Earth Image Photography, Nature Photography, My Summer Office

6:15 p.m.-

My God what a different place this is on a late Saturday afternoon compared to an early Friday morning, like yesterday when I came out to work. Dozens of boats working the river. Pontoons moving fast loaded with twelve or fifteen riders (one cute young lady even complimented our flowers and EZ's smile). Flat-bottomed Jon boats slow or stopped sideways to the channel with cheerful white-haired grandmas and shirtless grandpas chauffeured by cheerless fifteen-year-old boys, crabby to be caught in such clumsy geriatric company.

A pontoon pulled in at the boat landing and interrupted a chat with a fun friendly couple from Illinois who were looking to buy land. Pontoon owners now launch and load their vessels as routinely as regular boat owners. Until this year they were customarily launched once a year and docked for the summer. Favored for large capacity to hold lots of friends they are being used by people who can't afford waterfront property.

We pulled around the last river bend and had to wait while a fishing boat twirled circles at the entrance to my office. It stopped when the captain saw us. EZ exchanged rowdy greetings with an impolite Poodle.

I always check for spies before slipping into the office, so tonight waited mid-stream and pretended to fish until they were out of sight.

I've brought along the fishing rod and a couple of treble-hooked baits to see if I can catch the bass who regularly pesters frogs when I'm here. In fact just this moment ten feet to my left I've watched a dorsal fin languidly showing out of the shallows. It might be only a Red horse (Sucker-like) and doesn't go after bait, but we'll see and I'll let you know.

7:28-

Ah-ha! Caught him!

Fifteen or twenty casts and I said "hell," and called it quits. Stowed the rod and sat down in a snit. Then pulled anchor and re-set it ten yards upstream and cast into the spot I've seen the most frog-scooting action. Threw out the lure a few times, then changed to a different one, hoping it was a floater which bass generally like better. I'd picked baits out of the tackle box at home and had no idea which sank and which didn't. The second one sank too. But I hurled it over the water and got it to land near shore, began reeling it in and felt a lively resistance tug, and logs don't fight back.

The line slackened. Then tightened and pulled out line. A swirl spun at the surface, then a splash. A fish face gaped up at me. Another splurge and the line dove under the boat. I played it like an amateur with twenty-pound line, cause that's what I had.

Retrieved and lugged as the startled fish tugged. It surfaced at the bow and splashed EZ, who joined the fun by barking and marching back and forth on her deck. Fish fought and I laughed. Ten pounds of bass all to myself. Lifted it into the boat and dropped it on the tote, where it pooped rusty goop and flip-flopped. EZ stayed her distance, then dipped in for a sniff of fish and flinched back when it flipped. Then sat and stared down at it, like offering condolences. Unhooked the lure from a ripped lip and laid its twenty or twenty-four inches back in the river, but I didn't have my glasses on to be sure the fish wasn't merely twelve inches.

8:46-

Went to town and looked around. Nothing new. The water-ski show, a perennial favorite in summer here, has put out a boatload of teenagers to practice water-skiing. It's late in the season and I am concerned for the boy who falls off two skis and raises big splashes every time he uses one hand to give the finger to the driver on board.

8:54-

A young woman wearing a plastic painted face just hurried out of her house and snapped a flash photograph of the sunset. Two pre-school children wearing matching plastic faces circled her prosthetic waxed legs and chanted the Coldwell Banker leitmotif.

Tom is smoking his pipe and fishing at his space under the NO FISHING dock. If he had a professional fishing rain hat and a raincoat to match he'd look like the olde fisherman we've seen stereotypically captured in studio settings.

From a boat, any boat, children always wave, and laugh, and get excited by a doggie. Most of the women will wave back too, because they enjoy connecting. But it's a rare man who will wave. When he does, it's grudgingly, out of his own best interest.

Humidity, promised to rise sometime tomorrow rose early and is nudging the gauge at 98. Rain is scheduled to move through tonight and, without precise agenda drop more rain on and off tomorrow.

A pontoon is gliding by with an elderly couple slow-dancing to Moonglow.

It is impossible to imagine, sitting here in a T-shirt, in a silent rocking boat, that winter is a real entity; that this warm moist womb will come to an end as will December when I sit shut up inside a cocoon of dry, fish-fried, recycled forced-air.

EZ and I are drifting in the same waters I drifted alone seven years ago when I lived in a duplex apartment on an apartment-converted resort cabin after leaving a marriage that had worn out its sense.

In a thirty-year old aluminum boat categorized "homemade" by the DNR because it didn't want to know more than that. It's the boat I learned the river in and discovered my Summer Office, in degrees of farther reaches from home each time I headed out.