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Resting There Now

It's a light moist on the lake surface, a refreshing humidity not known here except on these hottest days, when the lake evaporates so fast in the fantastic heat that the air can't even consume the product.

Men are working on a snag barge, slowly cruising the lake pulling dead-heads and logs, long dead trees, from the lake. Some of them two, three thousand pounds, these chunks of wood, a few so water-logged they are submerged all but a branch or knot sticking up from the water surface. Even the logs that aren't submerged, they blend in the light and the waves that pick up in the afternoon breezes.

If you're smart on this lake you always watch your path as you move over the waters. Locals usually watch. Vacationers usually don't. For the first half hour they remember what the guy at the Bait 'n' Gas said, but the day feels warm and right, and there's that second beer, going down easier than the first. It's just so easy not to look. To treat the lake like the placid thing it appears to be. But you leave the south end and head to the wilds up lake, it abounds with these hull-wreckers, these open gateways to the bottom of the lake.

It's 1600 feet deep in places, this lake. "Picture your YMCA swimming pool deep-end, times two hundred," said the old guy to the little kids on the boat as he pumped fuel, when dad had gone off to the toilet. "Slimy with algae. And black as night. Rocks and old trees. Cold." He shakes his head and looks down at his task. "Jesus it must be cold." These kids won't be water skiing today, much to dad's mystified disgust.

On the snag barge there are three men: there is the senior who smells always of pine sap and diesel. His hands a color that doesn't match the rest of his body, daily handling things that stain. Things that disfigure. There are the two summer boys finishing the hardest job they've yet known. But getting tan, building muscle, swimming, accruing stories for a lifetime of beers and girlfriends and neighbors and grandkids.

The summer boys are bored and begin wrestling with a six-foot long iron bar that's as thick as a closet rod. It's 15 or 20 pounds, pounded flat at one end, ground to a point at the other. Its proper use is separating and leveraging, moving these monsters of wood with ease, blissfully unknowledgeable of Euclidian principles.

The two have the bar between them, now coated in sweat as they work to unfoot the other. "Grabass" is what the snag boss calls it. They deftly leap logs, over, between, on top of, teetering on one foot here, nearly falling over the edge of the flat-top barge there. A push, one finally tumbling, using his falling momentum to unseat his opponent.

In panic of going over, the bar is let go, hurtling over the edge like a javelin. It goes into the water without a splash, it's trajectory so true, the black iron instantly disappearing into the black water. And it flies toward the bottom, gravity owns it, the light above not so much receding as just blinking out. In seconds the blackness is utter. No sound. Fish only sense this rushing body, en route to a place too deep even for them. Now alone, a long trip even at this speed. Striking the bottom rock with a shink, then tipping slowly to lay flat. And now, for a thousand millenia.

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Bad Preznint! No pretzels

338:
Number of days Bush has spent on vacation during his presidency, a new record. The previous record was held by Ronald Reagan, who spent 335 days on vacation during his eight-year presidency. Bush has topped that in just four-and-a-half years.

$35:
Approximate price of a barrel of oil in 2000 when Bush said,

"What I think the president ought to do is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots. ... if in fact there is collusion amongst big oil, he ought to intercede there as well. I used to be in the oil business. ... And so I understand what can happen in the marketplace."