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 fo