Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

February 2007

TEN YEARS AT THE LAKE

a Diary from Back Then,
with Fresh Updates

Took this picture just the other day. Duck species don't change much in ten years.

17

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 and dismount easily.

 John and Tracy’s dock next door is covered with what appears to be fresh whitewash.

Why is it that all the fish-eating ducks (the heron, too) shit white?

At this rate, my neighbors won’t have to paint their dock this summer.

Update:  Ducks don't change in ten years, but people do. "John and Tracy"? They've been gone from the lake six or seven years, moved off to nearby Skagit County where, rumor has it, they bought a farmhouse and some acreage. Two children, both girls, perhaps followed by a boy, Tracy is doing editorial work or teaching at Western Washington University and John is a stay-at-home dad who farms a bit. Or so I think. We've had no contact since then. The owners of their one-bedroom cottage next door to us have retaken it, after a series of renters who were all undesirable and often destructive. So it is in use on some winter weekends and more frequently in the summer by Fred and Amy Berg, who now have a little boy of five.

Most of the time the cottage is unoccupied and we  have in effect a woodsy vacant lot next door. Oh, yes: the Bergs bought the next lot over, so we have two unoccupied pieces of property to the East, most of the year.

How nice.

"Coming at you." (Not Jack, but a Goggle dentist.)

16

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.

“Did she like me?” he asks, eagerly.  It is a naked question.

“Doesn’t everybody?” I reply, my usual facetious self.

“Well, no,” he admits, with a sudden sad face, “no, they don’t.”

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.”

Update:  Jack is still my dentist. We have been through a lot together. (I'd say about $15k.) But we are still friends, friendly. And I am without many teeth in these 10+ years. He extracted them about as well and as kindly as any dentist could. Painful, but the pain quickly over with and the prosthesis better than years of dental pain.

Jack has built himself a large, modern dental office, complete with LCD screen over the patient's chair and an array of largely pictorial DVDs to keep the patient visually occupied while the work goes on. Large windows front on the backside of a Taco Bell and, beyond, a shopping mall. Taco Bell has declared war on this innocent dentist, perhaps because of some landscapers parking their trucks there before the dental clinic opened up, and now I must gaze at some small, permanent painted signs on Taco's rear wall that proclaim, "No dental parking."

Other paring okay, then?

Jack  my books at the Stanwood bookstore, Snow Goose, when he learned about them--learned that they were about flyfishing, a sport he used to indulge in and looks back on fondly. He invited me to lunch in the hour before he was going to perform a root canal (on me) and was hurt when I declined.

He told me (as he lowered over my supine self) that he used to tie flies, and could tie them as small as size 27, which is about as small as hooks come. I believed him. I couldn't thread such a small hook on the smallest leader made, I know. He did this just to see if  he could do it.

I am impressed. If you have to have precise dental work done by anyone, particularly a root canal, have it done by someone who can tie the smallest of fishing flies, such as Dr. C. Jack Randall.

Thanks again, Google Images

15

Here and there along the Skagit river there are eagles now.  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.

This makes me think of human Sunday outings with the kids in a car.

Update:  The above was written in 1996, some ten years earlier, and late in that year--I'd say October or November. It is presently late February and though there are eagles around the Skagit and my lake, to the West of there, not so many as then. As I recall the October presently past was only a fair one for eagles, or eagle abundance. And similarly for chum salmon.

Once, about then, I asked a State Wildlife Biologist about eagles--where they roosted before the coming of the salmon. He said  he knew, but declined to tell me. Angrily I asked, "Why not?"  "You might go and shoot some of them." My God, I thought. Later I learned his answer might have been, "The San Juan Islands."

Now, how could somebody take a boat and go to that vast watery area and shoot a bunch of bald eagles? Impossible. He exalted in his private knowledge and thought he gained power by not sharing it with the public. Yes, there are awful people like this, and they are employed by the agencies which they supposedly serve.

Speaking of eagles, when I salmon fished out of Ketchikan, Alaska, we often caught rock cod on our troll, which, when brought to the surface quickly bloated terribly, and when we released them, floated briefly on the surface. Soaring bald eagles would spot them (with their eagle eyes, of course) and drop, drop, sharply precipitously and, seemingly not touch the water, but then would steeply rise with the fish in its talons.

An impressive sight. And here at the lake we regularly see an eagle or two, and much more rarely one with a fish in its talons.

More often the bird with a fish is an osprey.

On the Wenatchee River, fishing for steelhead, we saw ospreys daily,  many of them, and they would dive and go under water, in search of a good-sized fish, and I used to keep score of the number of dives it took in order to produce a single fish.

It was many. The osprey is not efficient at this, but catches fish enough to stay at it and make a living.

More so than I.

Pooping cormorant stretching on my neighbor's dock, formerly mine

14

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.

Update:  Fifty years ago I was in a play, No Exit, by Sartre. This was in Seattle at a playhouse at the Women's Century Club--truly "off Broadway." Seattle's Broadway ran by it a block away.

A minor actor was sick and couldn't perform, so my girl friend, Cheryl, who played the lead, asked me to step in.

"What do I do?" I asked.

"You play the part of a crowd," she replied.

"How do I play the part of a crowd?" I nervously asked.

"Don't worry," she said kindly. "You'll be off stage, till the end. Just make a lot of crowd  noise."

 I nodded, relaxing in my shoes.

"You have one line, though. Memorize it. You get to come on stage for it. Wear a trench coat. You're still part of the crowd, don't forget. Two lines, I guess."

"What's my line?"  I asked, nervous again.

"You say, 'We're looking for the nigger.'"

"And they ask you, "What nigger?'"

"And you say, 'The one who shot the stranger on the train and cut the Senator's nephew with a razor?''"

 "What? I can't do that!" I was incredulous.

"Yes you can. Then you go back off stage and start making crowd noises again."

And I did. One night only . The sick guy was back the next night. I was gone.

No Exit is a better name than No Outlet. Truly.

Red-breasted mergansers in early February of this year, with perhaps a common male or two mixed in

12

To live on the lake is to become intimate with its birds, ducks, and geese, or else purposely to resist such an urge 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.

Update:  Note: there is no number 11 entry in the original manuscript, so you are not missing a thing, Meriam.

Alas, the American widgeons (with an odd, European widgeon mixed in at about a 1/100 ratio) are long gone; the they left when the good folks of the Lake Ketchum association voted to "treat" the lake with fluridone, which killed the duckweed proliferation that brought the widgeons here in the first place. And while a little duckweed has never bothered me, or interfered with my swimming, I do miss the widgeons and their proliferation.

The other species are present in about the same numbers, including the "Daffy Duck" genus.  No horned grebe lately but many resident pied-billed grebes. A rare common loon, though I haven't seen or heard one for months. But this year we have a number of red-breasted mergansers, and I think some people miss observing their transparent, tufted red crowns and mistake them for the common species.

A mistake the careful nature observer doesn't want to make, but is highly forgivable, with a B for trying.

Where Grandy Creek enters the mighty Skagit at a time of low autumn water, ten years ago

10

“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.”  Men don't usually talk about something being beautiful. We pass on by.  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 manged 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?

9

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, in rural Mount Vernon.)

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 field 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.

Update:  Tweeter's farm has passed into the hands of his daughter, I am told. He still lives there, but now raises calves, not milk cows. The Ketchum Lake Association took him to court over the pollution from dairy cattle being so much more than from beef cattle. The Lake Association didn't exactly win, but they scored some concessions through the State Department of Ecology, which didn't press their case and asked for voluntary concessions. Tweeter doesn't farm or graze his lower field which drains through a wide wetland into the lake. This has reduced his usable acreage by about a quarter, I'd guess. But the phosphorous pollution to the lake is still measurable, though much less than before, and exceeds that of any other lake in the county. So it is a long way from cleansing itself through natural processes and flushing.

I haven't been offered an ostrich egg in a decade and no longer see any sign of them. But llamas are proliferating everywhere in the Pacific Northwest. And, alas, the Dutch belted cows are gone from the fields on Cedarhome Street to the East. They were so unusually pleasant to come across. A big development of new homes has taken their place.

Hmmmm.