Sitting on the jetty, south end of the lake, where feet used to hang over and hit water last winter, sun shining, 1.3 metres—rising 4cm this working week—and from out of the water, right in front of me, slipping through the still surface layer, pops the small round head on the end of a long neck of a turtle. Yerrigan/yaarkin/yagan.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
The Height of the Nest
Mid July; lake level about 1.3 metres. And the Swans’ nests have been built high. They stick out like little volcanos above the surface; built against future rising waters—waters that will rise in the time it takes for the the future to birth in cradled warmth—first of egg, then nest and feathers—so that eventually it may step off into waters still lower than the nest’s edges…into another liquid.
The Steaming Lake
Clear sky minus some slight cirrus at the lake. It is cold. There’s a slight easterly at the river, but it is glassy at the lake. And today there is steam on the the water, and steam coming off logs in the sun. Fungus lives on a tree branch by the lake’s eastern entrance, white and wrinkled. A djidi djidy sits on the grass by the gazebo near the water’s surface; 1.26 metres. A swan shoes a swamphen. A swamphen shoes a coot. There’s a black face cuckooshrike. And wardong the old crow gathers a loose twig from a tree—he doesn’t fly straight to any existing nest but to another branch, where he sits a while watching me watching him; maybe he doesn’t want to show me the nest…maybe it’s the first twig of the one that’s coming next.
The Owl Whisperer
There is a kind of owl whisperer at Lake Claremont. I see her fairly often, and we have become kind of colleagues. She has rescued barn owls from the water, and from the attack of crows. She has no qualms about picking them up, or throwing something over them if only it will help. She’s been scratched and harassed in the process—by crows, magpies and owls. She looks for them, and finds them, amongst the trees beyond the edges of the lake; she tells me where, and sometimes I can see them too—like the tawny frogmouths to the east, or the barn owls to the north west in recent years. She tells me about other ones today. I look and look and cannot find them; not like she finds them, and they find her. And yes, she does (with no negative judgment intended) slightly resemble one.
Rivers Becoming
I take a walk today out where one river becomes another, both ways. I start at the Derbarl Yerrigan Swan River side and walk upstream, levels still pretty low somewhere near mid-winter flow. I follow it up the bank, northern side, hopping a granite rock or two; 10-o’clock flowers coming out, moorhens, galahs, shelducks, black ducks, egrets, herons, fantails, balgaz, tuarts, melaleucas, zamias, casuarinas; kangaroos at Walyunga—where it turns into the Guggleyar Avon—water bubbling, guggle-yarrin. Then I turn back around, following the water as it flows.
Noticing also, on the valley walls—especially south side—the many dead trees. It looks like the red and orange of northern hemisphere fall…though without a springtime coming.
Back to the Lake
Back to the lake today after five weeks of being away: USA away. And the thing I especially note are the bardoongooba—the Australian shovelers—tipping themselves 90 degrees to reach what they need to reach down there—most likely grasses—orange legs kicking in the air; the lake at 1.2 metres.
Lower Salmon, Nimíipuu Country
We have just rafted the Salmon and Snake Rivers, Idaho, Nimíipuu Country. There may be too much to say: Bald eagles, big-horn sheep, hawks, osprey, a salmon, mother bear and cub bathing in the river, waterfalls flowing in, quick rapids, longer slower stretches, turkeys, pidgeon-like chukkers, rocky-grassy steep hills all around, scrubby bushes and ponderosa, sun and rain, killdeer (plovers), something like an avocet, starlings, robins, night hawks, bats, rising fish, alto and cumulus and cirrus, blackberries, magma rock columns vertical and horizontal, later sandstone, white sandy beaches each night we camp on, poison ivy and scraggly bushes. Five days. All pulled by on the arms of my cousin and his wife…and those of the river.
Arches
We drive the drives and walk some of the trails of Arches National Monument, Utah; the red-rock forms looking all watery—sculpted by water and wind—resembling the wet-sand castles you might make at a beach; many arch-like forms, the spaces beneath worn away. Close up, the sand is a fine, dusty red. In one spot—a kind of mini canoyn—we take our shoes off and feel it warm and soft between our toes, so dry. Later, we are staying in a hotel-motel in nearby Moab, the Colorado River flowing close by—a kind of marshy floodplain wetland to the west. And as soon as that sun sets, whole clouds of mosquitos come flooding in, ravenous—beings of too much life, too much wet…with the dry, side-by-side.
Pagosa Hot Springs
By the side of the San Juan River flowing cold and spring-summer-melt fast in Pagosa Springs, we walk past the nearby sulphurous foul-egg-smelling scents of the hot springs by the road and river’s edge. The hot, steaming water runs from out the side of the bank above the river, flowing from one shallow, hard-rock pool to another. There are about five pools, seemingly man-made or assisted, in which we sit with grey sediment and test the temperatures—the top one’s very hot, the next one not so bad, and then eventually a spot opens up in the ones right by the river’s edge where we can lean against the flat rocks and find a spot that feels just right, goldilocks-like, between the heat of the slowly-flowing spring, tricking in, and the cold, once-mountainous water of the river’s edge, with only a semi-porous wall of rocks between.
To Santa Fe
Drive Taos to Santa Fe New Mexico. After the sharp peaks of Colorado, and the tall sharp Ponderosa pines, here we find the slightly rounder peaks of high desert, and the more rounded Juniper pines; everything dryer, more worn down; softer rocks? We find a cold spring by the Rio Grande while looking for a hot one. And as usual the clouds build up more cumulus in the afternoon.
John Stubley 