There’s a lake out back.
It wasn’t there last week. We had a puddle last week. Big ol’ puddle in the backyard, something about the way the ground settled when mom and dad finished building the house years and years back. It always appeared there every spring and smeared itself between the backyard and the little porch steps like a swampy fence. Just big enough to do a running jump over if you were eight and ambitious and if you aren’t ambitious you aren’t eight.
Anyways, we had that puddle last week, just like every other last week for every other April. But now it’s not there, and neither is the backyard, and the little porch steps lead straight down into four feet of water. Because there’s a lake out back.
Not quite sure how that’s happened.
***
It’s not a bad lake, really.
A bit small and VERY strange, but what there is has all the essentials. Got a little stretch of beach to wade in from (mud, mostly – no sand, no pebbles, and we’re not close enough to the Shield for a solid rock lakebed). Got a little cliff near a deepwater dropoff for jumping in from. Got weeds for pike to hide in; got reeds and marsh nearby for swans to nest in; got a beaver lodge; got a creek coming in on Mr. Morton’s side of the property and a stream running out through Mrs. Jaxton’s herb garden and down the block; got a few small islands in the center with stubborn conifers and a few brave and doomed shrubs that we’ve seen a few idle turtles sunning themselves next to; got a lot of blackflies around its edges in the daytime and a lot mosquitoes around its edges in the evenings and a big ol snapping turtle whose size is impossible to estimate from the enigmatic distance we’ve always sighted them at.
It’s got just about everything, which is really weird since it’s only about twenty feet across. We took out the tape measure and everything. Twenty-three feet four inches, or around seven metres if you’re feeling more sensible. And yet it – and its contents – remain perfectly proportionate. The most obvious sign is that the bug bites (and there are a LOT of them) are completely normal-sized, but the next would be that you can dive right in and have a proper swim-around and wade out and swim to one of the islands and back and it’s all a good time instead of you wallowing in a half-inch of muddied water as you wash out the banks from shore to shore.
Not quite sure how that works.
***
The lake has attracted visitors.
Yesterday Mrs. Jaxton and her family had a picnic on the north shore; today Mr. Morton brought some friends and beer and their friends and their beer to fish and drink beer. They left wrappers and beer cans everywhere until we complained, and then they threw the beer cans into the lake when they thought we weren’t looking. The cans have become new islands, and I can see turtles sunning themselves on them. It’s hard to pull them out because they’ve sunk right into the lakebed and also it’s real tiring to swim all the way out there to pull them back into shore. Guess we’re stuck with Isla Budweiser out there.
Someone knocked at the door after all that went down. It’s a surveyor from the city, here to map and chart the lake. She says to expect a visit from some hydrologists soon too. There may need to be a study on how the lake and the municipal sewer systems interact. There are developers out there that need to know more. There are ecological trusts that require alerting. A farming conglomerate has demanded that the lake be drained for the growth of corn. There are many disparate and intricate interests involved.
Not quite sure how to handle this.
***
The lake has been purchased by a consortium of developers.
Waterfront condos are planned which will produce many many many millions of dollars of economic investments and fund at least twelve construction jobs for about a year or so. The beavers will need to be evicted because they won’t stop stealing the surveying equipment and using it to plug holes in the shoreline. The turtles are now sunning themselves on the construction equipment. One of the backhoes backed up too far while hoeing and dropped off the diving cliff and is now buried under thirty feet of water. Six different firms sent us six different emails and seven different phone calls and thirty different veiled and incomprehensible messages with a thousand different meanings, any of which could be bribes, threats, or both. We’ve been invited to join a property-owner’s-association and barred from membership for life.
Not quite sure how this is going to end up.
***
The lake is gone.
There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how it happened, or even when. We woke up today and we’ve got no lake, just a puddle – not even a big puddle, it’s tapered off a bit because it’s mid-April now and we’ve lost all the snowmelt to erratic evaporation. A puddle with some Budweiser cans and a backhoe and what appears to be a lot of shed beaver fur and a single really big really really dead pike jammed in it.
The developers threatened to sue us for breach of contract; the turtles have vanished without a trace; and the surveyor came back to let us know that since the lake’s gone we’re not going to be fined for conducting landscaping without a permit.
A swan beat the living shit out of Mr. Morton last night. He’s in the hospital with four broken fingers and a nose that’s been flattened like a tomato on a highway. He’s said he wants to sue us but there’s no sign of a swan and we don’t have a lake the swan could have been living in so we’re pretty sure he’s got no case.
Not quite sure about the emotional or fiscal ramifications of any of this in the long-term, but I mean, what else is new?