Earth Image Photography, Nature Photography, My Summer Office

8:02 a.m.-

Unloading the boat is an unconscious routine by July. Back up to the water, get out and unhook the winch strap, release two bungie cords from the transom, carry the briefcase and cooler and Thermos and whatever else is loose on that day and stow them inside the boat. Move the marigold pots from shelter on the floor and place them on the deck for maximum sun. Slip-knot the bow rope to a Honda hatch strut and put a loop of the rope under a lip of floor mat to keep it inside the car while backing. It will release and pay out once the boat is afloat and I hit the brakes hard to keep it moving down into the water. Then hit the brakes hard. Momentum continues the boat off of the trailer. I drive forward, get out, untie the rope, re-tie it to the dock, and go park. EZ knows the routine too. She walks off the dock, sits in the bow and waits. It's well practiced, performed with no thought of whether it'll work out. It always did.

But trouble had been skulking. The wad of bow rope tied itself a knot during the night.

The boat continued backing as usual when I hit the brakes. Then the rope lifted and tightened and yanked the boat to a stop and jerked the hatch down, bending the arm ninety degrees.

The hatch strut on a Honda, like hatch struts on other cars, is a long slender shock absorber, similar to a screen door closer, but much more expensive than screen door closers because Japanese entrepreneurs want it that way. The ends are attached: one on the car, the other on the hatch. And it cannot slide into the upper sleeve if bent ninety degrees.

8:25-

Rarely sure if it's a beaver or muskrat traveling beside the stream bank. They swim mostly submerged but for the eyes and top of the head above water, though a beaver raises slightly more of its head and points up its ears, like a dog swimming. Their pelts are both streaky dark brown and they submerse with equal silent dexterity, reappearing sometimes fifty feet elsewhere. Muskrats haven't a flat leathery tail to slap on the water in a fit of alarm, and they are diminutive, about one-third the size of an adult beaver. From a few feet away a muskrat is easily recognized as itself, is rarely mistaken for a beaver. But beavers don't usually swim close to anchored boats, only at a distance, which makes the difference in size to a muskrat less apparent.

I've just been given an up-close example of beaver. I will no longer have trouble telling one from a muskrat. Beavers are bulky and broad headed. They swim powerful and swift, darting irascible eyes, are much more confident than a muskrat. A big one swam past a minute ago, along the course I've become accustomed to muskrats regularly passing. Beaver knew I was there. It always knows I'm there, even if I don't. And it rarely leaves me alone without making a scene. But this morning he did, and stroked out of sight down Chelsea's channel to the east.

10:10-

A boat intended for little else than to float and hold two young boys and a dad out of the water while floating, is stopped alongside a lily pad garden. Each has a black baseball cap shading eyes from the late afternoon sun. Three bamboo poles are held long over the side or pointed tall at the sky like Liberty Ladies fishing. The boys are wearing life vests, making them look pregnant, but I don't think they are old enough to care. The dad sits in the stern near a black six-horsepower outboard. The boy in the middle is busy raising his cane into the sky and pulling small pun'kin seed sunfish out of the lake and back toward his dad who removes them and puts each safe back where it came from. The boy in the front threads worms onto barbed hooks and smoothly repeats the cane-raising process.

Here there is little investment and no monthly payments. A man fishing with two boys is having all the fun a man can. And the world, for this time is far gone. It's all there is.