Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

Double-tufted cormorant

390

A good day's trout fishing for the newly planted rainbows. I caught and released five. Then I was greatly surprised to find my line zinging out to the center of the lake and my spool nearly bare.

"A huge trout," I thought, rearing back. In the center of the lake a cormorant flexed its wings, as they so often do, and then make a couple of strange maneuvers; I noted this only in passing, picking up my rod and beginning to reel in against a terrific pressure.

I pumped some more, bowing the slender rod, and the duck made another abrupt and awkward movement, all on the surface. Then it dove, and I lost the small amount of line I had managed to retrieve. I began to think there was some connection between my fish and the cormorant. And there was.

I pumped, the bird fluttered on top, I pumped some more, the bird dove and came back to the surface, and slowly I regained my six-pound test mono. The spool filled back up.

A next door neighbor kid came out on his dock and called out in friendly fashion. John, his name is.

"I think I've hooked a cormorant," I told him. "I may need some help in releasing it."

He climbed a low wooden fence and came to my aid, saying, "I've had a lot of experience with geese."

"Geese don't have those mean, hooked beaks meant for ripping," I said. "But any help will be appreciated. Be careful."

I got the bird to within a hundred feet of my dock and John announced that I had it licked. I thought otherwise; the really difficult part was coming up next, I realized from playing foul-hooked salmon in a river. I would have to "beach" the bird and then hopefully it would be John who released it.

But it happened in a much more fortunate way--fortunate for me and for the cormorant. I could see a white tuft below the bird's head, which I took to be some lightly colored breast feathers. Once again I was wrong. It was my fish I saw, or so we learned a few minutes later.

The cormorant struggled mightily and, suddenly, my line came free. "I broke him," I told John, both thankfully and a bit regretfully, for a fisher likes to win the battle and land the fish. Or duck. Or whatever.

I reeled in my slack line and saw that the weight and leader were intact. Only the hook was missing. So, in a way, I won, for I didn't lose 150 feet of line to the bird and the lake. But I didn't land my fish, or whatever.

The cormorant swam away on the surface, flustered, angrily, without looking back over his shoulder, as it were. Soon he rejoined the flock of six others in the center of the lake, where they all began ruffling their wings, in true cormorant routine fashion.

Later John came over and told me he had recovered the fish. The cormorant wouldn't relinquish it, and I had thought perhaps the duck had swallowed the fish. But he hadn't; he had held it tightly in his fierce beak, all the while, during the long fight.

"It was pretty mangled," John told me.

"Dead?"

John nodded his head affirmatively. "I threw it back."

"Maybe a duck will get it," I said sadly. "The osprey or one of those carrion-eating eagles."

And I hoped it was so.

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now. . ."

389

How fleeting is the bloom of the cherry tree. The Buddhists were among the first to recognize the significance of its ephemeral blooms and how they parallel the brevity of human life. So the feeling the cherry tree produces each spring is one of mingled sadness and joy.

You don't have to be a believer in Zen to enjoy this poignant season and the beauty of fresh growth in the woods and garden. But it may help some. . . .

Basquiat, Untitled, 1982

388

I don't know what you like, but I like this, an untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. He painted for only a few years and died in 1988 of a drug overdose.

Grim as it is, it is immediate and effective. What a vision. I imagine he worked quickly and did this in a few minutes.

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor