July 3, 2009

• The Ones That Got Away (illlustrated with the ones that didn’t)

  The kings are in!  It’s salmon season in our neighborhood.  The local general store is one of the weigh-in stations for a salmon derby.  We stopped in there today before going to get water, so that we wouldn’t be hauling a load of full jugs and buckets all the way down to the store and back.  The odor of less-than-fresh fish hung over the parking lot.  Inside, on the counter, were laid out half a dozen or so photos of proud anglers holding up their fish.

  One was beautiful, silvery and not very big, good eating size.  The rest were huge spawned-out red things, hardly fit to eat but impressive trophy fish anyway.  I had the camera with me and thought a picture of the collection of photos would be suitable to illustrate this blog entry.  I was setting up the shot when Dennis, the owner of the store, stopped me.  He said some of those people wouldn’t want their pictures on the internet.  He pointed out one photo of just a fish, and said that fisherman wouldn’t even allow them to photograph him.  Since the guy’s name was in the margin of the photo, Dennis wouldn’t even let me take a picture of the fish picture.

  Back at the spring, before I started filling jugs, I captured a few images of the surroundings.  The first three are the little stream that runs off from the spring, down into the muskeg, toward Sheep Creek.  (As usual, click to enlarge, especially the ripples in the third one down.)

  

  

  

  Next is a patch of clover, and then a fireweed flower spike.  Click the fireweed for an explanatory caption about how we know when summer begins and ends around here.

  

  

  

  After we filled our water containers and loaded them in the hatch, I turned the key to start the car and nothing happened.  I popped the hood and tried magic first:  Blur (successor to another old silver Subaru station wagon named Streak) likes having his fluids topped up.  There have been times he wouldn’t start and no amount of wire wiggling and other fiddling would do it, until I topped up his oil and coolant.  This time, that didn’t do it, nor did the wire wiggling, so I got serious.

  Doug moved water jugs out of the way so he could get my tools out so I could remove the battery cables and clean the terminals.  It was after I’d loosened the bolt and asked him to dig my knife out of my purse, so I could scrape the terminal and inside the clamp clean, that we discovered I’d set my purse down during the abortive photography at the store, and left it there.

  I improvised with the jaw of an open-end wrench, removed enough corrosion that the electrons were free to flow, and the car started.  Back at the store, Becky, Dennis’s wife, had seen my purse on the counter where I left it beside the fish photos, and stuck it behind the counter for me.  Geez– if I’d not left my keys in the car, I’d not have been able to drive off without the purse.  Must remember that.

  Thanks to a double layer of insulated mylar bags inside a cooler, the ice cream we’d bought during our first trip to the store was still frozen when we got home.
  

  • 9:23 pm
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