I don’t pretend to know how waves work generally speaking. I’ve never really needed to know anything more than when to avoid them and how to survive those waves I was initially trying to avoid. Generally speaking (again), I don’t trust the ocean or anything that lives inside it. I don’t trust the way it moves- I don’t trust myself enough to understand what it will do next. Luckily The Wayside doesn’t have a lot of ocean features. There’s a math problem that explains it: the drivable area of the country versus its physical boundary.
I don’t do math either.
‘The Wave Lake’ in Northern California sets off a lot of the same alarms I hear when I see the ocean. It sets off a few others, too, like the alarm for the movement of a spider. The alarm for a particularly gnarly looking mold. It takes me a while to figure out, but I think it has to do with the waves generating so visibly from the center of the lake, as though some massive heart is beating just underneath the surface.
And, in a way, there is.
‘Difficult to reach, and not for the normal reasons, ‘The Wave Lake’ resides deep within a wealthy gated community called ‘Ridgeburn.’Ridgeburn, at its outset, was created with an understanding that the lake at its center (previously Lasso Lake) should be made open to the public. As the development gained the backing of wealthy soon-to-be-residents, many of whom had law degrees and connections in local committees, the actual process for any non-resident citizen hoping to visit Lasso Lake became… arduous. In fact, an op-ed published some years after found that the process was technically impossible, a fact that was quickly quashed by the same powers-that-be that created the rules in the first place.
The shore of Lasso Lake (still its legal name) was tamed and, hoping to impress the snow birds in their summer habitat, it was fitted with a submerged wave machine. The device systematically ground every living fish in the lake to a pulp over the course of a week and the reek of it, the viscera, was so potent in the sun that Ridgeburn opted not to reintroduce wildlife to the area. Rather than alter the wave machine to make it less damaging, they fitted it with a powerful filter.
Lake Lasso now exists like an open wound, wet and lifeless and pulsing. It is wholly dependent upon the machine that collapsed its ecosystem. Without the filter, it becomes a stagnant puddle, its life only larval mosquitoes and rare bacteria.
But it’s interesting to see.
Travelers are advised to just sneak in by foot and linger only an hour to avoid detection. Swimmers are advised to avoid the center. It’s chewed up a small dog in 2023.’
I don’t swim. I mean, I do, generally speaking, but not at ‘The Wave Lake.’ Some combination of my revulsions keep me from wanting to touch the water- from even throwing rocks into it. Nobody is on the beach when I arrive. Nobody is on any of the beaches. The lake laps at the shore like a robot and I leave, mildly sunburned and climbing over fences.
-traveler
