The Lake

Today the sun got up early. It's "fall back" time, so the sun, ahead of the game, beat me to the park, up and shining in the cold morning air. A bus had started stopping at this corner, where you used to could drive around the part but now can't because of the non-barrier barrier right there. But the old-fashioned carriage bus, that the city brought out of mothballs and uses now for a shuttle, stops here on its shuttle circle. A couple approached tentatively. Does the bus stop here? Hard to tell with no bench of pole, just a slab of concrete.

I'm using a new routine, for a while at least. Instead of all the way around twice, once at a jog and once at a walk, I cut back across, halfway through the second round. I light out for the territories. Cut across the wonderful open, the world receeding, breathing, across the wide open swale. Heading for the opposite corner.

I can do this because they cut off the spinklers in winter that always seemed to go off in the early morning. Now, the grass grows longer, thicker, with less mown chaff on top to gather on my socks and shoes. I walk on dry, soft, thick grass. I preferred the mowed but unfertilized ground of the old days, before the sprinkler system, because it had more variety of weeds and gave a firmer footing and harder edges to the rises. This new, softer grass smooths the gently undulating terrain, with its sloughs and dips and dents.

The park sinks in the middle, about six feet, like an enormous shallow serving bowl with broad sides that flatten, bear the trees, the whole thing lined with the necklass of the jogging track. I often think it could fill with water, like a playa lake. West Texas has tons of playa lakes. Sometimes when you take off in a jet in the early morning and look to the east over the great Caprock escarpment, you see them spread like jewels into the horrizon. Hundreds of them, shallow and round, recharging the massive Ogalala aquifer, hidden far below. They capture and hold the rain, dripping it down through the limestone, seeping in the dark to the underground lake of pure splash and depth. The shallow lakes bring cranes, geese, ducks, coots and harbor bass, catfish, salamanders, waterdogs, and newts.

Our city has a dozen or so playas that the fish and game stocks with rainbow trout in winter. A put and take fishery. The park doesn't hold water though. Sometimes it tries, after a hard rain, to get a glisten of water out there in the soggiest part. Maybe fool some tired geese. But it seeps away, evaporates, only held by some tougher water plants and cruised by enormous black dragon flies, almost big as bats, out in the sour, hot, wet marsh, that itself will soon dry and harden and crumble.

Today I walked, cut across, through what would have been the lake on the park. I watched the margins of the park as I dropped down the shallow slope, the imaginary water swirling around my legs getting slowly deeper, the grass waving around my feet getting dimmer in the dark, decay stained water. Out in the middle, the water around my neck, I could only feel the bottom, still warm from yesterday's sun, the water slowing my progress, lifting me so I almost swam or floated from one bounce of foot to the other. My head at the level of the jogging track, I passed sloughs and dips in the terrain, places that would hold fish. I looked for the edges and soft rises where minnows would congregate, line up side to side and tail to tail, a mass surging as one. Then I rose again with the slope, up toward the rock-lined garden in the corner where I would emerge, dripping, almost dry by the time I could lift my foot, wet with black and yellow chunks of debris, gobs of stinky mud, broken acorn shells, leaves, bark fragments, strands of grass and lost feathers.

Back on dry land again right where the water would end, a drifting of grass clippings making a ring and depositing a last batch of debris on my sagging socks. I left imaginary wet, dripping tracks crossing the street and onto the sidewalk, the tracks getting fainter as the sun warmed the concrete and I headed home.

Panhandle Playa Lakes