Rick Simonson

A Summer Day and the Cycles of Things

A beautiful summer day it was yesterday in Seattle, the best, most glorious kind of day. We both whisper to our friends elsewhere how this can be, and yet tell others that it is never really like this, that this is the blink of an eye, and that on the morrow you'll be back in gray soup.

But it was also a kind of  nightmare day if you had wings, feathers, fins, gills, fur, or tails, in the appropriate combinations, and if you were of the human persuasion but had affinities with the previously cited. Most every manner of sanctioned mechanized mayhem, in spectator manner, was unleashed Yesterday was the big annual hydroplane race on Lake Washington. It is not just a little boat race. And what it brings, by air, land, and water: big booming fireworks displays, loud music (okay, it is summer), packed car traffic on residential streets not made for it, and the whole screaming, jarring, nerve-and-window-sill, car alarm-rattling Blue Angels thing, over, around, and through whatever you might be obliviously trying to do. And the big boats and the little ones: thousands of people. Pee and fuel into the lake. Lots of it.The geese, who know a thing or two about poop, can't even handle it. They take over ground surfaces by the lake for days, until the water begins to reacquire its more proper aquality.

Sometimes Mist Place escapes, sometimes not. Yesterday was the former, an excursion to the lovely Cedar River Municipal Watershed and its Watershed Education Center. 30 miles east of the uproar and you are there. This is Seattle's drinking water. Mist Place got to know about this place thanks to the propensity of one of his favorite reps for getting married. Get married enough times, and the location possibilities start adding up. This most recent marriage (a keeper), was celebrated here. And indeed, another wedding was being celebrated in the low-key, very appropriately-designed cluster of buildings that make up the Education Center.

Here all seemed fairly right with the world ... except Mist Place forgot something. A book. Since when is there going anywhere without reading? And Mist Place has books to read, and, ostensibly, write of. Not that there wasn't then reading to draw upon. Mist Place can't name the books, but has read of how all this works, the cycles of water and condensation, clouds, rain, and snow, the currents and cycles of things.

So Mist Place did that. There's been learning of readng places, landscapes, too. This place on Rattlesnake Lake is more often a truly misty place than not. Its buildings are built big with eaves for a reason. Dripping happens here. But not this day. There was a deep quiet on the artifically made lake, its blue-green waters. Cedars, aspens shimmering, maples aflutter in their late-summer greenage, the close sights of bushes and berries, and the more looming sights of nearby Rattlesnake Peak, and off a ways, Mailbox Peak. A few people in the water near shore. A kayak (no motorboats on this water). You had to use imagination to think of the low sky, the clouds, the snow or rain that goes into streams and into this reservoir, but not too much. More gets used as you try and think how it all works - this water streaming down into the river, a short thing (30 miles) in length, where it drains into the south end of Lake Washington. (Mist Place had passed this place on the way). Here it takes more imagination to wonder how it might work. To get from Lake Washington to the sea takes some interesting movement, including a set of locks. But once out those, you would be off in Puget Sound, an arm of the sea, in the push and pull of tides. When, where, how it all goes to make clouds, to make rain or snow ... and where that goes ... can water here become a cloud that drifts south, deposits its moisture there? Or vice versa? Does water at the cellular level have a honing in for home? for other places? Mist Place ... needs to read more, or read again. Indeed, the days, the time, the weather, and season for that are soon at hand. Almost always, after this August day, there is the widespread feeling that the light has shifted. The dark and the wet will soon be upon us, making this all possible. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 6, 2007 | Comments (0)