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The lake had a way of being there, not knowing that it was situated on a major hub. A hub where biped animals zoomed back and forth in speeding boxes that the lake couldn't have possibly fathomed when its ancestors told it about one-celled organisms. Growth, you see, had a way of compounding itself, not really being linear. So this erratic motion everything led to what it saw today, a bunch of bipeds staring at the lake, many arriving in speeding boxes that spoke with no language, while strange buzzing contraptions operated by the bipeds whizzed around on its surface, and stationary boxes that were seemed as permanent as the lake itself but never communicated resided on its shores. Bipeds walked to and fro from inside of the semi-permanent boxes to the speeding boxes, disappeared and brought other bipeds back with them to ride on the strange contraptions with buzzing noises. A dizzying effect of culture shock that no amount of history lessons could explain, dazzling the lake while the frizziness of mist danced around it. There were names for these bipeds, the semi-permanent abodes, the speeding boxes and the strange contraptions with buzzing noises. For some reason, the names sometimes changed, depending on which bipeds showed up. But most of the times the bipeds seemed to refer to themselves as people, the semi-permanent abodes as stores, houses, or restaurants (depending on the structure, for some indecipherable reason), the speeding boxes as cars (or for larger ones, trucks or sometimes vans), and the strange contraptions with buzzing noises as boats. It was a crazy thing for the lake who had known the sun and the moon, who had known the separation of the firmaments which defined it as land while it mated with the water known as sky. So confusing , all of this movement which now seemed entrenched that it seemed to have erased the fluid definition of stability that it had known before. It was everything had been forgotten, except in some dark recess of the bowel of the lake itself.  The bipeds, in naming everything to keep all things to maintain their illusion of control and mastery, had even gone out of their way to name the lake itself. Cazenovia Lake, it was called nowadays, though there had been a bunch of bipeds before that called it 0-wah-ge-ha-gah. Things seemed to change as for the bipeds to suit their needs, and they seemed to be a baffling lot. But they paid a lot of attention to the lake, whatever nom d'jour the lake was assigned. The lake didn't mind them so much, but some of the buzzing boxes and contraptions were disconcerting. When the bipeds came alone, they were quieter. Their voices sometimes was muffled in the wind, and yet the lake could sense their voices as it lapped along the shores. Sometimes, it crawled up closer so it could hear, to eavesdrop and partake in their world, wondering what it was that they were thinking as they sat and watched and waited. Cazenovia Lake was busy doing its watching one day, and I was there to meet it. It was the usual scene with the sun being out and bright, a late summer day before everyone would have to scurry far and near to school and autumn chores. So the place had the usual charm with picnickers enjoying the view, motorboats flying across the lake's skin, and a parking area to invite everyone to come and join the place, to stop the rushing about and smell the water. In a way, the park was beckoning all the bipeds such as myself to be like the lake and sit and watch. Which always to me was a great invitation; who can fault anyone for listening when nature called?  I was in the mood to just sit and watch, not so much as a salve to a stressful day, because the day had been one of those days where I roamed, drinking the nectar of freedom that came from being the stranger that came the town. So this place, this visitation that I made to this lake, was just an extension of this persona. Here, in this role, I could sit and be just as I perceived the lake as sitting and just being. It was interesting that I and many of my other fellow bipeds had a tendency to think that because something in the "natural world" looked calm, it was sitting in some kind of meditative trance. Who knew what it thought and what it did, and maybe it resented the intrusion of the bipedal world so much and for so long that it forgot to be angry and just allowed itself to be resigned to its fate. Or maybe, it had no knowledge of went on at all. But a human perspective is the only one I had with me, and it seemed impossible to know how else to communicate with the life form in front of me without channeling it into anthropocentric terms. I could assume that it was broken in spirit from the powerboats that seared through them, though I wasn't pure enough in action to really preach the evils of pollution and global warming, seeing that I arrived here by car from miles away, and have been known to enjoy a spin on skidoos and dinghies. I saw what I thought was an oil spill along the edges, although you had to walk right up to the riverbank to see it. Sitting by the picnic bench and breathing in the late summer air, I could pretend it wasn't there. Hence, by some definition of perspective, it didn't exist. Which would turn the place into a picture perfect for a postcard, though of course that statement assumed that everyone fancied a postcard of bucolic taste. All depending on what perspective a person seemed to want to take with this sort of situation.  If I was surprised at all by what lay before me, it lay to the far right of where my perspective was. There appeared to be, way in the distance where the shoreline did a dance with the forest behind it, a bunch of boats tied up to moorings. That in itself didn't seem surprising, seeing that this was a lake. But what did seem out of place was the kind of boats that were there. Speedboats and motorboats of a very large size bounced up and down, their bulk looking so displaced here in this relatively small lake that they looked like someone had downloaded them on an I-Phone and manipulated a photo of them to trick my vision. I wasn't much of an expert on boats, but for the most part, I'd seen this size of boat only out on the open water, such as harbors that eventually led to an ocean. The only lakes I'd seen boats like this were Great Lakes like Lake Michigan or Lake Ontario. Not one not-so-Great, like Cazenovia. I don't know what the boats were doing here, or what would possess someone to join some club like this to tie a big boat like that here. It was like they had been bought to show off and not to use, like a Madame Alexander doll or some other expensive item that was absolutely useless. Otherwise, I didn't have the faintest idea why someone would go out of their way to buy a boat like that to stick it here. The boats all looked like errant preschool children stuck in time-out. But hey, I was no boat expert. Maybe it was just me, stereotyping the scene. An older couple took their place on the picnic bench next to us. They carried this trip like favorite worn slippers, as though this trip was the thousandth, even the ten thousandth together. But maybe it was a first date and they had found perfect compatibility on e-Harmony. It was hard to tell by looking, because observations could yield just as many imaginations as a flare of colored glass. Kayakers arrived with their transportation on the spines of their four-wheel drive trucks and took to the lake, as well as a pair of fishermen who came with their fishing boat attached to a trailer that forced them to park their vehicle in semi-legal fashion, just so they could hop quickly into their marine hunting terrain. Facing away from each other, they spoke only when their engines were off; otherwise, were lost in their own worlds of whatever it was led them here, or maybe they wondered what was on TV later on. It was hard to know what exactly what they thought. As it was with the lake itself. I thought I could hear what the lake told me, but like all communication, it was infused with my own prejudice of what I thought I wanted to hear. Namely that we were strangers to this place, the stranger coming to town, the town being the lake and not Cazenovia itself. Just to the east of us was the city of Cazenovia, a college town full of bipeds like us who came and went, maybe never even to visit the lake first hand. I don't know what all this coming and going meant to the lake, or anything that lived within its fathoms. Maybe they too busy with their lives to even care, sort of like the idea of a person being so busy that they just weren't concerned about trivia and gossip. Maybe the lake was delighted to see us. It was hard to tell. In many ways , it was as though the lake and all the life around me was observing me as much as them, incognito in its watching so as to learn more about my without knowing about their watching. Maybe they had their own impressions, according to whatever prejudices it held. Maybe there were spirits here who watched, or the collective of all life who had been here watched, and now I was part of it. When we left, the lake was as quiet as when we began our journey there, but I doubted it was as silent as it seemed. |
