Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

When poppies last in the front yard bloomed. . .

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We have three kinds of poppies in the yard facing the lake, the small orange California weed, the big red ornamental poppy, and this huge, strangely colored lavender poppy that has just come into bloom, and looks slightly different from this digitally altered photo of mine.

At first I saw it towering next to the chard and thought it a weed. Then it showed these huge buds (lower stem); the buds I thought were seed pods, and I meditated briefly on trying to make my own heroin, but didn't want to damaged the fragile economy of Afghanistan any further as a meddling American, so decided against it. But then (mirabile dictu!) it opened into a sexy delicate bloom, huge and reminiscent of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

And then there was another, and another. The longer they are around, the paler and more fragile they become, and after a few days begin to shed large petals to the ground. Rain strikes the petals and they start to dissolve, and soon the ground beneath the poppy looks like wet newsprint.

Meanwhile the genuine seed pod is forming and thoughts of manufacturing my own drug from it return. Where can I get a how-to book? From the library?

"May I help you?"

"Yeah, do you have any books on home heroin manufacture?"

(Shriek, flee.)

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The sight of a new brood of Canada geese warms my heart. If only we humans showed such devotion and concern to our own!

This morning, streaming across the lake, a flotilla of Canadas, young and old, in tight, protective formation (though they are huge and there is no visible threat). Tightly clustered, if I were a mathematician, I'd express the arrangement of adults and juveniles thusly:

A,J,J,J,A,J,J,J,A

Now, two of the adults could be their parents, but . . . three? The extended family of geese (they don't even have to be aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers) is impressive and awesome.

At least it is to me.

Early June moonrise over Jack's compound

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Because the lake receives massive inputs of phosphorous and nitrogen from a nearby dairy farm, we develop an inordinate amount of algae and pondweed about this time of the year. Spike rush, cinquefoil,  yellow pond lily, long-leafed pondweed, water smartweed, etc., grow in abundance in our lake and require annual chemical treatment to keep from covering most of the surface.

Duckweed has traditionally been among the worst of these weeds. (The good side of duckweed is implicit in its name: widgeons love the stuff in the fall, when they migrate and appear by the hundreds.

Unfortunately this year, it appears that the State Department of Ecology won't allow us to use the chemical Sonar (fluridone), or any other chemicals, on the lake because we have not furnished them with an acceptable Integrated Aquatic Lake Management Plan. So we don bathing suits or waders, grab grass rakes, and wade out as far as we can to "harvest" the weed that clots our shorelines.

Some places the algae is trapped and will not disperse through natural currents or by strong winds. There it remains until it is physically removed by the landowner. Unfortunately the chemicals that control weed will not effect it; in fact, because both algae and pondweed utilize the heavy phosphorous in the lake, killing weed has in the past made more nutrients available to the algae.

You get rid of the one, you have more of the other.

Robert Arnold, Editor
rcarnold@direcway.com