Earth Image Photography, Nature Photography, My Summer Office

5:44 p.m.-

Green foliage is flying past, horizontally. A late afternoon storm is plowing violent furls in the western sky and gray-green creases on the lake. But EZ and I are safe in the car, parked hastily on the grass lawn beside the quintuple-slot boat landing in town. Citizens of the lake know trouble, are driving fast and looking back over their shoulders. And many are plowing high wakes and looking back over their shoulders. All of them wanted more and waited too long.

A fast boat with two fishermen on board crashes into the ramp. The one in the front, who was supposed to seize the dock as it flew past, keeps moving when the boat stops on concrete. He splashes cool water and bounces onto the parking lot on his hip. There is swearing then. I think it's escalated and loosened between the two in diatribes ten minutes earlier.

Wind rocks the car.

If it was I on the big lake I'd beach the damn boat and run into the nearest house, then ask permission in the morning.

5:49-

Desperately wind-blown winching and cinching blurs engage all five ramps. Everything is dark gray except whitewater wakes and the spray of a jet boat full of kids far offshore arcing and banking and taunting the electrical clouds. Then it rears up and blasts to the landing, but a responsible older man who was queuing there first scuttles ahead and gives them the finger.

Lightning, forking homesteads and charbroil campfires on the far shore, throws down a good one at the golf course, just across the narrows in the northwest. Boat loaders shout "shit," and crank faster.

A commercially prestigious Pigboat cuts hard out of a bay across the lake and targets the ramps, laying a slim efficient path through the water.

White man legs in shorts run back and forth between pickup trucks and little skipper buddies in boats bobbing off shore.

"Here comes the rain," someone screams over the wind, escalating to a whistle through signposts and electrical pole guy wires.

Five guys standing tall like human lightning rods streak past on a flat-topped pontoon. Six boats, then eight, are rocking in wait out in the lake where a white veil of rain is headed our way. A woman piloting an eighteen-foot Princecraft fishing scow is having trouble keeping it from filling with wave water. She circles out into deep water, head scarf flowing, while waiting for a husband's trailer to arrive.

Raindrops arrive sideways and hurl onto heads on the piers and heads running across blacktop and heads bowed out on the lake like everybody's praying. It's a hurricane scene. Imagine archival film footage of Andrew or Hugo with trees flailing and spectator's rain jackets vibrating and wind blowing straight flat carrying debris.

And Biblical amounts of water are filling hearts and humors with graying moods.

Princecraft woman drives her boat up onto the trailer. Husband clicks a hook to bow ring and hauls the whole works--her sitting at the boat console--out of the lake and through the parking lot and out of sight down a residential street.

Two young men are having trouble with an old Fiberglas tub. It's been pulled onto the parking lot but is listing much lower on the starboard side. One man is wearing a cowboy hat and a wet white T-shirt; the other is wearing a baseball cap backwards. Both have on cowboy boots for extra height to hoist the leaning transom back into compliance on the trailer. No luck.

Backward ball cap backs the trailer back into the lake. Cowboy hat guides it too, back, down, deep, deeper. Up to his crotch where wallets and pocket lint and other matters shrivel. He stands on the boat trailer fender and jockeys and heaves for a minute or two, then waves a right hand forward and his buddy drives it out with soaking wet cowboy riding the bucking contraption.