Lake Alto

If I do anything for a week or more, I can't go a day without it. So by 6PM today, I was jonesing to get in some water, having enjoyed the decadence of sleeping into until 7AM this morning. Lucky for me, this little jewel is right down the road from me in Waldo. After an hour of paddling, drifting, and watching the clouds gather over the blackest water I've ever seen, I fell in love. I don't know its history, don't even know if it's man-made or natural, but if I ever find a house on this lake, I'll move heaven and earth to move there. It is silent, moody, traffic free, and big enough to actually be a lake.

The maps claim there's a canal leading to Little Lake Santa Fe, and I suppose there is one, after a fashion, but it seems only to be navigable by reptiles and birds. No matter, I simply paddled to the middle of the lake, kicked back, and watched the storm clouds gather over the south shore. Even the sound of the trucks downshifting on 301 fit in somehow. I regretted having to paddle back to the truck.

By the time I got there, a local man was pacing back and forth along the canal. He walked over to where I was pulling my boat out and asked me if I had caught anything. I thought the absence of any fishing equipment might have precluded the question, but I realized soon enough it was just a pretext for his telling me his views about various unjust local, state, and federal laws. I thought I knew where this was going and braced myself for the inevitable anti-Obama tirade. Yet he stopped me in my tracks when he described his worst fear: that the Republicans would be put back in charge. After a lifetime of having my easy assumptions debunked, you'd think I would have learned my lesson by now. No doubt I will run into him again when I return to this lake.