Blog 102 Lake Ketchum Art Galler

Clematis doth in the garden grow, in this digitally edited picture that makes everything else appear to be dying. (It's not.)

Let my wife write this entry, for once. Much more interesting than mine have been at mid-summer. This is a fragment from an email sent to our son and daughter-in-law. We've recently endured three 96 degree F. days in a row.

It begins with a discuss of mason bees and how beneficial they are to berries and apples:

I had heard about lining the holes with paper or even paper straws. I tend to leave critters to their own devices figuring that they survived for centuries without maid service. People say that one ought to clean out bird houses too, but I don't. I had momentarily forgotten that the adult mason bees die at the end of the season so one is dependent on whatever eggs have been laid. I was picking raspberries a week ago when a mason bee crashed into my dish of berries. I was surprised as it late for mason bees. She could have been visiting the last of the raspberry blossoms.

It seems like the summer season was late arriving and we are now rushing into fall. I'm thinking about building a structure around my beans or I'll never harvest any of them. The newspaper said we have to plant fall and winter crops now. and remember to keep the seeds damp.

This is an interesting review of mason bee life:

http://gardening.wsu.edu/library/inse006/inse006.htm

I somehow thought that you would have permanently installed your air conditioner in the computer room. It being on the west side of the house you must have a lot of warmish afternoons. Is your basement cool? Our basement is running about 10 degrees cooler than the main floor. Your father is quite happy there. He also has a fan running most of the time.

Our air cooler is very large and heavy. It would easily slip into one of the sliding windows in the basement but not on the main floor. I'm not anxious to have it in the bedroom because of the noise. We're optimistic about having no more hot weather.

Must go out and move the sprinkler again. We have a bench on the north side of the house which gets a breeze. A good place for me to read The New Yorker.

About mid-week last, the trout gave up hitting, and now the perch are in their ascendancy. They will intercept both bait and fly. The trout, well, they have grown lethargic, what with the warm weather. The lake now measures more than 70 degrees F., the exact number of degrees depending on whether the sun is shining and how deep you go with your thermometer.

And now we have bull frog tadpoles--enormous lethargic creatures. They lie in shallow water and don't frighten away. The prospect of a lake tightly ringed with croaking giant frogs is not one I like. But there is nothing I know that will eat them up.

Oh, the trollers and I can still catch an occasional rainbow trout, but it takes a while, and there are not many biting. I count on my fingers the months of good fishing we've had in the past year. Nine and one-half. A banner year.

Now, when October arrives again, I think I will fish seriously again. It was just last year I decided to give it a try, and was happily surprised by many months of sixteen inch trout.

Fishing continues good, by every standard, though it has slowed some since the advent of hot weather. Lake temperature is now in excess of 74 degrees F.

This heterogeneous assortment of young fishermen tax their plastic craft to its limits. None is wearing a life preserver. It is presumed that all can swim a few dozen yards to shore. Every once in a while this ability is tested and comes up short. You can read the results in Monday morning's newspaper.

Our lake has been lucky. No reported deaths in at least the past ten years my wife and I have lived here. But I remember a fishing trip twenty years ago to nearby Lake Sixteen in Skagit County. I was alone in an eight-foot pram, when a man walked out on his dock to chat with me.

I wore no life preserver, though I am a poor swimmer. He said, "Guy drowned right out here yesterday." He said no more. I had a cushion float beside me, but my chances in a mishap would depend on my being able to grab it as the boat went over, or in some other way I went in.

I remember a chill passing down my spine. He offered no other details and I asked for none.

We are overdue at this lake, I suppose. But I've noticed in newspaper accounts of other drowning deaths that big power boats, or diving from boat houses, are often involved. We don't have any of those here, and motors are restricted to small, battery powered ones. And of course no water skiing is allowed behind outboards. So that helps some.