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.