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Tuesday, July 9--

1:47 p.m.-

Hard to know if EZ was panting because of pain, or heat. So, to play it safe I retraced half-a-mile and gave her a pill. (As I did yesterday when, within seconds, she screeched twice from her end of the car.) Spent half-an-hour anchored under the leaning maple reading the new Newsweek, learning about Why We Can't Sleep, The Latest on Prozac, and how the Donna fertility tester--now on sale in the US (marketed overseas since 1993)--will make life less messy for women to monitor ovulation periods by evaluating saliva instead of urine.

The deerflies are here in high swirling action. My God! Idling upriver they attack from the woods, careening and brow-biting. Forehead, under the glasses, wrists, toes, left shin, nostrils, I am in constant motion touching and whisking and slapping my hands. Touch nose, shake an arm, pat forehead, slide right hand along left wrist. A base runner in the woods picks up a stick and runs to a tree, then stops and stares back to be sure I meant what I said.

I'd forgotten what a non-stop madness deerflies can be. And, I was wrong about last year. Within seconds--not minutes--of stopping, they fly away and leave me, though not EZ, alone.

Had nearly two inches of rain yesterday morning and the river is about that much higher. Redwing blackbirds are trilling and a medium breeze is swishing green leaves. Frogs have been skipping like stones ahead of fish jaws popping.

It's warm again today. Town was overcrowded with brutish self-determined visitors. Air conditioners ran hard. Ice delivery trucks idled blasting compressors and concrete radiated liquid gasoline fumes.

A country music festival opens Thursday, but the grounds are already full of early arrivals who pitch tents and park campers then drive into town and demand better service than a town of eight thousand can deliver.

"Upwards of fifty-thousand," is what the newspaper said to expect. So, EZ and I are out of the way, comfortable in the shade of our own country music.

2:18-

An inch-long caterpillar is lowering itself on a strand of silk, swaying on the breeze, attached to a branch fifteen feet up. Lower, lower, it touches the river, (for a drink?) and starts a slow climb back.

4:05-

A major inconvenience of this new outboard motor is its inability to tilt up in shallow water. There is a way, but I'll be damned if I could figure it out when it started dragging as we drifted far upriver. Any movement and the deerflies charge at us. So, there we were stuck in mid-stream with the far tip of the motor poked in the sand. I lifted the motor. Hundreds of deerflies zoomed out of the trees and started circling and biting my legs. Arms, face, ears. EZ's too. She's caught up in her own fight for survival and can't come to assist me, fingering black metal parts down underneath a motor I'm holding up with the other hand. A lever with a swivel on its top doesn't rotate. Must be there for show--SLAP!

"Goddamnit!"

Bastards.

I drop the motor. It slices a noteworthy trench along the bottom. Back up. Lean over again and fiddle with twirlable brackets. Motor down. "Clunk." Log.

I open the tote and pull out most everything searching for the owner's manual I put in there. Not there.

"Hell with it." I hold the motor, we drift and slap flies until deeper water passes under and we flee fast.

Three deerfly carcasses are on EZ's deck. "Good girl."

Water tinkles somewhere under a hidden waterfall along shore. Following sound I discover the spot where a narrow cascade dribbles. Last night's rain is still releasing out of a marsh inside the forest. Nature's perfect flood prevention scheme; rainwater held by the sponge of foliage and mosses and layers of ground cover rather than racing without restriction across blacktop and concrete parking lots and dumping all at once into a river.

If only Wal-Mart would acknowledge responsibility and proactively take initiative. Wal-Mart's Super Center shares the same parking lot as us at True Value. Two years ago they doubled the size of the paved parking lot to an eighth-mile across. Hard, nonabsorbent blacktop with small grates here and there to drain rainwater out. During a heavy spring rain customer cars were islands for a time because the storm sewers couldn't keep up.

Couldn't three-foot wide strips of grass be installed across a parking lot slope to slow down the runoff, provide some aesthetic mood, and give the ground a smidge of its own moisture back?

Though pessimistic, I still watch for sunflowers to show themselves along the dozen places we planted seeds. But, it's been over a month and I hold little hope. They had a variety of soils, from sandy acidic under pines to loamy alkaline along lowlands. Checking the bluff at Grand Sandbanks today, I saw no sign of a sprouting seed.