Afternoon Walk At Lake Dillon
After being cut at lunch, I took the dog to Lake Dillon. We parked the car at the marina beside the sailboats moored like zoo animals, with no possibility of current or crossing. It was 71 degrees by 2 P.M.—the sixth time in seven days Summit County has set a record for this time of year. I put on my Chacos, and let the dog nose our way to the water. We walked and walked, but where was the lake? Reaches of mud stood between us and the shy lake, who had retreated deep into her bed.
The papers proclaim:
“Lake Dillon froze late—
ice melt device fell through,
before two months passed.”
When snowpack lets go early, the watershed exhales winter too soon. Warm days like this one accelerate the melt, forcing tributaries like grubby fingers to spring up and rake down the thawing soils. Instead of soaking in with all the nutrients, the water’s pulse runs off downslope. This overland flow gathers silts and clays, which is deposited in cloudy fans at the water’s edge.
Sun on Tenmile Range,
deposits dry in wind and light—
cracking into plates.
Organic debris, mainly uprooted willow, colonize the elbows of tributaries. They strew about like tumbleweeds on the Nebraska highway. Sasha seizes one with her teeth, and drags it toward a trickle of stream.
I let her delight in the carpeting textures beneath her paws. The caked mud crisscrossed with streams. She drops her back to it and rubs, rushing once more to her feet with a gully-wide grin.
While she roams, so do I. A red nun and the NO WAKE SIGN direct my steps on the expanding shore: navigation aids to nowhere. A couple with a black labrador stroll out to an island I’ve paddled to before.
Paper says 160 slips will be unavailable. “Boating season will be majorly compromised.” The empty platforms stretch like Roman aqueduct ruins, their arteries silted.
Aristotle wrote of watersheds in 350 B.C.E. in his treatise Meteorologica (Book I, Chapter 13) that mountains are porous. Giant sponges that retain and release water.
Aristotle wrote—
mountains, vast and porous, hold
water, then let go.