Life at the Lake a diary of living on a small lowland lake
Ketchum
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Lake Ketchum in the fall, beneath a newly risen moon Note: Ten years ago my wife, newly retired, and I moved to the lake. I decided to keep a journal of that first year--what I might discover about the lake through fishing it and prowling around its shoreline, visiting with neighbors, taking water samples as the new lake monitor for the county's Surface Water Utility, talking to fishers in boats, but most of all using my eyes to see what was truly going on. It was an exciting time, that three-hundred and some odd-days of discovery. Each year since that time, the sense of adventure and uncovering new things about the lake have repeated, but admittedly without the same intensity. And those denizens have changed considerably. In a way, that first year was an idyllic time, not to be repeated. There have many changes, not all of them good ones. Our seven species of fish have dwindled to three and the fourth, the large- mouth bass, are greatly diminished, so much so that there are so few good-sized adults to fish for that most good fishers no longer do so, and nobody with any sense of decency would kill one of them for the pan. But ten years ago, that wonderful flyfishing fish, the black crappie, lived here in abundance, and was a continuing daily joy, for he would take the fly pretty regularly. Alas, he is no more. He disappear about three years ago. I am still searching for the answer to what killed him. But all this is to come, and many good things have arrived in the past ten years. (Give me a moment and I shall think of some.) Many of our residents have moved away or, alas, died. But new couples or families have arrived, and for each of them, as was the case with us, have made their own joyful discoveries. There are about 85 households here, and there are but a few vacant lots to be found. Last year there were a few new homes built. By rough count there are about half a dozen lots left, and their owners are in no hurry to sell. But they will, and more buildings will be constructed. Thus is the lake being continually reborn.
Some Representative Views of the Lake and Its Environs
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TEN YEARS
AT THE LAKE
a Diary from Back Then,
22 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 buddy, 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. Alas, so do I.
But my love of movies continues unabated. Instead of pay per view, or premium channels, as they are more aptly named and subscribed to, we now have high definition DVDs, and they can be found on various HD channels on either cable or satellite. Better yet, they can be delivered by the postal service overnight by companies like Netflix. (Actually, there is no other company like Netflix, with t his particular service.) The movie you "order out" can be an old one, going back 50 to 75 years, or one made available simultaneous with its theater release. So there is no reason to go to the mall and its theater complex, not unless you like popcorn and being surrounded by lots of people. Few of us do. We generally see a movie a night. Last night it was a recent British film, The Mother. I thought it excellent, Norma only a little better than ordinary. Now, when baseball season starts on April 2, the entire situation will change. If the Mariners win a few early games, we may watch much fewer movies. And that will be all for the good, too. So it goes.
21 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. Showtime came as a bonus for six months. No charge under a rather complex bonus compensation system. Most of the movies offered are pure drivel. Many movies are now cheaply produced to fill the demand of so many premium channels. We have found out that the so-called premium channels are not worth the monthly cost--which seems to be only a dollar more a month than back in 1996. So, is that a bargain or not? Depends on what you watch and how often. To see movies of choice we have Netflix, with DVDs delivered by mail about a day after they are ordered, with a max of three at any given time. And we still haven't been to a movie theater, for the "grand experience," though a drive around the countryside indicates there is one multiplex only five miles away (and it has been there for years) and a couple more within fifteen miles. So some things have changed not much. Ah, but professional baseball season is coming up, and it will be in HD this year, which will make considerable difference, even though the Seattle Mariners will probably repeat at the bottom of their division, as did the basketball team, the Sonics.
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. Funny, I had forgotten the poinsettia bit. The house is now occupied by a crane operator, a burly bachelor of middle age, whom we rarely see and who occasionally comes out in his yard in summer to cut his grass, then disappear. When I was lake monitor, I used to stop by his place just to see how badly flooded he got in high water and to keep track of the algae that accumulated along his shore and out into the lake for many yards. Still does, but I don't. They guy has so much algae that he has to repeatedly rake it, through out the summer. In comparison, luck us has practically none at all. Perhaps not fertilizing our lawn or applying pesticides has something to do with it.
19 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. I said something about the rigors and frustrations of the job. “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.
Rain runs off the bare hills quickly and small annual floods are more frequent. Worse, big floods, and severe ones, come most every years. As for Dana, he is about as far away from here as he could be and still be in the state of Washington. Colville. He manages game in the barren foothills of Eastern Washington where there are few conifers, mostly pines, and they are not so highly marketable. We do not communicate and have never been close friends. Something about agency people prevents this. Curt Kraemer remains a friend and we see each other, or talk on the telephone, occasionally: about the same as in the days when we were working together on environmental matters. He is retired now and seems glad to be out of the business of managing fish, which is rife with politics. He fishes more than in the past--usually up on the Sauk or on one of its wild tributaries. He is a champion of the dolly varden, or as it in now called the bull trout. He catches them regularly and some of them are large. And they are wild. They have never seen the likes of a hatchery. Once he told me that people shouldn't live on rivers. Rivers need to be wild and undiked. If so, they will flood regularly and spectacularly. The people who live near their banks will lose their land and their property. Sometimes their lives.
18 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. Most fishers put back their catch these days. Not so sure if they did ten years ago. Not with such regularity, anyway. If so, if we do not eat our fish, how can we intelligently begrudge the diving ducks their catch? We can only admire them for their prowess and proficiency. To do otherwise is to become a flaming hypocrite. We see the kinglets only occasionally now. I don't think their numbers are diminished. Well, they are so small they are easily overlooked. So, maybe they were there, and we simply missed seeing them because we were not looking down at the ground. |
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Life at the Lake
Robert Arnold, Editor
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