Life at the Lake a diary of living on a small lowland lake
|
|||||
|
Note: We start in medias res, as the Romans said: our blog was originally part of BlogStudio's "Life at the Lake" and also mirrored in Lake Ketchum Art Galleries. But in the former case, BlogStudio seems to have gone belly up, and my own site, Lake Ketchum Art Galleries seemed an inappropriate place for a daily journal. Soon it will become all painting , photography, and drawing again. We also have a literary website, Kingfisher Journal, which you might enjoy visiting now, even if you've been there before. Content changes regularly. It emphasizes poetry, fiction, painting, and flicks. The newest edition features the nude as art. So, here we are, reborn as Life at the Lake. Content changes almost daily. We will add archives soon, since we are already 18 months old, and growing. Some Representative Views of the Lake and Its Environs
.
|
A BIT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY The five books below comprise significant aspects of my life that have more or less divided themselves into individual volumes. DOSTOYEVSKY AND THE BOY SCOUTS Sorting It Out has to do with my ancestors
and antecedents. I put together every scrap about them and myself that I
could find in order to document accurately what the past can tell the
present about the future. Desperate Women is about the girls and women in my life, the idea being (jokingly) that they'd have to be pretty desperate to want to have anything to do with me. Sorties into the Fray is about my working life, alas, and was brought about by two men who had worked at the same companies all of their live asking me at a party "where I worked." As a writer, my working life was most varied and vast. I decided to try to see it through their eyes, and of course failed. One can only see through one's own lives, and a good thing it is, too. And, finally, I hope, though perhaps not, is Quick Jack, a book about my friend and antagonist, Jack Leahy, who died young, in the usual Irish manner of dissipation and bad luck. Our lives up to a point, long ago, were remarkably parallel; I found Jack interesting, at least as we were growing up, and then quarreled and separated, then almost got back together again. I thought that his academic and intellectual development might offer a lens through which my selfish own life might be seen in better prospective, though Jack's life all by itself was pretty complex and interesting. You best be the judge of that. ROUGH CUT, a Writer's Journals 1974-1994
Flyfishing Books
Two two more books to be added to the autobiographical contents, both having to do with fishing and lakes:
|
The life here. . .
395 And while we are deep into a nature perspective, here is an odd visitor to our feeder at the lake. It is the mourning dove, though there seems to be nothing particularly sad about this pair of hungry birds. they have come back for several days, and we look forward to their reappearance. They are not shy, and can be approached at the window or even directly from the deck--up to a distance of maybe fifteen feet. Which is plenty close. And they are becoming addicted to the ordinary bird food. Oddly, they feed neatly, without the constant spilling of the juncos and finches, which must be part of a regenerative planting process. An odd species, every now and then, comes as a delightful surprise, and reminds us of the time, in our Seattle days, when we spotted a magpie on a telephone wire. Magpies are indigenous to the Eastern part of the state, some hundreds of miles away. How a stray got over here remains unexplained, along with whether or not the stray ever got back home.
394 What a great Jeff Larsen photo from Thursday's Seattle P-I. I've tentatively entitled it, "Dunlin Kissing Their Shadow." True, it is not a picture from the lake, but from the seashore. But--hell--water is water, birds are birds. And I've seen the occasional dunlin here.
392 Everything is in bloom now! Big red rhododendrons, tiny orange and blue azaleas, poppies even, and nameless small white flowers I can't identify. And the trout are hitting. Yesterday, off the dock after lunch, a three-pounder, caught and released--the year's biggest to date and probably for the rest of the season. Meanwhile there are basketball regional playoffs off the dish, and baseball is just getting well underway, with Jamie Moyer not having lost a pitching duel yet this year. Of course the bodies still pile up in Baghdad and environs. It is hard to remember that Baghdad and the Tigris/Euphrates were once the seats of civilization and culture. No, it is more an oil-related battlefield, with a new enemy, "the insurgents" causing the damage, now that the old enemy has been defeated and a so-called democratic government put into place. Flowers still bloom, here and there. No holding nature back. Too bad nature includes car bombs and other forms of "pruning."
391 About ten years ago, Snohomish County acquired from the Burlington Railroad thirty some miles of track between Arlington and Darrington, in Washington State. It was on a 99-year lease/option, which means the railroad can claim it back, but not for a long period of time. The County has since proclaimed that the railroad grade is "the future site of a non-vehicular trail," which would be wonderful for all of us who like to get out in the country and . . . walk.\ But nothing has happened, except the county has posted road driving barriers and signs like the one pictured above. The sign goes on to warn walkers that there is "no public use" allowed on what might have been a trail, but is so badly overgrown with Himalayan blackberry that most of it is impassable. Of course the county claims that there is a public liability problem with letting the public use it, but that is more excuses to go along with the one of having no money to develop and maintain the trail. So it goes to waste. When the railroad owned it, they only ran two trains a day during the week between the two small cities; this was for Summit Timber to haul logs into Darrington in the morning and finished lumber back out in the late afternoon. And the railroad maintained its right of way, for if it didn't, no timber business. So we who knew our ways around could walk along the river (the North Fork of the Stillaguamish) and enjoy the scenery. If we were so dumb as to walk during railroad hauling time, the train ran so slowly that we could easily step off the track and wave at the engineer and fireman as they moseyed by. No more. Off limits. No walking. Of course people still walk the grade, but illegally, and usually are forced to turn back because of the wall of young alders and thick blackberry that bars and confronts them. And there is no way the citizens can challenge this institutional neglect. The county as money, and other means, to acquire lands for proposed parks, but no money to construct parks or to maintain their lands. And the years go by, the decades, while publicly owned lands are restricted to the public and they grow progressively more unusable to its citizens.
Thanks for the visit,
Visit some of our recent journal
entries, or blogs
|
|||
|
|
|||||
