The picture here is a shot of me napping under the trees the last time I was in Stanley–Fourth of July ’76, America’s Bicentennial. I’m told that when we get home and download our photos, I’ll have a companion piece: me with rolled-up jeans and sunglasses, blissfully asleep on this beach.

It is absolutely still out here, and I feel as if I’ve been transported into a postcard. My husband and I have a sandy beach of Stanley Lake to ourselves, the Sawtooths steep behind the water, and no company but a brown-headed duck (I need to get out the bird-book) and a fishing Bald Eagle. I know there’s a little forest-service road somewhere behind us, and a handful of campers tucked into the trees, but it’s easy enough to imagine we have the world to ourselves. I’ve just finished splashing around in the creek taking photos (hadn’t meant to be IN the creek, but hey, stuff happens) and am contemplating breaking out the sandwiches we packed.

My husband (whose appetite for Catching was whetted yesterday by the bull trout he briefly hooked) is trying his luck again, and still enjoying the fishing itself, even if the eagle is so far having better luck. He’s Hawai’ian, and grew up spear-fishing, but yesterday was his first catch with the Idaho contraption we call a fishing pole… We stopped at the Stanley Merc to ask what lures the fish are biting on, but the clerk had evidently used up her friendliness during the high season, so we resorted to holding open palms toward the fishing display to see which lures felt the most Mana (a Hawai’ian word that loosely translates as “spirit-power”), and bought those.

“Babe! BABE!” The excited disbelief in his voice told me before I even looked up–he had a fish! Hands down, this is the cutest sight of the week, my graybeard capering on the sand around our just-caught dinner. “I caught it, BabyDoll, I caught a fish!” I knew my Mana-detector had proven true when I chose HIM; apparently it works in the sporting-goods aisle as well. ;)