Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

330

Cattails, right? What's so special about cattails?

Nothing. Only, last night, a certain slant of late-summer light caught them just right, and I ran for the camera. It is transitional time, the old seedpods remaining on a few, the others just forming and far from mature.

The light quickly faded. I starting casting for bass from my dock. I caught two in shallow water. Neither of them very big, they caused me to reflect that of any two fish caught, one will be smaller. To put it more positively, of the two one will be larger.

But not necessarily by much.

And then I went back to the baseball game on TV. It was midway through. The Mariners beat Minnesota by a run. Tonight it is the Yankees.

Everybody loves the Yankees. Especially here in Seattle, where the team is peopled with former Mariner players who have gone on to . . . glory.

329

What is left of the poppies, now that it is August, is the individual mummies of what once were huge, magnificent blooms--tall clusters of them. But, hey, they are beautiful in themselves.

The dry brown shards of blooms and leaves are falling away, to leave the seed pods brittle and hard as dirt clods. Shake them hard and brush them with your hand and you have dried bouquets of graceful stalks and stems. They are very tall and light in weight, so if you put them into a vase you will have to add stones or glass beads to the bottom to keep the bouquet from tipping over.

That's okay. What you will have is an arrangement that will last indefinitely, surely through the coming winter, when there will be no fresh flowers for the table.

Moonrise to the East, digitally enhanced a bit

328

Ah, these summer nights, with the moon early rising!

(Of course it is rising later and later, and it is waning when I write this.)

Earlier this evening the osprey put on his aerial acrobatic show--hovering, dropping, pulling up at the last instant, climbing, soaring, fluttering in mid-flight,  then plummeting like a stone, crashing into the water, rising in a shower of spray, all without catching fish.

Me, I got two small bass on a fly. Gladly would I share, but the wise old osprey won't come near me.

So many nights he goes to bed hungry. How many misses comprise his evening hunt? Plenty. And a cheer goes round the lake and  from its docks when he nails a fish, and flaps heavily away with it clutched in his piercing talons.

327

"It's looks Chinese to me. Am I  right?

Good. It ought to, for it is Chinese calligraphy we are learning, stroke by stroke. This is a sample worksheet from Johan Bjorksten's excellent book, Learn to Write Chinese Characters, Yale, 1994. Yes, I did it.

Written correctly, the characters are graceful and beautiful. Mine are not, not yet, but I am making progress in that direction. And yesterday I think I got it. Got it right, that is, for I can now look at most characters (especially the abbreviated ones), see the stroke order (which is fixed and inflexible), and without looking back at the character draw it.

Okay, so I do look back still, once or twice per most complex characters, but I am drawing much more rapidly and smoothly than even a day ago. And this is very satisfying. Late yesterday afternoon I was all grins.

Four lines up from the bottom grid (all characters should be drawn in square boxes, until the box format becomes ingrained) is a poem, "A Thought on a Still Night" from Li Bai, who died in 762 AD. I've read it in translation (much lost there) and now I've written it, but not yet in the correct poetic format. That will come soon--when I can create in MS Word Tables the right grid boxes, which ought to be fairly simple to do. The characters will be more difficult to form prettily.

I am looking forward to trying to do it.

Oh, the method recommended by Bjorksten is called "fountain pen calligraphy," and mine is done with a cartridge-fed Sheaffer pen on ordinary white paper. It can also be done with a bamboo brush, and is even more beautiful.

I have a ways to go before I try this.

One of the few large bass I've caught here

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We have never left The Lake, despite recent sorties into the political arena. In our watery isolation, we remain part of the Great World, and are affected by events happening around us and around the Nation, not to mention the World at Large. For what is The Lake but a microcosm? And what is one life but a synecdoche for all our lives?

This heaviness dispensed with, we return to the water. For water is all. If you don't believe this, you've never been thirsty enough to drink from a river or a lake. And we all have wells, or draw from a community water system. But if things were different. . .  ?

Not so long ago, the village of Stanwood used to get its drinking water from -- guess where? That's right, right here.

Last year's bass spawn have grown to a respectable seven of eight inches in length. And the big bass that spawned this year (as reported earlier in this blog) appeared in schools of tens of thousands. And guess what the fingerling bass are presently feeding on. That's right, their progeny.

Best not to think about such things too long or hard, for it only leads back to thoughts of the upcoming election, when we all feed off of our anger and each other.

It is a wonder that the Nation survives such an ordeal every four years. But it seems to, and even prospers.

Robert Arnold, Editor
rcarnold@direcway.com