(image from here)
Once, in conversation with my brother-in-law, I commented (I was living in Kentucky at the time) on the number of rivers I had to pass/cross/drive over (whatever) to get to places - the biggest one being the Ohio River, should I be going to Ohio or Indiana. He was (is? we haven't talked in years) a long-haul trucker, & he thought about the rivers he regularly passed/crossed/drove over, & he said, "We really need more rivers in Texas."
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The closest I've ever lived near water was probably where I lived in my first two years in Austin. I was within walking distance of what was then called "Town Lake" but which is now called "Ladybird Lake" (so-renamed after the death of the former first lady) & which is really a part of the Colorado River. Not that I walked down there much. I was a busy student & the lake was kind of smelly & there were some terrifically large rats (nutria?) that lived there. They did not strike me as being shy but I did not want to find out if that were true.*
In my last visit to Austin, we went to find a food cart which just so happened to be in that very area where I lived from 1986 to 1988. & so, after thirty years, with many of the old apartments that were there demolished & replaced with condos & snazzier apartments, I walked with my wife & my dogs down to that lake. It felt like there were far more people around though it was a moderately cold December day. & perhaps it was natural that there were - according to the internets, when I moved to Austin, there were barely half a million people living there (485,000 is the number I got); thirty years later, the city had almost doubled in size (907,000 it said to me). This is just the city, not the metropolitan area, which I believe now contains over two million souls. In any event, I didn't remember much about the area, but it was nice to be close to Town Lake again, even if she had changed her name.*
The picture above is of some place called "The Harbor Rockwall." I have never been there. It's a harbor on a lake - called Lake Ray Hubbard - which forms some of the eastern boundary of my home town of Garland, Texas. (Rockwall is the town it's in, in case you were looking for a wall of rock.) It's possibly the closest harbor to when I was born, although it wasn't there when I was born; it was built in 2003. I hadn't lived in that area for sixteen years when it was built. But I made a half-assed effort to find a harbor near my birthplace & this is all I got.*
According to this Wikipedia article, Lake Ray Hubbard (some folks these days call it Ray Hubbard Lake) was named after a fellow "who presided over the Dallas Parks & Recreation System board from 1943 to 1972." It's human-made, says the article, "created by the construction of the Rockwall-Forney Dam, which impounded the East Fork Trinity River." The article mentions that the lake "contains a large population of hybrid striped bass, white bass, largemouth bass, channel catfish, blue catfish, white crappie, black crappie, & alligator gar." When I was a kid, we went swimming in the lake, probably not a lot, but a few times, & I remember one particularly lovely afternoon ruined when someone saw a water moccasin. We were made to get out of the water forthwith.*
The article also mentions, "Several areas of the lake have been infested with hydrilla." Because of the use of the passive tense, the sentence suggests someone is responsible, & I guess someone is, whoever brought the non-native plant to the area in the first place, but I don't think it was intentional. One of the problems with having a lake, I suppose.
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Just thinking about harbors tonight made me think about every time I'm near water, I kind of want to live near water. We walked around the Willamette River a couple of weeks ago & there's a dreamy quality to watching a river slowly pass you by. I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to fall asleep in a home near the sea or a lake - to see if that dreamy quality truly has a soporific effect.
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