photos from over twenty years ago and perhaps store them in digital form . . . forever, or longer. But it has been tempting to print out some scanned pictures, first trying the laser printer, then the color DeskJet. The DeskJet was designed for just this sort of work and has excellent results—at least to my favored eye. So I sent off a sample page of three prints to my book printer in Rochester, Washington, and asked his opinion of whether they would be good enough for a line shot or direct plate making in the same manner that I supplied him with page proofs. His reply will be interesting.

Now I want to try to scan a color slide, that is, a transparency. They are only an inch by inch-and-a-half in size, and I can’t imagine the scanner capturing all the vital detail . . . but who knows? It may work. It will be interesting to see the results blown up, say, four or five times.

Yesterday much of the time across the noon hour was eaten up with telephone line problems, namely, I’ve gotten no incoming calls for about a week, only a dim ding on the phone and nobody on the end of it. After much time-wasteful testing by me, doing what repair service told me to do, over the phone (since I could call out), it was determined to send a repair man out to the house. Did I know it would cost $85 for the first hour, if the problem proved to be within my house? No, but what was I to do but authorize it, since we live by the telephone, and also the TV and satellite dish.

The problem proved to be in their switching network, for which they phoned me an automated thank you, the following day. Nothing colder and more bone-chilling than an disembodied voice thanking you for something that was their fault, and the apology—if that is what it was—was meaningless, since it came from nobody, at the stroke of a button.

I’ve lost some book orders, I am sure. There must be buyers who try once, then go on to something else, never to return. But a nice order came in from Castlegar, British Columbia, for three each of the limited signeds. Now I have to face the problem of shipping them over the border and the prospect of duty, though duty ought to be all on their end.

I will query them, once my Internet Service Provider connection gets reinstalled. Seems I lost it, when the telephone line was being worked on while I was connected to the Internet. So one problem causes another, and they compound into the short future.

Remember those calves that I said dotted the meadows with their mamas? Well, they are now nearly as big as the cows, and a boy has to look twice to tell them apart.

About a year ago John Evans told me an Irish joke. We were talking about somebody—maybe George Keough, long-time dead—and John asked, “You know about Irish Alzheimer’s, don’t you?” I said I didn’t. “It’s when you forget everything but the grudges.”

I laughed, thinking it pretty sly and funny. Yesterday, while fishing the Flats with a dry fly, ostensibly for steelhead but catching incidentally a fine, scrappy searun cutthroat, I neared John’s property, and thought of him and his joke again. There are Evanses, way back in my family. In fact I am as much Irish as anything. Four-fifths, you might say, commonly called a fifth. And it struck me that I am Irish enough to tell an Irish joke, but not Irish enough to tell it well.

From Castlegar, British Columbia, comes an order for three leather-bound copies of C/C, and also an order from Seattle’s Avid Angler, where I left one on consignment; now they want two more and to be invoiced for them with the usual trade discount, because customers have shown an interest in the one. It has not yet sold, I believe. So I have spent the morning, or a small part of it, tying flies (Skunks still, with a red/orange tail and a two-part wing, half white, half black over it) for the books, sewing them into cards as soon as the head cement is dry, and Norma has glued them into the books, which I then sign and number. About a third of the leather ones sold to date.

This afternoon we took the dogs to the Lime Plant public access on the Stilly and let a man throw a green softball-sized plastic object for them to retrieve, far out into the river. Strong wind and boys swinging on knotted ropes out over the big cutthroat pool, and falling in with a huge splash, so I didn’t fish. Also, it didn’t seem the right conditions for fishing. This morning was gray with clouds, and such a morning there would be no wind, no swimmers, and the hole is huge and wide, with plenty of room for searun cutts—to which my mind is turning rapidly.

A call late this afternoon from Irv Conner in Wenatchee, returning my call from a week earlier. He’s been fishing tarpon with Bill Marts in Mexico and hook half a dozen, landing two, both over 100 pounds. It is challenging and difficult and full of hardship. Recently I’ve read about it in Russell Chatham. It takes a guide, a long boat, a motor, and the ability to cast big feathered lures a long way, as the huge fish come surface-cruising into view and, hopefully, within casting distance.

Saul Bellow writes, “Democracy cannot thrive if leaders are unable to teach or to console. A certain amount of deception is inevitable, of course. So many of society’s institutions stand upon a foundation of fraud that you cannot expect a president to ‘tell all.’ Telling all is the function of intellectuals, supposedly.” He wrote this in 1983, having to do with FDR’s presidency, but it seems most appropriate today, when Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (who she?) are occupying the front page of the news, the TV bits and bites, and much conversation in coffee shops.

Bellow, a sophisticate man and possessing one of the best minds around for decades, is speaking jadedly about what we all know—in our hearts, so to speak. We ask our leaders to lead, not set moral examples, and history proves beyond a doubt that most of our leaders were venial men, if not worse. Our leaders have lied to us repeatedly, usually over serious matters, such as an attack on our ships or our soldiers in far-off lands, or supposed threats to our national security (whatever that is). And we have gone off into battle, in air or land, accordingly, in response. So to have a president lie to us about personal matters, such as his sex life, ought to be performed and received with mutual tongues in mutual cheeks.

Presently the President is denying he had sexual relations with a White House intern, at the time barely of legal age, but comely, assertive. There is a question in the air over just what constitutes sexual relations, and perhaps the President does not consider being on the receiving end of oral sex a genuine sexual encounter. Only intercourse is, in his opinion. What is the other? Well, some kind of innocent interlude, evidently.

Though most the women of this world would not agree, there are surely some who would, compounding matters. In fact, matters may come down once again to linguistics. What is war, what a police action? What are peace keepers, what are war mongers? Certainly a blow job, eagerly performed in the Oval Office (Oral Orifice?) is more than a handshake or hug exchanged between President and aide.

The above is just another Sign of The Times, a fixed point on the endless string that is Time and Destiny, but one that at present seems to occupy us all and on which we are placing an emphasis that time will prove excessive, inordinate.

A change in the weather, at last. Nights cool enough to keep the dogs in their dog house and us under blanket and bedspread through the early morning hours. Days that follow are not over eighty, though there is still the threat of more really hot weather to come. Clouds cross the sky, though there are peeks of blue sky between them and occasional washes of yellow sunlight.

The green algae on the lake extends to the bottom in many places, becoming brown and sinister, while the yellow/green clots on the surface drift whenever there is a breeze; they tend to stockpile at the East end of the lake and there are homeowners there, and hired men, who gather the stuff in with long-handled grass rakes and pile the heavy limp stuff on the edge of their beaches, which turns black/brown quickly and becomes dense where the sun dries it.

Don’t know whether it serves as a good source of fertilizer or not. The duckweed and Mexican water fern did, we know, and the lush flower and vegetable gardens our neighbors and us have are evidence. The algae, however, is ruining fishing, and even when the surface of the lake seems clear enough to cast into, a distance offshore, the hook brings back a long string of brown or green algae. You know when you’ve hooked it because of the new weight on your line and also because your lure stops wiggling the way it is supposed to.

When kept clear of algae, a bass or large crappie often follows the lure right to the surface alongside the boat. Otherwise fishing seems to be at a standstill. Yet people still arrive throughout the day with cartop boats, or pulling trailers, unload, fish desultorily for a short portion of the day, and depart. Rarely is it the same vehicle and boat a second time, though.

Norma found a store that sells fortune cookies—they are all packaged up in hard plastic and there must be two dozen inside. When questioned, er, interrogated, by me, she responded, “Well I like to eat them.” A good enough reason, I guess, and what one does when there is no Chinese restaurant near by. They are mostly sugar and flower, the package tells me, along with eggs, water, artificial flavoring, shortening, and something called Yellow No. 5. The name of the company is Regal; I should expect no less. The exact number of fortune cookies in the package is withheld, but not their combined weight, which is 10 ounces. The cost? One cent less than two dollars. A bargain, but only if you like fortune cookies.

A few days and as many fortune cookies later, Norma gives me her prize—the little slip of paper tucked inside and the chief reason why anybody bites into one, which is to retrieve the fortune notification, which must always be good. It takes a believer, believe me.

Her fortunes are (in random order, the same way nature operates): “You will soon receive compliments on your style,” which I am highly envious over. “Sing and rejoice, fortune is smiling on you.” (What I might expect, as of old.) “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.” (The influence of Confucius remains strong.) “It is better to have a hen tomorrow than and [stet] egg today.” Don’t know about that—have always been a little partial to eggs, fried or scrambled. Even boiled hard, which takes more than five minutes of a rolling boil—the only kind worth having.

Thought I’d pass these on to you, Dear Reader, in case you are in need or needy. Who doesn’t need a little more good fortune sprinkled into that person’s life?

The scanner that I have Garth for Christmas, at his request, and which he lent me unasked for, has proved most useful, and I have begun (inspired) scanning all my old flyfishing magazine articles onto my hard drive. It is easier, and faster, than I’d thought. It is a scan per page, and most articles are not much longer than four pages of closely set type, usually in three columns, which my scanner handles as easily as peeling a grape. No, fast as a slow wink.

Once scanned, I am asked to name a file on which to store in on my hard drive. I do it in Microsoft Word, though Word has not “recognized” the file as anything other than what it is, an OCR file, replete with errors. And it stores it in Word 2.0, which is unknown to me, and it initially asks me if I want to convert it into Word, edition not specified. I do, and so I click the button and it is saved a shade differently; when I call it up, or open it, all those unusual words which I live with and the spell checker does not recognize, no matter how many times I request it to, most politely, are underlined in wavy red, which means I am supposed to do something about it, for any word not recognized by Word is suspect. No, it is more than suspect; it is highly doubtful. I can then add it to the spell check’s supplementary vocabulary, or else tell spell checker to ignore it, or ignore it every time it pops up in the document. This I regularly have to do and do.

It is amazing to me how carefully a printed page of dense type can be scanned and how accurate the results are. With some articles, I hardly have to edit a word. In others, though, I have to do a lot of correcting and in one instance move text blocks around because of a sidebar that was run along the bottom of all my pages and the scanner intelligently read it as run-on text. I don’t blame it a bit, or the tiny problems it has with hyphenations and columns.

So far I’ve scanned about five articles, all in the proverbial wink. How many more are there to go? I don’t know precisely, but I have a thick stack of magazines—perhaps a foot or fifteen inches in height. Most are from Flyfishing magazine which I wrote for for about fifteen years, off and on. It seems I’ve written short biographies of most all the famous steelhead flyfishers from the generation that preceded me, or the truly pioneering one before that.

The idea is to archive the material, partly, but to put it all in one place where it can be manipulated. It can be store digitally on floppy disc, hard drive, ZIP (hold 100 megs of data), or writable CD-Rom. Whichever way it is infinitely editable. The idea has been lurking in the back of my head for sometime that I am not going to live forever and both my sample copies of magazines (some of them long-time dead) my get lost or will deteriorate (fox, become brittle, etc.) over time.

Also I might just like to publish the stuff in book form. Writers do. Why not I?

But I think each old article will need considerable polish, cutting, smoothing out, and a thoughtful preface written for each, placing it in context of why I wrote it and the conditions (some grim, some still unpaid for) under which I of my own consent decided to write it.

When I get the biographies done, I will move on to some book reviews, and then there are a handful of technical articles on lines, flies, wading, etc., that are of a different ilk but still important, at least to me, in my not so humble opinion of myself.

I already just after Christmas scanned three or four old novels I thought worth preserving in something other than their decaying Pica format and yellowing paper. The scanner was not so accurate, in their case, or rather the copy was so poor, the typing uneven, the inking variable, that the dear scanner had problems reading and reproducing it. But the scanner has come close enough to reading the novels that it will be easier to edit the poorly scanned text for spelling and other errors than to type it all again (sheesh!}, and the use of the spell checker is such a help.

I never realized how bad a speller I was before, until my word processing program began to offer me professional help. How much I needed it. And still do!

This morning, a sunny Saturday in August, arriveth at the public access about a gentleman’s ten o’clock two bright red all-terrain, multiple use vehicles. In tandem they unload their occupants and the devices with which they will fish the lake—float tubes. It is the black float-tube club, or whatever they call themselves, and look very professional. Each trots his down to the shore, already inflated, and they don waders and special paddles or fins which fit over their wading shoes. They wear vests and nifty caps—worn with a flair that only black men seem to have.

Rather than fish with flyrods, as I might have suspected of them, earlier in the year, when first sighted, a condition that might draw from me a filial response or premature bonding, I see them rig up ultra-light weight spinning outfits, equipped at their terminal end with bright floats and some largish object which must be a crappie jig.

Then the put out to sea, or namely lake, one, two, three, four; there are four of them. They began to fish in tandem, that is, closer than I would like to fish with someone who is not a beginner and in need of constant coaching and consolation. Also, they fish very near to shore—only a short lobbing cast to the edge of the pernicious green algae. The bobber tilt when the line is slacked, then tip forward as the retrieve is begun; often the bobber hops in response to the rodtip, which is what jig fishers do to make their fast-sinking lure or bait more attractive.

While I watch I do not see them hook any fish, but hours later I find some tiny dead perch that have evidently been caught-and-released. Unsuccessfully, I must add.

So they don’t keep and eat all the panfish they catch? I thought they were a black favorite.

My favorite local, livable painter was Richard Gilkey. Yesterday we went on a pilgrimage to where he lived, not far from here, on Fir Island, which is a body of flatland that often floods situated between the South and North Forks of the Skagit River. In this unusual instance the forks are not at the headwaters but near the mouth, denoting that there are two mouths, hence called forks, at least for the medium distance they run before emptying into Puget Sound. The land between is called an island, which is stretching the point in my book, since each is bridged by a highway and is not surrounded by water in the ordinary sense. They are only skirted by water, which is a long way from being surrounded by it, but this may be a technical point important to nobody but me. I have a grab bag of just such trivia that looms with undue significance in my mind and I shall, I fear, never get past.

I must back up. We decided to stash the dogs in their kennel and drive the twenty-some miles to LaConner, where the art museum is having a show of early Morris Graves paintings from his early years, namely the Thirties. Hence my favorite prints from the early Fifties must be deemed his middle period, or one of them, surely. The show was magnificent and contained many paintings we had never seen before, paintings from when he worked in oil and had not yet semi-permanently gone over to egg tempera or watercolor. Simply magnificent. He is my very favorite painter, even more so than Gilkey. But at a quarter million dollars a painting, who but Bill Gates can afford Graves? And Gilkey, so fine, was in partial eclipse in his last years and his paintings, alas, sold at a fraction as much. This is what made them affordable by folks like me. We are not poor, but neither are we rich by today’s standard.

The Graves paintings were wonderful and exciting. The docent, or whoever she was, was pleasant and informative, without being one of those know-it-alls that often work in museums, usually for free, for nobody would pay them for such opinionated nonsense and simply wrong facts. We left in bright sunlight and hopped in the Mustang convertible. The trip home by the straightest route took us across the South Fork bridge and onto Fir Island. It was where Gilkey had lived before illness had made him end his life only a year ago.

“Let’s see if we can find the place,” I asked Norma. She was agreeable. The helpful docent had told us in a little more detail than we’d had previously where the turn off was; it was at the sign marking a public access for hunters. The land was large and flat, the distances considerable, all of them in straight lines and marked by right-angled property line bisecting roads that led off for a mile or more. Way off in various directions a farmhouse could be seen, with attendant barn and outbuildings of various sizes. We took all the major roads, roads that were not labeled private in an unfriendly way and seeming to meant what their no trespassing signs proclaimed.

But none led to Gilkeyville, not that we could determine. Finally we took a road that led back to the South Fork dike, a road familiar to us from other investigative drives. We neared the end of the road and had not seen a single soul to ask for information. But right near the road’s end I spotted a farmer walking from his barn to his house and hailed him, rising up in the convertible’s seat in order to be hear. An airplane was flying by—one always is—and he could not hear me. He walked in our direction, his hand cupping his ear to signal me that the noise was too much.

“A very good painter, yes. We’re looking for the house he used to live in. It must be near here.” I ended the sentence with a rising note of question.

“Yes, you can almost see it from here. Come over this way.’ I backed up the car, using the rearvision mirrors, which makes for slow backing up, at least it does from me.

He pointed at a clutch of buildings nearly a mile away across a vast flat field, some of it barren, most of it growing root crops.

“It’s right behind there. If I remember right” and I had no doubt that he did “the number is 6221G. There’s a little dirt road, the other side of those poplars. Houses all strung out in a row. His is the last one.”

“We want to see where he lived and worked,” I said a bit lamely and apologetic, because the occasion seemed to demand an explanation that we were on more than a curious mission but more of a pilgrimage. But he didn’t seem to care either way.

We made the drive and saw, up ahead, a new beige Cadillac making a turn into the same drive that we were aiming for. We followed it in until it came to a gate by a house guarded by an old golden retriever, which is the same as not being guarded at all. The dog advanced at the occupants of the car, who were dismounting, and then at us, its body waggling, its tail, too.

I told the white bearded man who was the driver our mission. He said it was his, as well. I’m not sure whether he or his wife were relatives or he was simply an old friend of Gilkey. It may have been a combination of circumstances. Whatever, they were headed for the old Gilkey house, which had been sold to a relative, as a condition of the will, I suppose, and the goal of the man was to pin a note to the screen. By this time we had exchanged considerable information and felt as though we had known each other, since we each had a Seattle period during which we had known Gilkey, however slightly, and had exchanged other coded information that allowed us all to drop our guard, such as drinking as youths at the Blue Moon Tavern.

Together we inspected the grounds. A lot of recent history was contained in what we saw. For instance, around 1993 the Skagit had flooded badly, and being on the Flats in a low, exposed area, the water had poured into the basement where Gilkey had his studio, ruining many fine paintings. (Later he salvaged a few, or parts of a few.) The flooding motivated him to build a studio the following summer, a studio raised high on stilts to prevent future flooding from ever coming near his work.

The house itself, only a few yards away, had experienced many floods and only the basement ever got wet, though very wet indeed. It was a modest building, as we’d heard it was, but in good repair and with fresh paint on its siding and a good roof overhead. We could peer into the basement—the former studio—and see that it was empty. The new studio had its large windows boarded up. I could think of several good reasons why this was done. The old friend was named Jerry and said it still contained some very large paintings that were unsold at the time of his suicide. Jerry did not have a key. Good thing, too, for we would have been tempted to take a peek, and somehow that would have been morally wrong.

We returned to our respective vehicles and I led the way out. Jerry got out to close or lock the gate. It probably required a key. If we had not run into him at exactly the right moment we might not have had the gall to walk in past the closed and locked gate, and not have had the experience of seeing exactly where it was where Gilkey lived and worked.

I took in a 360 degree survey of the countryside, which was already familiar, for we drive nearby frequently. The beautiful knobby hills East of Conway, near Lakes Sixteen and McMurray, have been badly logged and in an effort to leave the uncut habitat areas and linkages currently deemed necessary by wildlife biologist for game birds and animals have left the knolls looking as though visited by the galloping mange. Many times of late I have thought it would be better, aesthetically more pleasing, to have logged them bald than to have left them this way.

In so many of Gilkey’s paintings these hills have been reproduced in shadowed tones, smoothly, beautifully. I don’t know if there is any comfort in knowing that Gilkey isn’t around to see daily the horrible desecration of the countryside he loved so and made famous to others who didn’t have the eyes or time or proximity to see it for themselves.

It will grow back, of course. But by then all the rest of us who remember will be dead, too.

When so many men that I know talk about retirement—this includes bosses, each in one of those familiar confidential asides—what they really mean is a long respite from demanding routines, routines not of their making or choosing, and the tyranny therein imposed. They picture idyllic idle days stretching off into tomato sunsets. Well, sometimes those days are like that, but mine are filled with demanding routines of my own choosing, and they have their own imperatives which, however, being of my own selection, are sweeter, though no less demanding. Perhaps they are even more so, since I have nobody else to blame them on.

At sixty-seven, I am not old. (You may disagree—it is still a free country, last time I looked, though we have long endured period of doubt.) Yet I keep telling myself that, next year, I will attempt no new long work, one that keeps me at it, day after day, or else oppressed by the fact that I have not made my daily contribution to my word hoard (as the Anglo-Saxons called it, when referring to their oral literature). I doubt whether I will succumb to this dictum, however, not because it isn’t attractive but because it reminds me too much of the dream of all those old confiding bosses—all of whom are retired now. I am tempted to track them down (Howard Miller, you hear me?) and ask them if retirement is as wonderful as they thought it would be.

A writer doesn’t retire, nor does he quit, I suspect. He keeps grinding away with his pencil, or today on his word processor, wearing out those cheap but efficient keyboards that send miraculous signals over their thin cable to computers whose innards are so special namely because they are so mysterious.

A computer and attendant word processor is capable of doing so much work in so short a period of time that to us old-timer writers it seems sometimes that we are cheating ourselves. To accomplish a volume of work without spending a lot of time and labor (i.e., sweat) seems to cheapen the results of work and the writing that flows (spell checked, formated, ready for the printer) from our pens, so to speak. I think writers that are under thirty-five, let us say, have no first-hand familiarity with such mundane tasks as repetitive typing of drafts, resorting to dictionaries for spelling and usage (I have a dictionary on my taskbar, activated by simple highlighting or selecting, and it nearly instantly gives me a full unabridged dictionary’s uses of the word, and all the related parts of speech), and making erasures and using white opaque to blot out mistakes that today would be labeled criminal.

I am presently scanned in most of my magazine articles from the nineties, but I see where they go back to 1980, though there are few then to comprise much volume. My first story for a careless SalmonTroutSteelheader magazine goes back to 1980, I see, and my short story in Esquire to June of the same year. Though starting five years earlier, publishing in The Argus, The Weekly (of Seattle), and View Northwest, 1980 is about the time I came of age professionally. I was fifty. Talk about your late bloomers.

A scanner is a wonderful tool, especially when coupled to an OCR (won’t define that because everybody alive in America today must know what it stands for, or else is illiterate and won’t be reading this, anyway) because it will try like the dickens to read and reproduce anything in print, no matter how badly it is printed. A lot of my early stuff was badly printed by marginal publications and now I must pay the price in bad scans that require mucho correction on the keyboard. I am fairly fast at that, having had lots of practice. I might, for instance, challenge a professional female keyboarding specialist to a race—not of speed typing but of implementing corrections of an editorial nature in badly scanned material in one of several word processors.

So I scan the articles in, a page at a time, letting the pages pile up until I reach the end of the article and then saving it to my hard disc with a distinctive name, so I can (hopefully) find it later and import it into a document. This might be The Collected Short Writings of R C A. In my mind I group them by category. All seem to be about the out-of-doors, mostly fishing, and of the fishing all of it being with the fly. The categories I find are: important people, the largest, and I seem to have pretty much covered the ground with locally famous steelhead flyfishers, the first generation of which I have known to some degree; one article on lines and techniques; a few articles on places, most of which got rewritten and appeared in my book, Steelhead Water; and quite a few on flies and flytying, including book reviews on important books on the creme de la creme, the Atlantic salmon fly. They will comprise a nice large section, all by themselves, and include articles published in The Salmon Flyer, Trout, and Frank Amato’s excellent short-lived quarterly, Steelhead Fly Fishing Journal, which lasted for six issues before becoming absorbed in a parallel quarterly called The Rivers Journal. I appeared in five of the six issues and all four of the first year’s publication. My batting average then is either 100% or 83%, depending on how you count.

It is good to know that all this old material still somehow exists in print and will become digitized into computer files, accessible if I ever decided to put it all together in a volume and publish it. For this to sell (says the new Arnold, now a publisher) there would have to be a resurgence in steelhead fishing, with improve runs in Canada, the Columbia system, and in dear old Puget Sound. Not to mention Oregon and Idaho.

It is not likely, so these small efforts of mine to gather in what is properly mine seems, right now, selfish and a form of wordy aggrandizement of interest at the moment only to me.

Lake sparkling blue-black, dotted with large collections of floating algae masses the color of unripe apples. As with the proverbial iceberg, some large percentage lives beneath the surface, deceptively luring boats to come close. At the end of everybody’s dock (it is not a collective dock, you understand, but a collection of docks that may be spoken of collectively because they all extend about the same distance into the lake from each of our shorelines and to about the same depth, seven feet, at the end of them, there is apparently clear water, but if you look down closely you will see brown algae drifting and some of it stuck to the bottom. It has no roots, so far as I know, but great density and weight, which ties it down—anchors it, actually. So what you see is not what you get, necessarily. Usually you get more algae than appears to be there, going by surface impressions. Which we all do in most things. In the case of floating algal clumps, it is not good practice.

Next year, when the lake association has its annual meeting, I think I will argue vehemently (as I always do, whatever the subject) in favor of not “treating” the lake, that is, poisoning it, not unless bottom testing reveals we can use copper, as in the past, for copper will kill the algae that abounds to take up the vast phosphorous overload in the lake when there are no weeds or plants to utilize it.

True, we have no weeds, no plants, no lovely nourishing water lilies, so the lake is—going by surface impressions—great for swimming, though excessively warm by now, but the algae is not worth the price. Fishers I’ve talked to, plus myself, would rather have dense living beds of duckweed and Mexican water fern, plus abundant lily pads, than this noxious algae, if that is the only choice open to us. The use of copper sulfate and Sonar would produce a clear lake, I am sure, but there will be a price to be paid, and it will be in biota and biomass, that is, fish production.

But this is a multi-purpose lake, and its fishing comes farther down of the list of priorities for most people, and not right at the top of mine. The aesthetics are important, too. And I’ve noticed we have fewer ducks now that the weed is gone—probably fewer spinyrays, as well.

The real test of ducks will be when the migration is underway this autumn. Will the flocks stop here, as in the past? I doubt it. There is nothing to attract them. In the past it used to be the widgeons and shovelers that age up the duckweed. It took them a while—weeks, with hundreds of ducks in attendance, working away diligently—but they managed, even while the weed was naturally dying out.

We have a new fence; actually it’s an extension of the old cyclone fence that imperfectly closed off the front, or road, side of the property. Now it extends to the front of the carport, thanks to a fencing crew from Economy Fencing. In spite of what their name implies, they are not cheap. It will cost in excess of $1800, but—if Robert Frost was right—our neighbors will benefit, as well as us. There is a gate between Anton and Carrie’s yard and ours; they now have one of those feisty terrier breeds that never get very big. Our dogs love to run into its yard and retrieve (after all, it is in their job description) assorted toys and edible chewing objects bought expressly for the little dog, whose name is Lucky. Only time will tell whether such a terrier brings good luck. It may be bad.

So now our dogs can bound forth in the morning, or at any time of the day, and not trespass on our good neighbors. The gate maintains that it is a friendly fence. On John and Tracy’s side the gate is different. It is of wood, painted to match the deck trim and, actually, a part of the deck fencing. It will open with a click latch.

But already the dogs have found a way through the fence. It took them, oh, about five seconds. It was most natural for them to slip between the vertical bars on the deck fencing and drop down to the gravel slope beneath, which would ostensibly free them to roam not only the lakeside of the property but give them quick access to our neighbors yards on both sides of us.

So we will have to come up with some kind of additional fencing, probably wood but chicken wire would do, ugly as it is, to close in the sides of the deck fencing. It should not be a major problem. Already I have alerted out handyman, namely, Norma, to the problem, so that her fertile mind can start working on a solution.

A fish from the Elbow last night, at eight P.M., on a sinktip and purple marabou, after fishing dry unsuccessfully for first steelhead, then cutthroat. Still lots of water in the river. The fish, a hatchery male of 28 inches, fought sluggishly, and was kept for Norma.

Young Headrick intercepted me on the way out. “You’re not going to give me a bad time, are you?” I asked. He said no. He inspected my fish. Then I exited the same way I came in—through Al Knudsen’s old property, where my car was parked at a pullout.

The river above the Elbow now permits easy crossing, which can be done by dropping down off the riprap. It is much faster, but involves some mild trespassing far down from where the nefarious Headricks live.

It is good, as of old, to take an Elbow steelhead around eight P.M., the way Wintle used to do so successfully, about this time of the year, August 10.

It is hard, or near impossible, to fish the lake now, except from a stationary position, because of the many algae islands. They drift slowly, driven by the prevailing breeze, and the people down at the East end of the lake, like Jack, are recipients of the major burden.

When Anton and his three-year-old, Keaton, try to troll, Anton is always putting down the oars, reeling in, and plucking the noxious stuff off the hook. And even when they still fish with jigs off his dock, the stuff comes trailing in on the retrieve of enough casts as to be discouraging.

Looking round the lake at any time of day, there is usually one landowner standing on his shore or dock, hauling in the algae with a grass rake.

There are those who say I should travel more—my wife, for instance—and journey outside our country, visit Europe. South America, Africa, etc., as she has done, when she was working. But (among other reasons) I should hate to miss more than a few minutes of life in my nook of America and what is happening here, there, everywhere. I know, I know: we live in One World, and communications are almost instantaneous and have been for decades. I have proved this to myself to my own satisfaction. But still. . . .

CNN is our major link, worldwide. So I should miss only what is deemed by professionals as non-essential. Ah, but that’s just it. What they agree to is not what I would choose, and choose I must, on my own. My minutiae is mine and is not interchangeable with somebody else’s—expressly because it is mine, of its own particular and subtle creation, differing from all others. I want to experience it directly and, if deemed worthy (even in its smallness) write about it. And sometimes write about it even if it is not worthy.

Word from Avid Angler is that they sold one black leather copy that was on consignment, prompting a confirmed order of two more, plus that one, and the second was sold before they arrived, making two. Now two isn’t many, but it is a lot for a shop manager who was suspicious of handling them in the first place, and now he is confirmed. Between now and Christmas there should be additional sales. We are scheduled for a tying/signing/selling session on Saturday, November 21, and I will furnish the books as publisher/author, taking sixty percent and the shop its forty. That should work out nicely, provided we sell some.

It is nice to know, also, that there are people out there who bought (and read) Steelhead Water and consider it good enough to pay $100 for a later book, signed, numbered, with a fly tied by me tipped in. Have sent but two off to Kaufmann’s Streamborne on Seattle’s prestigious Fourth Avenue, where the sales ought to be better, at least theoretically.

About a third of them sold now. If I sold them all, the leather-bound edition, I could just about pay off the publishing costs of the paperback and blue cloth edition. But that is a little too much to hope for, I think. Still, a very positive sign. Those who have read it tell me they find it enjoyable, and I may trick some fishers into reading a serious book, when they think it may be just another how-to-do-it.

Vanity Fair is such a trip—I use the word in the sense of the Sixties, meaning it takes you on a fantasy—land excursion. We haven’t subscribed to it in several years and, at my urging, sent in one of those cards that come in the mail, offering “substantial” savings over the regular subscription price. Which is true enough. At a dollar an issue it is a great buy. The first issue is 348 pages.

Of course much of it is advertising—fashion advertising, and therein lies the “trip” element. Such photography, what beautiful women (and men, if that is your choosing). What tonality, what color, what style! Much of the photography is quasi-pornographic. Another word for this would be, I suppose, sensual. But it is more erotic than that. It is openly sexual and promoting of the body cult that has for so long obsessed America and its people, myself included. A woman cannot be too slender—even if she is bulmanic in order to be wafer thin. But she must have good bones. If she does not have great bones, she is simply skinny and uninteresting. And she must be a master of makeup and posing.

There are those in the trade to assist her. They will not touch her with a camera unless they know ahead of time what they will see in print. And they saturation shoot their film, casting aside excellent photos for the perfect one. They know what they are doing and they bring pleasure to whomever turns the pages and luxuriates in what each full page layout offers them. It is considerable.

No wonder all of us have highly refined tastes in graphic images; we are bombarded by so many of them that they, singly and collectively, keep inching us higher up the aesthetic scale of photographic values.

Now the editorial material is another matter. It is subordinate. It is possible to leaf slowly, languidly, through the magazine and never read an article, merely look at the pictures that enhance and surround it, treating them almost as advertising copy. Yet the editorial content is high—by certain popular standards, the same ones that are showcased in People magazine, but nowhere near so sophisticatedly.

These are the grand people, the famous and near-famous, the titled, the movie stars and titans of industry. They are the leaders in lifestyle and fill our TV screens and popular magazines with their comings and goings, their affairs, their parties, their divorces. Yet the magazine achieves a literary veneer of excellence and prides itself in printing in advance of book publication long excerpts from novels, autobiographies, and popular non-fiction promoted by the large New York publishers. In fact, it seems a tryst and the interlocking ownership and directorship of the mass media indicates that it may well be the same hand promoting in TV, magazines, movies, and books a product from the same controlling industry.

One hand not only washes another but gives it a helping hand in always an upward advancing direction. This too is America, and done on a grand and handsome scale, such as in Vanity Fair, it is a delicious product and one hard to turn down.

The book excerpt in the current issue (September 1998) is “Salinger In Love,” and it is from Joyce Maynard’s book, At Home In The World, to be published in October by Picador USA. It details a love affair between reclusive writer S. J. (Jerry) Salinger, who was 53 at the time, and a young college student and budding writer who had just published an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life”—a rather hip and trendy title that fashionably implies that her full life is now over and not much will follow.

Salinger contacted her and they began first exchanging friendly letters, then phone calls, then meetings, and finally she moved in with him for about eight months, during which time they were unable to achieve penetration, as it is called. Finally, when she got a book contract and publication of it was imminent, he unceremoniously told her good-bye and kicker her out of his house. Now, about 27 years later, the mother of three, she has decided to go public about the affair, and there is no reason to doubt her veracity. The Salinger she writes about seems to be the same one we have wondered about, all these years, and is just as kooky as we have suspected.

He is, in short, odd and not very interesting. We are surrounded by eccentrics and believers in strange things in neighborhoods all over America. None of them write like Salinger wrote; what he has written since—in about forty years—we can old guess at. We are told, however, that he has written steadily. We do not know how well.

I remember reading his stories in the New Yorker and buying his books, as they came out. They were very fashionable—just the kind of thing Vanity Fair is after. How good they are is still debatable. There is no doubt that each generation finds him popular and readable, but it may be at a very early age, say, sixteen and younger. I remember a lot of lighting of cigarettes—something now we disdain doing.

We writers of short stories in college could get away, consequently, with having our pale, thin characters light up to a degree that can only be called distracting. We ourselves smoked, of course; we were veritable chimneys puffing into the night, hunched over our old-fashioned office-type typewriters.

Writing classes required ten thousand words for five quarter credits. Some of us ground them out in one or two nights that wore into morning, puffing away on our Chesterfields, fortified with a beverage of choice—beer or Scotch, in my case. Our product was careless, sloppy, and unedited. The least any of us got as a grade was a B. That meant “good,” though most of us were not. It was the average passing grade for an English major, even though the Gentleman’s C was proclaimed to be. The As were reserved for the really talented, and further divided up into minuses and pluses, which complicated matters additionally.

On our transcript the grade went down as a solid letter—A, B, or C—but in the department’s file the pluses and minuses added up (or subtracted from) our standing and scholarships, Freshman comp teaching jobs, and readerships. Readerships were usually consolation prizes for those who did not play the game well, as I did not, and did not get the greatly coveted and rewarding teaching jobs, complete with your own students, whom you judged ruthlessly and rewarded even more stringently than you in turn were rewarded, for we were all still taking graduate classes.

All these memories provoked by a Salinger article, after all these years, and a picture of him taken ten years ago, when he looked like the surly curmudgeon we all suspected him of being. He dealt with this young girl harshly—I’d say cavalierly, but it smacks of cavalierly, which is not my intention at all.

A grumpy old man who spends his time when not writing in his corklined room watching sitcoms on the tube and—highlight of the day—old Thin Man movies, and the like.

Gad, do we all age into carbon copies of ourselves, cartoon characters, ludicrous ghosts, japes of what we used to be? I hope not. Knowing of this likelihood, can we not all take pains to avoid such a fate? I think so.

I am grateful to Vanity Fair for bringing me what led to this insight, and also the information about Tom Wolfe’s new book. But nothing less than a bestseller in embryo form will interest them. Meanwhile I muse envious to some extent from my distance, and participate as much of America does to a world that is not interested in them other than as a buying public.

I think I like my obscurity and the prospect more of the same. To have a handful of readers—say, 2500 of them—know of my writing and value me is plenty enough. That and having enough money and good health to continue on my reclusive way.

A rabbit in the front yard, up by the road, hobbling away. Norma likes the idea of rabbits. “Yeah,” I say, “but just wait until they start nibbling your favorite plants.”

I stand at the head of the Elbow, casting out a wet fly on a sinktip, and afterwards standing dead still as the fly fishes through the slow run. How still am I? Well, a mature bald eagle flies up the river and comes within about thirty feet of me, unalarmed. Now, that’s pretty still.

Writers have countless dreads, one of which is being trapped somewhere, such as in a car, without pencil, pen, or paper. This can also happen in the dead of night, waking up out of a dream, or when some thought so brilliant it can’t wait for morning pops into your head and you dread losing it to a fractured memory. Consequently one strives always to have pencil (at least) and paper around. But one doesn’t always succeed.

I have developed a fondness for BIC ballpoint pens, namely, their “round stic medium USA.” They are cheap as pencils and hold a lot of ink, though like a lot of things they eventually go dry and leave you scratching like a hungry chicken at the dry page and leaving lots of embossed tracks but no words of memory.

The dogs also have developed a fondness for these slender black-and-white pens. They like to chew them up and partly eat them. If I put one down for a moment on the sofa where I like to read and nap, it is immediately gone. Sometimes they simply disappear—have they eaten the whole thing? Ugh. But often they turn up again—in shards, in sections, some of them white bits, others sections of the narrow transparent tube that holds the ink. The ink usually seems to have disappeared; I investigate the insides of each dog’s mouth for telltale signs but have never found any. You see, a black tongue would clearly indicate the culprit.

Last night I was called for dinner. I eat fast and afterwards usually have an ice cream cone with my dogs downstairs. In the short interval they had gotten one pen earlier, plus a pencil; now they got a second pen. Before I am faulted for not learning from recent experience, let me state that I did, over and over, and put the second pen up high on a table, and not on its very edge. Biff I think it was deftly rose on his hind legs and picked off the tabletop with his black lips. And then he began to devour it. Perhaps Cate shared in the feast.

There was ink on two of the sofa cushions, indicating that either a dog took the pen up there in order to feast in total degenerate comfort, or else committed its crime on the floor (where conspicuous ink was spilled in quantity in two close locations), got ink on some already black part of its anatomy, then climbed up on the sofa to rest after this strenuous ordeal and deposited said ink on the cushions. Either way I had a mess. I bawled them out in no uncertain tone or words, over and over, perhaps alarming my neighbors and confirming them in their suspicion that I am an ogre. Then I called for help, that is, Norma and some cleaning solution.

She had a tube of some mysterious stuff that she had bought through the mail because it sounded good. And it was. You squeeze it on the spots, after I had first blotted up as much ink as I could, in all those places, with Kleenex, and rub it in. You wait “no more than five minutes” before you brush it off. You can use water additionally. We did both, over and over. And—lo!—the ink came out! Nearly all of it.

The reason you don’t leave the past on longer is because it will bleach out whatever is underneath. Of course Norma tested the stuff on a bit of material from an inconspicuous spot and found it didn’t in itself stain. Afterwards some of the sofa cushions were wet from water, where the ink was the heaviest. This morning, however, the ink seems to be all gone, and there is very little bleaching. I think the good results where in part the result of the house’s previous owner having had the sofa Scotchguarded. It has made frequent cleanups successful, though there has been a gradual graying of the beige corded material.

Now if I could only develop an aversion therapy to cure the dogs of this new habit of eating ballpoint pens, I could keep my pens to myself and not get caught up, several times in the day, without one at hand.

My neighbor Anton says he has not seen the lake so clear in many years, and he has been here ten of them. I complain about the floating islands of green algae, and he says, “Yeah, but they are all close to shore. You get out in the lake a bit and it disappears.” He and his wife and kids go swimming daily, these hot days—yesterday 88 degrees in Seattle.

The lake is warm and . . . clear. He tells me to look to the bottom at the end of my dock and I will be able to see stones on the bottom. Sure enough, I can. But the light penetrates there and their is algal scum as well; it is brown under water and extends in vertical columns. He and his kids are fishing lead-headed vinyl jigs with floats and spinning tackle off his dock, new last year, the mirror to mine, and catching lots of spinyrays. I try it and on my second cast catch a nice crappie. Enthralled (again!) I determine to try it off mine. After all, these dogs have not seen fish caught in any numbers and surely not here, off the dock.

There are two problems associated with this. The first is getting fish to hit off my dock. The second is to keep the dogs from leaping into the water from the dock each time I cast. Which is what they like to do. Of course it ruins the fishing.

So, with a borrowed jig on my flyline and the dogs tethered, I make a few casts and soon hook a medium-sized fish of beautiful coloring. I call across to Anton, “Hey, what is the spinyray with the bright red dots on its gillcovers and gold on its belly?”

Of course. I’d forgotten, though I’d caught my last only a month ago, clear across the lake.

The fish is so beautiful I want Norma to see it. Usually whenever she gets to see a fish it has been dead for an hour and all its lovely colors are badly faded. A fish right out of the lake, alive, is sparkling, vibrant.

So I let the fish continue swimming on the end of the flyline and set the rod down on the dock; it’s safe, so long as the dogs are on their cable chains. I run to the house, calling for my wife. No answer. Finally I find her at the furthest extension of the property—by the front gate, gardening or fixing something.

We walk the 300 feet to the dock and I haul in the fish, which has somewhat recovered and is full of wriggles. It sparkles in the late afternoon sunlight. She agrees, it is indeed beautiful.

We marvel a moment, then I slip the hook free of the jaw, remembering to hold the fish by its lower lip as I work the point out. Then I dip and lower the fish gently to the water’s edge and let it swim free. Quickly it dives out of sight.

I fish on for a few moments, alone, the dogs regarding me from their tethers. I catch two crappie, one of medium-good size, before I lose Anton’s gift jig on a too vicious strike and must retire, since I am without a suitable lure and, besides, it is time to swim the dogs for the second time, this hot day, and to have a dinner of hot dogs and beans.

Anton’s wife, Carrie, is master at the yard sale. She has one each year and plans it out most carefully. Last year we were invited to add things to theirs and sold a lot of junk we no longer had any use for; this year the sale is solely children’s toys, most of them plastic and large. So this morning, starting at noon, she opened her gates and droves of bargain seekers appeared. Oddly, about half of them were older people—probably grandparents in search of toys or gifts. Now, I wouldn’t have thought it.

Now people come and go, all day long. Often they park their cars across our front entrance, now gated, and this produces havoc when one of us has to go out or, as was just the case, when Norma comes back from the grocery store.

“What nerve,” she exclaims, having waited for one of the parked cars to complete its mission and leave.

Partly my fault, I had waited, seeing the parked cars across the entrance, but not wanting to vent my ire until Norma was there, waiting, in the red Mustang convertible, to get back in. Then, so hungry waiting for lunch, I snuck in the house to make myself a sandwich, just before she arrived. But perhaps it was a good thing I wasn’t there, or I would have chewed out the owners of the cars over the new fence.

It is the kind of thing I can’t prevent myself from doing. Norma, much more moderate than I, simply dismisses them with, “What nerve!”

Later she said, after mulling it over for half a day, “Maybe they thought the closed gate meant nobody was at home and to park there would be okay.” I had been thinking much the same thing myself. The problem was partly of our creating, then.

Thinkers have systematically divided ideas and their situations into two camps, only two, and often “armed,” a thing and its opposite. Well, yesterday I found there were but two groups standing in front of Queen Anne High School in order to have their pictures taken as a group to commemorate our fiftieth year since graduation. They were those with name tags—a handsome gold-on-cocoa badge, with names print large and conspicuous—and those like myself without them. I promptly wanted one and set about to acquire one, but was told by an elderly woman who was evidently in charge of greeting people, a natural-born greeter, that there weren’t any. Immediately my paranoia came to the fore, but again it was wrong in doing so.

“The name tags are from last night,” she murmured. ”Weren’t you at the banquet?” Her look told me it was clear to her that I was not. I agreed.

Everybody at the banquet—$48 a plate at Shilshoe Marina, followed by live music and dancing—got a name tag and clung to it for dear life. It is how we tell the players from, well, the employees. Without a name tag, you remain anonymous, as I was now and remained being. It made people give me a querulous look, and to turn it off I had to practically shout my name. This produced further blankness. It was not a happy situation, nor I a happy camper.

I strode into the area, proclaiming, “This can’t be the right place. Everybody here is old.” It did not occur to me until a moment afterwards that many of the returning class did not consider themselves old and, in fact, this was the first time anybody had pointed it out to them.

Then I asked loudly, “What have they done to the Grizzly Inn?” It was directly across the street from where we were assembling ourselves and was now gone, replaced by (of all things) another school, this one designed for quite small people, judging from the size of the implements on the playground.

I saw a sign there on the cyclone fencing that said something I found hard to read, for I need new distance glasses, and have been putting off the exam. I thought it said, “No drugs allowed on playground,” which seemed to me a sensible idea, since they could just as easily be bought within the confines of the school, or out in front.” I asked the woman who had intercepted me if this was not a good idea, and she replied with a weary air, “It says “No dogs allowed on playground.”

No you don’t, she probably thought. Drugs aren’t even mentioned. The sign does not address drugs. Drugs have nothing to do with the situation

And I thought, in response, It is people like you with your look-aside attitude that make the drug culture what it is today.

A man was standing alongside this woman, whose name tag proclaimed some innocuous three-part name (Mary Carson Johnson, for instance, though this was not it) that I did not recognize from the old days. I think he had said his name, or she had, but I was too busy talking to hear it, and I am a mite hard of hearing, anyway. He or she now repeated it. It starts with a G and was familiar to me. His first name was Art.

“No?” I said, disbelieving. The Art G. I remembered was a young man, with black-black hair. This doddering man had gray or white hair, cleverly hidden for the most part beneath a peaked cap, across the front of which, in faded khaki was minimally stated, “W. R. Winston Rod Company.” It was a name familiar to me.

“Art?” I asked, again eagerly (for everything about me this day, this afternoon, was eager, “are you a flyfisherman?”

His response was not what I expected. He neither affirmed nor denied that he was. I was prepared for everything but ambiguity. But by now I was full of ancient emotion—in fact, I was practically choking on it.

“Art, I remember how your father took us trout fishing and we camped overnight at Lake Sixteen. Remember? And the Boy Scouts? Beaver Patrol?” I held up three fingers, tightly bunched together, in case he forgot the common sign by which we recognize and greet each other.

But Art was already in the process of disengaging. Had I somehow offended him with common memories from the past? He doffed his Winston cap, showing me his thick wad of whitish-gray hair proudly, and smiled; either his teeth remained entirely his own or else some expert had given him a false set that for some big money would fool the world.

Art was busy backing up. He was not tall to begin with and stocky; he was guard on our football team and all-city. Once, in a game of boy’s club football, I had caught a pass and ran down the sideline as fast as my little long legs would carry me. Art hit me with a body block, very professional, and I lay on the turf for a long time, trying to remember who I was and what I was doing, lying there. It was a clean, vicious hit, the kind that thrills only the people giving it and those watching it.

As he moved away, toward greener pastures (I presumed) Art seemed to hunch smaller, shorter, and I saw in profile his considerable nose. This I didn’t remember. G., I thought; the name was vaguely European, perhaps a Russian derivative or one made American through some modification. I thought, Why Art is a Jew. I never knew that. For he had aged in a certain way and his face had developed a set, all of ours had, and it was distinctive. He looked a little like Andre Previn or a middle-aged Saul Bellow. But he still looked good and oddly handsome.

He—G.—was doing something with his hands, as he backed away. What was it? He was sort of wringing them. No, that wasn’t it. It was as though his hands and forearms were circling each other in an Oriental motion, he grinning with those fine white teeth of his, but insincerely, much like an obnoxious waiter might, no, an obsequious one, one trying to look overly sincere but overdoing the act. But his arms and hands weren’t really revolving around each other in a conspicuous motion, almost like the great wheel of a steamship reversing itself as it come to the landing dock; it just seemed as though he were, in a parody of that action.

Quickly we assembled for the group picture. There was a decent number of us, but not all that many. I whispered to the man and woman in front of me, whose name tags sparked no bells, that I supposed that everybody who wasn’t there was dead.

“It was printed in the Kuay News.” It was, I recognized the newsletter of the alumni association, a group I was certain had never advanced past dubious high school accomplishments and still lived arrested in that age, fifty years ago, when everybody was simple and straightforward. Which of course none of us were, nor that time. We were full of duplicity and deceit. Still were.

Most of the cameras were mounted on tripods and the cameras had self timers. Usually these are for ten seconds, but some of them evidently were set longer, for their operators wandered around idly and took their sweet time in joining the group to be in the picture. But others sprinted for the crowd, which occupied at least three wide stairs of considerable length, placing themselves near friends or wherever they thought they might most stand pout.

I was way down on one end in the middle row, almost an outsider. I hunched familiarly closer, striving to be a part of the crowd. The plan was for us to adjourn to what used to be the Queen Anne Movie Theater and, more lately, a bowling alley, then a restaurant that serves beer and burgers. My kind of place, normally, I decided then and there not to participate further.

High school had not been a pleasant experience, not in my book, and my life only got better as more time passed and I was able to put some distance between myself and the institution and its people. Now we were all being artificially brought back together for a purpose, one of fond remembrance and bonhomie.

If it hadn’t existed then, except in illusion, how could it exist now? It couldn’t be recreated. It would have to be formed anew, for the first time. But looking at this colony of old folks I realized that there had been some bonding last night, at the dinner dance, and old times had been resurrected once again for some of them, and they clung to the memory (if only last night’s) desperately, consoling each other, encouraging each other.

I looked for more familiar names and faces but could find not a one. E. and his wife, whom I used to date (a euphemism, to be sure) even while they were engaged, was not present; I’d recognize him, to be sure. There would be no reason for her to be there. I looked for Barbro Carlson, a blond beauty I dated once or twice but made no further headroads into, but she was not there, and clearly was not included in those women who, like me, did not sport a name tag. Nor Diane, nor any of the other babes, unless they were cleverly disguised as old ladies for some masquerade ball that was being held later in the day. One I had not been invited to and had no regrets over.

Sign of the Times (what, another?): Methinkest, every man in America is envious of Clinton’s relationship with the pneumatic Ms. Lewinsky. (He just publicly admitted to indiscretions involving her.)

Every steelheader today is some kind of lawyer. He has to be, the regulations are so complex, political, and changing. For instance, the Wenatchee is open to “trout” fishing through the end of August, then closes to steelhead fishing to protect so-called endangered races in the upper Columbia. But the Wenatchee’s runs are strong and healthy, at least they are in my opinion.

And what are steelhead, anyway, but big, sea-going rainbow trout. So I went fishing on Monday and caught one of about five pounds, fishing obviously for them with a long Spey rod and in heavy water with large flies. Nobody else was on the river except some floattubers. Now, technically I could have kept the fish, for it was of hatchery origin and longer than fourteen inches. But of course I didn’t. It was a steelhead and soon the steelhead closure will be in effect. I was pretty lucky, catching a steelhead so early in the season, and not many fishers know there are a few this early; one year I caught one on July 21. And other years I’ve taken them in August, weather permitting. This means it has to become cool enough so we Westsiders can tolerate the heat. It had been running over 100 degrees F. for weeks. Suddenly it dropped to the mid-70s and low 80s, and I drove over.

My fish weighed only about five pounds, perhaps less, but it had the telltale clipped adipose designating a hatchery fish. It fought well, but did not have the weigh to break a leader or rip a lot of line off the reel, and I fought it out midstream at the top of Merlin’s pool, and twisted the hook free and released it in streamy water. It was a pretty fish, with full rainbow coloring. It might have passed itself off as a rainbow trout to anybody who did not know better.

I caught the fish on about my tenth casts. I fished the pool through twice thoroughly and went to the Turkey Shoot. Water high and clear. Nothing. The next day, after overnighting in the Village Inn and sleeping under the airconditioner all night, I fished the same pools again, not landing anything, though I had a couple of hits on my fly and, once, hooked something very heavy that felt like a fish but was unmovable and finally pulled free. I will never know what it was, but heavy.

To fish Merlin’s Pool is a delight, always. It is the finest pool I’ve fished and is exciting, especially in its fast, bouldery stop water, when the water is high. A fish might lie anywhere. In such water it is apt to take immediately. And has, in the fifteen-year past. So I am always filled with joy and a slight trepidation.

I may go back. They were picking Bartletts. Larry has a new pup—a 10-week old yellow Lab female named Abby. And there are many attractions. The motel (The Village Inn, run by a Korean couple) gave me, upon request, a commercial rate. Only $40 dollars, plus tax.

I am fully entitled to it. After all, I am president of Kingfisher Press. And I was traveling on business, albeit monkey business.

Barnes and Noble in University Village has ordered 15 copies of C/C; they said on the phone, after much tracking them down, it was 20 copies, but, hey, I won’t quarrel with such numbers. We’ve talked about a promotion this fall and I will stop by and sign them in a week or so, alerting their Pam Lee first.

Checking with the distributor, Partners/West, it turns out B&N has ordered about one copy for each of their stores in Washington and Oregon. It might be worse. I understand their reasoning: if they don’t have one on hand, how can they try to sell the book? And if they manage to sell that one, they may reorder. They can always clear out the unsold single copy and take not much of a loss—it is probably easier and cheaper for them than to return it to the distributor.

Oh, the order from Amazon.com Books last night on the email, saying they had customer orders on hand, turned out to be . . . ready for this? A single copy, discounted at 43%. It is hardly worth the effort of invoicing and shipping it off to them. Oh, well, that is life.

Anglers Book Supply in Eugene has no orders, evidently, to date, but then their catalog is not out. I talked with Mark Koenig there about a promo and I am going to come up with an insert to his invoicing of fishing tackle stores. Black and white, with a picture of the book and probably some steelhead quotes from it.

I’ve contacted some of his stores with my flyer and had practically no response. We’ll see if this does any better, once his catalog come out.

Oh, I talked to B&N University Village store about a promotion—perhaps myself tying flies and talking about the book and flyfishing. If at ease, which I’m usually not, I might even pick it up and read from it, though any prolonged reading would terrify me and put me off from attempting it. Old graduate-school seminar paper trauma again. . . .

More on this high-school reunion event just past. Somewhere in the voluminous writings of that sage, Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.), he wrote about us all being “formed” in high school, and spending the rest of our lives trying to get over it. I never got over it, the remark seemed so pungent and telling. A lot of time has gone by, and perhaps my faulty memory has not got it just right; if so, so be it. It is how I remember it that counts, at least here.

We are formed in that cruel crucible of high school—ground up with the pestle of conformity and social pressure to be something we are not. The values perpetrated by the American high school are awful and demanding, and those caught in the crucible and ground to powder. Many do not escape without permanent psychic damage. We spend the rest of our lives trying to forge new values and learn ways to live with them, instead of the old socially-prescribed ones. Often we are not successful.

Thus when you return to your fiftieth reunion, you are hopefully a different person. If you are different enough, you won’t return; you won’t want to be reminded of what you once were. If you have transcended the awful experience and forged in your personal smithy values that are very different from those you learned, you will not be popular, but then it is the unpopular ones who go on to do something different—something unique or halfway creative. Those who retained the high-school values are apt to have existed for the past fifty years in a mediocre way and accomplished nothing of value.

They are the earth’s ordinary. They exist in each other’s opinions of themselves and measure success in grandchildren (highly vicarious, that), cars they drive, houses they live in, titles at jobs now long past being held, and outward signs of how much money they have in the bank. They who shout the loudest are likely to be the ones who are less successful, the most pretentious. Which in a familiar way harkens back to high school, and the system of values a few of us rejected because they—even then—seemed so pretentious and without substance.

Of course everybody is some kind of failure, myself included. But none of us really wants to seem himself through such naked eyes.

. . . evidently Arthur G. did not flyfish, or if he did, did not want to talk about it, for some intensely personal reason. I wondered what that might be. Or else—today—people sport caps and T-shirts bearing logos that have nothing to do with their personal preferences or proclivities. Such things are mere ornamentation, without meaning. Perhaps this was the case. Art might have liked the cap because of its color (sun-faded beige, very fashionable and outdoorsy) or its fit. Like high school itself, it reflected the kind of man he wanted to be, to be identified with, rather what he was. Thus we strive to become something better or more transcendent than we are, and in the process and through trying sometimes achieve it.

But often it is a shoddy thing, nothing worth becoming. I mean, Winston rods, if you aren’t a proficient fly fisher or caster? I guess it is no worse than wanting to emulate Michael Jordan and wear his number on a Chicago NBA jersey. But shouldn’t this sort of thing stop at about age fourteen?

Once again it signals the prevalence of high-school values long past the time when they are fashionable and forgivable. I mean, we are grown men and women.

Today we lament the passing of J. Burton Lauckhart. Who he? Well, I’ll quote from his obit by Carole Beers, who sounds like she had one too many.

“J. Burton Lauckhart, who directed game management for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for three decades will be buried Tuesday with an open-winged mallard he stuffed himself.”

Who says obit writers aren’t entitled to a bit of self-indulgence, after so much dreariness and gloom? I’d have had trouble passing this one up, myself.

Talk about your stillness. Standing on my dock last night, flycasting to the crappies, a muskrat swam right up to my feet and ducked under the planking. I saw him clearly—it is unclear whether he saw me. I’d like to think not. Little pointy rat ears and bewhiskered muzzle; long wet sleek glistening body. Then gone. A few minutes later, between casts, the line lying limp on the water, a second muskrat appeared. Did the same thing, essentially.

Now, I’ve known for some time that they have tunneled nests in my Styrofoam floats. I don’t know how many reside there, but I’ll bet it’s plenty. When Neighbor Anton tore down his old dock, he found a complex and interesting network beneath there, with much of the foam missing. I’ve seen shards of mine floating in the lake.

I must be host to many muskrats. That is a nice way of looking at it, since I am powerless to get rid of them. Why not call them . . . mine?

Biff is the hunter, the fisher. Cate couldn’t care less. I’ve spotted this characteristic long ago, but not been confirmed in my surmise until only recently, especially today. When I was casting from the dock, Biff showed a special interest in what was going out there, under water. His intentness is what signaled the possibility. I’d have to tell him to sit, which he does willingly enough; then he would watch the flyline, knowing it was the key to what happened next. I was using a float indicator in the form of a Corkie bobber and— I’ll swear—he would watch it move and bob when a crappie was pulling on the fly or jig.

When I hooked a fish, I’d bring it flopping across the surface, fast as I could. He would continue to sit, eyes riveted. First time, we had a big problem. I couldn’t bring in the fish fast enough and, when it neared the dock, Biff dove on top of it. I swung the fish in around his hulk and caught it in my hand, ready to release it. Biff watched from the water. I had to order him to swim around to shore and run out on the dock again, which he did readily enough, quickly enough. Then I stationed him, sitting, by my side and began over again.

There was quite a wait, it being a slow evening. Just as he was losing patience, there in the dusk, I got a strong strike. It was a bluegill—which is a strong, hard-fighting fish. As I wrestled it near shore, marveling at its deep dark color and the spot of iridescent blue on its gillcover, Biff dove again. I tried to swing the fish in over the edge of the dock but it was a heavy fish, lightly hooked, and the hook pulled free, the fish swimming off. It was the best thing that could have happened, for the fish. And there again was Biff, looking up at me from the water, way below the dock.

It was nearly dark and late for the dogs to be up. And wet, too. Norma was concerned about them going to bed so wet.

“They’re Labs,” I told her. “Wet is their natural condition. Don’t worry about them. Besides, it’s a warm evening.”

And now I have myself a fishing companion. If only I can keep him from diving off the dock and into the water at the sight of the fish, in close.

Oh, yes–earlier in the day Biff spotted Cate swimming along the edge of the dock. He was on the dock, with me. He watched her closely. Then, when she was close, he dropped exactly and precisely on top of her. His ninety-some pounds took her completely under.

A moment later they were both wrestling in the shallows, growling and chewing on each other’s necks.

I guess the young of all the mammals sport around and pretend fight with each other, much as our dogs do. I saw grizzly bears feeding on salmon in Alaska in a movie, and this I what they did, behaving much like our dogs. In fact, the manner of chewing on each other’s necks, and mouths, seems to be identical in bears, lions, and dogs. It serves as practice for the time they will get out in the world and have to survive. But dogs don’t have to fight to survive; they are entirely domesticated. So it is a throwback to much earlier times, besides being evident fun in itself.

Across the lake is a house previously owned by an ex-Marine who flew his battalion battle flag in his drive way and an old weathered American flag from the mast in his lakeside yard. I used it to determine the wind direction and its approximate speed. Well, he finally sold the house, after about two years of trying, and it was bought by a man named Crane (“like the bird,” he told me, when I met him, out in my boat) from Lynnwood. It turns out he is a friend of a man who was looking at our river property and seemed fairly interested. He knew much about Lake Ketchum, as it turned out.

The house is lit, year-round, by dozens of tiny white bulbs that must be triggered by a light-sensor, for they appear at dusk and are gone by morning light. It is all very pretty, especially in snow and when there is fog out on the lake. The lights operate independently of who owns the house and for quite a while the ex-Marine lived in Eastern Washington; the lights went off and on without him. Seemingly they had a life of their own. It gave the house an odd personality. It seemed to announce its presence as though through one of those speaking cones. The house stood out from all the others circling the lake and seemed to greet you.

I never saw the lights come on, which it did long before twilight; suddenly there they were, dotting the dark shape of the house, which was surrounded by nearly black cedars. The house was not exactly dark, as I’ve stated; much of it was painted white, but so much woodwork was stained dark brown, and then there were the double staircases leading up its front, that color, too, that the overall effect was somber and staid. I was surprised to learn when it went on the market that it had only two bedrooms. But the flier pointed out that it had a second great room (besides the living room) that could be turned into something splendid. I wondered what this might be. It offered unending food for thought.

Mr. Crane—he has a first name, and he told me this, but it fled my mind at once, and he remains, somewhat mysteriously the man named after a bird, as he pointed out to me, as a sure means of my fixing in memory his name—is retired and comes up to the lake irregularly but often. He has married children and those children have children, which means the place is literally crawling with children. He keeps his lawn cropped close and rakes his beach of the noxious green algae frequently, though the children swim in it so often (as do my dogs: this is how I know this) that the action pushes the algae away from shore and it drifts away, usually to the East.

Do his grandchildren, like my dogs, come ashore bearing patches of green on their bodies? I suspect so. The algae clings; it drapes itself across everything it touches and tends to stay there. Thus it is transported out of the water and onto land. I am always picking the stuff off my wet dogs.

Norma’s tomatoes have blackspot disease and we will be lucky to get a few to ripen, while Tracy and John’s tomatoes grew in a hothouse environment, for he built them a special wood and smoked plastic enclosure, in which they prospered. Both started out with store-bought plants. Ours had a tower to climb, a tower topped off with a black enameled Labrador retriever weather vain to tell the wind’s direction with a large arrow.

John gave me three small red tomatoes and we have eaten them. They were delicious. We gave them, in turn, a huge zucchini—which had been lying around in a wire basket for, I guess, a couple of weeks. Norma said it had been stored too long and might not be good, so I told John this and he shrugged as though to say, You can’t hurt a good zucchini. I’m not so sure. Later Tracy told me that there are lots of things you can do with green tomatoes, such as make salsa. I didn’t tell her we don’t use salsa, for it seemed to be impolite. She also told me that (old) zucchinis can be used for making bread. Seems to me Bonnie, over in Cashmere, did this with some of the ones we brought over for her, at her urging, to pay her and Larry back for all the pears they give us, each year.

Tracy seems most friend and, perhaps, regrets her harsh words to me, months ago. She was, after all, under a lot of pressure, what with an advanced pregnancy, a trying two-year-old, and little adult companionship. So, ostensibly, we are all friends again. But not quite so close, so sharing, so confiding. This is what harsh words engender. Things are never the same afterwards.

Cate has warmed to the fishing, but is not as intent as Biff (or I). We all scamper out onto the dock and take up positions. She is apt to bore quickly and go wandering off for a swim along the edge of the shore; not Biff or I. We remain anchored out on the end of the dock, our four eyes fixed on the water’s surface, where a strike indicator tells us where our fly is or a large float points out the crappie jig three feet down in the clear water.

The large red-and-chartreuse float causes a problem, however, with both dogs. It is many times larger than the orange Corkie I use as a fly strike indicator, and they must see it as something much like a crappie, lying stationary out there, on the surface, for when it come reeling in, they are apt to pounce on it, so I swing it in fast, as I do a fish, so that they will not leap on it as it approaches our feet. Sometimes I’m not fast enough and one of them, usually Biff, will launch himself and land on it in mid-air, smothering it with his body. Of course the pair of them make it a competitive feat and I have to watch out that both dogs don’t land in the water at the same time, as is case when I throw the retrieving dummy for them.

This morning Biff surprised me by diving on top of the float, just as I was gathering in line on the spinning rod, and of course the skinny nylon line wrapped behind the spool and entered the gear house. The reel wouldn’t turn and the float had entirely disappeared beneath the dog. I tried to handline it in, but it was weightless and soon tangled from twists put into it. So there I was, dog and float and jig all wrapped together.

The only thing that saved the situation was that Biff obeyed. He swam around the front of the dock, while I tried to get myself together, and when I was unable to, he followed my commands in the length of the dock, as I swept in line until I came to the bobber. Now, he had originally landed on it, causing it to vanish, but I saw it again, floating free of him, but near enough, and I looked for the bright jig, thinking I spotted in on the side of his wet black coat. I clasped the float and broke it off the hopelessly fouled line at the swivel. I gathered all the loose line in one hand, as though it were limbs or boughs, and held it tight to the cork grip on the rod, letting it trail on the ground. Biff paddled near in about three feet of water.

As we came into shore, tight to the dock, I let my hand follow the leader to his body and then grope beneath him, again following the monofilament, until my fingers came to the jig. It was, fortunately, barbless, or nearly so. It was lodged in his wet fur and the hook was not imbedded in any skin, so I was able to pluck it free.

“Good dog,” I said again, as much to myself as to him. He was now free. He followed me up the grass and over to the glider, where I placed the fouled rod, reel, and line up high out of his reach, out of fear of further entanglement. Then I began to sort out the mess. Luckily it all started to come clear, including the reel—the line simply slid out of the reel case and where the gears were located. I lost a couple of yards of thin mono, but that was all. The outfit quickly and nicely pieced itself back together in the reverse order in which I had dismantled it. Soon I was back in business. The fishing had to wait, however, until the lake settled down from the plunging dog.

We’ll try again this evening. It is simply wonderful to have the dogs with me and them knowing what it is all about, this fishing business. Their intentness is a great pleasure and it enhances the event and the day.

Mona Flatray is president of the lake association and has been, ever since Ray Lee gave it up, passed it on to her, and became head of the Water Board, which determines how high the lake should be, summer or winter, and upon vote of the members whether or not the lake will be “treated” in spring, which is our euphemism for poisoning it with chemicals to kill the weed that flourishes.

The two work hand in hand, comfortably, and most members (but not I) are happy to leave all the decision making up to them. I—as you might guess, up to this point in my narrative—don’t like to let anybody do anything for me, except maybe dig a ditch. But, overnight, something has happened that neither Mona or Ray were powerful enough to head off. You see, Mona lives down at the end of the lake, on its SW corner, off from the wildlife island and actually on a kind of deadwater slough. It is where algae and weed pile up and become stagnant in late summer, which is now.

The property next door to Mona was recently sold, after a couple of years of different For Sale signs bearing the logo of several realtors going up and ineffectually coming down, after a prolonged period of time. But ultimately the land sold. It is steep at the top, boggy at the bottom, and not very attractive. The best thing it had going for it was its tall second-growth firs and cedars. Well, they have all come down, almost in a wink. The new owners have sold off the timber, under the guise of clearing the land, presumably for a building site. This has been happening all around the lake and most conspicuously across from Mona’s side road, where the tight, close development I facetiously call Sandwich Island Estates has sprung up.

The trees are probably more than seventy years old and nearing one-hundred. They are stately and would fool most city-dwellers into thinking they were old growth. They are about as old growth as we are ever to get anymore, except in parks and special preserves recently set aside by environmentalist. They will do, and will have to do, for most of us, unless it is a long drive you are looking for.

Poor Mona. The good news is, her house squatting under her own tall conifers, is now bathed in sunlight on its North slope for most of the day. I suppose her supply of mold and mildew will decrease substantially. But the land lies raw and ruined, with stumps rising on its roadside slope—ravaged and hideous. The land is newly turned over, mostly sand mixed with the bright red clumps of cedar rot. Over one stump some wag has piled cedar boughs—what, to disguise the crime? Soon they will turn brown and hide nothing.

A truck is loading timber and preparing to haul it away. It will bring a pretty penny. A mulcher is attached to the back of the truck and the crew has put down its Steil chainsaws and is busily feeding the limbs and needled boughs into the mulcher’s mouth, where they are ground to pulp. A bulldozer with a blade sits idle, waiting for the time to arrive to start turning over the land and smoothing it out. Next will come the foundation, I suppose.

Earlier the bulldozer was used for putting in what is called the haul road. It was for the truck, mulcher attachment, and crew. They needed elbow room in which to work, to bring down the trees, to introduce the sunlight into the long-shaded area.

How long was that? Since the start of time. Since the planet cooled enough for stuff to grow. Long before the arrival of man, whatever his form. How’s that for long?

LaConner has claimed the Northwest Artists as its own, but they are not. Morris Graves moved away fifty years ago and, besides, was little more than a visitor. Gilkey (not in the first order, though a friend of acquaintance of them all) is truly a Northwest Artist and so is Guy Anderson, who lived here practically all his long life and recently died at ninety-plus. And Mark Tobey was never here, so far as I know; I remember him from University District days as a student (me, not him) and his friend and lover, Pier, or however he spells it, while his fame built and before he moved to Basil, Switzerland, for tax and other purposes.

The remaining Northwest Artist was Kenneth Callahan, who was born in Granite Falls, lived in Seattle, and moved to Long Beach, Washington, for the back half of his life. Yet LaConner claims them all and nobody objects, including me. It is a good a place for a shrine as any. And the museum is a handsome, spacious, bright new building, a place that will do a good job of honoring them all.

We joined the museum as family members, which gives us two passes good for a year (normally a visit costs $3 each, for each of you), and promptly bought a Morris Graves print, a numbered tempera painting from his Winter Bouquet series, printed by the Seattle Art Museum to honor a show of such paintings of his from two years ago. It is quite lovely, and is mostly gold and muted brown and red. It pictures two vases containing winter flowers, rosehaws (which we call pips) and hellebore. We will have in framed soon.

There is another print of his available in the form of a poster, but we must wait a week to get it, for it is in reality a poster for the current show at LaConner and is a menagerie of seabirds, none of them immediately identifiable as a particular species but each of them showing familiar characteristics of different ones, oddly and I should guess humorously combined. It dates to the early Thirties and is still in the artist’s personal collection.

That is not because he couldn’t sell it. Even napkin doodles of his bring thousands of dollars and a full-scale painting a quarter of a million dollars. As much as Gilkey admired Graves, the money Graves’s paintings brought must have rankled him, right up into the sad, sad end.

I have been thinking of becoming a docent at the museum. They have a special training program and what you do, as I understand it, is sign up for a certain amount of duty time each month and man a chair and talk to people who ask you questions about the artists on display. Since all of the Northwest Artist have been my long-time favorites, I already know much about them and admire them greatly. Have to be careful here and not go into the training program, if I decide to, thinking I already know it all. There may be a lot to learn.

I continue my reading of Saul Bellow’s It All Adds Up, (which is taking me a long time but if I keep at it it all adds up.) He quotes a lot and so shall I—his quote from George Orwell, which I tellingly misread. Orwell writes, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of civilized men.” Bellow does not say what this is from, or when, but obviously it is long ago. I quickly scanned it and believed it said, “the resentment of the obvious.”

A writer could make a career out of taking such quotations and changing them ever so slightly, making them different and entirely his own. I suppose it has been done, and possibly even frequently.

A dog needs someone to belong to, else it is nothing, rootless, lost, needy. A Lab needs a man, presumably, because most women are not physically strong enough or domineering to make a Lab want to behave. It is only when a Lab is made to behave that it knows it is loved.

When can one say with some authority that autumn is here? Well, one can’t, but there have been intimations for some time, and then when summer returns it lacks sincerity. A definition of early fall might be, “When summer lacks authority.” That doesn’t mean it won’t get hot; it only means the heat is without true strength and threat.

Intimations mount and become dominant. Soon they are nothing else than themselves prevailing. Then it is truly autumn.

A day alone, what bliss! Only my dogs to distract me—and, boy, how they do! I try to read—Bellow still—and after a brilliant three-quarters of a paragraph, they want more morning food, and won’t leave me alone until I give it to them. I am more than happy to do this, since they have been off their feed, having evidently eaten something noxious and (Biff, anyway) been sick at the rearend. A little blood in the mucus of his stool is concerning, but this morning they are plenty active and are eating some again.

Biff has developed a waist and is very handsome in his large-boned way. The weight loss is becoming and I can see how fat he had gotten—this is not desirable in so young a dog. Norma tells me many dogs are allergic to beef in their diet and suggest we switch back to lamb and rice, with barely. I thought the dogs would benefit from beef and enjoy it, as I do. Another case of the pathetic fallacy carried to pathetic heights.

Last night, hurrying off to meet Russ Osenbach for a late fishing of the Manure Spreader Hole (the only one with enough current and substrate to possibly hold fish, at this low height of the river), Norma swung the double gates open for me and I tried to shoot through before the racing dogs caught up with the Explorer, forgetting (I forgot) that the right gate must be held in open position by a large rock or else it will swing back immediately, in pendulum fashion. So it reached its apex, as it were, and came bounding back, just as I accelerated. I hit the gate head on. It doubled back on the post that holds it, collapsing it outward—and that portion of the cyclone fence adjacent. The effect was that of an accordion. The gate came off its hinges, the force was so great.

I stopped immediately; I think I was in the process of stopping at the same time I hit the gas. I stopped in my tracks, but the damage was done, and it is considerable. I stood up the gate on edge against the damaged fence post and drove away, feeling absolutely awful. It was a lapse in judgment and that lapse entirely mine.

This morning I called the fence people—the same ones who, only a couple of weeks ago, installed the addition so we can enclose the dogs and permit them in privacy to destroy the front garden, copious, and all its large shrubs, rhododendrons, and small trees. The man on the phone in Mt. Vernon was very nice. He told me he had done the same thing. So, another person can be so stupid? He said Mike Martin, the estimator, will stop by tonight on his way home on Camano Island and look it over. I presume this will include an estimate for repairing or replacing it.

T’would be nice if they had a comeback or other tool that will pry a hollow fence post back into a straightness position, but I doubt it. Hollow metal, once bend, will not resume its formed shape, and there will always be a big dent. I would settle for a dent, but I don’t think they will let me. No doubt it will have to be replaced entirely. And it will cost some.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I am not referring to myself, of course, only to the fence that insisted on racing forward and striking my vehicle.

It could be worse, much worse. Norma asked if the Explorer was damaged. I rushed to look. Not a touch of bumper or paint. The front end is much stronger than I thought, and I am grateful.

Earlier this morning the lake was heavily dotted with floating green algae; now, a bit of wind has come up, this gray day, and the islands have all moved to the East, collecting and joining in somebody else’s front yard. With so few living plants and so much phosphorous-absorbing algae, it is a wonder we have any fish. But the crappie are getting large and so are the bluegills and pumpkinseeds. They are almost worth bothering to fish for.

As for this year’s largemouth bass, we saw schools of tiny ones, no more than a fraction of an inch long; perhaps the sunfish are feeding on them, thinning down their enormous ranks. Maybe they will become carnivorous, rather than insect and zooplankton eaters. This might be natures way of compensating for the lack of phytoplankton and insects that are dependent on floating weeds for their sustenance.

Next year (I swear, now) I will cast my vote for living weed, rather than this green mass of scum, even if it means the lake will become paved again with solid floating bright green masses of tiny weed. As I remember it, in fall it turns red as it begins to die off. This is about the time the huge flocks of widgeons and small ones of northern shovelers arrive to help with its disposal. This year, we strongly suspect, Norma and I, that we won’t have the populations of ducks, because there will be nothing to attract them. And I hope that all the lake dwellers who love their birds and ducks so will remember this, when it comes for members of the lake association to cast their votes for “treatment” next year; that is, poisoning.

There seem to be some people semi-serious about buying Bob and Eileen Donahoe’s property, down four lots from ours; it has been on the market for close to two years. It is about time.

I was standing on my dock, fishing, or trying to, with my dogs, when I saw people standing on their dock—three people, two obviously a married couple, the other with papers in her hand, apparently a real-estate agent.

As the dogs launched themselves into the water, ruining the fishing for half an hour, at least, the man called out something friendly about Labs. In response, they began to swim in his direction, coming out on John and Tracy’s dock, then scurrying through the weed growth (still living) on the dry part of their property, where the treatment was not effective, thankfully.

I asked them if they were going to buy the property. He said they were considering it. I said if they got serious to stop by my place and I would “tell them all the scandals about the lake.” This in my response to his asking about the lake association and its costs, which I informed him of. They are twenty dollars a year for a couple; anybody half serious ought to be able to budget for this.

The next day I saw Eileen attending her garden, up by the fence, and I called out to her and asked if the people were serious. It has been a long time, with few people responding to their sign or the multiple listing. She said she thought they were, but they had their own house to sell first. Ah, this is frequently the problem. I asked where the couple lived. Mukilteo, she replied; it is a small town on Puget Sound, North of Seattle.

The property there ought to sell fairly easily, I said. This is true and not just wishful thinking, for Seattle and South Snohomish (we live in North) homes are at a premium and often bring more than their asking price in a kind of auction. I told Eileen if the couple contacted me about my offering to tell the scandals, I would point out that we had bought our lake-front home before we sold our Seattle home, in the same manner as most people do, and had no trouble selling it.

The fact of the matter is, I do not especially like the sour Donahoes and wouldn’t mind replacing them with some friendlier neighbors. Especially some who like Labs and dogs in general.

I am simply a writer. But that is not so simple. On my deathbed, instead of uttering some memorable trope, I will probably just reach for my notepad. It will be the duty of someone else—some wag, I hope—to mouth for me my ultimate unforgettable utterance.

I have departed from my writer’s notebook this year, sadly, in order to write these more formal essays. The notebooks I have dubbed “The Salmonberry Chronicles,” and they have covered, oh, fifteen or twenty years. When we moved to Lake Ketchum, it seemed time for a change—not that we don’t have salmonberries here, for we do, but not in such abundance as up at the river. So I began calling the notebooks “The Lake Ketchum Chronicles,” in 1996. Pretty deft, eh?

But this year there is hardly an entry. Instead . . . this. You gain something, you lose something off the other end. So be it. Not much is lost, in terms of world literature.

Martha and Jane live in a house across the lake. The are definitely a couple, but a couple of what I don’t exactly know for a fact. In years past, a pair of elderly women would have been thought of as simply “friends,” and nothing particular would be meant by the common term. Today we all know about Lesbian couples. Women being ostensibly more sedate and mannered than men, or used to be, they were probably not very flamboyant in their youth about their sexual orientation. That is, they did not flaunt their preference. They probably thought of themselves individually as loners, until they found each other and set up heavy housekeeping. The world accepted them then, as it does now, as a couple. What they do, or did, in private is their own business. Some still sleep in the same bed, while others find they sleep better if they have a bed to themselves, just like ordinary old heterosexual couples.

Jane and Martha have two dogs. The dogs are noisy. One is a Doberman, the other a sheep dog of some obscure breed. They run along their fenced yard on the side of the South Lake Ketchum Road and yap at most everything that passes. Jane and Martha have recently installed opaque plastic slats in their cyclone fencing, making it impossible for us walkers to see in, but the intent was to keep the dogs from seeing out, and it works only partly, and they can line themselves up at the gate and see through the opening. Thus they bark and howl about the same as in the past.

Howl? Yes, they are a pair of howlers, and when the fire district’s siren goes off to signal a fire or accident, the dogs happily (or unhappily, I don’t know which, but it is vehement) join in. They are heard by everybody who lives on the lake—but association count, ninety domiciles.

The other day, while I was writing my daily account of this particular year’s chronicle, I heard a soft mutter of voices. Now I often hear people talking, for sound carries alarmingly well in this pocket containing a lake. Ordinarily you can hear much more than you want to, even if you are a habitual voyeur. I could not help but listen, yet could make out no distinct words or phrases; it was ordinary conversation. Then I looked out at my magnificent view. Two swimmers were casually headed my way, traversing the width of the lake here, where it is widest. What is it, three hundred yards across? I might guess so.

This was unusual. Most swimmers keep to the shoreline, where a dock or beach is handy, in case they have trouble. Or so it seems to me, a poor swimmer. But this pair were out where the most danger was. For good swimmers I suppose such a distance is no real challenge.

It was, of course, Jane and Martha. I’m not sure I can tell them apart, for sixty-year-old women look pretty much the same; they call them crones now, without detriment. One paddled without a splash, in a kind of steady breaststroke, while the other moved along with a stately crawl, neither of them exerting themselves very much. Much like distance runners, they were able to maintain a desultory conversation, all the while. I admired them for this, their swimming ability. How wonderful it must be to have no fear of water, to move through and across it seemingly without effort, crossing huge distances as steadily as a boat would.

Now I, with my great love of water, still or moving, constantly plunged in it on a river or in my boat on the lake, am unable to swim well, as is the case with many of my friends—Ed Weinstein and Bob Taylor being two extreme cases. They cannot swim a stroke. And I am not much better.

We are drawn to water—haunted, Norman Maclean would say. His is the better word.

When Jane and Martha reached our dock I was curious as to what they would do next. Still talking, talking into the day’s end, though it was yet early, each executed a turn that did not necessitate ducking her head under water, and began stroking in the opposite direction, back to their dock and their house.

I looked again, a few minutes later, for I was half-engrossed in what I was writing, but as usual dimly aware of what was going on around me, and saw the pair nearing mid-lake. Steadily, relentlessly, they moved apace, apart, together, each with her own particular stroke. The next time I looked they were gone, having reached home and, I suppose, climbed the ladder at their dock, walked to the house, reached for towels, and rubbed their backs and shoulders dry.

Another Sign of The Times (don’t say you haven’t been warned, several times now): In a Stanwood barber’s window. “Closed until mid-September. My hands get tired, you know.”

No, I didn’t, but I do now. If anybody is human, it is a barber, and who must touch people’s heads, all day long, not to mention work the fingerholes on the incessant scissors?

Where are we now, I mean in time—real time? Well, last week, President Clinton went before the grand jury investigating him and his involvement in White Water and various other debacles, and the same night uttered his weak mea culpa to the American public. Two days later our missiles struck the terrorists in Sudan and Afghanistan.

That’s where we are. The big question is, what to believe? What is the truth, what another pious lie? That is the American dilemma today, but hasn’t it ever been so?

Also the great bull market appears to have ended with a sodden thud. The Dow has dropped about a thousand points in the last couple of weeks, what with the small cap stocks (as they are condescendingly called) taking the brunt—say, more than 20%, led it would seem by vast economic crashes in Asia and now in Russia.

I bought my wife a singing bird clock with plastic rim make to look like oak. For ten or twelve dollars more I could have had real oak, but there are limits to my generosity. With the clock—which chimes a different bird call, every hour, and is operated by batteries and a light sensor, so that at night the damn thing is mute—come a pair of compact binoculars, the two sponsored by Audubon. If they put their name on it, it can’t be too bad, can it?

Cate has learned to walk at heel, just today, though the same day she was recalcitrant about retrieving the throwing dummy to me, and wanted to play with it instead. My fault—my fault for allowing both dogs to retrieve it together and play with it afterwards, or rather my being unable to stop them from doing same. But on our walk today, I called her back and told her to stay with me, letting their mutual leash trail along her flank. Lo and behold, it was the trailing leash that did the trick. I praised her in my unusual soft voice, all the while, calling her back when she tended to roam out, soft all the while, and complementing her when she did what I asked; we continued halfway or farther round the lake. And Biff kept close, too.

I should imagine he will soon pick it up. I kept her on my left side, which is traditional, occasionally stopping and telling her to sit, then to heel, and finally releasing her to play with her brother. She treed a white cat, and, will still excited, I called her back and told her to sit, then to heel, and she did both beautifully.

It is important both dogs come when I call them and stay close, for there is much traffic circling the lake, and while most of it keeps its eye out for dogs and kids, a very few are heedless.

It was a great stride forward and satisfying for both Cate and me. I think Biff was a shade jealous, and this will be useful in getting him to do the same, or nearly the same. I have to figure out how and where to position them. With Cate, though, it was as if she was waiting for me to wise up enough to ask her to heel, sit, and walk close to my flank.

I remember my old German Shepherd, Wolf, some forty years ago, and how she trained one Sunday afternoon at six months, when my parents and I were watching Lassie on TV. In a wink. And now this, in pretty much a wink, too, but of course the dogs are almost exactly nine months. The delay is because of their extreme competitiveness and tendency to play and scrap with each other, at every opportunity, and especially when vying for our attention.

Just like children. But what are dogs (and cats) but children for people who are without or need more than allotted?

There is a prevalent theory that, for every mile you go West of I-5, the freeway, there is in winter one inch less rainfall. So Anacortes is the driest place around, until you get to Squim, which is practically drybelt. I’ve quoted this theory whenever it was to my advantage, namely, to people who live in Seattle. But I was not aware until lately, with considerable traveling around up to the river (but 30 miles away) and twice now over to Cashmere in Eastern Washington, how much cooler it is at the lake.

I mean, I thought it should be, but I didn’t know it for a fact. Late in August, it is probably six or eight degrees cooler than at Oso, by the river, but closed in by trees, in a little pocket in the foothills; in winter, it rains more there, too, and there is more snowfall. In short, it is thoroughly more miserable there than here. It is not just the people but the place.

In Cashmere, where I went on Tuesday to fish, thinking I’d overnight but deciding not to because the dogs did not like to eat in an orchard and, based on that, I thought they would not like motel life, and if I put them to sleep in the Explorer, they would continue to chew up chief items of interior design and utility. So we came back early.

We came back early, too, because it was so hot. The thermometer at Larry’s said (once it snuck into the shade) 86 degrees. In Wenatchee, where temperatures are officially recorded, it was but 82. Thus, the Cashmere differential. The next day the forecast was for 86 in Wenatchee, which I translated to 90 on the river, in Cashmere. I decided it was too much, and fortified by Norma’s thermos of spaghetti, I drank much water, tepid coffee, Diet Seven-Up, and drove back into and past the sunset.

We did get a wonderful fish in the Turkey Shoot. It was a seven-pound native female that jumped six or seven times and ran hard but came in when I butted the 13.5-foot Spey rod. Biff plunged into the water at the scream of the reel and began swimming at it when he saw the first jump; each additional jump confused him and he was well below me when I muscled the fish into shore. Cate, cool all the while, watched the play and saw the fish nudge the stones, me slip the hook free, and the fish swim free for deeper water.

Biff arrived on the scene about the time the fish disappeared and missed the watery climax, which was okay, just right, for he would have been a big problem, very much like Sam was; almost identical. A very satisfying day, catching a fish on the St. John, a favorite rod, a choice yellow-orange-red fly, a fish bright and perfect and about as good a performer as one might expect.

The river will close for all fishing to protect the steelhead run early next week (officially deemed threatened), and I shall not be back, because of the heat and, besides, my two trips were exactly right, and I am renewed in a way I need badly each year at this time. I need no more of a great, good thing.

I would like to see there be a placename of Ketchum— a town, a post office, a general store, even a gasoline filling station. As it is, there is only the lake. A lake may be enough. If I got my wish (be careful there, goes the classic warning), I would no doubt we disappointed with what I got. A tiny, sad metropolis. Stanwood East and West are bad enough, what with BP and Shell’s gas pumps staring into each other’s face, and McD and Burger King squaring off and squirting mustard and ketchup at each other. Or battering each other with French fries.

Now my town of Ketchum would be right out of the movies. It is a Thirties kind of town and would have a general store—never mind the fact that the one down at Cedarholm has shut down and the one at Milltown sells only junk disguised and priced as antiques. I would have a store with oiled wood floors and a potbellied stove around which would gather on frosty mornings potbellied men in suspenders and lead-colored workpants held up by scarlet suspenders. My people would be straight out of Faulkner, complete with “Yarms” and “Nomes,” they are so polite and formal.

You could get a ham and cheese sandwich, my favorite, for a couple of dollars, and it would be fresh this morning, the bread homemade at the same time, and the Swiss cheese would be generous, as would be the mustard and leaf lettuce. Sure, they serve potato chips in those stiff little bags, aluminum foil on one side, plastic on the other, yellow, white, and red, but you’d know they are fresh and unsullied.

Hard-boiled eggs in an old pickle jar, pepperoni, salted peanuts, and a choice of only three famous beers, all in glass, would top off the lunch counter. There’d be a disordered morning paper there from Seattle, and you’d have to pick it up and shuffle it into some semblance of order before you’d attempt or dare to read it. But it would all be there. In my world, my community, nobody’d walk off with a section, on penalty of scandal.

The cans along the wall on long shelves would be of meat dinners long ago discontinued—Nalley’s Meatballs and Gravy, for one. On the next shelf would be Kellog’s Pep—if people could buy it again, Wheaties would go the way of the aging athletes cascading across its box front. Down the tube of future history.

Ketchum would resemble that wonderful skiing village of the same name in Idaho, but be quite different in ever respect. We would not ski here, but fish, and the lake would have trout in size and abundance. There would be just enough competition for the fish to be interesting but not threatening or discouraging. The store walls would be covered with brown wrapping paper outlines of the biggest trout, but none under six pounds would be allowed.

Everybody in Ketchum would own a dog and none of them would bite. Of course they’d be Labrador retrievers, but, hey, they come in three flavors, take your pick. You can have licorice, chocolate, or vanilla. If you pick licorice, you will have no trouble finding yours in the snowstorm promised by the Channel Seven weatherman, who never missed a prediction. The downside is, you can never find your dog at night.

If you choose a vanilla dog, you will have to squint to spot him in a blizzard, but at night he will be easy to locate even with a weak flashlight. And chocolate is the best of both worlds, but a little short on each when examined through a magnifying glass.

Ketchum will have an occasional woman stop by the general store—a traveler in a fine car, alone. She will ask directions or instructions for getting some place, but will be in no hurry to go there, and will linger, smiling, chatting, giving the men of Ketchum long looks out of her koal-fringed eyes. Her mouth is as red as love and she will tell you without a smile that she longs to live here, but her life is so complicated (if you get what I mean) that it is impossible. Yet she will have a free hour or two, and it will serve her for memories for the rest of her life, which is guaranteed to be spectacular.

She will say no to nothing, maybe to everything, and there will be no proposition that will offend her ears. She takes life with a grain. All men are interesting, that look says, even aging ones with beer bellies, gray workpants, and suspenders the color of a fresh wound. Her fingers are tipped with the same color and she punctuates her words with a light punch in your ribs with her hands. She knows when she is being kidded and that it is the same things as joshed. It is a sign of affection.

When she crosses her legs, leaning forward on the same kind of stool as we all sit at, up at the counter, out of eagerness and interest, her nylons go whisk-whisk. It is the sound of dry wheat in a light wind. On her right front tooth is a smudge of lipstick, but nobody will mention it to her and we all would die if it went away, and her with it.

Then she is gone and we await another woman’s visit. It will be a long time. We know we have been blessed by something special indeed and that whatever follows will be, as the sex books say, an anticlimax.

But then Ketchum is exactly that, people waiting for s something to happen that never does. It is in the waiting that we endure and mellow into colorful characters, each of us.

There is a pleasing flexibility about the group of books I’ve bought, borrowed, or checked out of the library in terms of the priority I’ve assigned them in the order to be read, and I can shift them and the order around at will, depending on what takes on importance in my eyes, at the given moment. I’ve long enjoyed Bellow’s It All Adds up, but in mid-summer have been badly bogged down in my advancing through it. I’ve savored it and read it slowly, usually no more than a few pages at a time. The dogs, you know, keep interrupting me and demanding instant attention and gratification, and I’ve lovingly given it. But it does greatly retard both my reading and my writing. So be it, I say, at least for this languid time in the year and in my life.

Next will come, I think, Jim Harrison’s Warlock—one of his few book I haven’t yet read. It is a bit hard to find, so when David Hamilton, Bookseller, listed a fresh paperback copy being remaindered at only three dollars, I snatched it up, that is, ordered it out, dimly knowing that the postage and handling for it and one other book for Norma will equal the purchase price of the two.

Now I must finish the last pages of the Bellow, and do so in a relative hurry, perhaps even today, one mostly blue and green, beneath a heavy August sun. Soon bad weather will be gratefully upon us and the time will have arrived for serious long bouts of study and writing, when the miserable weather outside dictates nothing much else. That will be the time that the dim-witted watch their hours of television and when I anticipate getting some serious work done.

A writer searches for his “voice”—his authentic voice—most of his early life, and when he finds it, writing is simply a matter of listening to it and setting down what it has to say in an idiom particular and unique. Or so it goes, or is supposed to go; I subscribe to this theory, while at the same time pointing out its pitfalls, such as lack of plot, characterization, narrative technique, ad infinitum.

Good writers have a way of saying things in a way nobody else could have said them. Bad writers do, too, I think. A secretary from the stenopool once told me, having read something that I’d written, that I write “just like I talk.” Indeed I do. Long-winded, tediously so, verbose, pedantic, often dull, self-limited, self-prescribed, I drone on and on. “Give us a break,” might be the outcry, but it is easier to not read me instead.

It must be satisfying, like Bellow, to have a large audience who follows you through life and buys your books in numbers as each comes out. I must settle for a short span of slight notoriety and a small audience that comes late in life and is most fickle; it will drift away with the slightest breeze of something more interesting on the horizon. Fishers are like this. They have sustaining power only in one thing. They can go for long periods of time without a fish, but find books not even for their idle moments, as Emerson would have it, but only bought or borrowed in hope of learning some new deadly technique.

Not here, friend. Beg, borrow, or steal one of my books, and you will be disappointed, if that is your goal. But better buy one than any of the other dismal three.

Having children is taking out a promissory note on heartbreak. The big question is, how will you handle it, when the note comes due?

I was born in Chicago in 1930; Saul Bellow was just coming of age there, then. I left ten years later as a child; Bellow never left, not in his mind, though he lived many places, here and abroad. He always returned to Chicago, I once for two days in the Palmer House, nearly 50 years ago. Thus I am dependent on him for news of what has happened. It has been a lot.

His was the North Side, mine the South, but he knows the entire city well, and there is no faulting him on Chicago matters or, for that matter, many others, for he is one of the best minds around and has made his world-presence felt for many decades. He has seen Chicago change from clusters of ethnic neighborhoods to a population largely black and Hispanic. Sighting drug deals is a common occurrence that goes almost without the need for comment. Graft and corruption have been rampant in city government and among the police. But, hey, this is Chicago. Who would expect else?

Bellow gave a name to an architectural characteristic that was an early part of my life and in his description of it brought it rushing back from the obscurity of long memory. It is the six-flats, a distinctive apartment complex that sprung up in the Thirties and became, along with the Polish bungalow, ubiquitous, at least in Chicago.

In fact, the bungalow concept was absorbed and incorporated into the six-flats—which are not much more than three bungalows to a side stacked atop one another, with a common stairwell running up the middle. Before I was born my parents lived in a new one on Yates Street, but moved shortly to one most like it (but presumably more commodious) on Essex Avenue about the time I was born.

Bellow writes, “After fifty years, one is reconciled to these brick shapes. You get the builder’s idea. You see what sort of man he was, and you take his sometimes lamentable work to your heart. In the entry of a typical six-flat are the brass mailboxes and the bells, three to a side, and a short flight of stairs. Indiana limestone or Vermont marble, pleasingly worn, leads to the glass door that brings you to the main staircase. . . .

“Six open porches at the front were common in Chicago, the coarse brick laid ornamentally, looking a little out of plum. . . . There were grass plots between he sidewalks and the curbs, cement passages between the buildings, and then there were the large backyards, which faced the alley with its line of small garages. Chicago’s back porches are wooden, and the stairs are open to the weather, crudely built, trussed with planks that are hammered to the beams in long X’s.”

How well I remember these—small boys fighting among themselves in mock and sometimes true seriousness, shooting innertube rubberband guns at each other, where a direct hit would produce more than a sting, a huge red welt that didn’t go away for days. We also fashioned spears out of ferns growing on vacant lots, stripped of their side plumage, which we hurled at each other, the roots forming the spear head, sandy soil still clinging to it. Our shields against such weapons were garbage can lids, and we wound ourselves solitarily or in pairs and unruly threes in and out of garage rows and through alleys, which were mirrored by the garage strings of apartments backing up on ours on neighboring streets.

Bellow brings it al back, then some. “There was always plenty of space in Chicago; it was ugly but roomy, plenty of opportunity to see masses of things, a large view, a never entirely trustworthy vacancy, ample grayness, amble brownness, big clouds. The train used to make rickety speed through the violent evenings of summer over the clean steel rails. . . . On the South Side you rode straight into the stockyard fumes. The frightful stink seemed to infect the sun itself, so that it was reeking as well as shining.

“But I was speaking of the six-flats, with their simple symmetry, like six pack bungalows, economically built from the simple plans of hack architects, kitchen above kitchen, bathroom above bathroom, sun parlor (ah, yes, those; I slept in one) above sun parlor, the strict regularity making the plumbing, heating, and wiring cheaper to install. In this mass production there were nevertheless trimming, nifty touches, notes of elegance and aspiration.” (“Nifty” is a Chicago word; nobody else would have said “nifty.”) “In each front room (no one ever called it a drawing room) was a dummy fireplace with artificial logs; an electric bulb was concealed within, and the heat of this bulb fluttered a pleated disk, which revolved and threw flickering shadows. At each end of the dud fireplace were bookcases with art nouveau glass doors. Above these, at each end of the mantlepiece, were two small hinged windows, also leaded. The fleur-de-lis was the commonest ornament. There might be a pane or two of stained glass even in the toilet. The dining room was separated from the front room by china cabinets, waist high. On top of these a pair of hollow wooden columns (serving no purpose) occasionally stood. In the dining room was a built-in buffet in the same style, often with a beveled mirror. These fixtures, turned out by the hundreds of thousands, were designed to be quickly and cheaply installed.

“And this was how most of Chicago lived.” Bellow goes on, but I shall not. (It All Adds Up, pp. 255-257.)

Evidently we lived together, Saul and I, but I don’t remember him until years later, when he came through Seattle on a lecture tour, touting Augie March, to be published, and reading aloud from it in the Walker-Ames Room of Parrington Hall on the UW campus. “I had, earlier” he writes in his essay on John Berryman’s passing, “written two small and correct books.” (Page 267.) Afterwards we budding short-story writer, our teacher, and Bellow went down to Howard’s Restaurant on the Ave. and drank coffee, while he regaled us with tales from that “Whitmanesque book,” as he later called it.

I saw him as a cocky Chicago kid, smart and talented, a Yid, a bit broad and greasy, a type. Decades later, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, I bullied my editor at the now-defunct Argus into my writing a celebratory essay on Bellow; in order to do it justice, and him, I had to go back and reread practically everything he’d written, including those two fine, initial, “small and correct” novels. It took me weeks, the reading alone. For the essay I got $50.

Bellow still tells me about Chicago—what has happened since I’ve been away, and enjoying it so. The city has gotten worse, but still is charged, has dynamic energy, dirt, heat and cold, violence, the wind off the lake. The old ethnic (we never called them this, he or I) neighborhoods have moved to the suburbs—the Wops, Micks, Krauts, Polacks, Jews, etc. They could afford to; those who could not stayed.

Anton tells me he used to wrestle. I know he now referees high school wresting bouts, for others have told me so. As a gym teacher, he works out constantly and is very strong. Yesterday he spoke contemptuously (as only a German can) about companies charging so much money to replace entirely broken parts that can be fixed or straightened out, such as my metal fence post, the one that held the now-crumpled gate. So I decided to take him up on his offer of lending me a towing strap from his pickup. With it, I intended to hook up to the trailer hitch on my Explorer and gently but firmly pull the post straight again from exactly the same angle that I struck it. But, as it turns out, it wasn’t necessary. By the time I got there, Anton, the wrestler and weight-lifter, had straightened the post, all by himself.

“Remind me,” I told him, “not to ever get in a fight with you. Also, any time you want to go through a (fishing) pool first, just do it; I won’t contest you.
So now all I will have to pay for is a new half-gate, plus hinges to attach it to the straightened fence end post. It ought to be much less than the $250 they quoted me for the full job. Just how much I will have to wait until Monday night to find out. That’s when Mike comes to fix it.

I’ll call ahead and tell the company that the post is now straight and all they will need is the parts mentioned a above. Then it will be a simple matter, after I am billed for the gate and work, to subtract it from the $250 of the estimate.

In the mail comes a flyer from Van Gorman Eagan in Campbell River B.C. So that is his middle name? Haven’t seen him use it before. Sounds rather elegant, but then he is a transplanted Mid-Westerner (Wisconsin) who went to live and teach high school on Vancouver Island, next door to Roderick Haig-Brown, his friend and mentor, and stood up for him when he got married, there.

We are both writers, ones with now three books under each of our belts. We both were disappointed with how Frank Amato published our second book (that is, in paperback) and have decided to try one on our own. I have no idea how good his is—I guess you have to read it to find out, which is the whole idea of writing and selling books. His is called, Rivers On My Mind, which at first glimpse doesn’t sound so hot, but on second sounds better and better. Rivers do have a way of getting on your mind and staying there. He is publishing 480 copies, 100 in hardback and 380 in paper. The costs are $35 and $20 respectively. This makes his about the same price as mine. So I (Kingfisher Press, that is) sent him a check for $35, but suggested that he send it back and we reciprocate If he doesn’t want to do this, why then, I’ve bought his. But I think he will.

Mine, I pointed out, by way of a bargain, is 100 pages longer than his. “Heh-heh,” I added, facetiously. His chapters sound interesting and literary, which is the kind of book I like; we both try to stay away from how to do it, but that is what sells. Chapters are: Little Rivers, The River By My Window, Magic Hours, Clearwater, Dickens’ Trout, Messages from the Past, and The Enchanted River.

I offered to help him market the book in the USA, and once a couple of years ago I contacted him and Art Lingren in Vancouver B.C. about some kind of join publishing/marketing enterprise, but nothing came of it. Lingren seems to be happy publishing books on flies with Amato still. That leaves Van and me out in the cold, so to speak. But it is not very cold, out here, and there are some benefits that greatly outweigh having others make all the key decisions.

As August ends and September presses down, with its considerable weight (the sun), the loss of my Wenatchee river fishing becomes unbearable; for fifteen years I’ve gone over there, as soon as the weather cools enough for me to put up with the inherent suffering. That is about 84 degrees, though I’ve cheated some and paid the price. This year I made my two trips, the first alone overnight, the second a day trip, as it turned out, with my two dogs, and took a fish each time. Marvelous, and it will have to sustain me. I think it will, but still I lament my loss.

Those cool mornings, the pears hanging heavy on their boughs, the congestion and clutter of picking and loading bins, the visitors to my riverside camp, the nights in the tent trailer, our aging dogs and the ones chosen to replace them by both Larry and myself, the gun club starting its practice trap shoot on Thursday night, Rustyburgers for dinner, Monday night football viewed from inside my trailer, the joy of Norma’s arrival, and the confidence of getting a fish from either the Turkey Shoot Pool or Merlin’s on any given day, even when I didn’t. Daylight shortening down and nights cooling, with slippery orchard frost in the mornings. My chapter, “Wenatchee Mornings” in Steelhead Water put it about as well as I could say it, but I echoed it strongly in the next book and, come to think about it, in whatever I happen to be writing, when this time of the year comes bouncing round.

Transparent apples aren’t really so; they are green, with pink tiger stripes, much like a dog salmon. We have such a tree, up front, at the lake, and it had been severely cut back by the previous owner, Arlene Haight, or rather some gardener had been instructed to do it, and obeyed ruthlessly. The first year here we left it alone—Norma’s idea. The second year she looked at it and decided to do the same; it rewarded us with a few apples, its boughs having shot up toward the sky, under much cedar shade for most of the day. This year it is blessing us with apples.

They fall off the tree before they are fully ripe, of course. This is the nature of much fruit, unless chemicals are used to restrain the tendency. Many of the pinkish apples I picked up off the ground; when others looked ripe to me, I picked three, then a couple of more, the next day; it seemed to me (not an apple person) that the bruises they got hitting the ground were worse than having apples a little tart and green.

For lunch a couple of days ago I tried one. Tart is a good word for it. The flavor is, well, mild. The transparent apples make good pies, however. Norma has made one already, and it was delicious; I took a large last slice with me to Wenatchee and ate it in a golden delicious orchard, licking my fingers and searching the wrapper for every last crumb.

There are enough apples accumulating in the refrigerator and kitchen counter to make more than one pie. Perhaps tonight Norma will bake it. I find I am looking forward to it very much. Nothing equals or beats fresh apple pie, especially when you put vanilla ice cream on top.

The extent to which autobiography—a writer’s life, as lived—plays a role in his fiction has never been truly recognized, though in some obvious cases such as Hemingway it is thought to be close. In Saul Bellow, according to a New Yorker article by James Atlas, it is much higher than anybody has previously thought.

I, I am cursed by having a normal life, without any great tumultuous love affairs, divorces, errant children, etc. To write fiction as it ought to be written, I would have to draw on very slight episodes, ones that never materialized into anything much.

I don’t think you can simply make it up, stories that live strictly in your head, for they will lack the emotional intensity to making characters and plots live. The best ones, it would seem, are drawn directly from people the writer knows, and the terrible things that have happened in his life. Or at least with most American writers of my time.

Two telling remarks by Adam Gopnik from his article in the New Yorker, “Man Goes To See A Doctor,” about his many years in psychoanalysis. “Old age seems to be a series of lurches, rather than a gradual decline.” And, “We expect our fathers to take as long a time dying as we take growing up.” (Pp. 120, 121, New Yorker, August 24, 31, 1998.)

There is no such thing as a country road any more; they have all been improved to carry traffic at a fast rate of speed, with double yellow lines down the middle and single dotted ones to indicate when you may at your own risk and others pass. Often they have no shoulder and, worse, are deeply ditched. If you go off the road in a vehicle, you will roll. If you roll, you are apt to be killed. Also, there is no escape route.

Just yesterday we met a detour on the Pioneer Highway, which takes us to Conway, LaConner, and the freeway, depending on where you make your exit turns. The road was closed because of an accident; the road was tied up for many hours. Today we learned the cause. A woman in a car crossed the centerline and met, gulp, a gravel truck. She was killed. There being no shoulder to tow the wreck, both lanes of the road were closed indefinitely. Initially we were turned back at the junction with 300^th, and retreated East until we came to the freeway, which was where we were headed, but not in this roundabout fashion. Returning, we decided to try the Pioneer Highway headed South, because there were no warning signs of a detour, but, sure enough, there was one when we had been speeding along it for some time, and we were routed through some interesting countryside in the Cedarholm vicinity.

Walking along the county roads near the lake, as we do each day, to exercise the dogs, it is abundantly clear at certain times of the day that we do so at some risk. Cars move along the road at various speeds. Most of the lake denizens drive fairly slowly—especially slowly when the road develops blind curves. They are on the outlook for children and dogs, not necessarily in that order. When they come upon people walking, the often swing wide and cross the centerline, giving pedestrians and dogs extra space. This may cause the drivers some personal risk.

The dogs are walking at some version of heel now. Suddenly Cate caught onto what was being asked of her and did it. Biff was a little later and is still lackadaisical, inattentive if something more interesting presents itself, as it often does. So both dogs will walk at heel most of the time, and I’m finding that Cate will come back and walk at heel of her only volition, for she enjoys it. She is smarter than he, keener to what is going on, but both are good dogs, eager to please, but mischievous and still do considerable damage.

Biff is my fishing dog. I spotted the characteristic early and have watched it develop with great pleasure. He will sit or stand (the former is preferable, but not always attainable, at least for long) while I fish with a fly or jig and bobber on my flyrod, watching the movement of the float and waiting for the flash of a fish being hooked and hauled to the dock.

He hangs on the edge of the dock—actually perches there, almost like some huge bird, crow or raven. Occasionally he misbalances and falls in. I don’t think he likes this, because his head goes under and water gets in his ears. When he dives in, it is a surface dive and he lands flat, his head way out of the water. When the fish comes swinging in, he lunges for it. Yesterday I let him pick up a perch from the dock and carry it around in his mouth. He had a little trouble with the pick up and tended to use his heavy front paws to position the perch for pickup. After a moment he would drop the perch back to the dock and I would scoot it to the edge and over, back into the water. But the last perch of the day Biff carried proudly off the end of the dock and, mouthing it softly, tentatively, into the shallow water. He didn’t know what to do with it, so I ordered, “Drop,” which he did, and the fish swam away, only a little the worse for wear. He seemed glad enough to be rid of it.

Today we found a school of black crappie and I was glad to see them, since they had been absent from our (note the “our”) catch for a couple of weeks and I feared they were gone for the year. They hit harder than the perch and tended to swallow the hook deep enough so that it was hard to remove. Biff was content to watch them being released into the water from off the dock and did not fall or dive into the water.

Both dogs are now retrieving the throwing dummy when it is tossed into deep grass or brush. This is new and enjoyable, and I find it interesting (as I did with Sam) to watch the searching procedure, how the dog will make widening circles, venturing out and examining new areas in a systematic manner until he or she finds the dummy, which is flame orange. Biff will tunnel through heavy brush to find it. Cate is not so venturesome. Both find it a good game and enjoyable. There is a look of determination that comes over a Lab’s face when it can’t locate what it is after, and the dog will not rest until he does, or else becomes thoroughly frustrated and needs human help.

Sign of The Time: Corn Maze. This is apparently a new game and farmers create a maze out of their cornrows and charge people passing by for the opportunity to work their way through the American rural equivalent of the English countryside gentry’s hedge maze. Perhaps there are prizes to be had for the shortest time.

Another sign is a homemade sign alongside the country road advertising Ostrich Meat. Hmm. There are ostrich steaks listed. Don’t think I’d care to try one. First it was ostrich eggs, which didn’t sell. Then young ostriches—the fruit of the unsold eggs. And now the adult ostriches are being butchered.

Soon there will be no more ostriches, which are not native to our soil, anyway. A passing phenomenon, to be sure. This leaves the buffalo and the llama as passing roadside attractions.

In the Puget Sound area it is estimated that there are 33,000 millionaires. Who does the estimating? I don’t know or care. Whether it is accurate (to within 5 percent, as they often say, depending upon the size of the sample) matters little to me. Fact is, there are a lot of them.

The New Yorker no longer defines a million as a symbol of individual wealth. The bar has been raised another notch and two million is more like it. Damn. Just when I was getting close.

This week the market fell considerably and the word is we are in a bear market, after all this time of the bull. I should guess so. My own wealth is down, but not a whole lot, simply because I’m not too much in the market. Mainly Microsoft, which took a pretty good hit, but it is still up sixty-some percent since January 1^st. So down is still up, in this instance.

So many millionaires. What do they do with their extra money? Most are too young to give it away. So they buy symbols of ostentation, I guess. BMWs and houses that take your breath away with their watery views, the mountains ganged against the horizon.

Me, I’d just as soon live on a lake. I do. And have a place on a river. That, too. I consider myself better off than I have any right to be, with free time for my many hobbies, some of which resemble hard work.

I’m thinking of buying a digital camera, but want to check out the product very closely first, including its probable uses for book printing. The computer graphic files are large and the resolution in terms of pixels is 1536X1024. I’ve downloaded some Kodak files taken with their DC260 camera and printed them out on my DeskJet color printer. Wow. Very fine grain and the colors excellent. Printed as gray scale (that is, black and white) they are fine grain, too, and resemble prints made with Kodak’s old famous Panatomic-X film.

Now I must check with my printer and see if he can handle the digital files. He says he can, but not such prints, which look pretty good to me. Waiting for a report before I buy said camera, which will cost $870 at a NYC discount camera store. That’s a lot, but the camera will do a lot. And no wet darkroom and expensive chemicals and printout paper.

It is important to fix in time and place the cultural minutiae that is unique to us and our lives. Consequently, one more Sign of The Times is coming up, folks.

Beanie Babies. In particular, the first 20,000 ticket holders coming to watch the Mariners probably lose one more time, in some way unusual, in others boringly predictable, will receive a Moose Beanie Baby. Why a moose? Well, it is the mascot of this team, even though there are no moose in our state, nor for many miles outside of it. But that’s okay. Seattle is home to the Supersonics, a basketball team named after an aircraft designed but never put into manufacture. So we are a culture of pretenders.

Another sign, but a different indicator of these times. The Volkswagen Bug has been reintroduced into the country in a slightly more streamlined version and, of course, much more expensive to buy. A young guy who lives across the road from the lake on its South side has purchased one and is very proud, washing and polishing it frequently. I greeted him and said something insincere about his new car.

This made me think about how most guys, some women, hold jobs that are barely tolerable. They take them to stop a gap, then find that much time has passed by and they are still there. If they dare to look closely, they will know that they hate their jobs, but don’t know what else to do; besides, most jobs have perks or respites that make them more human—even a coffee break, a lunchroom, a discount on the store’s merchandise.

I may be wrong, but I think this guy is trapped in such a job and it is the car—the silver-gray Bug—that makes him stand out and differ in what he believes to be the world’s opinion of him. In other words, the new car makes him somebody. He is in debt, strapped, but when he lovingly washes and polishes up the car, he becomes for a moment somebody unique, distinctive. In his own opinion, of course. But that is what we are talking about and what matters.

Yesterday I decided to treat myself to a haircut. I mean, one other than what dear Norma has provided me with, sometimes I fear unwillingly but unprotestingly. So I drove to Ken’s in Stanwood village.

Ken had been on vacation, or R&R for weeks, saying in a sign out front of his deserted place that “his hands were tired.” Evidently they still were, for a woman was behind the revolving chair and it turned out she was the one who was replacing Ken, while he still rested his soul and his hands.

One guy was just getting into the chair when I arrived and I beat, barely but without running, another guy who pulled up in his car just behind me and called out, good- naturedly, “If you had hit that stop light back there I’d have beat you here.” Which was true, but I was in no mood to tell him to go ahead of me.

We filed in and took seats. I wondered if I wanted a “haircut out” badly enough to want to wait for it? But I did; I did decide to wait. Meanwhile the guy (slightly) behind me kept receiving phone calls on his cellular phone and in order to hear and be understood kept wandering out the door and into the street alongside his car, an old dusty maroon Buick. I said to the barber and his customer (client?), “I guess that is an outdoor telephone,” meaning in my obscure way that they only seem to work if you go outside with them. They got it and chuckled or mildly snorted.

Soon it was my turn. I mounted the chair and was given the cloth around me and the pin at the neck. “Is that too tight?” she asked. I said it was not. And then she began to apply the electric clippers to the back of my head and the sides.

I felt it necessary to explain why my hair was so uneven in length and, since she was not present, blame it all on my good wife. While ungallant of me, it was highly accurate and even truthful. Norma’s second stroke effected the use of her left hand, the one with which she grabs a tuft of hair and snips it off. As she progresses in the haircut the hand and grip get weaker and the hair resultantly longer. Also, she cuts it short on top, long on the sides. The lady barber had other ideas. She cut it exactly the opposite.

At the end, before she applied the scissors to the top, she wet it down with a shaker bottle, working it in so my surprised hair was deeply wet. Then began the snipping. She explained that they no longer used a straight razor on the back of people’s necks; I think this was when we were talking, at my instigation, of AIDS, and how in contrast dentists and dental assistants wear plastic gloves and wrap everything in sheets of the same material.

“We don’t have that fear,” she told me, snip-snip. “But we have our hands in so many chemicals that sometimes we get burns. Ken is allergic to the chemicals and develops a rash—that’s why he has to have time off. His hands and wrists break out badly.”

Ken was in his fifties, but thinking retirement. He was known far and wide as the best barber around, and that was why the detour at the West end of Stanwood that brought more traffic streaming slowly by was not needed as a business enhancement. The place was always full. He was in great demand. She was, she explained, the barber who cut Ken’s hair. His was a one-barber shop. The woman worked at a hairshop in Mt. Vernon, and that was where Ken went when his hair had grown long. I kept this in mind in case I wanted her to cut my hair sometimes in the future, or if Ken proved unsatisfactory, though I was now believing it was an honor to have Ken cut your hair and I might not be worthy. I also wanted to know where to find her for Norma’s sake, she who will not let me reciprocate haircuts (wisely, wisely) and gets tire of going into Seattle for hers, a hundred-mile roundtrip.

She was almost done. The price was $8.50, which I’m told is ridiculously cheap for haircuts today, especially from stylists, and seniors got fifty cents off that price. When I got out of the chair, I had not had, as of old, a glimpse of my head or the traditional chair twirl and mirror hand to show off how it looked in back, before it was too late to remedy the cut there if the patient—I mean, customer—was even slightly outraged.

Have I mentioned that my hair is thinning and receding at the temples? Well, it is, and it has been a recent and slightly disturbing realization over the past several months. My hair now wet, parted, and slicked back, I barely recognized myself in the long mirror behind the single chair. The face looked at me, a stranger’s

No, that’s not right either. It was my father’s face, aged spotted at the temples, the mouth set in a grim line.

My God, I thought: I am getting old. My fate will soon be his. And I began to think of my son, getting older at exactly the same rate as I did, as my father did, only of course each of us had a generation’s head start on the other person.

How have we spent this long summer, now winding down over the Labor Day Weekend? Watching dumb baseball games instead of improving our minds with excellent movies (which we are paying for, even if we don’t see them) delivered to our house via Primestar Dish. That’s how.

We saw a Michael Douglas/Sean Penn flick called The Game on a Mariner’s off night. Both men know their business and do not sign on to movies that are dull or vapid. Therefore it was well-made, like Dick Sylbert’s are, and full of fast-moving plot lines, good characterization, and camera work that enchants the eyes, regardless of what story is going on. In short, a modern excellent forgettable movie. It is what we are conditioned to receive and are emotionally disappointed if we don’t get.

How sophisticated we have become, visually and perhaps in other ways. Movies from past decades, shown over and over on “classic” channels, let us down from every standpoint because we are cleverly jaded and expectant. The plot lines develop tediously and the characters are often stars who cannot play other than themselves. You can leave the room for a drink or a pee and no miss a thing. But the modern movies are so tight and truncated that you don’t dare avert your eyes for more than a moment or else you will have missed something essential and, like learning math, you can’t go on successfully if you are missing what has preceded what is now going on.

Since I miss a lot anyway, I like to have my movie watching on tape so I can backup and revisit what I’ve missed. And, alas, I often need auditory enhancement, that is, hearing help, because I miss vital conversation that contains the plot elements necessary to knowing what is going on.

With bad movies, I just let them run on, uncomprehending specifically, being contented with the visual action and letting the nuances escape me. Often I will stupidly ask Norma about some critical point that I’ve missed and ask her to fill me in, for without it I will be in more ignorance than usual, than is permissible (or admissible).

To me this is hilarious, but to another it might not be so. My frugal neighbor, Anton, is planning a trip in October to the Grand Ronde River in Eastern Washington, with his fishing buddy, Chad. Neither have been there before, where I have been, but not recently. Anton is asking me a lot of questions about where to fish there, where to stay, boat- launch areas, etc. I reply that I have a whole chapter on the river in my first book, SW. Now Anton won’t buy a book, though he will buy $350 stockingfoot waders. If he wants what’s in a book, he will either borrow the book or else take it out of the library. This I know. And I won’t lend him a book that I have written because I am dependent, in part, on book sales for my income. So we are at loggerheads, but friendly loggerheads.

But he wants me to leak information about the Ronde, as it is called, and I am willing. Actually, the book contains little specific information on where to go, how to fish, etc., and is additionally about fifteen years out of date—though the basic geography hasn’t changed or the place names. Of course I won’t tell him this. The idea is to get Anton to buy the book, or at the very least check it out of the library.

On the other side of me is Tracy, the young English major/mother, who wants to be an editor, is a heavy reader, a non-fisherperson, and who has read carefully at least two of my books, having edited one of them. How odd. What a contrast they provide to each other. All this, at least to me, is mildly amusing and no cause for permanent pique. Yet it momentarily miffs me, Anton’s chronic parsimoniousness.

Why, he is so tight he can’t get his hat off. And other similes and mixed metaphors keep leaping into mind to describe it, always in hyperbole. Yet Anton is generous in his own particular fashion, though he tends to borrow lavishly and to return one’s items niggardly. But I suppose that is half the fun, if fun it is.

Ten days in a row with the temperature over 80 degrees produces this one which will serve as a seasonal respite, the thermometer predicted to rise only into the mid-seventies. It dawned with thick fog, after a night with a full moon late to rise and still hanging far to the East when we went to bed at midnight. The fog lasted until eleven or eleven-thirty, producing a breezy day with plenty of sun and flue sky. It is Labor Day, the day on which people labor only for themselves. Anton has got his house painted at last. I, I have put off doing a long, tedious porch railing, for which Norma bought me the prescribed paint, after a false try, about a week ago. I mean, I couldn’t have started to paint it until then, now could I?

Tracy and John, our rental neighbors to the East, have returned from ten days on Vancouver Island, regaling us with tails of camping on the beach and warm-water swimming. They are enthusiastic about moving there and setting up housekeeping. Tracy says that electricians are not in an abundance and raves about the exchange rate; the Canadian dollar is worth sixty percent of what ours is. That means it will buy an astonishingly whole lot.

A flock of about forty Canada geese has somehow materialized, growing from our two pair of last summer. They are bonded, a true flock, and fly back and forth from one of the tiny ponds feeding the lake to the lake itself, at all hours of the day or night. Of course you can hear them honking. The hours they keep! Simply shameful.

Everybody on the lake hates the geese—hates their droppings, which appear to be dead green snakes, reminiscent of those fireworks snakes that decompose into weightless gray ash. So far, not many geese snakes have been spotted on lawns, so the lake must be absorbing them all. I guess it is no worse than the accumulated excreta of widgeon flocks. Because of the total absence of duckweed, we have had none of those so far. I’ve seen a couple of lovely widgeon flocks wheel, descend, then depart the lake. We have nothing to hold them here except memories, memories for both bird and denizen.

Now the goose flotilla streams by on the far side of the lake, illuminated from an autumnal sharp angle of a cool sun, all the colors of summer muted by a soft haze that reminds me of the best of the English landscape painters, who are adept at catching that eggshell haze.

A touch of rain overnight has left a single telltale puddle on the deck; otherwise the dry wood and earth have absorbed the drops as if they never fell.

Today, if all goes well, I shall buy the new digital camera from a local chainstore and perhaps begin to absorb some of this seasonal mutability in a digital manner. Oh, the copy of the obscure Morris Graves paintings from books goes well and we are replacing all those little drawing that Loren Smith did of me and my fishing for my books with them. A nice change and, besides, who wants to keep looking at himself and a gallery of fish out of water? Not even I.

The dogs have had a restless night and I think it is Cate who ate something that cause digestive disturbances; these dogs will eat practically anything to keep the other dog from having a fair crack at it. We could hear her whining, off and on, throughout the night and into the early morning hours. Usually it is Biff who has his gastric problems. In the morning there is a pile of scat in the pen and a puddle indicating pee. When I take them down to the wetland to relieve themselves (far from any drainage into the still swampy water) she does not have anything to do, while he performs his usual.

Earlier this morning, though not early, the dogs were barking their alarm bark, barks that signify something or someone unusual is about. This is never any of our neighbors, whom the dogs know and ignore, at least from an alarm standpoint. This time it is the intruder bark, over and over, and other dogs nearby pick it up, or else our dogs pick it up from them. Then I hear a shrill maniacal noise—piercing, not unlike mad laughter. For a while I can’t put the finger of my memory on it. Then it comes to me, as I prepare to take a shower: loon. It is the loon’s lunatic, lune-mad shriek. It repeats itself at odd intervals.

“You hear the loon?” I ask Norma, who is upstairs. She answers that she hasn’t. Then, after my shower, she tells me, “Yes, I heard it, or heard something. It did sound like a loon.”

There has been a stranger, also, standing out at the end of Odekirk’s dock—a guy, in his late twenties or early thirties. Could the noise have come from him? It is possible. If so, it is the best loon imitation I ever heard. The guy ought to go on radio, whatever that is. Oh, yes, it is where sound is still supreme, principal.

I take the dogs in for their morning meal, grown small because they are in transition to one meal a day when they are a year old, or thereabouts. They seem frisky, as usual, and eat about their usual amounts. Cate is quick to the feeding dish, which is a good sign.

Yesterday our son, Garth, paid us a seldom visit. He loves playing with the dogs and they enjoy and obey him just as much as with me. One of the purposes of his visits is to weight the dogs—he works out regularly with weights. He first weighs himself, then lifts the biggest dog, Biff, and Norma leans low over the scale and reads it. We do a bit of subtraction, whistle at the number, and Garth lifts Cate, and we do the same.

Definitely autumn, with the first rain in twenty-one days and the temperature under seventy degrees, all day long. The fall equinox isn’t for about two weeks, but I don’t mind a bit. The vine maples have changed and their is a dusky yellow to the green of the deciduous trees, with brown leaves beginning to pile up in all the usual places.

I fished the shrunken Manure Spreader Hole yesterday, with Norma and the dogs up at the river place, and saw a small bright steelhead rise in the fast shallow water I had just fished through. (Isn’t it always the case?) Then the top of the Flats, which is very shallow and where I hung up and didn’t break off but must have spooked every fish in the rest of the pool. Nada.

Returned to pick up my wife and dogs, and stopped off at the Elbow for a quick fish-through. Nothing again. Young Hedrick followed me out and missed seeing me snip a Tropicana rose from Van Druesen’s property. He rarely comes up and it would have shrunk to a pip by the time he does. A fast drive home, with a stop at Thrifty for fresh meat, some bananas, and milk, followed by a late dinner for us four and watching the Mariners lose another game, 10-zip.

All in all, not a bad afternoon and early evening. Norma sawed up deadfall small dry limbs for winter fires, while the dogs frisked on shore and in the shallows. Saw Joe Bly, who has bought another new boat and trailer, this one with a twenty horse Merc that doesn’t seem to work.

The cat does not love the radiator of the recently driven car that warms the cat so lovingly; thus, sitting and looking at my two dogs cuddled so fetchingly, I truly wonder whether they love each other or simply love the warmth the other provides. Of course they are deeply attached, but they are fiercely competitive, each wanting to be the only dog, and the way they go at it, after hours with only each other in their nighttime pen, makes me think they would like to see the other banished, if not outright dead. Yet they are incapable of making any kind of move without the other in close attendance, and constantly look for the other when at range, out of doors. Much of what they do is in tandem.

The great fear is that one will find some edible morsel and glom it down before the other gets to it. This seems to occupy their every waking moment.

There are many birds and fish I know by heart, never having seen them. For instance, today I spot in a new catalog that came through the mail a saltwater fish with a crooked stripe down its side. “Snook,” I said rightly, and the catalog confirmed me. A moment later, “Tarpon,” and again I was correct. And I have never caught a brown trout, but when I do, I will not mistake it for anything else.

Birds are a similar matter. Norma identifies a purple finch at the feeder, and I would have, too, had I been first. The rufous-sided trohee had to be looked up and so did the western tanager. But other birds triggered the mind’s eye and we called out to each other its name, triumphant. With ducks, there being a limited number of species in this world, compared to songbirds, it was easy, and I remember sharply the first cinnamon teal, followed by a blue-wing, both on the same day, and the tiny secretive green-wings are on my short list of favorite birds and still give me a thrill each time I spot them. Unfortunately they avoid Lake Ketchum, I know not why; if loons will pay us the occasional brief visit, there is always the hope for green-wings, perhaps on one of the tiny feeder ponds where I rarely go.

In bad plays and movies, characters shout a lot to make up for weak plots and poor characterization. Cf. A flick called Windy City, which does dishonor to its source, Chicago.

“Dis” may mean to dishonor, rather than disrespect, its object or person referred to, which would lift the insult onto another plane, perhaps a classic or heroic one.

There are so many wonderful old words that seem to have fallen into disfavor, disuse. One of these is “slut,” though I understand it is now deadly popular among high-school boys to describe girls of low virtue. But throughout history there have been fine euphemisms for much the same thing—terse, derogatory description—including those awful four-letter words that signify the sex organs. And of course there are elliptical phrases that are even more apt, more telling.

Why not say of her, this particular girl or woman, “her orientation seemed to be entirely in her genital area”?

Both dogs now walk at heel with some regularity. She was first; she is, in most things. She picked up the idea quickly, but he resisted it, seemingly dumbly. But slowly he heaved to, too. Now we can walk around the lake, calling them back when necessary, when a truck or car or school bus is coming, and they return, a bit slowly, he especially. I must keep my attention on them nearly all the time, which puts a stopper to any adult conversation I am having with Norma, who religiously participates in these walks, each and every one of them.

Yesterday we had a terrible scare and it might have been more serious, devastating, than it was. A small slight woman appeared up ahead, at a good distance, and the dogs broke command and headed for her, vying to be the first to be petted. We cannot seem to break them of this and Cate of jumping up on whoever it is. She has been “noed” often enough, and turned aside with outstretched hands, so that she very cleverly darts in from the side, and jumps up on the tricked party.

This time she knocked the woman down. We were still a hundred yards away, I’d say. I was rushing in her direction, shouting, Come, Heel, whatever came to mind that might turn the trick. Nothing did. Down went the woman, on her side, on the hard black asphalt pavement. I screamed; she did not. No, no, no. But it was too late. She lay there, as I approached, the dogs happily bouncing round, circling. I shouted curses at them, at Cate in particular. I offered to help the prone woman to her feet, if she was able to get there. Small, frail, and very old. She particularized the latter in her first words.

Christ, I thought: a broken hip. But, no, she slowly reassembled herself and finally took my hand, selecting in the manner of old fragile people to rise in a particular, individual manner. She examined the palm of the hand that was not gripping mine. “Are you hurt?” I asked. “Can you stand?”

“I think so.” And she did, brushing off her clothing, which was white. Her hair, too. And she tentatively smiled. My god, I thought; her own teeth. They were white and original, and here and there I could make out a gold inlay. Beautiful, costly work.

She was not hurt, only lightly scuffed. That was too much. I feared a serious injury and law suit. (Must call my insurance agent today.) She was good natured about it, much more so than I would have been. How close we came to . . . disaster. Selfishly I was thinking only of myself, me and Norma. The poor woman. So easily Cate could have hurt her and how lucky we were.

Let’s see, where were we? On Christmas morn, Hans Berg died of cancer. His wife, Joanne, began feeling poorly shortly after and at first thought it was a byproduct of her grief, but it worsened and soon she was unable to eat and was sick to her stomach all the time. Doctor reports were indecisive at first, but additional test showed a malignancy on her pancreas. Bad news. It was inoperable and she began chemo and radiation treatments that were largely palliative in scope. She put her house up for sale and, in a couple of months, it sold. We didn’t know her or Hans well, but told her good buy the day she moved out. She said her plans were to build a new home on Camano, in part to escape the capital gains taxes on the home. This, when she had been told she had less than a year to live. Makes you think.

They are the couple with six grown children, all of them daughters. They are younger than Norma and I. Perhaps the idea was to pass along the house to one of the daughter’s—a married one, with kids. Her grandchildren. So Joanne moved away to live in one of her rental houses until the new house could be built, provided that she lived so long, which was doubtful. Gone, we think of her occasionally, usually when we pass her house on a walk or drive, and wonder how she is coping with her plight.

A man moved into the house, a burly guy with a full reddish beard and jovial manner. Occasionally, from directly across the lake, we see a woman and child, but it does not appear that they actually live there, only come to visit. I introduced myself to the guy but forget his name; in time, I suppose I will reacquire it. When I met him, I made a joke about the welcome wagon stopping by his place on Thursday. Of course we have no such critter and he acknowledged my usual dumb remark as the joke it was. We passed on.

Monday night we were watching television, the Monday Night Football Game (see what an intellectual I am?) and I chanced to glance out the window. In the old Berg house’s left front window glared an oversized TV set, really huge. In fact, with the aid of bird-watching binoculars I could see the screen quite clearly. What was our new neighbor across the lake (about a quarter of a mile, but it was a sparkling clear night) watching? I squinted to see, but couldn’t quite make it out. All I could see was color and pattern. Hurriedly I began surfing through the five network channels on our set, glancing from it to his. The problem was, screens are redrawn (as they call it) in nanoseconds and when you see an image on one, it will have changed before you can locate it on another set. So I surfed and watched, and finally settled on Channel Four. Back and forth my eyes shifted, and his colors and patterns seemed to be the same on mine.

The new nameless guy was watching Monday Night Football, too. Seems perfectly ordinary and harmless, just like us.

Tell me the kind of jazz you love and I will tell you approximately when you came of age, for don’t we cling to that music as we age and play it over and over again, responding as we did then? So when you say you like to listen to the jazz of Paul Desmond, Dave Bruebeck, Chet Baker, you are saying you are a contemporary of mine, and if you add Bird and Miles to your list, you place yourself at having been hip to the scene about 1950-55, which makes you sixty-five or older. And when you hear one of their riffs on the radio and it stops you dead in your tracks, it means that (at least for you) no good jazz has been written since then, and the jazz from an earlier era sounds corny and ancient.

Sign of The Times (again, but different): sometime this will be recent history, and we’ll all look back with sad nostalgia, but right not it is what is happening, current, heart-wrenching. The President of the United States is being humiliated by the Kenneth Starr Report going to the House of Representing, detailing his sex life in the Oral Orifice and providing David Letterman and Jay Leno with all the joke material they will need for a year. What a sad day, especially if it leads to impeachment by the Senate on a host of charges having to do with perjury, intimidating witnesses, abuse of power, etc. The details will indicate that he used the White House as a brothel. It is hard to know what to make of all this, but at the moment, after repeatedly begging forgiveness and invoking God’s help, it would seem he is incapable of governing and is a laughing stock. He has shamed the office and turned it into a long-lasting dirty joke.

Of course I have no vote in the matter and more than likely will change my opinion over the next few weeks.

We have complained about the Canada geese and how their flocks at the lake are growing in number, and how they leave their snaky green turds on lawns. Today Norma spotted a lone goose, while we were feeding the dogs this morning, and asked what she should do about it. Thoughtlessly I said, “Send Biff after it.” Which she did. It took him a moment to realize what was being asked of him and, before that, to find the goose with his eyes. But then he got the idea and went after it. The goose emitted a goose-like squawk and waddled surprisingly fast for the water’s edge, whereat he began swimming towards the center of the lake. Biff plunged in and followed. About a third of the way across it struck him that he wasn’t going to catch up with the goose, no matter how hard he swam, and began looking right to left. Then he stopped, turned round, and swam leisurely back to shore, where we welcomed him with a dry towel.

“The last rose of summer” is a sweet, fanciful term for this time of the year, when fall is advancing rapidly and the warm days of the previous season linger but with decreasing intensity. Today, for instance, is warm again, in the high seventies, but there is no longer a threat of real heat, only this pleasing variation on the old theme, a theme which has become tired for some time.

Autumn here always means rain; in fact autumn doesn’t start until the heavy rains move in and hold for days, swelling the rivers and bringing in fresh fish. The lake is as low as I’ve ever seen it and we have a sandy, weedy beach. There are people on this lake who import sand and tend and rake their sand as though it were a living thing, perhaps a garden. Not us. The people who do are generally those with grandchildren and want to provide a real beach on which they, the children, can play. The work that goes into maintaining a beach like this is considerable, and I’m not sure that the kids really appreciate it. Usually they’re out in the water, frolicking, boating, or high up on the lawn, playing with the dog. Everyone has as dog or two, we country squires. The only ones who don’t are curmudgeons like Donahoe, a long-time resident who will move away as soon as he can find someone to buy his house.

His luck has been bad, in this regard, and it perhaps explains how he has grown so sour.

Public response to the Starr Report locally is amazingly benign. About sixty percent of the people interviewed think Clinton governs well, support his programs, accept his multiple apologies, and believe they can overlook his detailed sexual indiscretions. I, for one, wouldn’t have thunk it. Perhaps people have become jaded with so much porn and near porn available, and the common knowledge of what couple’s private practices consist of. Oral sex (the great byword) is taken for granted, where as a few decades ago this was forbidden stuff, practiced in deep secret and enjoyed as something halfway sinister, forbidden. Now it is all out in the open and part of the daily conversation.

School kids reading the papers or listening to the news on TV ask, “Mommy, what is oral sex?” I wonder what the answer is, other than, “Go do your homework.”

Meanwhile newspapers (the Seattle Times, for example) publish lightly expurgated versions of the Starr Report using ellipse marks to detail where salacious material has been left out. This is so children, reading the paper, trying to keep up with Current Events as they have been told to do, will get the gist of what is going on, but miss out on the prurient details. I, of course, hurried to the Internet and read the prurient sections at length. I did this in the name of objective reporting and the need to know what happened so I could make an informed decision.

And what is my conclusion? Gee, I don’t know. I guess what he did in private is his business. Yesterday, however, I didn’t see how he could avoid impeachment hearings in the Legislature. Now the word is, Congress is waiting for public response before they form an opinion, or else they won’t say what their opinion is, under the guise of having to remain neutral, judicial, in case a vote is taken in the House.

But you can be sure an opinion they have, and it will be closely tied to party lines. The Republicans have been seething for revenge ever since Nixon was faced with impeachment and resigned. This is their opportunity and the news value is so high that the media will keep the issue alive as long as they can. This will be for a long, long time.

A warm gray day with no rain now for nearly a month (though we had a morning drop, the other day, that was immeasurable) and Norma must sprinkle some so that everything doesn’t dry up.

Up fishing the Elbow the other night, I came home to be greeted as to my success. “No fish,” I reported, “but look at all this produce.” My new generous friends, Dan and Carol, loaded me up with Swiss char, young carrots, some round hard little objects called lemon cucumbers, which one of Norma’s books says should be eaten like an apple. I tasted it and it was crunchy and had an onion aftertaste, but then I don’t like cucumbers except in their processed form, pickles.

The chard was pale and with white stems, different from the beet-like chard they gave us earlier, which was a mite tough though flavorful. This was tender and tasty. The rest we’ll have later.

The river was dead low and I fished the entire length of the Elbow and Mary’s Gate with the light Spey rod and floating line, laying out repeatedly eighty-ninety feet of line in (if I do say so myself) long graceful cast. At one point I said to Dan, who was watching from his front year on the riprap, “Pretty, eh?” A bit vainglorious, I know, but then when I watched Mike Dull of Wenatchee do much the same thing, several years ago, it is how I felt, and I added to Dan, “It’s taken me four years to be able to do this.”

Fish are elusive in this sparkling lake now, the water warm, the time nudging mid-September. I can rarely get a strike off my dock, but then Biff keeps diving in at first sight of the chartreuse bobber, which he may mistake for a spinyray fish. The tiny orange float, a Corkie, I use on my flyrod doesn’t produce this effect on him. But all my vinyl lures are so chewed up that they may not look right to the fish and therefor do not produce strikes. Or else it is this warm, lazy time of the year. I know with steelhead it is the case, and it will take cold nights and rain to make them move and become active takers again.

Women know the importance of being ever cheerful, pleasant, and friendly; often they do this to excess, and it makes you shun them, for you sense insincerity/ Men seem never to have picked up the trait.

Tallest, or else the most isolated of red alders, have taken on a golden-brown, burnished tone, sun-blasted. This gives them an old, dying look, but it is only prelude to renewal. Everywhere the grass is burnt buff and has stopped growing, except for the moisture-sucking weeds, which still flourish and even put out their tiny blooms.

When I went fishing last, the dogs (who ever swim out to retrieve the least outstanding of leaves floating in a back eddy or come drifting down with the slowed current) roamed up and down the beach, fighting and tussling all afternoon, exhausting themselves. Once Cate came back, at dusk, carrying in her mouth this huge shapeless object, mud-colored. It thought it might be rusted metal but, no, it proved to be an early maple leaf, somehow turned the color of chocolate by combined action of the sun and the tepid water.

I asked her for it, to drop it in my hand, which she did and, after examining it perfunctorily, I gave it back to her. She carried it around a minute more, then dropped it to the beach. On the beach were a lot of alder leaves, some green, some gold, none of them that rich brown.

Word comes to us from Carrie next door that Joanne Berg has died. She was the wife of Hans, who died on Christmas morn. How sad—doubly sad. Here was this close family, the parents of six daughters, and within the narrow scope of a single year they are dead.

I knew neither of them beyond a hello; in fact, I don’t think either of them knew Norma or my names. They were too much in the terrible midst of their illnesses when we made their acquaintance. Hans’s held on, slowly debilitating him over the course of a couple of years; hers was most sudden—diagnoses in spring, dead before autumn. Our lake community is diminished. They were long time residents. He was a first mate on an international steamship line and a proud man, used to command and large responsibility.

Once he could swim the lake daily, from his place to the dock that is now mine. Summer and winter, too, he assured me, swelling his wasted chest with pride and memory. Gone, gone—to wherever it is that takes each of us in dumb time.

Is the mechanical act of writing this journal worth it? I do it much from habit, not quite from rote, but is it of any interest to anybody besides myself? I doubt it. But looking over what I’ve found that matters in seeks or months past, it seems to be still to be of interest. If it is to me, maybe to somebody else, or a whole lot of somebody else’s, in the long future that will not include me.

Yesterday, a Saturday, I drove into Seattle; I seem to do this once every couple of weeks of necessity. I dropped off a couple of art prints to be framed to match our original Gilkeys at University Village Frame Shop, by a large handsome woman who owns the place, a tasteful person, who was very busy but nonetheless found time to chat a bit and surprised me by using the word “groovy.” I immediately responded, “Fifty-second Street Bridge Song,” and we both hummed a few words or choruses.

Then I went next door and looked for fifteen copies of Country/City which got lost between the distributor, Partners/West and the University Village B&N. A woman on the phone told me they had found them, all fifteen, and to ask for Jason when I came into sign them, which they wanted me to do. So I did, but I searched for the stack of books before I asked for this Jason and could not find them. They never carried my first two books with Amato and I never knew why but was quite bitter. I used the restroom, then went to look for Jason.

I found him, a tall, tousel-haired kid in hornrims; he looked the part of an English major. He told me he had looked up my earlier books on their data base which is regularly updated by Partners/West and found I had none, none in print, he said, none listed. I told him they had at least five of each book; they checked for me on Friday. So on Monday next I will phone them and try to clear up the discrepancy. If they don’t list my book, but have it in stock, nobody can order it and no copy will be sold, it only stands to reason.

I signed all fifteen, at their request, dreading some of them to come back to me after six months or so and having signed copies on hand that can’t be dedicated. Well, so goes it. I suggested to tall, tousled Jason that some copies be put on the table other than Local Authors, such as Getting To Know The Pacific Northwest, or some such table that got a lot of pedestrian flow traffic. He looked doubtful about doing this and how it would effect their running inventory. He went off to help a customer and I still had his cheap blue ballpoint pen in hand and it was not good enough a one to bother to swipe. I hunted for him to return it, but he was still busy, so I handed it over to another clerk at the same Information table and returned to may stack of fifteen. I picked up approximately half of them and carried them myself to the traffic flow table and found an unoccupied slot and stacked them there.

It is not exactly the kind of crime that puts you in jail. It may aid sales immeasurably, since all the others are in a dim corner near the car-racing magazines.

There has to be some middle ground between glitzy tourista (the word has at least two connotations, one being simply the Spanish for tourist, the other a disease tourists get when traveling in a strange country) LaConner and, say, places like Oso, at the smallest, or Arlington, bigger, with its ugly rural decadence; perhaps simple Stanwood is the place and will grow into something calm, useful, and attractive.

Today I went to LaConner to attend the annual meeting of docents of the Museum of Northwest Art, though I am not a docent. I got permission because I am thinking of becoming one and now I shall. The docents number seventy but only thirty of them are active; volunteer work is like this, with participants giving of their time only when there is no personal or family conflict with their time. Often there is; often one can claim one, even if it is trumped u for the occasion.

They are mostly women of middle age or older. There are three men. Immediately I went to them and they welcomed me. Two are quite old, one a neighbor of Gilkey and the other an octogenarian, I would guess, who was involved in creating the museum and is one of its mainstays. The third is a man named Lyle, perhaps younger than I by a few years, who is dynamic and an enthusiastic tour group leader and public speaker. Very likable guy, generous and outgoing.

The meeting was in the large upstairs showroom, with chairs put out for the docents and fresh coffee served out of china cups. There were cookies and sweetrolls. We milled around, then we met. I got to know people and their names as the meeting rolled on. Several were very competent and gracious. It is a good group and I shall enjoy them.

A docent who doesn’t elect to lead tours (and not all of the docents like to do this and are shy, like me) give seven hours of service per month and sit behind a table at the door, greet people, assist them and show them around and perform information-giving as required or requested. It is a case, said Lyle, of reading their body language and giving them what they want. Which put me in mind of meeting Rae Tufts at Gilkey’s show at the Bellevue Art Museum, many years ago, and having to send her away, as she strove to explain each painting to me until I finally blurted out, “Rae, not the docents tour, please.”

Lyle has a good attitude. You must become a fount of knowledge about the artists in each show, so that there will be no surprise questions asked of you that you are not prepared for. He takes great pride in this and so shall I. The docents have a library, and each featured artist has a file of critical articles and books about him. This is a particular docent’s responsibility. It is very useful.

I met the museum’s director after the meeting, a certain Susan, and she was very pleasant and took time to chat with me. I lobbied for a show of Richard Gilkey, of course. She said, “Not before 2001.” That is not so far off. She is familiar with his work and his importance. He fits right in, perhaps more so than anyone after Guy Anderson, from the standpoint of being a native. Both lived on the Skagit Flats most of their lives. Other Northwest artists, alas, moved away, and Tobey, who is counted as among them, never really was one, and his involvement here was only peripheral to his life and short lived.

LaConner is a flashy, crowded little town, but at 10 A.M. on a Monday morning, the time of the meeting, many shops were not open and the streets were nearly deserted. I found a parking place easily, one just across the street from the museum. But already there were tourists on the streets, this fine day; rain is scheduled for tomorrow, but these were dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, T-shirts, or halters. Without exception they wore sandals and had very brown evenly tanned legs.

One must make one’s peace with LaConner. It has many benefits. I suppose there is a winter LaConner and it is far different, populated by natives who all know each other by first name and long history. Rain will drive the visitors away. They will cringe in cities beneath umbrellas. The town will become drenched, deserted. That may well be the LaConner that is worth getting to know and the one that is by nature the middle ground that I seek.

Another Zen gray day, with fog obscuring the far shore, the details softly coming and going; a lone rowboat briefly anchored off my dock, the man dressed in red, attached at the waterline to another boat and occupant, just like him but upside down. He still, fishing, with an ultra-light spinning outfit, adding an odd action to his lure with the slender bobbing rodtip.

When I look again, minutes later, he is gone. The lake is floating on an inverted image of itself, ghostly, both as soft as cotton batten.

Paul W. comes rowing his steelhead driftboat at furious pace across the lake from where he lives, a quarter of a mile away, in a blind rage. “Shut your dogs up, will you, I’m trying to sleep.” It is about three in the afternoon of a weekday. What is this? The dogs, sure, they are barking where I have them confined on cables in the sun, drying out after a hard swim retrieving their favorite dummy. Sure it makes noise, but then everybody around the lake has a dog, has two, and they bark at all odd times, including during the night. We learn to live with it.

Apparently not Paul W., who is furious. He continues to chew me out from where he hangs over his oars, a few yards off shore. If I hadn’t seen him coming and come out to greet him with a friendly quip, I wonder if he would have boarded me, come upon my lawn with cutlass swinging, or else stayed out in his boat, safe from trespass, shouting at me, making his own brand of noise.

Sleep at three in the afternoon? Perhaps he is an insomniac who is overcome with tiredness in mid-day, after a sleepless night (dogs barking?) and tries to catch a sustaining nap, whenever he has a free hour. But . . . such rage. I’ve heard of road rage, which can get you killed, but this must be something new, a new brand, lake rage, perhaps. I think Paul needs psychiatric treatment. But I need to pay more attention to keeping my dogs quiet during the day. When he accuses me of letting them bark during the night, I know he is hearing other dogs, not mine. I tried to point this out to him and how I sleep ten feet away from them, and they do not bark, well, not often and never for long. It is other dogs he hears, and so do I. But to Paul W., all barking dogs now are mine.

For those of us who love a small lake, coming across a big one is truly like an inland sea, and has many of the sea’s characteristics. Because we had never been North together, not along State Highway 9, and because we know these nice days are numbered, one less per day, here at mid-September, Norma and I decided to pack lunches, load the dogs, and take the Explorer for a ride in the country. We headed for Sedro Woolley and at the junction turned in the direction of Canada. And we almost got there, but turned back short of Sumas, which is a border town.

We encountered wide spots in the road such as Alger, Acme (not Acne, I assured myself), and Van Zant. Norma had gone by these places recently on a solo trip to Mt. Baker, crossing the two forks of the Nooksack river, where (I am ashamed to admit) I had never been. Now I have. The South Fork is wonderfully clear, though shrunken, as all of our rivers are presently, including the mighty Skagit. The South Fork hold steelhead, summer and winter, and I think there is a hatchery upstream. Near it my neighbor Anton, who knows this area well and considers it home, has had good fishing in the past, mostly in the winter. He says it is often “in” when other rivers are in near flood.

The South Fork of the Nooksack is fed by glaciers from Mt. Baker and all summer long, and other times of the years when it is warm, or Chinook storms roll in, is milky, as it was today. It is where we stopped for lunch and I took some of my first pictures with the new Kodak digital camera. Processed by computer the next day, they turned out fine, and I printed an excellent one of Norma and the dogs sitting on a log in the shade, where dappled still-green trees loomed prettily in the background.

The river was unattractive and we did not linger there. We retraced our route and took the turnoff for Lake Whatcom. An experienced UPS driver was on our bumper as we wound through the trees on a twisting road, so at first opportunity I pulled off on the shoulder to let him zoom pass. After a bit more of winding, we caught our first glimpse of the lake. Wow. It is a huge lake, over five thousand acres, and more than 350 feet deep; much of it is treed and unroaded, though logged at the turn of the century, that is, the past century. Settlements take place only here and there, and the lake has many miles of steep bank where no homes can be built near the water. Some of this is roaded, while much of it still is not.

My guidebook tells me that East Bellingham, a good-sized city, touches the West end of the lake. We had no idea civilization was so near. The lake looks like a mountain lake and behaves as one. In winter, its roads must be a terror. The lake contains cutthroats, some of them reported large, and kokanee, which are landlocked sockeye salmon. It also has some bass and spinyrays. Looking at it from the road, it is majestic and some of the home imperial. Immediately I wanted to buy a home and live there. Forgotten was my own little lake, Ketchum, and its quiet appeal. On Whatcom, one must have a speedboat in order to cover the large distances. I pictured remote inlet streams where searun cutthroat spawned and the lake cutthroat came in season to join them. You could only reach these places by boat and they were practically untouched. Dream on.

Still I loved the lake. Well, it was a warm, sparkling day, I told myself. What would it be like in the heavy rains of autumn? And the deep snows of this region in mid-winter? I was dying to find out.

“This is how real estate is sold to impractical people,” I said to Norma. “Like us, they come to such a place and find it idyllic. They contact a realtor and buy some place that has been on the market for a couple of years. They change their entire life, based on some whim. They take on debt, not knowing what lies in front of them. It ruins them and their lives.”

“I didn’t say that, did I? I’d love to, at the moment. At the same moment I know better.”

We drove on. But the image of the lake and the hills and Mts. Baker and Shuksan nearby linger in my mind and have lost none of their appeal.

Flocks of geese wheel around all night, honking in chorus. They are moving from pond to pond, and pond to lake, and back again. We hear them nightly, throughout the night, often, but yesterday we came across that noisy flock of forty on the furthest feeder pond to Lake Ketchum, at the end of 76^th Street, where a private unlocked gate leads to a dirty road that ends at the countyline road dividing Snohomish from Skagit county.

And there were the geese. The dogs spotted them first and looked to us for guidance. After all, it was Norma who first sicked them on the lone goose plopping around on our lakeside lawn. We tried to discourage them from more of the same, since it was a farmer’s pond and he had several domestic white geese in residence, and the Canadas mixed with them familiarly, congenially. But seeing the dogs, the Canadas took to the air and wheeled as if on one wing, making one of those vee-formations they are famous for. They wheel, they circle, the descend. “Look,” I said, “they are going to land again.”

“No, they aren’t,” said Norma authoritatively. She hates geese and I had just sung their praises again, pointing out how beautiful they were in the air and how—before the filled Seattle’s beaches with tons of their scat—everybody loved them. For the same reasons now, I pointed out, we can love them again, so long as they stay off our lawn and beach, and don’t pollute them.

The geese, as if in concert with me, who defended them, did what I said they would. They wheeled low, started away, made a smaller circle, dropped lower, and disappeared below the tree line. We spotted them, so many, at the far end of the pond when we reached the gate at the road and, seeing the dogs again, they as a body (a body politic?), took to the air again, with much honking, squawking, protest muttering, and wing noise as before, which is considerable.

It was the identical sound we hear each night, many times over, only up close this time and as a consequence much louder.

I grinned, Norma frowned, and the dogs stared, fascinated and a little overwhelmed by the size and number of the geese.

The perch fishers never give up. A familiar red truck is parked at the public access when I get up and an identifiable aluminum boat is anchored out at Perch Point, with a white-haired dude and buddy sitting in it, absolutely still until one of them has a strike or hooks a fish, at which point he reels in and, if he is lucky, unsnags his small fish and drops it (alive!) into a great yellow pail, the kind that compound bought in quantity comes in. Then the guy rebaits and casts out into the placid lake and become still again.

There is no limit on panfish, or spinyrays, except for bass and, where they have them, walleyes and other larger such fish. So the men dutifully fish to fill the bucket, grimly, though I know it is the excitement of the strike that truly lures them here.

Norma tells me that there is no danger of depleting a lake’s perch or crappie, and I suppose she is right, though the sportsmanship, or rather lack of it, is what concerns me. Most such fishers simply throw their life fish in the bucket to smother. They do not bother with the game fisher’s traditional rap on the head to hasten death. It seems to me the common decent least thing they could do.

The year is taking on its muted tones, the tall grasses wind-whipped to the same forward slant, the lake wearing a corrugated pewter configuration, the air containing a brief chill when the sun goes behind a cloud, and clouds are numerous now, ever present. I wear a flannel shirt now and wonder if it will be warm enough again to simply don a colored T-shirt without feeling a steady cold. Daily I try to shoot baskets now, out in front, and if I miss a day as I did yesterday I pay the price in stiffness and inaccuracy, my hands, arms, and legs failing to do exactly what I ask of them. But if I do what I know I need, a general feeling of self-sufficiency comes to me and stays throughout the day.

I never was a jock, not in my best days, lacking hand-eye coordination because of practically non-existent depth-vision, but it is possible nonetheless to stay fit and trim, which is my goal. As you age, it becomes more and more difficult, and inaction inclines to prevail. At sixty-seven, soon to be sixty-eight, alas, overall conditioning is what matters most. Besides, it will help me in my wading and casting throughout the coming fall and winter seasons.

Adobe Photoshop Deluxe 2, just by its name, promises a lot. A lot of what it promises turns out to be e. It will produce the old darkroom shtick I used to practice, such as solarization and posterization. There are some new tricks I never knew how to execute; now, thanks to digital technology, I simply click the right button, and there it is on the screen. I can save it, delete the effects, or print them out, in either color or black and white (now called grayscale). This provides tremendous flexibility, along with the new digital camera and its many applications.

For years my enlargers and darkroom have sat in storage, the chemistry outdated and unusable, my hundreds of black and white negatives becoming brittle and perhaps faded. My good prints from over twenty-five years ago are still stable because I used good fixer and plenty of it, thanks to the College of Engineering, where I worked and whose solutions often I helped myself to. But there life is limited and I suspect I am right on the edge of losing them. Having a scanner gives me the opportunity to save my best old black and white prints as compressed digital files, not to mention the color prints that I made at the same time, some of which have weird colors. Adobe will allow me to color correct them before I save them; at least I think the program will.

Lake Ketchum is where the Jolly Joe ice cream truck plays “Jesus Loves Me,” over and over, as it circles the lake.

Jim and Mary O. bought a house on the lake three lots down from ours and have lived quietly here—a large number of them, an extended family—for a couple of years now. Nobody knows much about them: they keep to themselves and only occasionally do we get a glimpse of one or two of them. It is usually her, the wife. Mary.

Mary seems willing to talk at length about herself. There is no reason to doubt anything she says. They came from Hawaii, at least just previously they did. Jim is a carpenter and so was one of their sons. The son fell from on high and died as a consequence. I presumed they were on a job together, but do not know this as a fact. In the long run, I suppose it does not make much difference, whether or not they were. A quick death, with no preparation for it through an illness, long or short, is a great shock. A lingering death, though less of a shock, is grueling, but the shock is less, because there is some time to adjust to it.

A second son died of leukemia. It is usually a slow, horrible way to die, with numerous false hopes as chemotherapy briefly halts the disease’s progress and leaves the weakened patient and his family with a believable respite. And then the disease returns and remission fails. A cancer patient with leukemia has a twenty percent chance of living five years—the length of time in which a so-called cure is claimed. Often the patient lives but two of those golden years and dies from some other direct cause, such as pneumonia or heart failure.

Losing two sons in a short period of time broke Mary O. This is other people’s summary of what happened. When I met her she was quick to tell me about her situation without any urging on my part; out it came, in a grand rush. All I could do was stand and listen, making sympathetic noises in my throat from time to time. I heard her out, but there were so many peripheral people involved and in their life that I sometimes grew confused and mixed up the list of characters. It would have been rude, inhumane, to have interrupted her with an irrelevant question about who was who, what was what.

Their family now consists, I believe, of two husbandless daughters-in-law. One is Oriental-looking, perhaps Hawaiian (a mixture of races), the other a blonde who is considerably overweight. There are some children and babies, but they do not seem to live with Mr. and Mrs. O., but live close enough so that they visit regularly and often are in attendance.

The house is not large, though Jim O. has made some improvements in the nature of his work, carpentry. To accommodate so many people, there is an older motor home parked in the yard and family and visitors stay in it when they overnight with the family. It wears a for sale sign in either its front or rear window (depending on which way it is facing). Also there is an assortment of cars and pickup trucks parked in the commodious front yards, which has been newly cleared and coarsely graveled. So there is much coming and going. It is hard to know (and nobody’s business) who is home, who is not, or for that matter just who comprises the family, and my interest is only passing and, for the purpose of this account, sustainable.

Jim I see very seldom. Usually he waves from his red pickup truck. I wave back, but then everybody waves at everybody else’s car, wagon, or truck, and often one doesn’t know who is inside because of windshield glare. Vehicle acknowledges vehicle with a wave; it is vehicles, not the people behind the glass, who greet each other. If I were to wheel my wire cart past him in the grocery store, I doubt if I would recognize him, or him me.

I suspect that in many homes around the lake there lies buried some great sadness, some event or string of events that news commentators would call tragic, though not measuring up to that classic scale, but nonetheless devastating to the families and persons involved. People pick up their lives—what other choice is there, except suicide?—and go on, impaired, crippled, ruined by what has happened to them. Chekhov, among others, wrote about such lives, the people ruined, wrecked, by small quiet dire happenings in their lives, whole collections of such people, interacting, trying to continue and make sense of their lives and failing to.

It is best not to dwell on such things, or to belabor them; but it is not good to ignore them, either, or pretend that they haven’t happened, or don’t happen in time to most, with a kind of terrible ruthless casualness that cannot be denied.

At this time, President Clinton is enduring a kind of agony that nobody thought possible, surely not himself when he accepted Monica Lewinsky’s invitation to flirt, play around, accept her proffered favor, and talk dirty on the telephone, late at night, from the White House. One uncommented on tragic element is that he “dumped” her (her word for it) and had to face her scorn, which consisted of blabbing at extraordinary length about what they did—her mostly. Hours and hours of such babble to whomever (evidently) would lend a willing ear, that Trip woman, old girl friends, a guy or two she had known. And now the whole world knows the prurient details.

A woman’s scorn is classic, and enough Sophocles and Shakespeare plays present it in grand horrific spectacle as to drive home the message: you do not spurn someone you have loved and get away with it. Greek women have been known, at least in drama, to kill their children to avenge themselves on unfaithful husbands. But today all we do is talk, most of the time, talk away our problems, our rage.

And one needs to point out the difference between verbal sex and oral sex, or does one? Doesn’t every school child know now which is which?

Biff hops in and out of the anchored boat at will, usually in search of something inside, such as the blue sponge that I use to mop up rain or condensation (or there may be a small leak). So yesterday I took him out for a brief boat ride. It is a precarious situation, for at ninety-five pounds, his sudden shifts of weight could capsize us—that, plus his characteristic of hanging over the side, looking for something edible or to play with. Thus, I did not venture very far out.

To remedy this I must put the motor into winter storage, along with its battery, and probably ought to wear light-weight clothing and a life jacket. I’m not much of a swimmer and am probably risking something (what, my life?) every time I set out. Alone, it doesn’t seem much of a problem; with one or two dogs, it is highly venturesome.

I need to be out on the water with Biff (my fishing dog) long and far enough to be able to predict what he will do over a period of time. This involves some risk. When he gets familiar with the boat and the ride, he ought to settle down and find his station; then I can trust him.

In writing, to indicate somebody speaking in a foreign language, contractions are often left out. Now, why is that? Don’t people in foreign languages use contractions? In French they sure do. It is a senseless convention, yet one we all recognize.

Tight patterns of very agile birds are briefly outlined against the dark water as they wheel, soar, and disappear, stage right. I can never bring up the glasses quickly enough to catch them in flight, but suspect from their behavior that they are some species of shorebird—dowitchers, perhaps. Whatever, they are pleasing to the eye and provide a visual contrast to our ordinary birds which, come to think of it, are scarce this year. Normally we have widgeons by the score. The treating of the lake with Sonar this year has killed all weed and lily pads, and as a consequence there is nothing for visiting flocks of ducks to eat. So they shun us.

Norma and I discuss this frequently. The loss seems great. Beneath the surface of the lake there may be many fewer fish, as a result. The plant growth is necessary to produce the small creatures the fish feed on; the prevalent algae does not do this, and the lake is the poorer for it.

The kingfisher is back. Welcome, King. What do you fish for? I fish for the king, of course. I am the official catcher and taster of fish for the local royalty. And who are these, pray tell? Why, you, among a select few. Anyone who notices my flashy uniform and peaked hat. I flit from here to there, pausing briefly on my high perch, always surveying the water below, and when I spot something suitable for the mighty palate, I dive and procure it.

Now comes the heron, dung-colored and glistening along his beak, his sheeny sides, where the low sunlight catches him—or her, as the case may be. The great bird lights on John and Tracy’s dock and leans low over the side and assumes a motionless attitude. He is fishing—I recognize the stance. He will hold like this for many minutes until an unsuspecting perch slides by in the dark, clear water and then will strike.

Goodbye, perch. Another lake denizen gives up the ghost in order to provide food for a higher predatory species. But then, we don’t eat herons, do we? So the system gets screwy, if we look at it closely.

Today we George Lawson, Librarian. He took his life Friday past when he believed he was confirmed in his suspicion that his long-time partner was leaving him. A note from Lynn Daniel to Norma gives sketch details: “Al tried very hard to convince him that this was not true. They were planning a very exciting vacation together and Al needed to change those plans. To George that meant the end
of this relationship and after having lost his previous partner in a very painful way, he could not face the thought of such a possibility again.

I understand that kind of pain, but it takes much more courage to stay on this earth than it does to leave it. We are all struggling here.”

I remember George vaguely, having met him only once or twice. He was pudgy and wore glasses, but did not appear effeminate, though I suspected at once that he was gay. He was pleasant and cheerful, one of the first librarians at Seattle Public to like computers and want to understand how they worked. This he did to the extent that others deferred to him on such matters. This gave him elevated status among them. He worked long hours and did not seem niggardly in the extra time he gave to the library.

The self-inflicted death of people still carries a terrible stigma; if the person is elderly and ill, the stigma is less but remains. For some one of middle age and in apparent good health, it brings ordinary into the tragic sphere. How much we don’t know about one another. Lynn alludes to the emotions and fears in such a relationship, or any relationship, but gives not details; either they are unknown or else not to be spoken among those who know or think they know.

Very seldom, except in dramas, do people kill themselves for love, or rather from loss of love, the loved one’s affection and attention. It is the stuff of theater or novels, magnified for literary effect. But newspaper daily accounts are full of such stuff. It seldom makes the front page but lies behind the short inside news stories, including fatal one-car accidents, which are always suspect from this standpoint. Lovers believe they can’t go on, when one has to depart. And so they don’t. They end the unbearable sense of impending or actual loss.

Yesterday, in bright autumnal sunlight, around noon, we drove to the Big Ditch—a dike within sight of Skagit Bay that holds back the sea and is the demarcation of tidal lands. The ditch itself carries freshwater from the lower South Fork of the Skagit River through rich farmlands, irrigating them and producing great crops, then drains the water back to Puget Sound; in winter, when the rains flood the river and the fields, the ditch collects the water and feeds it into a deep channel that funnels it back into the bay. Along the canal system and dikes are culverts with one-way gates on them; the water can flow to the sea but on high tides the sea cannot back up and fill the fields, killing the crops.

It is most ingenuously designed and provides a vast natural area or preserve, though I can’t say exactly what is protected here. Seasonal migrations of ducks and geese probably; there are huge fields that house rodents and hawks in sunny weather survey the land, on the outlook for food. They will dive and strike field mice ventured out of their burrows.

We often see hawks circling on high. They are harriers, previously called marsh hawks, but birdbooks now disdain this classification and you will no longer find them listed. I rather liked the name and when it began to disappear became mildly alarmed, thinking the bird was ancient or extinct. No, it simply became another bird, locatable under a different listing. It took me a while to find it, and then I relaxed visibly in knowing this excellent bird was still around and available to the eye.

The Big Ditch is nearly dry, and when the tide is out (as it was today) we could see the ditch water flowing with perceptible current. It is the differential that does this. When the tide is full, or high, it backs up to a certain limited extent (there is a barrier dam nearby) and the fresh brown water of the Skagit does not flow. It halts in its tracks and waits. When the tide changes over again, the sea backing away, the differential resumes and the water flows in the manner of a small slow river. But you can make out the ripples of current on the surface.

The sea is still a long ways off at Big Ditch. There are acres of grassland between the dike and the evident saltwater; between where we stand and the bay are some old weathered pilings that have failed and some huge driftwood snags that have come down the Skagit to the sea, then been caught by the tides and moved about, left high and dry in this nether area often visited by the sea but not securely claimed by it. There they remain, buried in silt, as if deeply rooted.

On some of the pilings have been erected crude shelters that must be duck blinds. How do the hunters reach them we asked ourselves? Well, perhaps by boat, when the tide is full and all this becomes flooded. There they wood moor their boat and climb the piling ladder to their blind, where they and their dogs (black Labs all) would lurk until bad weather brought in flocks of ducks, flying low.

Or else they would walk out to the blind at low tide, in low boots, placing their feet carefully one in front of the other where the ground is soft, marshy, until they reach the blind. Then they would climb an ever-greater distance. Tell me, would they have to carry their dogs up the ladder? My Labs weigh 95 and 85 pounds apiece. I can’t imagine myself doing this and the dogs could hardly do it by themselves. There the hunters would wait through a full change of tides until they could walk back over the newly unflooded flats. It would be half a day, twelve hours, before they could.

What on earth would you do to kill time, if no ducks were present? Maybe you and your dogs would play an endless game of Gin Rummy.

I’ve been hearing noises at odd times of the day and suspect tintinnabulation, but on the other hand such odd sounds may actually exist and I am receiving them. One such chiming sound I asked Norma about. No, she couldn’t hear it. Now, my hearing is impaired, so it is unlikely I hear real noises others don’t; the opposite is more likely. But when I described the sound and said I often heard it in the night, and mightn’t it be frogs, she replied, “The frogs in the lake are all gone now, but there are still tree frogs around. One of them has set up permanent lodging in the raingutter outside your bedroom window. [We sleep in the same bedroom and each of us has a window near our heads.]

So I have my own, personal tree frog, a green little guy, a perennial, and he plays me a melody to heard by me, and me alone.

Awakened to a closed gray day that necessitated turning on the lights for breakfast and a look at the kitchen thermometer said it was nearly cold enough to turn the heat on briefly—62 degrees. Most people, including Norma, would turn up the heat, but I have bullied her into submission and she resists, for I would just turn it back down. Today I am tempted to turn on the heat myself, especially downstairs where I write, in what might now be called the Dog Room. Here it is well below sixty. What exactly I am too embarrassed to check and tell. But it is cool—what I habitually call delightfully cool. Even when I am dire cold.

Now rain, good solid autumnal rain. It is falling quite hard and steadily. To take the dogs out for minimal exercise—this consists of throwing a tennis ball, over and over, in my free choice of three available directions on the road—I must don full rain gear, pants and parka, but disdain for now the low-cut shoepacks, risking my newly shined old Rockportlike oxfords. Next time I must bring out the shoepacks and store them in the place where now reside my sandals and shorts. Yes, symbolism in Every Day Life, but this too like shit happens.

Man drives down to the public access in a tan Range Rover, gets out, carries a wobbly plastic bag down to the water’s edge and carefully releases its contents into the shallows. The bag he sort of wrings out and folds in upon itself. He enters the vehicle and drives slowly away.

Now I, as former Lake Monitor, would dearly like to hold him accountable for what he has dumped in our algae-clotted lake, but know I can’t raise around there in my Explorer and corner him, as I once did the hatchery truck, before he is short gone. But I think I know what he is doing. Mind you, this is only a guess, but it is an educated one.

In the bag was water, plus the family goldfish or some aquarium specials. The kids and Mom decided they didn’t want said fish any longer (sick, dying, perhaps even dead?) and wanted them to go free to a good home. Hence Dad went on this errand of mercy. My friend the fish biologist, Curt Kraemer, once told me that such acts of mercy are frequent. Usually the fish are sick and die, unsuited to the wild climate. But often exotic species (piranha?) are gifted to a lake, and all of the spinyrays got in this lake, plus the Seven Lakes Basis lakes, but studied acts of transplant. They were long ago poisoned and stocked with the ubiquitous rainbow trout, but have been added to over the years by people who wanted their favorite spinyray populations available. And in warm water, with abundant weeds, these species prospered. Our local lakes are full of them and they tend to over-populate.

Hard rains, with all activity being moved indoors for the time-being. There is a seasonal malaise called SAD, though I don’t remember what the acronym spells out specifically. The acronym itself is plenty clear. When the amount of UV and the length of the daylight suddenly shortens, a physiological change comes over people, animals, and the floral kingdom. A psychological change closely accompanies the physical one. People become, well, sad, in capital letters. They grow depressed, despondent.

We had thought these days of sunlight and slanting rays would last forever. No, we didn’t, but we behaved as though they would, knowing all the while the better. We were not prepared for the reality of rain and early dark. We never will be. SAD really makes is deadly inroad, however, with the onset of regular time. Pacific Daylight Time become Standard Time deep in October, and the event is as though the shroud of doom descended, robbing us of that extra twilight hour and bringing full dark somewhere around four-thirty.

For now this will do. It is bad enough. Out in the yard, on the lake side, the garden crops are being neglected by those who planted them and the luscious tomatoes, I fear, will split and stop further ripening. They will hang, rotting, and drop to the ground, where the earth-bound creatures (slugs, especially) will have a feast they could not reach when the boughs hung high. The dogs bring back the last of Paul’s Jonathan apples, neglected by their proper owner and fallen to the ground, where field mice have nibbled them; some bites indicate larger creatures that had best not be speculated about. (We can’t have rats, can we?) Each morning Biff returns with a spoiled apple and carries it into the basement workroom for breakfast. He will eat it completely, seeds and all, before commencing his regular meal of lamb and rice and barley kibble. Cate watches and will eat a bit of apple if we hand-peel, dice, and feed it to her, which only Norma does. She is not the compulsive retriever he is, but every time I start to slight her in this regard she surprises me. She finds the missing tennis ball in thick cover when he grows tired of the search and discouraged. But he is the one to always mouth and bring to us whatever the favorite object presently is. For a while it has been half-chewed nylon chewing bones. He can carry two or three (if gnawed small) in his mouth proudly at one time. These he deposits, en mass, in your lap or on your arm, when you are deep into a good book.

Those abandoned crops include sunflowers, which Norma tells me she raised for the sake of the birds. They bloomed fully, then tragically dropped their heavy heads, before I had my new digital camera, so I was unable to catch their image while they stood proud. They drooped and sagged, and the seeds developed, and now the birds come in swarms to harvest them—Stellar jays mostly. This morning, though, in the rain, a dun-colored hawk fluttered among them over by John and Tracy’s arbor, where the ripened pole beans hang, brown and spotted.

Now hawks—not a peregrine but perhaps a harrier—do not feed on seeds, not so far as I know. Did he have his eye on the jays, which were barely smaller than him? He drove them away for the moment. Would a hawk kill a jay—for food or fun? I have no way of knowing for sure, other than long and studious regard, and they won’t combine to give me this opportunity.

I can’t imagine life without dogs, namely Labrador Retrievers, which have been a large part of mine for more than fifteen years. Today, rainy, I take the dogs out to relieve themselves (nice euphemism, there) late in the morning and we return to my downstairs workroom, Biff with his apple, Cate without, and I feed them their gruel. They are so wet that I have to towel them down before admitting them, a towel per dog, and hang them up (towels, not dogs) on the backs of chairs to dry—good luck. The humidity in the room must be 110 percent.

The rug down here is ruined from puppyhood. They have chewed holes in it, here and there, especially on the corner of the stairs, so not much is at stake when they chase each other around the room. It is a fast chase, in circles, toenails digging into the scruff, and they bang into things—the travertine coffeetable, a filecabinet, the back of an overstuffed chair. It is a good thing the room is so large, or else they wouldn’t get the exercise they demand. Meanwhile the first hard sustained rain of autumn falls with disregard for all of us, man, woman, beast.

Topical poem: Monica, Monica, Monica. Monica? O Monica. Monica! Monica! Monica?! Moan-ica. Mo-nicka. Ica. Ick.

Lewdinsky. Lou-in-ski. Loo. Loud. Loudinsky. Lay-in-sky. Laid-in-sky? Where? There! Everywhere.

Biff fishes with me, but Cate loses interest quickly and goes investigating along the shore in the tall grasses. Suddenly I understand what it is she is doing. While he fishes, she hunts. She hunts bull frogs. This I learned when she flushed one and he leaped out into the lake with a huge plop. She went right after him. (I presume a bull frog is a “he.”) Of course she missed.

They grow pretty big, the bull frogs do. One we saw on our walk around the lake yesterday had been hit by a car, trying to cross the road. (Why? Why, to reach the other side. Chickens don’t have a monopoly on such activity.) He got flattened. His underside was cream and green, much like a gartersnake. His body was plump, his legs long and skinny. He hadn’t been dead long and was still in good condition. The dogs wanted to taste it, but I called them away.

When I was a boy, in the Scouts, one time we caught a bunch of them the traditional way—a hook and bit of red cloth on the end of a stick, perhaps a fishing rod. We went among the lily pads and dangled this out over the water where they lay, three-quarters submerged, and they shot out their tongues, reeled in the red deceiver, and were summarily hooked and dispatched. We fried up their legs, discarding the bulk of each frog, and had them for dinner. What I remember from that episode is that they tasted a bit like chicken, but worse, and it takes a heap (more than we had) of frogs to make a meal for a single hungry boy.

Sign of the Times (What, again? I don’t believe this!): Monopoly is now available as a CD-Rom game. It is for people, I guess, who don’t like to sit around the dining room table with their family but relate instead around a computer monitor. Perhaps there is some way you can play it by yourself, like most computer games. Is a joy stick used? I’ve never known how those work in practice. Maybe you can tool around Park Place or Broad Street, buying up houses and when you get enough put up a hotel.

Also, an English teacher in nearby Sedro Woolley teaches kids to write about what they like most and least. They don’t read Shakespeare; I don’t think they read anything for the class. They write, instead, as a form of self-expression. Oh, yes—that! Likes and dislikes are what matters, plus writing about them. No judgmental qualities are involved. Whatever it is, put it down and everything counts exactly the same. The important thing is, you get to talk about what is immediate in terms of your life, your school life, and everybody’s is of equal value.

Good thing we aren’t reading books, for this class which advertises itself as largely remedial. If we were, Shakespeare and the latest novel derived from a popular movie would count as the same. They’d be equally important and meaningless.

The Stilly is dead low; the heavy rain sunk into the ground and did not raise the river’s level one bit. I fished anyway. Crossing above the Elbow at dusk, a little higher than usual, I found myself approaching a fresh Chinook salmon redd. I moved upstream to avoid walking on it and the eggs beneath. I always do this, though it may not make any difference, the eggs being buried sufficiently deep. Still I must.

It is good to see that there are Chinooks still and that they will spawn in this area that is now so shallow. The water was only ten inches deep. They spawn at night, and their great backs stick way out of the water. I saw none. It was too early, I guess. During daylight, they drop back to the deep water at the neck of the Elbow a few dozen yards downstream, where the oxygen is more abundant and there is greater cover. It is where I fish for steelhead—as of late, unsuccessfully.

Music plays around the house at Lake Ketchum, all the time. I have a host of CDs and they keep the music flowing from a 25-unit Pioneer player. It will produce about 18 hours of continuous music. Most of what I play is classical—chamber music: string quartets, piano sonatas, etc.

Several years ago on New Years Eve we attended a party put on by Maggie Leahy, the widow of my old friend in English and fraternity brother, Jack. There I met Cordellia Miedel, the widow of the conductor, Rainer Miedel. She is an accomplished cellist, performer, and teacher. While chatting with her about a number of topics on which we found we were each highly opinionated I mentioned my love of cello music and how I played Casals doing the Bach sonatas and partitas.

There was a heavy silence, the kind with a Germanic frown attached. Then she spoke, not obliquely. Music, she pretty much stated, was to be listened to closely, not to serve as background noise. The proper attitude was to plunk oneself down in a chair and do nothing but listen. I disagree, but did not do so vocally, leaving my amateurish enthusiasm hanging in the air, like some foul smell. Of course she is right, but many of us do not have the time or the professional training to always listen so. We like the presence of great music, and it accompanies us while we do other things. We listen, but often on a subliminal level. We absorb the music by osmosis—on our skin, in the air we breathe, as a backdrop to ambient noises provided by the outside world and by those of our own unavoidable creation. I could not do without it. I suspect many others feel the same way.

Ubiquitous music, the company of my dogs, the constant presence of the lake all combine to produce a useful, productive ambiance. It enhances my life and fills it with joy. I could of course exist without it, or without its contributing elements, but I would be poorer for its absence. I would not willingly do without it and put a pretty price on its availability.

Sorry, Cordellia. I know you mean well and are technically correct. But I just can’t do it.

In somebody’s novel—perhaps Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, read, oh, so long ago—there is a character, a kind of small-town philosopher, who jots down little notes to himself on tiny scraps of paper and then stuffs them into his jacket pocket, where they accumulate. His dutiful wife hands up his clothes and empties out his pockets of things he’s forgot. The little wads of notes she throws away.

I am always at a loss for paper and some implement with which to write on the paper I don’t have. I often use the back of a Kleenex box, but lately there is much advertising written there and there is not much room for me to scribble notes to myself. But I do—the writing crabbed and going around corners of text blocks. The box I bring in the house and transcribe (as I am doing now) into this journal. Waiting to be recorded in more permanent fashion is the following cryptic note to myself: “title, ‘Staying Alive’ (from baseball), or ‘Still Alive,’ as they say about a batter who is fouling off pitches with a two-strike count on him.

There. Now I can take the Kleenex box back to the car, along with the small writing pad I’ve made from the backside of used printout sheets.

What a joy it is to visit the Skagit again. All summer long it has been running murky with snow melt from the faraway glaciers; the dogs and I visited it when it opened again in June, but it was high and unfishable. Yesterday was the first time we went back—Neighbor Anton said it was running clear again, what with the cool nights at the end of September. We found it low, but murky still. I think work is going on up on the Baker River—a major tributary whose mouth is located at Concrete.

Norma was with us and disdained crossing the narrow shallow creek, Grandy, just above the mouth. Instead she remained on the warm sandy beach and read; later she said it was a pleasure having the dogs gone (they followed me, naturally, since I was wading in the water, which is what they do), for she was free to sit low on the ground and not have to be worried about them jumping on top of her. (She wears a cut lip from Cate doing this, a couple of days ago.)

The Skagit is shrunken, but still big. I waded far out in the shallow shingle high up in the Grandy Creek Run, one of my favorites. It was a long go until I reached deep enough water to start fishing. This conveniently turns out to be about the same depth the dogs have trouble holding their position in, and so they back up some and do not churn the water into which I am casting. It was good to feel the short Spey rod able to lengthen out its casts, though I had some difficulty with a mild upstream wind. And when I changed sinking tips, the difficulty had to be licked all over again. But I managed. The dogs frisked tirelessly on the big beach. I hooked nothing, for all my efforts—Anton had said the river “was full of silvers,” though they can’t be kept and soon, far up at the mouth of the Cascade, the hatchery-clipped silvers can be retained. I’m not sure I wanted to.

I fished until the hour approached six, then returned to the car, the dogs soaked to the tops of their large black heads. Norma rose from her seat on the beach; the sun had sunk behind the trees only moments ago and though the air was now cool the sand was warm, she said. We returned to the car, drove home into a fiery sunset, had a moderately late dinner, and watched the magnificent Yankees beat Texas in the first game of the playoffs preparatory to the World Series.

The semi-annual meeting of the lake association will be held on October 24, a Saturday. I will not be able to attend because I have a book signing at the same time. Norma, the vice-president, has asked that there be a general discussion of feelings about the results of the lake being treated with Sonar this spring. It has benefited the swimmers—mostly people’s grandchildren, but the lake has suffered from dense algal blooms. No lily pads, no duck weed, no Elodea.

I had forgotten about the pernicious , I don’t quite know how. Yesterday I got my hair cut by the famous Ken, of Ken’s Barber Shop, a Stanwood landmark. He grew up near here, at the end of 76^th Street, and remembers there being a mill near where we live, along with a peat bog that was cut and sold. Norma and I never knew that there was a market for peat in the United States; in Britain, it is used as a substitute for coal. Here, too, perhaps. Ken gave me (as I told him) the best haircut I’ve had in 30 years, maybe 40. He asked about the treatment to the lake and an old timer sitting near by, waiting his turn, asked about that “weed that grows up from the bottom.” Its name came lunging back at me. It had fouled the fishing so badly, and everything else that takes place under water, such as swimming, rowing, etc. The Sonar treatments had certainly gotten rid of the Elodea, along with everything else that grows.

We have no ducks, this year. No surface weed, no ducks. It is a simple understandable equation. I miss them. There used to be huge flocks of widgeons that would scatter, when I approached them in my rowboat; they would wheel and fly to the East end of the lake, where they would settle down in a descending cloud of individuals, still banded together. Their sweet chirrup would fill our ears at all hours. Gone, gone. There are no shovelers, either; few mallards, and I suspect the wood duck population is down or else moved to the nearby ponds. But last time I checked them there were only Canada geese.

At the meeting I was going to ask Norma to read a short prepared statement—no more that three sentences, I promised myself—about the lake’s condition, but now I hesitate. The Elodea was terrible. This year we had great water clarity, though the lake still had a tannin look. Ken said it always had had. He could never see down more than a few inches.

I asked him about the fishing in the lake, back when he was a kid. He never had fished it. That’s funny, because he is a fisher. He’d just returned from the West side of Vancouver Island and had a picture of himself and a friend, with an impressive number of large, beheaded king salmon spread out on the grass, marking the return to harbor of a successful guided trip out on the bouncing bay.

How do I know it was bouncing? Well, every time in the past I went out after salmon it was. So I presume so, not having experienced anything else.

I look more intelligent as I get older. This is because my hair is receding at the temples, much like my father’s did, and his thinned too, so mine must be thinning, as well.

This gives me a higher forehead. A higher forehead signifies, as we all know, greater brain power. Hence, more intelligence. Why, if I live long enough, I’ll be all brain.

The third sizable rain of autumn. Twice I’ve bailed out the rowboat. It took quite a while and left me with a mild backache. Now I face the task again and think I will unload the heavy battery and light-weight motor, and put them away for the year. But I’d like to get out for a little bass fishing—or whatever the lake might yield.

Yesterday I was talking on the phone to one of my distributors, the one in Tukwila, and a guy in a boat by my dock took a scrappy fish of medium weight. I was, of course, enthralled. In a hurry, I got off the phone and dashed outside, before the fisher could get out of ear range. “Was that a trout?” I asked eagerly.

“Bass,” he replied. “I’ve caught a lot of them this morning, all in the one-pound range.”

This is a small crankbait. I’ve got one, bought at sale at Fred Meyer, but never taken out of its shrink wrap and tied on the end of my line. I have half a notion—no, a full notion. . . .

Even a small lake like Ketchum develops a good chop when the first storms of the autumn roll in. One came in that very afternoon. There have been winds and rain ever since. I have an urge to go out one more time, at least, before I put the boat up on sawhorses, inverted to keep out the rain. But for now, I’m looking for a window in the weather just to bail out the boat, I hope for the last time.

It probably won’t be. The boat is still anchored to the dock, but it is bereft of its motor and battery. I donned waders to do this, first bailing out a great deal of water with the old rusted red-and-white enameled sauce pan relegated to this duty since it is not good for cooking anymore. I must have bailed for half an hour, reflecting all the while that I need something with a bigger mouth. The waders were some help, since I had to sit on the wet dock and managed to stay dry. Then I eased the battery to the edge of the boat, edge of the dock, and lifted it by its stout cord. First I had to disengage its copper clips from the battery terminals. I put on heavy gloves to do this, aware that if I happened to get bit by an electrical discharge, it would be a good one, enhanced by water, which is a known conductor. It was perhaps an unnecessary worry. All went well.

The motor has a hanger in the storeroom and I had to search a while to find it, trying the wrong hangers and finding the moderately motor would not be supported well by them. Finally it nestled into its rightful place, and the battery fit just beneath it. The boat was now in its righteous condition, that is, level to the water and to be powered only by oars. The breeze had calmed down and there was no sign of rain; the lake grew calm and the temptation to go out on the water was too great to ignore. I tricked the dogs into entering the kennel and quickly swung the door closed behind them. But only a few yards out on the water the yipping protest grew loud and, miffed, I returned and set them free, another diabolical plan in mind. I put them in the car and chained them up, as though we were headed for a ride, one of their favorite activities. Then I slunk away and went fishing. All was still, silent.

The water was just great for a quiet row and troll. I used for the first time the little weighted willow leaf spinner, with the yellow marabou trailing on a treble hook, which I carefully debarbed. It cast like a dream. Once, too much so, and I had to row into the dead weed along Bruce’s shoreline and free it from the snag it had broken off on when I tried to pull it free. Having only one of the rigs, I did not want to lose it, especially after I’d taken a nice bluegill right off my dock but out in the boat.

A true bluegill and not a pumpkin seed, though they are very much alike and closely related. The bluegill has an ink-blue spot on its gillcover, while the pumpkinseed has a bright orange one. Both are dark, blue-black, and have a golden orange belly. Otherwise they are the same. They fight well and are heavier than the other spinyrays, generally speaking. I also caught several medium-sized perch, some casting, some trolling the spinner rig. Then it was time to come in and watch some baseball.

The Yankees beat the Texas Rangers, three straight, to advance in the World Series Playoffs. It was expected. The only thing that wasn’t was the three-hour delay caused by a torrential rainfall, so that the game ended the following day, Saturday morning early. The announcers had to be back in New York City the very same day. I think the Yankees had a day off, however.

It was nice to be back on the lake, fishing, and catching something. The hope was for trout, but they are in short supply. The weather again is blustery and cool—just what the month should produce and for which I am strangely grateful. Summer, and the Indian version of it, are not my favorite season. They are, as a matter of fact, my least favorite.

The harvest is just about over. The tomatoes, surprisingly, produced well, in spite of the blackspot threat early in the season, and all ripened and were delicious, sweet as fruit, which I’ve heard they are, technically. And just this morning Norma brought in the last of the squash and zucchini. A few cherry tomatoes still hang on their brown dying vines, looking like tiny Christmas ornaments. And that season is rushing on.

An ad in Koen Pacific’s newsletter (which normally costs $85, a real ripoff) brought in three widely spaced book orders. That’s not much. The hope is for more, especially since the distributor passed out extra copies at the big bookfair in Eugene, Oregon, a week ago. This will be a good test of what it takes to make a book sell. Most don’t, and only the ones with big NYC publishing houses behind them, with tall promotional budgets, have much of a chance of recovering their costs. Otherwise, it is the luck of the draw, a very small one, and the odd chance it catches on by word-of-mouth and not a siege of advertising.

Fall is a sad season, in many ways, with the days growing depressingly short, the skies leaden nearly all the time, and frequent hard rains. It makes a warm snug comfortable house all the more imperative. Fortunately we’ve got one, and soon there will be evening fires in one or more of the three fireplaces.

The house is brightened with two new paintings tastefully framed in dark wood and oatmeal linen liners. Both are prints. Richard Gilkey gave us one of them, shortly before his death. That makes it special. It is of a sun-flower sun hovering over the Skagit Flats, and the brushstroke-renderings are so good that it is nearly impossible to distinguish it from an original, a couple of which nearby. It rightfully takes its place in the Gilkey Gallery and holds its own.

The other is a Morris Graves winter bouquet, number something, a very fine but inexpensive print job and framed the same way. This gives a nice unity to our wallcoverings, which is an oblique way of saying our paintings. With the long dark days approaching relentlessly, they will do their considerable part to spark our daily life.

I speak of it in the singular because Norma and I seem to have but a single one.

I am suspicious of the spoken word. Perhaps it is the result of TV advertising, or what they say to sell us something over radio. The word is debased, near worthless. I’ve long had a problem going to plays and hearing actors mouthing what I call phony speech. It doesn’t ring true; it is what characters say in order to background the play or to advance the plot, not what they’d really say. I don’t like to attend because I find such speech embarrassing, it is that false.

Similarly poetry, or what passes for poetry, these days, sounds untrue to me. It doesn’t have the metrics of poetry, and often the sentiments expressed are banal, without benefit of metaphor. There is what is now called “an event” at the Museum of Northwest Art this evening, a Saturday. We won’t attend. It is largely my idea. Actors are gathering in the huge upstairs room where some of the fine old Graveses are displayed, and they will read their poems inspired by the master. Now, I’ve written some things prompted by studying his paintings—poems, you might say—and they are surely no worse than what I’ve seen that’s on the program tonight, especially an acceptable poem by Tim McNulty. Yet my reservations remain strong. I don’t want to hear these poems, nor others to hear mine. If they want to read them in a book, fine.

This puts me in a mind of the docent program, where somebody leads you around an art gallery, expounding on his or her interpretation of each painting. I say, Stop. Be still in the presence of great art. If somebody asks a question, answer it truthfully if you can. Otherwise remain silent. What is there is there, for each of us to see according to his perceptions and what he brings to the act of seeing—a lifetime of living and reading and observing the natural world around him.

It is enough. Words are superfluous. Often they are too much. It is never wrong to remain still.

Rain. The dogs and I want to go out and play. Norma requires her daily walk around the lake. Rain. How cruel.

Bird count: two Northern shovelers, female; two ruddy ducks, one of each sex; pied-bill grebe; single seagull (they are usually married); heron.

The lure is called a Rooster Tail and it is made by Worden, in Yakima. That is the Yakima Bait Company. The size is 206, which is 1.7 grams, or grains. It is also 1/6 of an ounce. My color is Fire Tiger—for what it’s worth. That’s about $1.59, but mine was on sale and cost less than a dollar. It’s been in my tackle box for a couple of years, unused, wrapped tight in its bubble pack. Inviolate.

Casting desultorily off the dock last night I took a fine large-mouth bass. It was a scrappy fish, one approaching two pounds, and I called for Norma, who was working in the garden nearby, and asked her to help net it, for I was fishing an ultra-light spinning outfit and the dogs were circling eagerly. In fact, Biff plunged in the lake and was chasing the fish; I had to keep manhandling (wrong word, but comes close) the fish to keep it away from Biff’s jaws. Norma couldn’t handle the net very well, so I took it from her and made a sweep, just as the dog neared again, and brought the fish to the dock. Biff swam to shore and came running up the dock, but seemed uninterested as soon as the bass lay on the wood, free of the net.

She said she’d eat it—the only one of the lake’s seven species she hasn’t tried—so I killed it with the handles of the big pliers, and later she cleaned it. Word was, all summer, the bass tasted muddy, but now that the lake has cooled and there has been some rain, the hope is that the bass will taste good. If she develops a taste for them, I could easily become a practical bass fisher.

A bonus day, sparkling, nearly seventy. Wow. But Norma is injured; yesterday the dogs bolted to chase a tennis ball I threw and hit her, knocking her down. Today she is in a chair, with a badly bruised hip and shoulder. She wrenched her left knee again and it is swollen. She asked for her father’s old cane, and I brought it to her.

Why do people get sick, injured, or even die, on the most beautiful of days? Answer me that, and you will have said a whole mouthful.

Wilderness Ridge is a development near here. It is seventy-five percent mobile homes. A Wilderness Ridge II is under development, but it is new, nicely built homes running $169-189,000. The houses all follow a style popular now; it is different from the one of a decade ago, sarcastically called Bellevue Chateau. The new one makes use of white aluminum-clad windows with many panes and siding of knotty wood stained so you can see the knots through the dark, yellow-brown finish. When they are completed, rollout lawn is brought in and the beds are deep with bark mulch and new shrubs are planted in their midst. Our dogs love to play in such an environment.

The original Wilderness Ridge development owns a lot next to the public access one and next to where Hans Berg used to live, for so many years. They keep an aluminum boat there and people who come to fish bring their own electric trolls. Lately the boat is in near-constant use. One guy today has been out since before I got up. He moves along near shore, casting toward the beach. He must be getting fish, or else he and his neighbors wouldn’t be coming back.

This is no doubt the famous fall fishing lake people look forward to so much. Perch mostly, but crappie and small bass, as well. I’ve heard of no trout. Trout are put-and-take, and they got took in the spring. Last spring the trout fishing was but a ghost of the previous year, when I caught about a third of the legal plant.

It is good to have the Elodea gone. Its absence permits casting and retrieving, when in the past it was impossible. But we who cast toward shore are getting green stringy weed—not to mention algal clots. Still, it could be worse. Most of the great green algal islands have been blown away, or else have turned brown and sunk.

The wind. I’d forgotten about the wind, during the long quietude of summer, and how it comes rushing through the cedars, sounding very much like a car coming up a lonely country road. Now it’s back, approaching with its ghostly sound, a bit spooky and, well, ominous.

New glasses, new world, or at least a brighter, darker inked one, seen up close. It’s amazing how those publishers have re-inked their presses since last time I picked up their books; I am thinking of the omnibus Henry Miller, which cost me an immodest $10, remaindered. It is titled, Henry Miller, The Most Comprehensive Anthology of America’s Greatest Writer, and was published by some folks named MJF Books in, of course, NYC. Seven-hundred and seventy-nine pages long, it is entitled to the title, but I wonder if a collection of a writer’s obscure works can truly be called an anthology? No doubt that it is a valuable collection, however.

Today I called up the optometrist—it’s been two weeks, I mean. Have the new lenses come in? I do think they have—let me check. And there they were, in the bin. So I drove the dogs over, having also a nice check to bank on behalf of Kingfisher Press from my favorite distributor, one who pays upon receipt and orders by the box, that is, 38 books. Anyway, there were new frames and four new lenses, two of them with invisible bifocals. Group Health was going to pay for the bulk of the cost, but it still nicked me $180, a sizable bite.

I had asked for 3% tinted lenses on my bifocals, but they had put the tint on my reading glasses instead, so now I must wait until tomorrow for the distance glasses, and will read through tinted glass, which so far is wonderful. I mean, I can see up close again. This puts me in mind of what happened twenty or thirty years ago, when I got my first close-up glasses. I was a fingernail chewer since by boyhood, but now I could see clearly for the first time the ugly tips of my fingers. I vowed, right then, to stop on the spot, and I did. (Now I have lovely hands!)

Tomorrow the bifocals should be available, newly tinted. It should give me a rosy outlook, especially at a distance, when I view the macro world.

Women marry men whom they believe they can control. There may be exceptions to this, but they are probably mistakes and long-lasting ones that frequently end in divorce. Many of these relationships live on, in various degrees of what psychologists call disarray or dysfunction.

Carrie next door controls Anton to an absurd extent. He and I can’t engage in a backyard conversation for more than three or four minutes before she calls him away. One or two time, sure, or ten or twenty, it might be mere coincidence, but every time? How does she know where he is, what he is doing? She must have ears like a hawk. It’s, “Anton, come here. Anton, have you finished doing. . . ? Anton, we have to leave. Anton I’m leaving now and the kids need you to. . . . “ On and on.

Could she be jealous? Jealous of him spending his time with someone else? I don’t think this is the case. It’s simply that she wants him to be busy doing her bidding. My God, the guy cooks, gardens, probably washes the dishes, keeps the house in good order, maintains the firewood supply at three cords or better, all split and stacked under cover. He is a dutiful guy, a good ethnic German burgher, who puts family first, and even his passion for fishing is subordinate. (It should be, I know.) She has his every free minute planned out. She is children- and female-oriented, has lots of “girl friends,” whom she controls, as well. She is always getting together with him, while Anton minds the kids. Nothing wrong with this, of course. She selects them according to whether or not they have kids that are at ages that correspond closely with her own children, age and sex, calls them up, invites them over with, or sets up outside activities. Her favorite friend recently moved away to the Spokane area. She was mild and easily dominated, a pretty shy girl. Just perfect. But now Carrie has found others. Her type always does.

I like her, but can’t stand to be around her. (This probably means I don’t truly like her at all, or else I wouldn’t be writing about her this way. But one gets chronically annoyed at being interrupted in male conversations about subjects of mutual interest to Anton and me, such as fishing.) Last Saturday night I remembered that he, a gym teacher, likes to watch Husky football on TV, but with his roof antenna can only get the local stations. I get most of them with my dish. So, well into the first quarter, I remembered that Anton has many times asked me to tape such games for him to watch the following day, and has shyly asked sometimes if he could watch part of a game with us, live, for Carrie doesn’t like sports, I gave him a call. She answered the telephone, of course; her cordless phone rides around with her almost as an appendage, and often she is out on the porch, talking to a girl friend, because of the improved reception there.

“Could he call you back?” she asked. “We’re expecting an important phone call.”

Of course; of course he can and of course she would be expecting a call more important than mine. It isn’t as though we tie up the phone for hours. We probably talk six or eight times a year, and never for more than three or four minutes. That might total half an hour per year.

Norma said, “Maybe Keaton (their three-year-old son) is sick.” The kid is asthmatic and often they rush him to the hospital in the middle of the night with breathing problems.

Anton called back forty minutes later. I invited him over. Soon, but not right away, he came; I could picture him making explanations and Carrie, arms folded across her bosom, listening, interrupting, issuing silences that weighed like lead. Controlling.

Sure enough, they were waiting for the doctor’s return call. Perhaps I was too harsh in my judgment, I thought. We settled down to watch the game. Half-time was well over and we were deep into the third period. Our team was behind but had managed to tie the score. The fourth quarter started; the phone rang.

“I have to go home,” Anton explained after listening to his wife on the line for a few minutes, not himself speaking. The other team scored and the game ground on. We lost. In the morning Anton explained. They have a bedside monitor beside sickly Keaton’s bed, and take turns listening to his breathing throughout the night. My God, what a way to have to live? Does anybody get any sleep? I’ve long suspected that Anton was an insomniac. This would be the perfect activity for someone who doesn’t manage to sleep, anyway.

Carrie, he said, was ready to go to bed. They are both early to retire. She wanted him to come home so he could “listen” while she slept. It was about ten P.M. And so it goes.

On the other side of us is Tracy. She too has a husband who follows her biding closely. John. He is a dutiful father. She set her sights for him while bartending (she, not him) in a coastal town in Alaska; I forget which—its name. He is tall, lean, good-looking. Bodies are important to people who are ready to settle down, after long sexual searches for compatible companions. But the chief characteristic he had that she was seeking, I believe, is that he was infinitely controllable.

The above sortie on control gives the wrong impression, I think, for I like my next door neighbors on both sides and cannot really imagine better ones. It is a good arrangement, with us seeing each other as couples frequently at times, but at other times it must be a month or so before we see John and Tracy, who are quiet and stick to themselves. Who could ask for more in a neighbor?

Anton and Carrie, on the other hand, we are apt to see for a quick exchange of words nearly every day; it is the situation, really. We live parallel lives in several senses of the word. Our cars arrive in driveways that run next to each other, and we dismount and enter our houses within sight of each other but through a sparse screen of evergreens—shrubs, mostly. Are their kids are always playing in the front yard, under the tall cedars, every morning and every night, while John and Tracy’s kids are too young still for that.

Lately, with my new digital camera, I’ve made occasion to corner them and take quick snaps of them and their families. First Carrie on the street with Anton, and Cate appearing as an egoistic surprise on the left edge, smiling, or whatever it is dogs do with their tongues that give the appearance of laughing. Next I caught Anton and Haley picking the last of the year’s every-blooming strawberries; they gave me a generous handful, knowing I liked them, but the dogs ate half—my secret. I printed the two snaps side-by-side on 8.5X11 paper and presented them last night to Anton, who was doing some yardwork down by the lake. He seemed to like them. They were good pictures, for snaps.

Then I caught John baby sitting his two young daughters and fired off the last two shots on the card, using fill flash because the sun was at a harsh, unflattering angle. Quickly I loaded them into the computer, screened them, transferred them to MS Word for formatting (I didn’t bother to crop either of them, being snaps), and printed them out. The one of John and his infant daughters looks posterized, or done in process colors. But it is a good, bright, matt print, with nice white border, suitable for framing. I’ll give it to Tracy, first chance. She ought to like it.

Each year at this tie spider make an inroad in my downstairs bathroom. Some are huge. They appear any place, but the shower drain is a favorite; so is the area near the ceiling above the mirror over the wash basin. One year a female set up winter housekeeping there, fat with eggs, and I didn’t have the heart to kill her. There must be an out-of-season hunting regulation for spiders who will foal or calf or whatever in spring. Even if there isn’t, I generally obey this unwritten dictum.

Today I killed one. It was huge and early in the season. It must have measured an inch and a half across. It was in a bad location—on the tile counter, but it quickly scampered to the drain in the washbasin. (What is it about drains that they like so much?) There it stood, undecided on what to do next, where to go further, its little eyes bugged out on those extension rods that spiders have to see, I suppose, around corners and to use as periscopes. Trapped by itself and its propensity for drains.

I went to the toiletpaper roll, tore myself off a double sheet, and squeezed the spider to a quick death. May be all be so lucky.

Norma liked the bass! She had it for dinner last night and pronounced it good. Aside from newly planted rainbow trout, it is the only other species she enjoys eating. She’s now tried eight. If I manage to catch more or bigger ones, within reason I have a practical use for one, now and then.

She steamed it—a kind of poaching that takes place in a covered frying pan, with a little vegetable oil. She knows how to properly cook a fish so that it is not over done. The bass, reportedly, had taken on a muddy taste this summer, but apparently is now gone, what with the return of cool nights. The lake feels to the fingers decidedly cool again. But fishing it is providing a new difficulty. The algae and small grassy weed, and I suspect the start of the return of Elodea, makes fishing with a small lure or fly difficult. Four times out of five it comes back dangling or streaming weed. And of course fish won’t strike a hook so dressed.

The tight acrobatic formations of small birds I sporadically see wheeling and winging over the lake are shorebirds—the kind that so delighted Morris Graves that he drew and painted them, over and over. They may be dowitchers. We have beaches on the lake, for a change, and they have been visible, available, for the past several months; such birds seek these beaches and avail themselves of tiny clams, snails, larvae, and whatever else they find growing at the land/water interface.

Looked at closely, the birds are designed for swift flight. They have sleek silhouettes, and wings that are proportionately fast tapered and read for maneuvers. Until I identified them in formation, swooping and climbing so, I never realized what they were capable of. Now I regard them with admiration and awe.

I must admit this, a perennial weakness of mine for ham and cheese sandwiches. It is second only to my vanilla ice cream addiction. I have the sandwich, oh, two days out of three. The ham must be sliced thin, the cheese Swiss, and with it often comes mustard, lettuce, and sliced tomato in season (or out). Dill pickle slices on the side are nice, but not imperative. I used to eat potato chips with them, but for dietary reasons gave them up. Oh, all right—every once in a while I’ll indulge in chips.

I developed the weakness at Disneyland. Blame it on Mickey Mouse. No, I won (shameful admission) a technical writing award for an engineering human-interest story—if that is not an oxymoron—and learned that the professors who taught technical writing were all going to Anaheim for their annual meeting and would pick up the plaque for me. I asked the Dean why I couldn’t go and pick it up myself? Outlandish. A staff member? But hadn’t I won the award? True, true. So they came up with a stipend and I attended.

It was spring and I fashioned a drive down the coast, a stop off in the wine country, seeing the green hills approaching San Francisco, a long monotonous trip through the Central Valley, San Luis Obispo and the coast again, Santa Barbara, then the environs of steamy, delicious LA What could be better? The others flew, two professors with English backgrounds like mine, neither of whom could write his way out of a brown paper bag. They stayed in the Disneyland Hotel, where the other conference participants lodged opulently; I, in Motel Six. On the day of the awards, I drove over to see some sights. I checked out the hotel. Rather nice. It make Motel 6 seem a slum. I decided to have lunch there at the hotel coffeeshop. I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich, which way back then cost $3.50—that is about the equivalent of $15 today.

It was the best sandwich I ever ate. I examined it critically after the first bite and made note of its components, so far as I could make them all out. The man was shaved and copious, the lettuce fresh, the cheese Swiss; I don’t recall whether there was fresh tomato, but this being California I suspect there was. The sandwich was huge, a meal. I suspect there were fries or chips to go with it. Maybe a couple of slivers of sweet pickle or an olive, for the fearless.

Home again, my award (actually there were several, for I also wore the cloak of an editor, but the one as writer was the only one I mildly cherished) tucked away, the image of the sandwich gave me no peace. Over the years I’ve labored to reconstruct it and have now finely tuned it. It is what I build, or Norma erects for me, five days out of the week.

This book—mind you—is no mad confessional. Nor is it a book about my interior life over a year’s course. Rather it is a chronicle of a man living on a lake and restricting his particular vision to those aspects regulated by the body of water out there and the people living along its periphery. This should be apparent by now, but somewhere in this voluminous work needs statement. Now it has been said.

Many things are important to me but not mentioned here. Of course not: they have nothing to do with lake living. Nor do I intend to reveal the sordid depths of my psyche, much as it interest me. Those matters don’t pertain to the matter at hand, namely, the lake. The lake in all its mutability. I began about the time the first frost brushed the morning ground. Those days are near at hand. A little more time and they will be here, and this journal will have ground to a halt, its course completed. I look forward to it and dread it both. I’ll be relieved, free to do other projects; at the same time, I’ll miss it and the need to look critically at the lake and what is happening to it, visually and biologically, down deep and in its shallows.

Lately I’ve been awakening before first light, get up to pee, then lie back not uncomfortably, listening to the sounds of life around the lake. It is not yet time for workers to be departing in their cars or pickup trucks and their dogs to bark alarums to the neighborhood dogs. Nor is there the coughing yet of these vehicles starting their engines, their doors slamming more than one might think necessary for a single occupant.

I no longer hear, unless I am alert and listening, the approach of trains on the BN tracks, a mile away, or their Doppler Effect passage up to Mt. Vernon or Everett, to the South. When I got up to pee, I stretched hard and afterwards walked to the glass facing the lake and made a quick check of the water’s condition—waves, no waves?--and whose houses had lights on already. (None, except for a few night lights dimly blazing.) Now I lie back luxuriously, fingers locked under my head, breathing deeply and evenly, and try to achieve that lovely level between wakefulness and sleep—the state I imagine opium smokers attain and strive to sustain.

Now the light arrives by degrees, it being cloudy with rain approaching on wings of wind. I hear the first drops splatter on the porch rail outside my windows. Also the rustle of cedar boughs; those are showing rusty brown needles along their outer edges, a sign of seasonal dying back. The decks are deeply littered with them after each windy onslaught; you couldn’t keep them free if you pushbroomed them away three or four times a day.

I sleep again, easily, pleasantly, slowly drifting off and not awakening until eight or a few minutes later. I’ve never been one eager to face the new day, but lately I find its arrival nothing to dread, which is a backwards way of saying it is highly agreeable.

In the lee of a windstorm, with the rain lashing down, comes a boat drifting down the center of the lake. First I knew of it, the dogs started barking at the sliding glass door; this was followed by Norma on the intercom, telling me to look out in the lake.

At first we feared a drowning. We decided not. The boat had probably come loose from a bad mooring at the East end of the lake and was carried by the wind and currents to the West. It had an electric troll attached and shipped oars. Slowly it moved towards the outlet. “Get your raingear on,” I told Norma, “because the dogs and I are going to follow the boat to wherever it gets grounded.” This would be in the vicinity of the outlet, I figured, but we would intercept it before there—perhaps at the Wilderness Ridge Club property, which is in a kind of corner or small Northern cove of the lake.

From the cove we could see the boat was near the outlet but still floating free. Dogs and I hurried there and found the boat floating freely near the beach. I hauled it in with a downed tree branch from the storm, secured it with a rope (handily put in my pocket before setting out), and tied it to an abandoned boat anchor—the kind that comes from pouring concrete into an old metal can, with a hoop inserted first.

There I left it. It is in plain sight of our deck and I can keep my eye on it. Inside is some fishing tackle, motor, battery, and a lot of water. If nobody comes for it by tonight or tomorrow morning, I just may go down and row it back. It has a pair of good hardwood anchors locked inside.

It is a good, big aluminum boat, with two seats amidships, and wide enough to stand up in. Of course it must belong to somebody who will claim it. But if not. . . .

So I did it—I went and got the boat. This was the following day, and the wind had calmed and we were between showers. I had a small fear the boat might fill with water and sink in shallow water, where it would become another kind of problem, near impossible to bail out or to right. I drove down to the outlet and carried in (1) bootfoot waders, (2) life jacket, (3) spare rope, (4) rain jacket, (5) billed cap. I pulled the boat into shore and stepped in, throwing my gear in previously. The motor hung down and caught on the bottom. I unlashed the two secured oars and found that one oarlock was damaged and the oar pin would not fit fully into it. What the heck. I pushed off from shore and spent a while trying to get the water-logged boat off bottom. (It was made of aluminum but held a great deal of rainwater, plus fishing tackle.) Finally I did, and began to row along the shoreline. The boat was sluggish and the wind was against me. I made slow progress. Rounding the promontory near Allen’s old house, the wind struck. Now it seemed I made no progress at all, but I was, I did, and slowly moved ahead. I drew near Bruce’s dock, then Anton’s, and finally mine. I landed, as of old, and secured the boat to the Westernmost post. There it rests.

I think the boat is a liability, perhaps an albatross. But its owner should have a better chance of spotting it here, than down in the cove at the outlet. And when I have time I may bail it out and check over the motor and battery.

The came for the boat, early this morning, while Norma and I were still asleep—the men from Wilderness Ridge, as it turns out, who kept it sometimes pulled up on shore directly opposite us, and other times who haul it away between visits in an old pickup truck. Judging from the contents of the boat, they are spinyray fishers—worms and maggots mostly. They tie heavy leaders and do not trim their nylon connections; this in my flyfisher’s opinion makes them rough trade and undesirable. But to each his own. (We used to add, “Said the man who kissed the cow,” long before bestiality became a fact of life and was though of only as a kind of weird aberration without sexual connotations. But then why did he kiss the cow? A euphemism?)

They were fishing far down at the end of the lake when Norma, making her morning survey of the lake and its bird population, saw that the boat was gone. “Come quickly,” she said, though there was no need for me to do so. All she meant was that there had been a notable change. Indeed it was gone. A red pickup truck parked at the grassy Wilderness Ridge access was the only vehicle in sight, parked way back under a scruff of trees. Then she went out on the upper deck and spotted the boat, anchored, down at the East end of the lake, two young guys in billed caps still fishing.

“Must be theirs,” I said, going in to drink my orange juice, but not before glassing them briefly with the 10X binoculars. I was relieved, rid of a potential burden. The boat was a tub, a barge, a scow. It was too heavy for one to handle, though I have to admit it was sturdy enough to stand up in and cast from, even with wave action present. But after rowing it my distance, I realized it could only be readily propelled with a motor. A boat that can’t be rowed comfortably is not one for me.

Not that this one every was. Clearly it was never mine, and thank goodness, because it would be a liability. It would be hard to sell, collect rainwater, have an ugly appearance, etc.

The orange, leafy deposits from the Western red cedars are piling up on all the flat surfaces, everywhere, and provide a rich ground cover that, I hope, is good mulch and will feed the soil and its myriad plants.

When the ground is dry, the stuff proves light in weigh and will wind scatter, fluffy and scalloped along its edges, but when the rain pelts it it becomes sodden, heavy, unable to be moved; it clings to the ground mightily and won’t be dislodged with shovel or broom, not unless whatever lies beneath it yields ground, too. Also it darkens with moisture and is less pretty. In fact it is pretty ugly then.

Anton’s pretty vine maple along our Western fence line is changing color handsomely, some of its leaves green still, some russet, but clumps turning flame and golden orange—those intense colors that attract photographers as blossoms attract bees. Alas I am one of them (photographers, not blossoms or bees, for those grammatically inclined), and am already planning my pictures. I will need a stepladder to take them. That’s okay, for I have one handy. The pictures will be ordinary, I know ahead of time, but I will take them anyway, as a signature of autumn, the same way that travelers over Stevens Pass stop their cars, dismount, and snap away. They even break off branches of the colorful leaves, not knowing (or caring) that they will almost immediately turn curled, brown, ugly.

Every years the travelers destroy and disgrace the roadside of the mountain pass, but every year it grows back, the distance being greater each year, though, from the edge of the highway. Must be symbolism here for those so inclined, whose numbers do not include me.

This being the three-day Columbus Day weekend, Anton has gone solo over to the Grand Ronde River in Eastern Washington—my old haunt, before I discovered the lovely Wenatchee, which is closed this year under Threatened and Endangered Species regional rulings. Half my mind wants to be on the Ronde, too, but the dominant half says it is a long, long drive (seven or eight hours from here) and will be doubly crowded, what with the Upper Columbia System being closed. I have happy memories of the Ronde, but I have some unhappy ones, too.

My last visit was with Sam and the blue Pinto stationwagon, for which I had bought new tires. Three-hundred miles from home, I unwisely drove across an old horse pasture to reach the river’s edge, and picked up a nail from a fence that had been recently torn down. Also, there were thirteen fishers in the drift ahead of me, the Turkey Shoot. (There seems to be a favorite pool on every good river with such a name.) I quit the river in disgust at its crowded conditions and tried to drive away, only my left rear tire began to bump and flop. It was a badly corded road, but not that bad. I climbed out and inspected the damage. Then—in the heat and the dust of late afternoon—I changed the tire. After a night in a motel, I decided to return home instead of fishing again. I’ve not been back.

I wish Neighbor Anton better luck and a fish or two. This time of the year, the hatchery return ought to be large, and if the river has cooled some, the steelhead might be running in large numbers. Ah, I remember when. . . .

Looking back over this book, this long Ms., I am trying to place in time its start. Which month, which particular day, please? It would seem to be very late November or the beginning of December. So it must go on. I’m not done with it yet, not if it is to encompass a full year. I have more than a month left. Whew! I am looking forward to its close. But there must be a lot more ground to cover. And water, too.

Norma would say, “But if you don’t have this book to write on every day, what will you do?” The answer: “Why, start another, a very different one.” Such as the one I’ve thought about, a fully anonymous book on sex, called “The Little Dirty Book,” or some such thing. To be telling and truthful, and to say something meaningful, it would have to be fully ignobly confessional and not hinged to the life of a particular person, especially not me.

This morning, while I’m showering, a Canada goose starts grazing on the front lawn, just up from the beach, where I’m discovering daily these gray/green snaky turds—many of them. So I go running out after the huge bird, naked, blue towel flapping in my hands, shouting, “Shoo, you slovenly bastard” (really), and the great goose walks slowly towards the water’s edge with considerable dignity, much more than his accuser, enters the water softly, and begins to swim away with slow invisible stoke of his webbed feet, until he is, oh, three dozen meters out in the lake, where he halts his retreat and floats like a bar of Ivory Soap, while I perform a gross disengaging action, rain falling on my nearly dry skin, reentering the downstairs, pull the slider closed behind me, and recommence my drying action with the large blue towel, pulling it over one shoulder, grabbing an end with each hand, and beginning my brisk rub down.

I remember when Canadas were rare. In Country/City, I wrote some twenty-five years ago, a description out of Peterson of the various sounds they made, fascinated by this intrusive stranger. Why, I didn’t even know what it was until I had looked it up; I’d only seen their ragged Vee flights overhead in the fall. I’d known what they were, of course, but hadn’t seen them up close.

They began to overwinter in the Seattle area, on the shores of Lake Washington, many years ago, and were at first happily tolerated, for they are an attractive bird, with their bands of gray and chinstrap of white. On water they are graceful, as they are in flight. We used to like them, until we sent sailing after having stepped in their excrement on the grass. After a bit there was so much of it that you could hardly take a step at Magnuson Park without slipping and sliding on the awful stuff.

The geese proliferated. They have a complex parenting system, an extended family of aunts and uncles, really, that look after the young, and the system is highly commendable, but it results in even more of the offspring surviving than might otherwise take place. The lakeshore became so gorged with geese that the public protests mounted and wildlife agents at first tried to frighten the birds away with loud noises. Good luck, but it failed. They tried several other intermediate steps before they began attacking the eggs in the nests, sterilizing them, and netting the birds and transporting them long distances away—Eastern Washington. They soon returned, or else the empty places were filled with more migrating geese that recognized a temperate winter climate, with lots of water, wetlands, and grassy shores.

The problems still exists in Seattle and its environs. It has now spread to modest Lake Ketchum. The geese have colonized the pond at the end of 76th Street, where they are joined by some domestic white geese and a few mallard families. It is from here that they fly their sorties to our lake, many times a day, and to which they return as sanctuary at night and when people threaten them, as they are apt to do.

Mad men, naked, shaking big blue bathtowels in their general direction, and shouting near profanities.

Seven American widgeons, out in the center of the lake! Wonderful to behold! Both sexes represented. Now, if there was only some food to hold them here.

There is much building activity around the lake, and the advent of rainy weather has done nothing to slow it. First they must clear the lot—the original platting produced large lots and they are now being broken down into half-acre size, so that three lots are being developed nearly at one time. The loggers move in first and clear some working room; the alders are sold off, limbed and of great length, to the wood cutters; the big firs, hemlocks, and cedars go to market. Then the bulldozers arrive. They push all the scrap/waste wood into an enormous pile and set it on fire. It takes days to burn up.

Presently there are three huge fires smoldering around the lake. In this wet, close weather the smoke hangs low. Poor Arthur Flatray, an old man, with chronic asthma. He must suffer so. It is bad enough for the rest of us and may account (along with advancing seasonal mold and wood spore) for everybody’s running nose and catarrh. The fires burn day and night; they will burn until the fuel wood is all gone. They cannot be put out. No amount of rain will halt them, simply because the rain turns to steam and disappears from the heat they generate.

Thus a no-burn ban at this point is worthless. The fires, started in good weather, persist into bad. The smoke hangs in the air and will not disperse. We are stuck with it until good weather returns (good luck!) and the fires burn themselves out. But is there really any choice?

The fires burn on, green boughs heaped on top, crackling and sizzling, burst into live flame, orange and yellow. It takes a bucket scoop to feed each towering pyre. This they have, along with cutters to bring down the conifers and limb them, feeding the flames, their pickup trucks parked along the curve of the narrow shoulder, impeding traffic and making getting by them a risk.

It will end when it will end, when there is no more to wood and limbs to burn. Let us hope it will be soon.

First snow in the passes at mid-October, as per usual. A three to six inch accumulation is forecast. Meanwhile we measure the rainfall in inches—an inch and a half yesterday, a half inch more overnight. The rivers are in flood. The Skagit came up three feet yesterday, according to Neighbor Anton, who teach high school practically on its banks. He’s just returned from his first trip to the Grande Ronde, an old favorite of mine, over the Columbus Day long weekend. He caught two fish, which is par for the course, and enjoyed it greatly. The enjoyment of the Ronde is par, also. It is the most beautiful of rivers.

Across the lake this morning, under a driving rain, a lone fisher, a black, has anchored his twin-hulled pram out from Berg’s dock and is persistently still fishing for perch. It will probably be his last trip of the season. I’ve just had mine. Yesterday I bailed the half-full (half-empty?) boat of its water accumulation, dragged it ashore, inverted it, and propped it up on the twin sawhorses where it will rest for the long winter ahead.

What awful words, “long winter ahead.” The forecast is for a bad one, with lots of snow and cold. The kids would say that makes for a good one. Once I would have agreed.

The North Fork of the Stilly was long my favorite local stream, and I’ve maintained a second home on it for nearly forty years. That fork joins the South at Arlington, the two coming together where State Highway conveniently crosses the newly created main river. Well, after many a summer, the State department of transportation decided the old green lattice bridge was due for replacement, and this spring started work on a new cement span, with a center buttress out in the water and two higher ones rooted safely to land on each side of the largish river.

During summer the work went well, the river remaining placid and accommodating. A lot of construction materials were left on the huge downstream sandbar and when Norma and I drove to our place on the river we crossed the old Haller Park Bridge and looked West, seeing the rise of the center buttress—all that rebar and cement. Well, the flood took much of it away. Last night on the TV news there were pictures that looked instantly familiar. It was the Stilly, raging, and the adjacent landforms were recognizable at once. How much of the new bridge is gone I do not know and suspect the engineers in charge do not know either. The river will have to drop from floodstage before the damage can be assessed. But it will be large.

All that attached earlier to shore, of course, remains intact. But no more work can proceed in the important center until late spring, when the rain and snow runoff ceases again. Much has been lost in terms of work and materials.

There are certain special people whose lives parallel our own closely during a significant period and who we find, in long retrospect, were important to us, no, vital. They define us in a way we cannot define ourselves. Even after so much time has passed it is nearly impossible to separate ourselves from them, our selves from their selves. Key events in their lives are so hopelessly interwoven with our own that they take on an importance not commensurate with the events that occur, though those events often prove critical, key, in terms of the shape of one’s life. And often this period of time starts in college; it extends, in diminished form, to be sure, even since, and contacts become sadly limited. I say sadly because times change and people change with them. It is how we survive. Yet the other is there, dimly, more as a presence than a palpable person. One of these was Jack. . . . [Start of a prospective book tentatively entitled “Us.” Such mad ideas keep coming to me and most are best not followed up on. This probably won’t, either, but who know? Not even I.]

How important a single consonant is! Yesterday, while driving to Seattle and listening to NPR, I heard an announcer discussing the social and psychological rehabilitation of boxer Mike Tyson, who, she said, “bit of(f) Evander Holyfield’s ear.” She meant that he bit it, but probably was not a boxing fan, and wasn’t sure what was intended by the news release and thought he actually had bit the ear off. He had only taken off a painfully large chunk.

A piece was bad enough, plenty bad, bad enough to get him expelled from boxing probably for the rest of his rotten, unnatural life. Now he’s trying to get his license back so he can box again. It is the only way he has of making a living, since nobody wants to be around him or see him.

A guy will say, “Boy, I really need to go fishing,” meaning he wants to get away to the country and a rollicking stream, no matter if that stream happens to be choked with mud (as all ours presently are); that is, “out.” It is a wish issued on a sigh, most plaintively voiced. And I now release mine. Gasp.

On my walk around the lake yesterday, exercising both myself and my two dogs, I drew alongside the two-man crew that is conducting the larger burn in the steep draw above the top pond feeding Ketchum. The crew chief—a burly man of 53, with a large paunch, who confided that he was too old and battered to do the heavy work with a chainsaw, anymore—invited me to help myself to the limbed and stacked trees alongside the road that circles the lake.

I think I had asked, in a friend way, if all of that wood “was spoken for.” And he said, no.

They work under contract at clearing land before the developers move in, and, he confided, often the wood lies stacked along the road even after the house goes up. People say they want it for firewood, but are too lazy (his words) to come and get it. Not my Neighbor Anton, I know, and with his help myself.

He smiled at my disbelief, my astonishment. Could this be true, and not some ruse?

“Yes,” he said, “help yourself. Take it all. You’ll be doing us a favor.”

I walked on, still disbelieving. I had Cate with me, and we soon reached the house. Now it was Biff’s turn, and the plan was to complete the circle of the lake’s two-mile perimeter, to where the Explorer was parked at the public access. Halfway there, Anton passed on his way home from school in his pickup and I hailed him. He pulled over onto the shoulder. I explained.

He too could not believe it, but I more or less convinced him. I told him, “I’m only asking for a little of the wood, you understand? Not half, not forty percent, not thirty. Just some. We need some green alder to mix in with the rotten and very dry old wood we have that doesn’t burn well and produces little heat.”

“I understand,” he said. He hurried home to get his big Stihl chainsaw. When Biff and I got there, I saw him carrying it to his truck. I’d been thinking. Now, at heart I’m a broker, but I should expect to do something to earn my share, albeit a small one.

Anton works like a fiend—I know now where the phrase comes from; there are people who are dervishes, veritable blurs of physical activity. They are not common. He is one of them.

We worked hard for an hour and a half. I left the bigger alder and hemlock rounds for him to lift in, knowing after trying successfully one or two of them that they would soon exhaust me. And I have my hernia to consider. Mostly the stuff was medium sized. When I had the truck fully loaded, Anton drove it the short distance home and unloaded it alone in his side yard, where already stands a great deal of split and stacked firewood. We did three loads together, my taking the third one of smaller alder and no hemlock, which is a devil to split. Though it was nearly dark, Anton went back for a fourth load.

I can feel it this morning, last night’s work, but it is a pleasant stiffness and nothing severe. It was cold, too, and must have approached freezing in the outlying areas, as they are called, but there was no frost on the ground around the lake, so we received a reprieve from an early frost. It is time to go up to the river and replace the foam cones that we put over the outdoor faucets to keep them from freezing. And we will turn the furnace on to its lowest position, which keeps the interior around fifty degrees and prevents, so far, any freezing of water pipes and the toilet.

Twenty years ago a quick freeze came down from the hills in early November and up and down the coast caught people unprepared. The damage was extensive but not realized until the thaw finally set in, at which point water under pressure sprayed everywhere and soaked that which was just unfrozen. Marty and Joyce Sherman, down on the Oregon coast, reported extensive damage. And our own, up at the river, was severe, as was my neighbors. That was when Berger Bryson, now dead, spent hours under the muddy mobile replacing pipes, and the following year I had Bud, who does mobile trailer repairs, fully reinsulate the place. It has held ever since.

My idea in chopping wood is to apply no more pressure to the swing than is absolutely necessary, which often results in my applying too little power in my swing, having to pull the ax blade out and swinging over again—sometimes many times. I still figure this is the better way than swinging too hard, all the time. My idea is based on economy—Thoreau’s dictum or dictate—and physical frugality. Also, I am lazy.

I am now splitting (well, not exactly now, but a few minutes ago) alder and finding it is not so straight-grained as I had imagined; isn’t this usually the case? For every beautiful straight-grained round that will split with a minimum of effort there are five or six rounds that show obscure knotty evidence of their recalcitrance and promise a hard time. For these I reserve the wedge and sledge.

This is classic work, done since time immemorial. I join a nation of the dead that goes way back. Ronald Reagan, even in decrepit old age and plagued with Alzheimer’s, loved to split wood, and went to his Santa Barbara ranch with this in mind. Not so I. Still, I find it a pleasurable activity, in small enough doses.

First frost, followed by a low wisp fog that clings to the water’s surface for maybe a half hour, then dissipates beneath a brilliant blue sky and sunshine striking the leading edges of the turning maples. Simply beautiful. I now have two and a half truckloads (Anton’s) of wood to split and stack. It will last us more than one full winter. A bonanza.

The wag once said firewood warms you twice. I am in the first phase. Because the dogs wander off and the pair of them get into trouble at four or six times the rate that a single Lab would, I must keep them restrained. So, while I swing the sledge at the wedge tapped into a round, I make the dogs “stay” in a lying position. Or so is my goal. They try; they know what I want, only so many distractions appear and it is hard to concentrate. Two teenaged girls (one of them pretty, though this is traditionally how it happens) pass by and it is Biff, not the usual Cate, who rushes tot her and tries to ingratiate himself by jumping up repeatedly. I apologize to them and call them back. They ignore me. The pretty girls plays with the dog and doesn’t seem too miffed—as she has every right to be. Finally they return to me, I put them back at their station, bid them sit, lie down, they obey, and I return to my splitting.

Afterwards we return to the house and TV for the second game of the World Series. It is at Yankee Stadium, and I fully expect the Yankees to take it, as they did game one.

The bass fishers are back for a last try of the year. I’d thought bass had stopped hitting by now, what with the cooler water temperatures. But these guys look like they know what they are doing. They fish the same way that Eric Balser does, only they are less secretive. First thing I knew they were on the lake was when Biff barked at them. By God, they were practically on my shore, in a big boat, with a huge gasoline motor (not being used, but probably was earlier on bigger bass lakes, such as Big or Goodwin) and a tiny electric troll, casting only a few yards to my beach. They were in closer than the end of my dock.

How dare they? Well, they dared. Not much I could do except watch them through binoculars and note their every effort, since I’m not much of a bass fisher and have a lot to learn. What better way than to study the experts, which this pair of young men clearly were. But it looks like the most futile of activities. I mean, I still don’t believe, I guess.

They were fishing lizards. One using black, the other the olive. At the head—I could see quite well—they had one of those cone lead weights. Just what I have. They’d toss them out there and let them lie on a slack line. They’d move it a little, let it lie still again. It was a very lazy way of fishing. It is what is supposed to work.

I was encouraged to try it again, doing it a little less frantically. But it is so late in the year and my boat is up on dry land, inverted on sawhorses. I’d have to get the motor and battery out again, since Eric says oars and oarlocks are anathema. We shall see. Probably it is a technique I will reserve for spring, March maybe, when the bass are on the spawning beds.

A trip to the Skagit for coho produced nothing. It was a beautiful day, however, and the dogs romped freely on the long cobbled beach, while I worked my way slowly through the diminished top of the vast run. I fished the fifteen-foot Spey rod, wading deep, and had some trouble casting a long line and getting my timing back. The trouble with Spey casting is that you frequently “lose your Spey,” as I put it; your rhythm gets off, you misplace your anchor, you don’t power the forward cast correctly, nor do you stop the cast abruptly short of nine o’clock. Your casts get shorter and shorter, while you expend more and more energy into them. In short, whatever you do produces a sense of incompetence and failure.

Oh, it really isn’t that bad. I cast well enough—sixty or seventy feet is all you need, and I achieved that readily. There were no fish showing, probably none around, since coho at this time of the year will betray their presence by splashing and swimming around with their dorsals protruding the surface.

Once I thought the dogs had discovered some dead animal on the beach. There was a huge golden brown shape at the water’s edge, curled, bulky, and I was afraid it was a sea lion or seal, though there is little likelihood of one venturing so far up a river. The dogs hung around it, chewing on it some. Gulp. But then they roamed away, only to return—not exactly hungrily. Finally, troubled, I waded the long distance to shore in order to examine it closely. It proved to be an old mattress with the thick foam bursting out of its cover; that is what gave it the golden brown seal-like look.

Relieved, I waded back into the water, achieved my desired level of depth, and resumed my fruitless casting.

Anton took an eleven-pound steelhead Sunday night from the short flat run above Fortson. It is the best water around and fished relatively lightly for a terminal fishery, that is, one where the fish pile up below their hatchery feeder creek.

Years ago I told Bob Taylor, “The fish still run up to Fortson, but I don’t.” It is a crowded, unpleasant place to fish, and what is more in recent seasons a large part of the crowd is the accursed float-and-jig gang. Still, I have a hankering to go there in mid-afternoon of a mid-week day, and if there is nobody in that run give it a quick fish-through. The autumn steelhead are dark, but big and tasty. Yet computer graphics calls out, and then there is game three of the World Series at five tonight. So I may not go.

Didn’t, and split wood instead, walked the dogs and Norma, and watched the Yankees take their third straight. Today it will be all over.

The far shore of the lake is all golden in morning sunlight, the deciduous trees sparkling, orange and green, turning, starting to drop their leaves copiously. Yesterday it neared seventy and will do so again today. What a beautiful time of the year, what with our knowledge of the gray prolonged wetness to come.

The lake is a perfect mirror of the land’s activities, its colors reproduced only slightly diminished, true to life. Now I know what the phrase “true to life” means—has always meant. It is eternal.

I have an idea for my next book. It will be entitled— tentatively, at least—“Us,” or both letters might be capitalized, “US,” connoting that the Us is really a microcosm of the United States. That is a bit grand, admittedly. It would be the story of Leahy, Anderson, Norton, myself, perhaps Rule, with a host of minor characters, all of them drawn from our college life and just beyond. I’ve needed to write a college story, highly autobiographical, of course, and this might be a good way to site it. It would be volume five, the others being “Sorting It Out,” “Dostoyevsky and the Boy Scouts (my favorite),” “Desperate Women,” and “Sorties Into The Fray.” That should do it, but I have a hunch it won’t.

I love the drive out through the Skagit Flats, my destination LaConner! Whatever the weather, it is a delightful ride, with the vast fields stretching out in three directions. Today it was in bright sunlight, many of the fields newly plowed, others sprouting low greenery.

The occasion was a gallery walk-through at the Museum of Northwest Art and the speaker a man from the Pilchuck Glass Center, who incidentally owns a Pioneer Square art gallery. I looked at a lot of stuff I normally would walk on by—the fault solely mine. I still am not drawn to glass objects, but now know a little more about it and am not so ignorant.

There are three other docents who are men, and we are brought together for reasons of simple sociability. One is Jim Wylie, who, as it turns out, was Richard Gilkey’s neighbor. He has three original Gilkey’s (as do I). I expressed interesting in seeing his, some day. He says he wants to will them to his three sons; this is commendable. One picture has a local creek and slough, which he commissioned, though Gilkey really did consignment work, and it has the black sun (eclipse) image, circled by the smelt and apple blossoms, that I have in a reproduction. Gilkey liked to repeat favorite, successful images, from time to time. Another of Wylie’s is a familiar barn and, I suppose, scene of the familiar flats. I would enjoy seeing it, too.

He says that he and his sons have considerable acreage out along the dike on Fir Island. He must have been a farmer, though he is well into retirement age. But farmers don’t really retire, do they? I mean, they keep up some part of their farming activity into real old age.

Anyway, he is a nice, thoughtful guy and I hope to get to know him and his paintings better.

Sign of The Times. Guy with a pickup truck parked alongside the road, displaying a home-made sign, “Mushroom Picker’s Truck,” and a second sign saying, “Fresh Wild Canterelles.” Seems there is a business, each fall, finding and then selling mushrooms. Not that I have any taste for anything other than the domestic ones, raised in bland, rank captivity, and those only in small doses. But Norma could eat them in bulk, most days.

Also, those signs along Chilberg Road and Best Road that warn about farm equipment. I didn’t exactly know what they meant, but today was slowed to a halt on fast highway by farm machinery making its tortoise progress in front of me, often without a warning car, fore and aft, but with sets of blinker lights signaling the event.

Farming is a big business here. A few stands are still open, selling home-grown produce. Corn is about gone, but pumpkins have taken over. Tell me, what good are pumpkins? Talk about your waste. Few people buy them and empty them out for pies—which is laborious. Most Thanksgiving pies are made from commercially prepared pumpkin mush.

Here pumpkins are strictly ornamental. They are sold in stores and along the highway. People buy them for the kids, then carve them up as grotesquely as possible, discarding the guts and seeds. Man on NPR who grows them says all pumpkins are female; it is because they contain seeds. But then where are the males who have fertilized them? Do they die young, or what?

The fishers have not left the lake, but are greatly diminished. Most sunny days there is one, in a lone boat, usually anchored straight across the lake from me, when I rise (late) to eat my breakfast. The same few repeat. White boat, blue truck; brown truck, blue boat. How still they sit, out on the flat lake.

I sometimes like to think that I live on the edge of a great inland sea. Ha, ha. When a boat like the current one I see out of my study window appears on it is much easier to think this errant way—this is a cruiser, with a big outboard on the stern, and a racing windshield; the boat, however, is powered on this restricted lake by a diminutive electric troll, one which moves the craft with surprising speed. I don’t mean that they are rushing around the lake at top speed, only that when they want to move it, it moves.

And the lake today has that look of an inland sea, with haze over the water and a slight chop, the kind they call a fisherman’s ripple. The fact that I can see Hans Berg’s old house through the fog destroys the illusion, no matter how much I would like to retain it. So it is still (again) a small lake, a personalized one, one that never is a watery threat to us shore denizens. Which is exactly the way I would wish it, deep in my heart.

I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer, namely the Internet. But it is good learning time. Today I discovered that I could scan my old (25 years) black and white prints, carefully made in my darkroom at the U., and fixed with fresh chemicals, thanks to my job. It is a wonder that they’ve held up so long, but most show no signs of fading or other deterioration. Towards the end there, I went over to a stabilization processor, and some of those improperly fixed after temporary stabilization are in sad shape. Short of buying new chemistry and printout paper, and setting up a bathroom darkroom, they are lost to me, probably forever. Not much lost, really, I suppose. But some of the good ones should be archivally preserved. I’ve found a way.

I scan them with Garth’s scanner (on indefinite loan to me, who bought and gave it to him for Christmas, last year) and save them at 200 dpi in black and white to a ZIP disc, where they take up about 250kb. This means I can get 400 photos on a disc.

That ought to take care of it. Only two, so far. I don’t think I’ve got 400 that are that good. But I’ve surely got a quarter that many.

It will provide a good, worthwhile winter’s activity, when the rains returns, as they are sure to do. But this respite has been . . . grand.

A book signing at Flysmith in Marysville, at exactly the same time as the semi-annual meeting of the lake association. Norma, who is vice president, of course attended and said the attendance was small but lively, and they agreed to treat the lake again next year and to test again for residual copper, which was surprisingly too high this year for a treatment that would get rid of the pernicious algae.

Alec Jackson tied his peculiar variation of Spade (mine) and other flies, while people trickled in and out of the store. The event started at noon, a Saturday, late in October, and ended at four. By two in the afternoon I hadn’t sold a book and was on the verge of leaving. But then a man and his wife bought a book as a gift for her father’s birthday, and as I was on my way out to my car another quiet guy looked them over, recalled checking SW out of the library, examined the next two, and bought the newest. I told him the local library had SFL and suggested that he checked it out; if he liked it, he could always buy it later.

I’d rather be read than bought. (But don’t quote me on this later. I’ll deny I ever said it.)

This is the time of the year when the spiders mysteriously appear in my downstairs bathroom. When I shower, the become dark irregular balls on the tile floor, unrecognizable as what they are because I’m without my glasses. When I’m done with my shower and shampoo, I’ve been urged to use a squeegee to remove most of the water from the shower walls and floor; then the spider (if touched by the rubber edge, which I always do) becomes activated, alive. The rubber legs appear and extend themselves like tendrils. The thing scurries, but there is no place to hide.

Now I am of two minds as to what to do next. Shall I simply dispense this spider from his life? Or shall I magnanimously “save” him—or her, as often is the case, if I do, and it lives on to build a web in the corner of the ceiling and grow fat with eggs? It is my seasonal dilemma, and usually I side with the spider. This time I carefully squeegee him, her, or it into the drain, where the last accumulation of water carries the spider out of sight and out of mind, at least until my next shower.

“The colors of photography are black and white,” I must remind myself; this is the ancient dictum. As is the case of many such rules, I’m not sure whether it still applies. The colors (of the world, as well) of photography are . . . four color. This is a mix of red, blue, yellow, and black. Or else cyan, yellow, and magenta, plus black again, if you are talking about color printing and subtractive color processing of negatives.

My Kodak DC (digital camera) 260 takes, to be sure, pictures in full wonderful color, but so much of my earlier photography was in black and white that I tend to think in those terms. After all I shot more than 660 rolls of black and white Tri-X film, most of it bulk-loaded by myself for economy reasons. But my Kodak camera and my HP color printer will print out in delightful full tone black and white, besides color—using the same digital image. How wonderful –I overuse the word, I know, but what better one is there to describe this process of having the best of both worlds near at hand?

By accident on my graphic filed downloaded from the Internet I set my printer on grayscale and instead of getting full color I was at once back in the world of black and white photography. And (pray tell) how did you like it? Well, it took some getting used to again, but I think I like it. I’m still adjusting. Color is superior; black and white photography came about because there was no color photography, not at first, and then later it was so expensive. Now, conventional black and white photography is expensive. Long ago, the infamous Hunt brothers cornered the silver market, ran up the price, and Kodak and others raised the price of all silver-bearing products accordingly. When the market price dropped, do you think Kodak dropped theirs? Ha, ha. It has been high ever since.

Color is marvelous, true. Yet seeing again in the reduced spectrum of black and white gives emphasis to structure and design, to full tonality. But I think many of us who love photography have carried over those important components into color photography, and so there is no loss when we see and print in color. Color is, after all, what the natural world is made up of. Just think how these autumnal deciduous leaves would look in dismal black and white.

No, thanks. Color is here to stay with me. Which is not to say that I won’t do a little experimental black and white printing, or won’t bother to scan and save in digital form my best old black and white work.

The cat catches the mouse. The cat lets it go, so that the cat can enjoy catching it again.

I am getting old. No doubt about it. Most of the pigment is gone from my hair and along the left temple it is receding. Fast? Hope not. My father has this problem, and my brother went early bald; I haven’t seen him for so long I don’t know how he looks today, but he can’t have grown back any, so it must be pronounced.

The hearing loss in my right ear is pretty bad. I depend on my left ear to pick up conversation and what’s important (very little) on TV. I sometimes use earphones in order to hear British voices on PBS; they are harder for me, for some dim reason, and I miss a whole lot, even with phonic help. I tried a hearing aid in my left ear a year ago, but it proved not for me and I sent the expensive thing back while the State-mandated return was still in effect.

There is increased fecundity in the hair sprouting in both my nose and my ears, and keeping it reduced is a job akin to the lawn. When I had my eyes reexamined, the optometrist reported not only an astigmatism in my left eye, but small cataracts in my right. This may account for how my vision blurs and my eyes grow watery as I blink to clear them.

I won’t report on small benign growths in various non-observable areas of my body, my thirty-year-old hernia on my right side, my knobby and in one instance leaky finger joints, no more than by making this short statement. Generally speaking my health is good. And I am thankful for it, for so much work remains undone.

With a gray sky night settles down imperceptibly. Of course the ending of daylight savings time last night adds to the stalwart defense of the light. Light always loses the battle with omnivorous darkness. With a placid lake reflecting in barely diminished form the burning bush at Jane’s place and the flame tree at what used to be (and in my mind still is) Hans Berg’s, there is a bright tranquillity to the day that can only exist in places; the rest of the lake is a dull green, comprised of many shades, the full range.

Even if you choose to stare at it, and have no better thing to do with your time, you will not see, cannot, the process of diminishment, which proceeds without so much as a by your leave. It is like the day is sinking into slow quicksand. Now, I’ve met some bottomless sand or muck deposits that work just like the dying of this day does—once when as I boy I fished Lake Sammamish from whatever accessible shore I could find; another time in the Skagit, just after a flood, coming back over a known riverbar that had been my unknowing recipient of much sand; other such memories will have to be dredged for—and I became mired before I knew that I had, so that I was lightly stuck early. When you push off with one booted foot, you only drive in deeper, more unretractable, the other foot, and if you repeat this in the opposite direction, you’ll find yourself in a hopeless situation, sinking deeper desperately, less than an inch at a time. But irrevocably stuck, sinking.

And . . . what happened? Why, I was sucked under and drowned. No, rather I was suffocated. Goodbye, world.

Somehow I extracted myself. Once I climbed out of my loose-fitting boot-footed waders and crawled, wet to the skin, to the beach. On the Skagit, only a year ago, just before panic set in, I managed to drag my still-stuck foot after me until the heel freed and finally the toe. The lead foot, of course, sunk deeper while I did this acrobatic, but the water was shallower, and I managed to pull myself up on some gravely shingle that was next to dry. And from there I easily walked away.

Since panic hadn’t set in, and I was not full of adrenal rush, nothing extraordinary happened. I simply walked away from my near disaster. The day went on, my life continued.

The close of this day is very much like that, lacking all meaningful and exonerating drama.

Have I come full circle yet? Not quite. First hard frost will do it. Must get ready. Up at the river all the windows are closed, the furnace turned on to minimum (55 degrees), foam cones placed over both sets of outdoor faucets. The first of the last leaves (bare with me on this) have been carelessly swept off the long deck on the riverside; I will wait until after Halloween until I sweep it good and clean out the raingutters on the single side—certain that there are no more leaves to fall. By then the river will be churning in plain view.

Horticulture is nine-tenths destruction, said Peter DeVries, known for his bitingly humorous insights into human nature and much that lay in the realm called nature. (Nature-nature?) So I have been remiss for more than a single year in cutting back the greenery along the river’s edge, my reason laziness but the reason I give the world is that it is quicker and easier to cut down the stuff than to grow it (trees, bushes, grasses) back again, and the land’s next inhabitant will have a choice whether or not to have it wild or tamed.

I’m hoping that it will be wild, but it is not my matter to decide. When you buy land, such oversight responsibilities come with the purchase price, and often people are not cognizant of this, only in their right to post the land and to put up fences. I did neither and had few resulting problems that having done so would have prevented or corrected. I am a believer in open land, it boundaries only indicated by what naturally rises there and is encouraged.

Here at the lake there is no freezing problem that can’t be attend to first-hand, quickly. The house is warm and there is nothing in the outlying carport or woodshed that a little cold weather will harm. The boat is high and dry, and so is the pram, which I only used once this year to prove that the tiny electric motor will power it and nicely, too. Motor is put away in the storeroom, along with its battery and charger. The lake fishing tackle has undergone a preliminary sort—my, how it has grown this year, what with my quest for bass that will, I am sure, renew this spring, and I, armed with greater knowledge, will fish better and surer and perhaps get a really big one or two—and has been put away, though I tend at nightfall to wander out to the end of my dock and make a cast or two.

The dogs go with me. Cate has a short attention span and is apt to drift off along the shoreline, perhaps in search of frogs, of which there are still a few not gone into hibernation yet; Biff loves to fish with me, but the appeal of the water and my casting hitting the water usually triggers a dive into the lake which, of course, ruins the fishing for the short rest of the day.

Knowing this much, knowing it will happen nearly every time, I nonetheless take him with me out on the dock, nearly every time. And when I don’t, he watches me from inside the glass slider and occasionally issues a protest bark, which I cannot help but hear, through the double glass.

It is either this or something else that makes me sad and incomplete if he is not alongside me, while I cast, though I know all the while that after three or six or ten or fifteen casts, all of them nearly alike, he will be triggered by one of them no different form the others, and then there is the great splash of him descending flat as a Lab can make himself, and then he is churning around in circles after the fish that he doesn’t really believe is out there and which chance now I have of getting a strike from is no small that infinitesimal would be an exaggeration to describe it.

A title, “Like Tears in Rain,” a line from the movie Blade Runner, spoken by the replicant played by Rutger Hauer, as he is dying because he is programmed to, after four years of life.

A gift of my son each Christmas, the New Yorker magazine is delivered to my house each week, usually a Thursday, though I never know when to expect it and am always slightly surprised and delighted by the paragon of good contemporary writing. Each year they quietly renew it because they get it, too, and get a price break on the second subscription, but also as a thoughtful gift of love and one they know I appreciate. I can afford my own subscription and would buy one, though I am normally frugal about such ephemeral things as magazines.

From issue to issue the amount that I read will vary greatly. This is a strictly subjective matter. Some issues seem to have been planned with me in mind, and I read nearly all of it, including the tedious stuff about NYC, mainly of interest to inhabitants. But other issues fail to interest me and I rush through them with irritation. Where is what I am looking for? I can’t define what that is, though (like art and women) I know what it is when I see it, and respond directly, immediately, powerfully.

John McFee wrote recently about a saltwater fishing derby held off shore in Alabama, where the competition to win in various categories is acute. His understanding of fish anatomy is incredible. He seems to learn new science subjects as he proceeds in his research for a story, and it all comes out in the intricate telling. He’s done this in writing about natural phenomena in Alaska, especially on geological subjects, but his knowledge is not limited. His writing is a joy to read and an inspiration to aspire to. It makes me more careful and at the same time more thorough. And he is just one of many excellent writers.

This is certainly the cutting edge of good writing, and one I and other writers would be sadly lost without.

We are in the midst of a meteorological reprieve. It’s wonderful! The days dawn with a trace of fog, the sun already in evidence, burning, the colors of the deciduous trees edged with flame. There are coho in the Skagit and it is simply too fine a day to remain at home, hunched over the computer keyboard. Plenty of those ahead, with the rain slanting down and what’s left of leaves on the trees all leaning sadly to the right.

Finally the wisteria has stopped shooting out those snaky tendrils all over the porch. It is, in fact, steadystate. I don’t remember whether it loses its many willowlike leaves in winter or if it retains them. The plant has a Southern look, evoking decaying mansions overgrown with green neglect and wood rotting with heat and moisture. The sight of it makes me want to concoct a julep and sprinkle it with mint.

No, it doesn’t. This is just morning hyperbole. Please dismiss. But the wisteria is real, and I’ve been whittling away at it all spring and summer. It’s blooms, however, are quite pretty. They appear only if you don’t whack off the tendrils. I think there is a lesson there, for anybody who wants to sort out the elements.

I think there have been three periods of development at Lake Ketchum, and we are in the midst of number three. The first was back in the Fifties, when people from Seattle and Everett began to think of the close-in lakes as weekend retreats. They built what were literally shacks at random, available points around the lake’s perimeter, on land that had been cleared at the turn of the century. The drive, remember, was a long slow one, in spite of the relatively short distance—it was out along Route 99, now called Evergreen Highway; it was then and is now a collection of marginal businesses and industries strung out over miles of stop-and-go traffic lights, both North and South of the city. North of Everett it was a little better, the stoplights farther apart, but it was still as slow go.

People made the weekend drive, often leaving Friday night, and it often took two and a half hours. (Today that much time will take you into Eastern Washington, and the irrigated desertland.) People overnighted late on Friday, or if leaving at a more moderate Saturday morning, early, that night, and returned to their city in a funereal procession of traffic late on Sunday. Was it worth it? I, who went to my beloved Stilly on such a schedule, and at a comparable distance, would say it was. In spite. . . .

Ketchum was stumpland, being converted to farming; nobody much wanted a weekend home on anything other than a river or a lake. The Seven Lakes Basin grew slowly during this time, the aggressive Fifties. Then things quieted down some. In the Seventies, with I-5 newly installed and operating the full length of the Bellingham/Olympia corridor, there was further development, and the houses people put up were of better grade than shacks; they had the potential of being used, or adapted, to year-round homes. Only a few people commuted the time-consuming distances to places like Renton, Bellevue, South Seattle (namely Boeing), but I know some who did. They are well into their retirement years now. People consider them pioneers. Well, they were, if only in terms to the mileage they put on the cars each year.

In the Seventies habitat densened up and down the corridor, strictly according to distance from the hub, Seattle. Homes and businesses stuck pretty closely to the arterials, and the farther you got East of I-5, the sparser the settlements, and even the few that were named as towns often proved a disappointing general store and gas pump, like Trafton and Oso.

I can only imagine Lake Ketchum then and try to reconstruct it from vestiges remaining along the lake today. There is still that mix of weekend getaways and fine permanent homes. I live in one of them. My knowledge of its past is sketchy. I heard from the owner of the next door rental house that our original house—a mere cabin—burned down; this must have been, oh, in the late Seventies. It was replaced with a small one-storey house which is the foundation for the fine cedar home that is here today. Ron and Arlene Haight lived in the ground-level house while they built (no expense spared, since Arlene had family money) the commodious upstairs. Adversity struck them and Arlene living on in the big house after her husband’s suicide found it lonely and too much to keep up. She tried to sell it once for a lot of money, cut her price by more than fifty thousand dollars, and we snapped it up.

I go into this mainly to illustrate the factors (largely economic) at work in the development of the lake. By now most of the lake was occupied with a strange mix of homes—shacks for the weekend, modest year-round homes with a number of bedrooms, and the start of fine homes that were not cheap.

The lakeshore is not quite fully occupied with this range of houses, while on the opposite side of the drive circling the lake land was not, until recently, so eagerly sought. It is now. It is where homes are going up rapidly, and this is a matter of some concern to the denizens of the lake. There is a series of homes all built within the past several years, modest homes to be sure, many of them, so that the outlying area is becoming dense. Who are all these people and why do they want to live here? Well, the economy is strong (despite some ominous signs from Asia and Russia) and unemployment is low. Everybody who wants to work can. And husbands and wives both work now, even if they have children (and they do), so they have plenty of income. It is a change from when I was a young man and probably a good one, though I sometime wonder how the children of such marriage arrangements will turn out. Probably fine.

The shoreline of the lake is pretty firmly established with homes of a widely varying kind and expense. Nobody yet has had the bright idea of tearing down an old one in order to build a new luxurious one, such as people do in cities such as Seattle, because land there is otherwise unavailable. But with the great solid density of homes and developments springing up around us, it would seem only a matter of time.

This is the time of the year, early autumn, when a wag might say, toadstools are springing like houses, and not be entirely wrong.

Only one house at present is under construction on the lake itself, and it is an old one that is being built up on, much like ours was, ten or more years ago. It is a summer cottage being reconstructed on its foundation, and that foundation being expanded to one buildable side. But at the same time more surprising things are happening, as the big second-growth are being cut down. Next door to Mona Flatray, the lake association’s aging president, a woodsy lot was cleared and a mobile home is being installed. The loss of trees troubles all of us, but especially Mona. Trees nourish people in their shadow. But that shadow deprives them of sunlight. Mona now has morning sunlight where she recently and for long had daylong shade. And across from her, on a wide triangle of land, crowded houses are going up alarmingly like those mushroom and toadstools. She is being crowded from two sides. The lake is the third side, and the fourth is a wetland where Farmer Dweeter’s pasture drains into our lake, long a source of phosphorous and deep concern.

Not only is she being crowded, but she may be crowded out. Her house is a modest year-round home and it will bring a good price when it goes on the market, only now with a rental mobile home next door the property values will be diminished. She (and we) had thought the lot unbuildable. Things have changed. The county is hungry for a larger tax base, and while environmental regulations have tightened, they have also weirdly loosened. You can build where you previously couldn’t, so long as a State-trained sanitation expert designs you a septic system that works and you are willing to pay for it. In near-wetland areas, they are expensive and often involve imported mounds of perkable soil.

The key, I’ve long thought, to the area is the Dorsey Shortplat. It is a lovely area of second growth that for all practical purposes is identifiable as old growth and the nearest we will ever come to it again except in distant parks. It is where we walk the dogs and stretches from the ridge over Skagit Bay to the perimeter road of the lake. I don’t know how many acres are involved but they are multiple. The man who was interested in buying our river property, but copped out, said he was the contract logger who deforested part of the Dorsey land. He left some nice trees standing. The goal, however, is development. The triangular half-acre wedge he cut contains at its Northern edge and easement, that is, an access road for Dorsey. It is now being built. All the trees along the edge are now down, and the property owner along side (who owns acreage himself for just his home) is furious. He had thought the developer would leave most of them for aesthetic reasons.

This is how it goes. Trees come down, roads and houses go up. It is the way of the world. It is also stage three of the Lake Ketchum development. It is a microcosm of the cluster home development going on up and down the wide corridor, East and West of I-5—the racetrack that makes all this commuting to jobs possible.

Steamers used to churn up Puget Sound and stop at Everett, Stanwood, Mt. Vernon, and placenames along the way now lost to time. They remain on some maps and the mills that used to go with them are gone, replaced by roadside markets and antique shops (which are fancy names for rural junkshops). The steamers were how people got to and from the country, where trees were being logged, until railroads and rail spurs were build out from the saltwater ports that hauled both logs and people. Some steamers traveled up rivers considerable distances and towns were founded along the river, Skagit and Stillaguamish; these rivers are now so badly silted in that they will not permit boats even a fraction of the distance. The silt is from logging and other development. It is the result of what is called progress.

Florence is gone; it was a steamer stop on the Stilly; Silvana remains, but no boat can reach there, and it is a feed and agricultural supply area, for they grow both crops and cows in the flat fields nearby that are annual replenished with nutrients from floods.

Roads followed the logging, almost always but not everywhere. New industries sprung up, but not at the rate than service and electronic businesses did later, in the Nineties. They brought people into the area and the support they required in terms of markets and supplies.

There are shopping centers, vast California-style groceries that are almost department stores in terms of the range of goods they provide. Homes have gone up in clusters with ritzy names—Church Creek Estates, Wilderness Ridge Two, etc. None are gated communities yet, but the time is not far off.

There is no more countryside. No, that’s not quite correct. There is still plenty of farming in the two river valleys, but whenever a small farm is sold, it is apt to be to a developer. No farmer can afford to buy a farm that a developer or builder is willing to pay residential land rates for. So the smaller, less successful ones are disappearing. And of course as farmers age and die off, the next generation is less interested in farming, especially if it means hard work and not a lot of money.

My hope for selling the river property at a good profit is to a developer, not a city man looking for a weekend retreat, as I did. I’ve learned this the hard way, over the past couple of years. People want already built houses, fine houses, new houses, where they can pick the fixtures, appliances, interior and exterior finishes and colors.

This is what they are finding on the edges of Lake Ketchum and all the other necklace lakes in this sparkling valley. I don’t blame them any and admit to looking at some of the homes rising with envy. If my own house on the lake was not as satisfactory as it is, Norma and I would probably bite at the bait of one of the new houses, with neighbors pressed up against one’s flanks, much as it used to be in Seattle.

Fortunately that is not the case. But still we are feeling crowded, and the loss of peripheral trees, both evergreen and deciduous, strikes deep. More and more there is less and less that is appealing.

Yet I look out my study window and see, this autumn of the brilliant bigleaf maples, sufficient beauty to take my breath away, and to do so repeatedly. I guess it is only natural to fear for loss and the press of the unsustainable future.

People are talking about what an extraordinary year it is for autumn colors, especially the maples. I never realized that the countryside contained so many until my drive out along the Skagit yesterday in search of coho. (I found none, none at all, only a couple of spawned-out Chinook salmon still finning where a greatly diminished Grandy Creek enters the river, mottled with white fungus and barely able to hold themselves vertical.

The maples everywhere are brilliant orange and gold. Other years at this time they are a dismal cocoa brown and sodden from heavy rainfall. I guess the lack of rain at the end of summer and persisting dryness of this fall is what produced their colors, which of course are the colors of dying. They and the scarlet vine maples and dry as toast, and you can actually see from afar the curl and crackle they contain. But beautiful. The entire countryside sparkles with bigleaf the color of newly minted coins, and in the shade the gold and green intermix harmoniously.

It is seems fatuous to wax so lyric and unoriginally about the colors of the leaves but, believe me, they are unusual, and people rack their minds to recall a year so splendid as this one. And even old people cannot recall one.

It is hard to see into car windows when you walk around the lake and you don’t want to slight your neighbor through your inability to recognize him, so I wave at almost every car or truck that passes me, and usually the occupant waves back, or I guess that he has, still unable to see inside. Similarly, when driving and passing some neighbor out on a walk (and many of them do, regularly) I generally give a soft honk-honk on the horn. This translates syllabically into “Hel-lo.”

There is a happy ambiguity about living in a pocket, a lake, between two vast watersheds, the Stillaguamish and Skagit, being a true member of neither and yet possessing key elements of both. It is the best of two worlds and comprises a magnanimous third. We have our own identity, and can pick and choose from what we like best in the other two, the visually striking Skagit flats and the smaller, more bucolic ones of the Stilly. The lake, however, has its own charms. These I have tried to enumerate in this book.

Still water appeals. It offers the prospect of peace, tranquillity. It doesn’t always provide it but—hey—that’s up to you. You can only ask so much of nature. It doesn’t repair the plumbing, solve problems regarding your love life. It doesn’t promise not to rain when you have a parade. To ask it to be other than itself is, well, fatuous. Don’t. Take nature at face value, as you might the lake. There it is. Simply enjoy. Don’t sue or dun if you are disappointed. Promise?

I’m sorry, Tobias Wolff (or is it Geoffery?), but it seems to me everybody living in Concrete, Washington, is a febe, one kind or another. (My dictionaries don’t list the word, but everybody knows it is a slangy abbreviation for feeble, as in feeble-minded.

I went to Concrete yesterday, in search of a famed fishing hole, where the Baker River enters the mighty Skagit. And I found it, after making a couple of inquiries and being shown a place to park alongside a woman’s mobile; she professed she had never walked down the dirt road that left the cul-de-sac where she lived. Maybe her two young boys made it impossible, maybe not; maybe she was just incurious. I was afraid to drive it, unseen, in case there was not turnaround and it led to a sandy beach (which it did). But there were a number of places where the road widened and a turnaround was possible. It was a long walk on a hot day, with sunlight filtering through the trees and the road a shaggy carpet of orange—those bigleafs again. Finally I heard the whine of a car’s tires stuck in sand; this confirmed me in my suspicion that it would not be driveable. I came out on the river bank about a hard third of a mile down the road and spotted an old red car, one with front-wheel drive, briefly mired and two men working on it to get it out of a drift. They did, and I passed by.

I continued up the long bar, sided with deep water, unwadable. Both Russ Osenbach and Neighbor Anton said it was a beautiful run. Well, it wasn’t. It was a place to launch your boat and motor to somewhere else. I prowled around, the dogs racing ahead, until I came to the mouth of the Baker. This was a worthwhile visit, all by itself. It is a big river, with a deep, slow, wide mouth. Then I retraced my course, fishing when the water slowed with the medium-sized Spey rod, driving out long casts that barely sand in the strong current. Then I retraced my route and headed back to my car.

I passed a woman who was terrified of my Labs. Well, they are big, and it is not the sign of a febe to be wary of big dogs. Quite the contrary. She was pleasant enough. Nearing where my car was parked I came across a man of medium age. He asked me if I had seen anybody on the road. I told him about the woman earlier. He seemed confirmed in what he was looking for—his mother. She had headed out this way, he told me, “this morning.” It was now three-thirty in the afternoon, and the shadows were steepening.

We passed what might have gone for the time of day elsewhere in a kind of uncomprehending mutual stupor. Everything I said, he repeated, as though trying to learn a foreign language by practicing his pronunciation, no matter what was being said and no doubt understanding what was being said in his direction. It was spooky and led nowhere. Finally, to end it, this stupid conversation, I started repeating the ends of his sentences, even though in some instances they were my own words flung back. We drew apart, each walking backwards. I went to my car.

One of the woman’s children was crying furiously, the door of her mobile open wide. The other little boy was seated outdoors on the stoop, surrounded by his toy plastic trucks. I told him it was the biggest collection of such toys I’d ever seen, meaning to compliment him without appearing too ingratiating. He said nothing. I poured the dogs into the Explorer, stripping off my waders and mounting my rod, divided, onto the carrying rack on the top of the vehicle. I headed off, noting again the country squalor of the place.

It was very much like Wolff’s A Boy’s Life, both book and movie. Something don’t change, no matter how much time you give them. Concrete (the town, not the building material, but it, too) is one of these.

Local note: The Snow Goose Bookstore in Stanwood is for sale. (They have six copies of my C/C on consignment sale there.) The price is $70k. I presume this is for the inventory. I doubt whether there are any takers. Still, it must be the dream of a certain few to be the proud owner of a bookstore. And its slave.

I have three CD versions of Bach’s partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied cello. One is by a Russian (Rostopovich), another by a Spaniard (Casals), and the third by a native of China now living in America (Ma). Each interprets the music differently, according to temperament and perhaps nationality. (Is there such a thing as a national temperament? I doubt it.)

Casals’s is my favorite. Yo-yo Ma has recorded the series of six twice, not all that many years between them. The music to all who hear it becomes highly personalized and one identifies it (I know Ma does, and so do I) with certain events in one’s life.

A man goes through life not alone, if he has music like this to comfort and elevate him at both good and bad moments. How fortunate we are.

The month of October winding down, with Halloween only a few days off, rains have returned (as well they should) and cooler temperatures that invite walk-taking, that is, when the rain is not drumming down, as it was earlier.

All things in their time and season. Not an original observation, to be sure, but an important one. Yesterday’s warmth and golden splendor was exciting because it was so late, out of season. It didn’t seem right, somehow, but it was sneakily enjoyable, all the same. Now, today’s rain, is what we deserve—what we are entitled to. No more, no less. And it is only seasonally fitting.

Phrases like “I think,” “I feel,” “it seems to me,” are unnecessary in most writing. They go without saying, as much as they are said. Somebody is writing the words on the page (no ghost is, certainly) and there is always that person behind the word flow. Of course he feels, thinks, seems. Make the statement direct. It has greater impact and less evasion. It is strong accurate feelings we are after, unveiled by subterfuge.

I think there is something spiteful in not reading the books of people that you know, and I’m sure I have indulged in the sport, over the past several decades, just as people I know (Neighbor Anton, for instance) enjoy not reading me. So be it. When you recognize in yourself negative characteristics that annoy you in others, you are on the road to expiation and renewal. Or at least some modicum of self-understanding.

The farmers along Pioneer Highway have got it about right: Halloween is a pagan holiday, with strong harvest overtones. They have uncarved pumpkins and shocks of corn stacked where private drives lead from the highway to dairy and produce farms. There is an attractive disarray about the arrangements, which I find inviting as I pass by. But they are not meant to entice entrance. They are more greetings to the traffic stream headed elsewhere.

Halloween has druid associations and was an important event to the Celts. It was a time when the dead were supposed to return, and we have held firmly to that belief when we encourage children to dress up in goblin and skeletal garb, and go out and try to scare each other. Macabre meanings are included, with lots of blood and gore. The effect is more to nauseate than to scare outright. I wonder if this doesn’t warp children.

The Romans occupied Britain for several early centuries and noted the pagan observations closely. The harvest aspects of the holiday were encouraged at this time. It was not until the Christian missionaries arrived that the celebration became preliminary to All Saints’ Eve, the day that followed, November first. So there was a kind of Romanesque bacchanalia that preceded the serious religious holiday, as often there is. In times more dedicatedly Christian than ours the day the followed had high seriousness. People prayed to saints both acknowledged and unconfirmed. This, I gather, gave support to the belief that living the exemplary life qualified one for sainthood, recognized or not. So you could pray to a known saint or to somebody you knew who had died who had saintlike qualities and hope that he would intercede for you in whatever existed of the Afterlife, namely, Heaven.

Around Wilderness Ridge there are ghost effigies and notched pumpkins lit from inside, and peaked black hats, black cats, anything that is black, skeletons painted on black fabric, brooms (the witch’s main accessory) out in front of many houses, houses which (witch?) are in competition with each other for, I guess, Halloweenness or Halloweenhood, the habitat of little children of all ages who believe this to be a serious holiday, and soon there will be tribes of them, the youngest gangs under the supervision of adults (who may or may not be themselves masked and appropriately garbed), and others, older, out to do mischief of various kinds, some cute, some vandalous, some indisputably criminal.

Halloween is not till Saturday night, the end of the month, a good day and night for terminating some things that might have gone better. At one house we regularly drive by, the lights are up on a living fir for Christmas. Can this be? Is it near already? No, no. The house also displays its Halloween decorations. Where is Thanksgiving, then, the true meaningful holiday that falls almost exactly between? Well, there isn’t much you can do, is there, to celebrate the day of thankfulness? You eat. There ought to be more. It ought to have its commensurate visual celebration and consist of something other than overeating the domestic bird that symbolizes (instead of the eagle) our holiday feast.

Now, I would support having the chicken as national symbol, though there are some that would argue that it connotes cowardice. The turkey is not known for its acumen, its intelligence. So we have the eagle, a rather cowardly scavenger and carnivore.

Besides, having the chicken symbol of national policy when it comes to military intervention in the affairs of other nations would be highly commendable. It would mark a major change in public policy.

The lake association voted informally to treat the lake again next spring with Sonar, if necessary, appropriating up to $14k of tax-assessed money for this purpose. (I was not at the meeting, off instead to a dismal book signing.) I am of a mixed mind on water treatment with chemicals. I think the absence of the tall stringy weed, Elodea, is the chief benefit, and it made anything other than still fishing possible. And the few who like to swim in the lake—mostly grandchildren of the denizens—saw a huge difference. But the duckweed is gone and there is nothing to attract the ducks. I find I really miss them, especially the huge flocks of migrating American widgeons. The lake is strangely barren without them at this time of the year. A few diving ducks, plus a mallard drake and three hens (possibly his mate and two full-grown ducklings) are in residence, but I have a hunch they will be gone soon.

Fifty—count them; I did; Norma said they were a few more I’d missed—Canada geese out on the lake. I admit, they are pretty, but they also constitute a plague, a plague of geese, if they overwinter here, as they are apt to do. They like to eat grass, slugs, weed, all of which we have in abundance. Each morning previously there was a lone Canada on our lakeside lawn, pecking at the ground and whatever he found there, leaving behind those snaky green scats that remind me of Fourth of July gray snakes that die in a long, curled soft ash.

Way across the lake where the sunshine is laid down in a narrow strip a small flock is prettily bathing. I think that is what they are doing. They splash and flutter in the golden light, sending out white and silver ripples, all very pretty. Then why don’t I welcome them? I’ve seen their likes before, along the shores of Seattle’s Lake Washington, where their excreta grew so thick and slimy that inattentive first-time walkers suddenly would throw their arms up into the air, do a comic little dance, and if they were lucky not land on their backs in the awful stuff.

Pass on, pretty geese. Do not linger at my peaceful lake. We want to admire you, but from afar.

In my book Country/City, Canadas were new to me. In fact, I had trouble identifying my first sighted, they were so rare. That has changed greatly. Then I had resort to Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds, where I found their honking cries variously described in so fascinating a way that I transcribed them, syllable by syllable. But none were exactly right; that is why there were so many offered. Today, listening to their chatter, I decided it was, “Chron-reek,” repeated over and over, in a range of individual voices, none exactly like the others. That must be how they identify and respond to each other as goslings in their vast extended families of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles.

We have those now, in number, but let us hope it is only a temporary arrangement.

What is a lake? Bad question. An enclosed body of water fed by springs and inlets, drained by swamps and outlets, with considerable but variable shoreline and a complex ecosystem comprised of much biota. Its temperature varies with input and sunlight; its watery composition upon input and oxygen content and flora; its biomass (fish numbers and size) with subtle factors only a few of which are closely identified and measurable.

A lake offers a pleasant environment to visit or to live. I have a home on a river, and thrill to its variations, but the tranquillity of a lake is more to my liking, as I age seek less adventure. Sometimes a large lake cries out to me, a lake like Whatcom or Goodwin or even vast Lake Washington, a lake accessible only by large powered boat, but I keep resisting the call and make myself contented with what I’ve got, namely a small lake, one that is innately lovable.

I am able to picture it over the centuries before there were more than a few uninterested Indians in the area, whose chief interest was the berries along its shore and the saltwater marshes that provided shellfish in abundance, along with easily obtainable smelt in season. The lake had no fish in it, none that were desired by the Indians or the early settlers. Fish were introduced species, and as with almost all the lake (Riley is one exception) became settled by various spinyray populations. Efforts to keep them all trout lakes failed, as anglers repeatedly reintroduced their perch and crappie and large-mouth bass. In a lake so confined and shallow, the flourished. And as the lake passed through ecological evolution and reached the eutrophic stage, these fish kept crowding out the desirable rainbow hatchery plants. Besides, trout need highly oxygenated water with a gravel bottom in which to spawn successfully, and Lake Ketchum was without it. The best it could offer was seasonal runoff from the dairy farming and agricultural fields that succeeded the logged old growth forests. It was not enough.

We denizens have made mental compromises with this rural environment, no longer dreaming of wilderness or the return of wild conditions. The word is civilization, and we are participants and products of a sophisticated advanced society, whether we like it or not. I like it, but have my moments of doubt when I long for something simpler and more rustic. But I know I am only kidding myself. I’d be lost without my satellite dish, my TV, my computer, the Internet, radio, personal transportation in the form of the ironically named Ford Explorer. None of today are explorers in any sense of the word except idealization. We can pretend to be Marco Polos to various degrees, but in our hearts know ourselves to be just what we truly are—law-abiding citizens of a complex and fascinating modern world. This is how we want to be, in our deep heart’s core.

The world of nature is modified, codified, and transformed to something much more of our liking. I live on a tamed lake and wish it to remain this way. I like the appearance of wildness, rather than the real thing, which has gotten increasingly hard to find, no matter how far and extensive the search. A tamed lake then is home.

It will do for my purposes. And what are those? Well, this book is an extended effort to define and describe them, over and over, and yet I fear I must try again, one final time. I want to experience daily the multiple visual pleasures of a lake and light, never the same twice (if your measurements are fine enough) but with recognizable subtle similarities. It is in these gradations that my joy resides. Mutability and constancy are its governing principles. If they are contradictory, then so be it, but I think not, think they are both part of the same package, consistency within change, change only in approved doses.

Cycles dominate our lives and we find deep satisfaction in the way the seasons repeat with only minor differences, year after year. Too much change is frightening; too little is stupefying. The variation has to be just right to be aesthetically pleasing. This is what we are after. All of us today are fed, clothed, and sheltered; a modern society offer these safeguards from the disasters of the past. (We have only new ones to face and which threaten us, not the old ones.) We are content in our creature comforts, mostly, and take them for granted. What we seek is some subtle variety of a kind that is repeatedly and infinitely rewarding.