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Life at the Lake

a diary of living on a small lowland lake

Lake Ketchum under a newly risen moon

a quote from Thoreau's Journals, 6/16/1840: "I am startled when I consider how little I am actually concerned about the things I write in my journal. . . . Of what consequence whether I stand on London Bridge for the next century, or look into the depths of this bubbling spring which I laid open with my hoe?"

Everything must have a name, and names are arbitrary —at least until they become established, after which they are hard to change. So I began searching for a name for these journals, which I had simply called, "Notebooks," numbering the pages consecutively and putting them into binders in bunches with Acro fasteners, when the volume got too great. I grouped them according to years, naturally. For some reason I cannot pin down, my "years" usually began around the first of July. Thus, they resemble the fiscal years of governments and corporations.

I searched and I searched, but nothing acceptable for a name came to mind. I had to come up with a better name than "Notebooks," one more descriptive, localized, particular. I wanted the title to convey a vital element of the Pacific Northwest, and its particular biological geography—what some call "bioregionalism"—of the country I love so, and away from which I seldom stray.

The image that kept coming to mind was recalcitrant salmonberry thickets; my crabbed manuscript was very much like them. How distinct, how indigenous, the shrub was. It grew everywhere on the Pacific slope of the Cascade Mountains, where it behaved like a weed, a tough, resilient series of growths reaching for the sky and only partly redeeming themselves with luscious berries in the spring.

Each year, my wife and I destroy many square feet of salmonberry thicket; if we don't, it will engulf and eliminate all other flora. In the Pacific Northwest, you dare ignore salmonberry only so long. Eventually, it comes to call at your door. It spreads and becomes dense like crazy, preventing you from walking along a favorite path that only last year was thin scrub.

The ubiquitous salmonberry became my theme and subject, as I wrote about other things. It took a while for me to realize the extent of its intrusion and its dominance. It rises out of an alder copse and takes hold, until it overcomes the landscape. So I tentatively called the journal The Salmonberry Chronicles.

I did not write pointedly about the salmonberry until I began composing the third volume my notebooks, when it seemed to overwhelm me from every direction. For some reason—familiarity, perhaps—I began to do some research on this abundant flora that was nearly a weed in my part of the country. This was 1980, or thereabouts. In my notebooks I discovered page after page of data I had collected from many sources. Looking it over, it seemed too good to hide inside a lengthy text—these notebooks. So I've brought it forward to use as a preface. It seems to fit better here.

I won't say the salmonberry and I have become exactly friends. It's more like we are colleagues along a riverbank. I have a healthy respect for it, especially in how it determinedly blocks my path when I set out for a day's fishing. If I intrude too far, its canes fling me back with a snap and a vengeance. Limp and dead all winter, in spring it is sappy and vigorous. One must come to terms with it, or lose the battle. I have chosen the former. Besides, the salmonberry is good to eat.

This is an extraordinary year for salmonberries. They virtually drip from their canes. There are two varieties, the golden orange and the burgundy. The latter are my favorite. [Years later, I changed my mind.] I can detect only slight differences between the two and it may be my eyes are effecting my sense of taste, for the deep bluish red ones seem the proper color for such a fruit and cause me to group it with its kin, the loganberry, the raspberry, the cascadeberry, and a bit farther away, the Himalayan blackberry that grows so extensively around here, with its tangles of impenetrable vines and fierce, hooked thorns.

The orange salmonberries are of a color that belongs to the citrus fruits, and I come across them in the woods as a surprise, an anomaly. Generally, I shun them, but once in a while find myself in an experimental mood and plop one into my mouth. Is it my imagination, or do I find them firmer, tastier, less seedy? They will do, I think, for most people's fruit-eating purposes. And the price is right. The burgundy ones grow right along with the orange, in a kind of fruity promiscuity of cane thickets, and the burgundy seem to dominate and attract me more, with their color, their lushness, the promise of their sweet taste.

Both are seedy. It is a fact of salmonberry life. And the flavor is, well, shall we say, delicate? It is a bit bland and watery. My wife tells me this is why nobody thinks to make jams and jellies out of them.

"Let's make some jam," I tell her, munching away on the red ones, but her cold eye informs me there is no chance, not unless I do it myself. I put it down on the bottom of a ladder of things I will never get around to doing. So each year, in sweet May, I gather my salmonberries, which means going on picking diversions on my way to fish the river. And because of the late start of the fishing season, I miss the peak of the crop, and must settle for the tag end of their season. Some are already rotting on the cane and are sickly sweet. I have to spit out their foul pulp.

Salmonberry canes grow profusely, given no encouragement. On my property, they are the dominant flora. They are impossible to get rid of permanently. Periodically I have to cut them back, or else be engulfed in them, forevermore. Now, I don't really mind them, but when they begin to steal away by tall inches my view of the river, it's too much, and I am goaded into action and attack. I go after them with machete, ax, and brushhook. All will serve to whack down the canes. Getting the roots up is another matter.

A salmonberry cane is light brown, scaly, dry. Its bark flakes. At its heart is a pulpy beige core, a little bullseye of soft-wood center. A cane has thorns, but they are half-hearted ones, and do a poor job of protecting the bush from human destruction. Thorns are pale, flesh-colored, which makes them hard to find to dig out. Each year I must open up the river trail, the one given over to the walks of neighbors and fishermen who are tired of fighting the current and slippery stones in an advancing season, when the bottom of the river grows coated with algae and slime. Wild rose and salmonberry—distant relatives, in which a family resemblance can be detected in the shared magenta hues of their different blooms—block the river trail. The salmonberry growths I can snap off with my bare hands, and do, but the wild rose will stab my palm, if I try the same trick.

I have confronted a wild rose that barred my progress, and carefully sought to find a fingerhold between its thorns in which to bend its stalk backwards and break it off. I can never find one so wide. The thorns are placed just close enough to prevent this—is it divine placement? I must use my pocketknife for the chore. The salmonberry, though, I can snap back out of the way. A shattered cane forms a spear point, wicked and dangerous. Stumble on one in the dark, and you will suffer a grievous wound.

If you are cutting down canes, it is necessary to leave yourself a handle to lever out the roots later. And you may get tiny transparent thorns in your palm, which remain invisible for days, when they begin to fester and pain you to the touch. They cannot be seen and, to remove them, you must perform exploratory surgery on yourself. It is best to try to catch thorns early, while there is a bit of root protruding from your skin; the use of the teeth is invaluable.

The stalk or stem of the salmonberry is what keeps the fruit in the air and safe, during bearing season. In fall, nature turns off the life juices and announces to the roots that the year is over. It is time to die back. It won't be until March that new shoots push up out of the mulch and put out their shaggy green leaves, tentative at first, then with blatant authority. Quickly, the leaves bear blooms, the blooms new fruits on new canes. Early in the year, canes are easily trespassed on; it is not until after bearing that they become tough and resistant. By fall, the thickets are impenetrable.

What I cut, I must bear out and burn. Some are canes are twelve feet high; this is why it is best to whack them down each year, while they are young. A few I've allowed to go on with their life, untrammeled, for they provide me with a free fence and a barrier between me and my neighbor. Properly cultivated, or rather uncultivated, they will soon form a wall. (Good walls make good neighbors, don't they?) Overhead in spring are small, deep violet flowers, some in clusters, others individually scattered among the green. The sun bursts out, and bees arrive with their suitcases to gather up the pollen.

The salmonberry asks to be left alone. I cooperate. Most of the harvest belongs to the birds and the insects. And the earth becomes richer as a result of what falls and is absorbed. This is my operating principle, until proved wrong. I believe in letting natural processes operate without interruption, or alteration. This is my conservation. I exercise a form of negative land management. The land can do whatever it wants, for the most part. I sit back and watch the advance of seasons and cycles. I strive to blend in. I do not interfere. I fish, I dream.

Berries aside, I am a writer, a role I take seriously, and these are my notebooks, originally intended for my own use. But I think they have some further value. My observations in many ways are typical for their times, while still maintaining, I hope, some degree or originality. But the original notebooks are so voluminous, so repetitious, so tedious even to me, that they require a strong editor. Since none was at hand, I had to perform the task myself. It was a little like doing a root canal on yourself. I've cut and I've culled and I've thrown aside much material, knowing I had it saved in another file: the notebooks themselves. And I've given them a new name—Roughcut—for they have reduced the volume by about forty percent. For me, that's doing pretty good.

All the material on fishing has been removed, unless it represents something more than a day's happy respite from my main activity, writing. But never one to throw anything very far away, I've save it too and put it into a special volume called "Riverscape." It is a thing-unto-itself and does not properly belong here.

"Roughcut" then is drawn from my life as a writer. It is not very different from my life as a man. It interested me as I made my daily entries over twenty years. It interested me still, or again, as I reduced its volume. My great hope is that it will interest others, too. rca

there is too much cyan in the day. Didn't realize it until I took off my amber sunglasses, while driving up to the river

all the unleafed bushes in the country burn wine-dark with sap, there are catkins on the barren alder limbs, and the "pussies" are gone from the willows. All is budded. Skunk cabbage out, crocuses

dandelions all over the fields, some already with puff balls. Vine maples unfurling tented leaves, and up on top of each stem are two pinkish shucks from out of which the leaf emerges. Everything growing with a fury

Henry Thoreau—you remember him, don't you?—would love a tent trailer like mine. But first somebody would have to pull the wheels off so it more resembles a cabin. Then it could no longer "travel widely," as he puts it, even around Concord. It is so efficient, neat, compact, simple—but all of these things in a modern, plastic manner. So maybe he would like only the idea of one

a photoessay or book called "Smoking," showing people in the act of smoking—cigarets (very slow shutter speeds like of Norma inhaling smoke through her nose, the way she does; pipes, grass, cigars, old men and women, even cabins with smoke coming out of their chimneys, leaves burning; the accoutrements of pipesmokers lying on the table, etc. A bit like Andre Kertesz's, Reading

Anthony Burgess, in his introduction to A Shorter Finnegan's Wake, says (p. xix), "being a river is very nearly a full-time job." Amen

the salmonberry asks to be left alone. I cooperate. Most of the harvest belongs to the birds and the insects. And the earth becomes richer as a result of what falls and is absorbed. This is my general operating principle. I exercise a form of negative land management. The land can do whatever it wants. I sit back and watch the advance of seasons and cycles. I fish, I dream

Country Western song, "Snowbird": "The one I love forever is untrue." How succinct, how tragic, how final, how poignant

on seeing restaurant workers picketing the Arlington Turkey House and giving them the sympathetic clenched fist salute; they were totally oblivious to its meaning, their sole concern being to keep me from driving in and eating there. Anybody who claims a bond with the workingclass has had no contact with them. Cf. George Orwell and his professed love of socialism. Yeah

the Keoughs are always losing priests in the woods. They wander off, reading their Bibles. One came up to the river today to say mass for them. Then he disappeared. "Have you seen Father John?" I was asked. "No." "Oh dear, I wonder where he's gone this time?" He wanders away, reading his Bible, then gets lost, and they have to go out and find him and bring him back

finally finished Anthony Burgess's A Shorter Finnegans Wake. Wow, what a chore. Highly unintelligible and behind all that intentional obscurity, a mish-mash. Am now reading Vonnegut, a collections of "opinions" called unmemorably, Wampeters, Forna, and Granfalloons. [A few years later, I read all of Finnegans Wake, and didn't feel this way about it at all. It was "pure music," and I enjoyed it greatly]

am reading Thoreau, as I was a year ago at this time. I ought to purchase his journals, while they're still in print. [Note: I did.] He is such a splendid writer, but I sometimes forget what the subject of his beautiful, long, involved sentences is—the mysterious "it"—and must trace it back, back. My fault, not his

In comparison, John Muir seems coy and obnoxious to the modern sensibility, which cannot tolerate use of the pathetic fallacy and certain other literary abuses

am reading Joseph Wood Krutch's (a wooden crutch?) biography of Thoreau. Thoreau would not like it. A lot of slop, intended for the mushy-minded. No footnotes to indicate where in the Journals the quotes are from. A sign of laziness and thoughtlessness toward the reader on K's part. K plays pretty free and lose with the great man's ideas, too

saw the Great Blue Heron in the backwater, but it spotted me from a couple of hundred feet away and took off, its great wings thumping, its neck crooked in the characteristic drain spout curve. Feet tucked back in flight like the return gas port on the Browning Automatic Rifle. {Ah, former Army days just won't be forgotten]

The other night, just before dark, an otter swam across my pool, thereby ruining the fishing for the rest of the short day. It dives silently, with no slap of its tail, as is the case with the beaver

Krutch's book on Thoreau is better than I thought at first, although a bit professorial

discovered some small frogs today—one not so small and the rest apparently this year's crop—along the beach at our river lot. They were dark brown and less than an inch long. They can change their coloration as necessary; they most resemble the green tree frogs we once hatched out from eggs collected in puddled rainwater at Boulder Creek, when my son was very small. Mosquito larvae were in the same water, and if the tadpoles did not develop enough in time to eat the mosquito larvae before they hatched out, we had to extinguish them before we became their victims

These tads lay in the fetid water along the beach, which is filled with iron compounds and bacteria. The shallow (but clear and moving) water near shore has fry of many kinds and sizes, mostly steelhead, but silver salmon, too. Amazing how sharp and clearly visible the parr-markings are, even on fish an inch long under water. I assume that the fry that flee from my shadow or movement are steelhead. Obviously, they are not tiny suckers

am thinking of doing a review of Richard Blessing's book on Theodore Roethke for UW Alumnus—the massive, brooding, domineering quality of the man, his one-of-the-boys competitiveness with college men (for coeds), his disdain for most colleagues, his open pursuit of undergraduate girls. The day he died, he had four times as many close friends and drinking companions than would own up while he was alive. All the "Ted and I's" I keep hearing

Hemingway, in an article, "Trout Fishing in Europe," says, "Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as somebody looking over your shoulder while your write a letter to your girl." Or maybe making love, in a less than private place?

Roethke taught me that metaphor is the native language of the mind, if not the soul. We must all learn to speak it, or live in an Appalachia of the spirit

today we do not covet our neighbor's wife; we merely covet his house, his car, the success of his children

a book of the seasons, but begin it in some oddball month, such as October, November, or February. [I did this, less than a year later, but in July.] Each month/chapter about 30k words long, but divided into thirds and each on a different subject. One might consist of close observations of nature and the seasons. One on contemporary events, which will fix the narrative in time and place. The third based on the particulars drawn from my small life, reading, daily events, etc.

saw a huge caterpillar that I could duplicate almost exactly at my flytying vice: size 2 hook; butt, black chenille, with three turns of grizzly hackle tied between two turns of more black chenille; body, pale yellow chenille; head, same as butt. I wonder what such a creature "turns into?" Something uglier than most?

went to the zoo Thursday to try out my new Leitz 135mm. lens and was dismayed at what I saw. Poor beasts. Zoos are prisons for dumb animals. What crimes did each of these species commit to be exiled to this prison farm for life? So sad, so dreary. They walk around, filthy, on concrete. What does it mean—that some large mammals will breed in captivity? Does this portend hope for the species? I think not. Some terrible form of desperation. I suppose there are people, too, who are only able to breed in front of their television sets

wrote a 500-word piece for Alumnus on Blessing's book on Roethke. Don't care too much for Roethke's Collected Letters—they're too full of the grubby business of merchandising his exquisite poems and ingratiating himself with those who have already arrived and can do him some good, such as Auden. Ted might not have wanted them published, either. But then he didn't plan on dying early, and had no reason to destroy or protect them by covenant

for years I thought the smell I encountered while driving past Everett was kelp and the sea, tide flats. Today I discovered it was sulfur dioxide from the pulp mills. Harvey Manning told me it was this smell, and hydrogen sulfide is the one that smells like rotten eggs. Both pretty awful

today, while driving down the street, I saw a girl who looked just like John Denver

about half the leaves are down, and on Saturday I cleaned a soggy mass off the porch roof. Later, I spooked the great blue heron on our beach again, and this huge slate-gray critter went swooping off in an upstream course, white dung trailing behind him.

Spotted a brown tree frog just above the hammock, down by the water's edge, and noted the woodpeckers are continuing their destruction of the dead alder snag there. The beach is solidly carpeted with leaves

the clicking sound of relays in a closed room. Like many typists at work on manual typewriters

the two-volume edition of Thoreau's Journals arrived today in the mail (list $50, my cost $36.) What a joy. For instance: this from the first day of journal-keeping, October 22, 1837. "I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, the floor swept, nor the lumber rearranged." Ah, yes. Sounds like our Oso cabin

the drought continues, though it is raining lightly now. None of the rains so far have brought the river up any. The Fisheries Department has closed many rivers to the taking of salmon by both white and Indian fishers. The coho cannot get up the river because of the low water, and already dog salmon are showing up in the salt chuck off the river mouths

The Alumnus has okayed my plan to do a review of David Wagoner's Sleeping in The Woods. He seems to have evolved quickly into the quintessential Northwest poet, with hemlocks and cedars, herons and loons, peopling his poems. A little like Hugo's Run of Jacks, but more mellow, reflective, philosophical. Of course, he is another transplanted mid-Westerner, like moi

recalling Thoreau's last years, all the rhetoric vanished and he became a precise observer, his style very simple. Possibly we should all progress so. Both Roethke and Wagoner delight in exact descriptions of nature. It is a compelling thing to be able to do successfully. Alas, many try and fail

Thoreau's "That which properly constitutes the life of every man is a profound secret. Yet this is what every one would most like to know, but is himself most backward to impart." Journals, March 14, 1838

the river is teaching me humility, but it is a hard lesson to learn. Besides, the idea isn't really to catch steelhead, but to build character, isn't it? My character must be coming along fine, judging by the general drift of things

am reading Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. Seems that wolves eat field mice and only the weakest of the caribou

had lunch at the river on Sunday, alone, taking the old folding aluminum chair down to the lowest sand bar and eating my sandwich very slowly, watching the high, wild water race by

fishing is basically a religious experience. Others have acknowledged this, such as Norman Maclean. It is not fish we are after, but some inner vision which we are lacking in, or in need of fulfilling. See Moby Dick

a story about an insurance salesman who gets involved in the lives of the prospective clients he calls on, and eventually goes mad, all insurance being based on impending death, and one's awareness of it, and a gamble against the odds

I have kept this journal exactly a year, and its pages number 51. This is a page a week. Not a hell of a lot of output. A little poem to celebrate the occasion, though:

am reading Henry Miller's trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion. Have finished last vol. first, Nexus, and am now reading the middle volume, Plexus. Doing it exactly backwards. Oh, that's okay. Henry wouldn't mind. His use of present tense. His celebration. Quite a powerful vocabulary—sends me to the dictionary, all the time. God, the words I don't know. Spender comments on his ability to mix aesthetics with prophesy. I agree

Rita Coolidge and Kris Christopherson have 64 visible teeth between them, at any given time

down by the Pocket, I saw the eagle again. It then disappeared up the river valley. It seems to have a fixed circuit. Must learn it precisely.

Kingfisher still by the waterfall, screeching his little heart out. Sounds like a police whistle—the kind with a rattle in it

last week felt so poorly I couldn't see well enough to read. Crabby as hell, too

on Wednesday I saw an otter swim down the Flats behind me. About 80 feet away, as I stood motionless, watching, it spotted me, dove, and vanished. First the head went under, in a duck dive, then the slick back. Finally I guess the expectancy of tail, which was denied me.

There is always a kingfisher flitting back and forth across the Flats, lighting in the big single alder just above the culvert across from MacLeod's. I could discern no nest. Do they winter-over here? Where do they breed? It seems to me I've been seeing this guy all winter

in September I bought some Langendorf cinnamon rolls at the Oso General Store. There were pretty tasteless and must have contained a great deal of preservative for, six months later, they are moist and unspoiled. They look just as they did, when I bought them. Would I dare to eat them? Just looking at them makes my stomach turn over.

All of which leads me to reflect: Were I to die and request to be buried with my sweet rolls, they would probably outlast my corpse. They might be found among my bones in my coffin, centuries later, just as they are today, moist and white and sugary. Would the anthropologist dare to taste them? Probably. And would he not die afterwards, that is, not before his previously allotted time

women probably consider asthmatic men passionate, when they are only trying hard to breathe, which they can't do through their noses, certainly not while kissing, etc.

journal-keeping is a habit, I guess, and I have broken mine. [Not for long, old buddy]

the green dogwood branches are turned to white, the lilacs are coming into full bloom, the tulips are just beginning to fade, and tomorrow I leave for California

the famous Leica poker game: "I'll see your Summicron and raise you—one Summilux." [An in-group joke]

am reading: Kate Millet, Flying; Norman, Stieglitz; The Case Against College; Blessing, Whole Harmonium, Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Blessing is a nice guy, had coffee with him. He's a professor of English here. [Dick died early of a brain tumor—a great loss]

huckleberries are ripe and although tart delicious. Introduced wife and son to my old Boy Scout delight, huckleberry pancakes. I think they were impressed and this may become a new family tradition each summer

a book of photographs, "People Laughing." Catch them just when they break up helplessly and look so silly

a chipped upper front tooth is sexy in a certain kind of young woman, like Cheryl in the College of Engineering

life is a pencil line upon a page, the moment’s a dot on the line, or else life is a string, with this moment an overhand knot tied in the string

a toothless old man who can swallow his nose. Saw this somewhere, perhaps on TV. In Ireland? Dorset? Good for a free drink in a pub, somewhere. [Thoreau could do this, too, I recall]

ah, the smell of apples. We put a bag of wine saps in the back of the wagon, and I breathed them in deeply, all the way home

man walks into a seafood restaurant. Looks at the menu. "I'll take the seafood plate, s'il vous plait."

"All right," replies the waiter, ” I'm not hard of hearing." And for those who didn't get it, the first time. “You don't have to say it twice. “

for quite some time now I've watched a brown twig-like inch worm tool around a branch. It can move quite rapidly, when it want to, or is not frightened, in a series of tiny gallops. But when it is lost, insecure, its front end gropes around up in the air helplessly, as if sniffing the environment, its hairy feelers testing the air for, I guess, gripping surfaces. This one was about 3/4 of an inch long and dark brown. I've seen green ones, and bigger ones, too

a lot of spiders toiling about. None looks pregnant, but this is their time of the year for egg-laying. The river is very, very low, with no signs of salmon, though Heinz says there are both humpies and steelhead at Fortson, which is like a pond

as I get older I find I can sit peacefully for great lengths of time, doing nothing, or next to nothing. Did not fish today, because there is practically no water

how dependent I am upon my eyes and reading. Of course I knew this for a fact, but not as so telling an experience, until I dropped my glasses in the river, last week, while trying to tie a fly on a leader. When the new glasses were ready on Monday, I read for six straight hours. . . .

I found the new Alex Comfort novel disappointing. Wayne Burns likes him a lot—solely on philosophical grounds, I suspect

actually I have two new pairs of specs. Both are aviator style, and very mod looking. One is for reading, the other for all else—that is, distances and mid-range. Besides being fashionable, I can see again, which is what is important

read that FSF will finally be interred in a Catholic cemetery alongside Zelda. Is this in Switzerland? The U.S.? Whatever, rest in peace, sweet Scott

"teach?" But I don't know anything. At forty-five, teaching seems like one of life's more futile endeavors. Ah, come on now. No, few things are worth the effort. I am thinking primarily of business practices. The literary life—now that's something worth while, and a full life's work