Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

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What a great Jeff Larsen photo from Thursday's Seattle P-I. I've tentatively entitled it, "Dunlin Kissing Their Shadow."

True, it is not a picture from the lake, but from the seashore. But--hell--water is water, birds are birds. And I've seen the occasional dunlin here.

Last week's full moon cast some interesting ripples

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Everything is in bloom now! Big red rhododendrons, tiny orange and blue azaleas, poppies even, and nameless small white flowers I can't identify. And the trout are hitting. Yesterday, off the dock after lunch, a three-pounder, caught and released--the year's biggest to date and probably for the rest of the season.

Meanwhile there are basketball regional playoffs off the dish, and baseball is just getting well underway, with Jamie Moyer not having lost a pitching duel yet this year.

Of course the bodies still pile up in Baghdad and environs. It is hard to remember that Baghdad and the Tigris/Euphrates were once the seats of civilization and culture. No, it is more an oil-related battlefield, with a new enemy, "the insurgents" causing the damage, now that the old enemy has been defeated and a so-called democratic government put into place.

Flowers still bloom, here and there. No holding nature back. Too bad nature includes car bombs and other forms of "pruning."

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About ten years ago, Snohomish County acquired from the Burlington Railroad thirty some miles of track between Arlington and Darrington, in Washington State. It was on a 99-year lease/option, which means the railroad can claim it back, but not for a long period of time. The County has since proclaimed that the railroad grade is "the future site of a non-vehicular trail," which would be wonderful for all of us who like to get out in the country and . . . walk.\

But nothing has happened, except the county has posted road driving barriers and signs like the one pictured above. The sign goes on to warn walkers that there is "no public use" allowed on what might have been a trail, but is so badly overgrown with Himalayan blackberry that most of it is impassable. Of course the county claims that there is a public liability problem with letting the public use it, but that is more excuses to go along with the one of having no money to develop and maintain the trail. So it goes to waste.

When the railroad owned it, they only ran two trains a day during the week between the two small cities; this was for Summit Timber to haul logs into Darrington in the morning and finished lumber back out in the late afternoon. And the railroad maintained its right of way, for if it didn't, no timber business. So we who knew our ways around could walk along the river (the North Fork of the Stillaguamish) and enjoy the scenery. If we were so dumb as to walk during railroad hauling time, the train ran so slowly that we could easily step off the track and wave at the engineer and fireman as they moseyed by.

No more. Off limits. No walking. Of course people still walk the grade, but illegally, and usually are forced to turn back because of the wall of young alders and thick blackberry that bars and confronts them.

And there is no way the citizens can challenge this institutional neglect. The county as money, and other means, to acquire lands for proposed parks, but no money to construct parks or to maintain their lands. And the years go by, the decades, while publicly owned lands are restricted to the public and they grow progressively more unusable to its citizens. 

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor