THE LAKE ESCAPE
Last Saturday, long ago as it seems, after babbling about my
"Project Emailia", I went off for a drive. Actually I usually seem
to need some sort of set destination to get me started with these
trips and that time it was to buy a $5 trinket that'll come in
handy as a future Chistmas/birthday offering to my mother (I've got
the the point where I'm pretty cynical about the whole gift-giving
tradition, but can just about stomache it if I get stuff second
hand or it inspires me to make something myself), as well as pick
up a free stack of CD-Rs (obviously CDs are reaching the point of
obsolescence, though maybe I'm the only person who's surprised
about that). They were on Gumtree, an Australian cassifieds site,
so I had my little adventure finding my way there, not quite sure
if I'd make it on time after messing around writing about my email
nation dreams for too long before-hand, but I actually made it
within a few minutes of the arranged o-clock. I'm guessing that
travel restrictions in rural Victoria might be brought back again
soon, so probably a good thing I did it then.
Destination reached, I picked a "wrong" turn to make at the next
intersection on the way back and enjoyed the whole afternoon
exploring all those little roads in my local area that I've been
going past for years and never turning down. Through the bush, up
some slightly dodgy mountain roads, I love the way the country
looks this time of year when the grass is all lush and green.
Though it does mean that all the little gravel roads that I tend to
end up on are full of muddy pot-holes.
A common theme of these drives is that I end up wandering around a
lake somewhere, so I was tempted when I "discovered" a lake that I
didn't know about tucked in the middle of a forrested valley.
Unfortunately the track leading down to it looked a bit too dodgy
to attempt in the Jag in winter, even for me, so I ended up winding
my way over to a big lake that I can actually see out my window at
home, but I don't remember ever going over to the boat ramp on the
other side. It's not exactly a popular spot, the boat ramp is
testament to wetter times, being about half a kilometer back from
the current shoreline, and hidden down more gravel back-roads. The
only other visitors were some cattle, grazing an area that was
obviously once underwater, who clearly saw my visit as the main
event of the day. I was probably there for a couple of hours in the
end, because the light was just right for photography, with the sun
shining over the lake through patchy clouds, and I kept seeing new
objects on the shoreline to include in the foreground but always
some way further along. Finally I got obsessed with a line of black
objects in the distance which in the fading light seemed like they
_could_ be a hedge but didn't look quite right. Finally I got all
the way up to them and discovered they it was a long row of old
truck tyres carefully arranged in an interlocking configuration to
form some sort of barrier which at my best guess was intended to be
a sort of waterproof fence for the cattle (except that the the
water had retreated far enough that they could just walk around the
end of it now). So with that mystery solved I set to trudging all
the way back along the sticky clay shoreline.
On my way, between taking more photos that I'll never get around to
developing, I thought about all the other lakes that I've ended up
walking around, and what it is that attracts me to them. The
curious thing is that it's really just access. Somehow society
likes to define lakes as a common ground that deserves public
access facilitated by paths and parking, and I suspect a large
cause for that is simply the fact that there's not much else to be
done with it, besides of course draining water in and out. It's
ironic that these unproductive spaces sometimes have so much effort
poured into them just because they're commercially useless. People
spend money on it as a group for the general good, because nobody
can make money off it individually. It just seems a curious dynamic.
From the opposite perspective it's facinating how in cities parks
are, in terms of people actually occupying space, such
underutilised areas of land. On my annual trips to Melbourne (which
haven't happened for as long as this phlog has been running now
actually, due to the virus restrictions) I'd often walk through a
park surrounded by high-rise offices and appartment buildings
(admittedly usually on an unwelcoming winter's day) and maybe
there'd be twenty people in sight. That many people might be in one
little shop or food outlet in one of the towering buildings
surrounding the park, making it a vastly underutilised space.
Clearly most people like parks in cities, apparantly it's actually
something that Melbourne claims to do particularly well, but
obviously that approval doesn't extend to the actual use of the
space proportionately with the rest of the city. So I don't think
people as a whole want the park because they use it, but just for
the sake of its presence. Just some controlled concession to nature
within their otherwise wholly artificial environment that gives
them a mental, if not even physical, escape from the very world
that they live within.
Would they like to be in the park, those people in the buildings,
if they weren't too busy fulfilling their commitments to the
society that built the city around it? If they don't, then they
might find themselves with nowhere to go but the park, the
uninhabitable land that they wished to remain useless for the very
promise that they would find time to spend in it.
Perhaps I make too much of all this, but I do find it facinating.
There's also the fact that so many towns and cities start up along
the banks of a lake, yet I go to a lot of those lakes and there's
nobody there - they're all in the town! Sometimes there's not even
very much access to the lake from inside the town/city past all the
houses built along its banks, for the sake of looking at it.
Of course I'm not much better, I only just got around to checking
out that side of my own nearest lake, and I try to find time for
that sort of thing amongst the constant need to make money. Still,
the fact that I can see the lake over paddocks from kilometers
away, without it blocked by endless houses, means I should be more
content in regards to my connection with nature than most.
- The Free Thinker.
PS. On another recent trip I found the highway to hell:
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/highway_to_hell.jpg
OK it's a pretty weak joke, but you get what you pay for with
them as well.
