Last night’s very high tide had the curious effect of making the water level downstream about 8 inches higher than the water level upstream. The flow device was working in reverse, pumping water upstream even though the dam hadn’t been crested. Maybe the beavers were, for a moment, grateful for the pipe and its installation. “That was so nice of you to bring us more water! We really appreciate it!”. I suppose the pipe could have been fitted with a ‘one way door’ so that the water could only push out and never push in, but then they wouldn’t get the benefit of the tide and we wouldn’t have had our waterslide otter to enjoy.
It was a strange, vertigo feeling though, to sit at the dam and see the perspective reversed. The hole under the platform was trickling water too, obviously all the mudding and labor had plugged up the big holes but some little gaps remained at the top, and the high water found them and pushed through the cracks. The water exchange is good for the beavers and the fish – a little fresh salty water to replace and mix with the pond.
Three babies and the yearling were seen, as well as the green heron, a swimming pond turtle, and a massive leaping fish.
The treat of the day is Mark Twain’s previously unpublished essay on “the interview” on the NewsHour. If you haven’t read it, go here for a delight of beaver proportions. He cleverly compares the interview-er to a cyclone. (Once you’ve had your first bad moment with the press you will understand why.)
{column1}
{/column1}{column2} “Concerning The Interview”
No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works. {/column2}
See numbers 4 & 5 in my “Advice for Advocates“
