For Love of Lakes by Darby Nelson

Author:Darby Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Diamond Lake has succumbed to an unholy synergy. How did this lake come to possess such a mother lode of phosphorus? The pastoral view from the landing provides few direct clues. No factories belch smoke or pipe phosphorus-laden chemicals into the lake anywhere on its shore. I launch my canoe onto the blue-green rich water to discover what changes have occurred in the relationships among humans, lakes, phosphorus, and blue-greens since my epiphany visit. A single motorboat plies the middle of the lake; otherwise, I am alone.

Fifty yards west of the landing I notice the first change. No sickly brown-green plant mat floats where a particularly odiferous one lay in my last visit, though the density of blue-green algae remains high as before.

Farther down shore I realize I have not yet heard the pucker-smack sounds of carp, so familiar before. And no wonder. The green-brown stew of elodea and coontail choking the stems of the cattails that attracted so many fish before is no longer here. I see not a single elodea and only one tiny sprig of coontail. The bases of the cattails are naked. I can see through them to the damp sand on the shore. Waves now more easily attack the bank, washing soil particles with attached phosphorus into the lake.

Plant mat covers only half the area of the small south bay it did before. Even the duckweed is missing. I paddle easily across water I struggled mightily to penetrate before. I follow a great egret around cattails toward Cormorant Point. Someone has cut up and hauled away most of the large dead cottonwood that formerly attracted pelicans and cormorants. The old tree was a favorite rest site for the big birds. I see none today.

Plant mats in the next two bays occupy less than half the space they once did. Blue-greens are as dense as ever. In dying back, the massive plant mats have surrendered their phosphorus to the blue-greens.

A soybean field slopes to the lake, rows stopping two lengths of a paddle from cattails that mark the water's edge, as close as a tractor can get to the lake without tumbling in. On my last visit the crop was corn. What fertilizer the plants don't pluck up, runoff water will deliver unhindered into the lake.

A turtle sticks the tip of its snout above the water for a periscope look then submerges. Two coots explode out of cattails, feet paddling the water madly, then comically paddling air long after they become airborne. A flock of pelicans and another of gulls segregate themselves to share a narrow beach off a cattail island. I modify my line of travel so as not to goad them into energy-wasting flight. The pelicans eye me warily but hold their ground. The skittish gulls take wing en masse, circle twice, then return to their end of the beach.

Two grand houses come closer into view. The earth-tone structures sit in commanding positions upslope from the lake, each set amidst a vast manicured lawn. What wonderful views these owners have of the lake.

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