After being left to explore, I couldn\u2019t help but notice many things that characterized this \u201cplace,\u201d Westhampton Lake.\u00a0 I looked at the water itself, in the shallow portion of the stream after the waterfall near the road.\u00a0 It was not terribly polluted or discolored in any way; it was the familiar color of countless other bodies of water that I had seen throughout my life.\u00a0 As I walked along the stream nearing the lake, I noticed a solitary Styrofoam cup floating near the opposite bank.\u00a0 Perhaps dumped by a passing car, maybe blown by the wind?\u00a0 As I walked further I saw the stream feed into the lake.\u00a0 This small stream became this expansive body of water.\u00a0 I noticed the hue of the water from a distance, now somewhat browner, maybe a bit murkier.\u00a0 Standing in the parking lot, looking through the trees I spotted a few more bits of litter in the water; they were nothing more than amorphous blobs of debris from that distance, but I noticed that they seemed to be all piled together in the center of the lake.<\/p>\n
After scrounging the area of the lake for the little details I started to think, but not about the litter or any sense of pollution that I felt the lake was characteristic of.\u00a0 Instead, I looked back, back to the beginning of my \u201cexploration\u201d of the lake: the concrete waterfall.\u00a0 That portion of the stream was clearly built, manufactured by humans.\u00a0 I thought then about the opposite side of the lake, where the dam is behind the Commons.\u00a0 That was manufactured too.\u00a0 After this point, I began to think of Westhampton Lake as a project, an experiment, maybe.\u00a0 A project by human beings, seeing whether or not they could control such a large amount of water in a single place.\u00a0 The waterfall and the dam were both means to achieve the goal of that project.\u00a0 Whoever wanted to control all that water obviously succeeded in their project.\u00a0 They birthed Westhampton Lake as it is today.<\/p>\n
Does this mean that the water in the lake has any less importance or necessity to the surrounding watershed, simply because it has been diverted, corralled?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Maybe the effects of the water\u2019s control are noticeable on the watershed, but the water is still the same.\u00a0 We can still recognize where the water is, how it behaves, and where it flows.\u00a0 But our sense of the water as a whole, not just the lake with a name, is also greatly shaped by the ways we find to control it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After being left to explore, I couldn\u2019t help but notice many things that characterized this \u201cplace,\u201d Westhampton Lake.\u00a0 I looked at the water itself, in the shallow portion of the stream after the waterfall near the road.\u00a0 It was not … Continue reading