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This year hardly had the smell of summer -- the essence of things baked out by the sun, like a many-coloured smoke. Today the wild pea vines are almost finished blooming, and their silver cover of powdery mildew made me think of frost.

I finally had a proper summer weekend, though I had to wait until September for it. Saturday you know. Sunday I woke up at eight, which was in good time to show up for the SPCA dog walk fundraiser, so on a lark I went down to Clover Point.

We ate a pancake breakfast out in the ocean air. The wasps were few and lazy and hardly troubled us. Blue sky for your dome and all that. Lovely. And all the sizes and shapes of dogs around you.

I met up with lemon_pickle, inlandsea, naomibellis and sundry others, and we did the walk. Then lemon_pickle mentioned the Sooke Potholes, and the star of my destiny was fixed above a waterfall.

The parking machine was broken, so we imitated other cars and left two dollars on the dash as proof of good intent.

Of course we walked up past the unfinished hotel, the stone foundation and monumental fireplace like the ruins of a castle, and climbed the fence (with some assistance from other kind felons to cantilever the dogs over) to the best stretch of the stream. Cold green pools in cups of stone.

We swam against the current up through the rocks and the miniature rapids. The dark pool under the arced stone. The narrow pass beyond it. And then the waterfall. White as foaming light. The wild pool clawing at its feet. The rocks like the open chambers of a stone heart, curved and sharp like petals.

At one point I was trying to hoist myself up onto a stone using upper-body strength, already diminished by the cold and the unfamiliar effort. "Come on arms, you can do it, come on... okay, ass, you take over." And I wedged myself up as gracefully as a drunken manatee.

At home and the desk, I didn't exactly study Shakespeare, but I did make my edition much more fabulous via some scrapbooking techniques.

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