Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

Over the weekend, Julie and drove over to the Ashokan Reservoir to take Lenny for a walk. It was around 50 degrees and there were just a few wisps of clouds, so a beautiful day for mid-December in upstate New York.

The Ashokan is one of a number of reservoirs around here that provide drinking water for New York City (Lucy Sante published a book on this). There is actually a NYC police station in this area, with NYC squad cars parked outside, in order to patrol and protect the NYC water supply.

It’s a somewhat strange and beautiful area—strange because of the uncanny collisions between nature and industry. At a distance, a reservoir looks like a vast lake, but of course it was created with technology for a specific purpose. And besides the police station, there are all sorts of industrial buildings scattered through the woods, which I suppose are needed for filtration and pumps and so on.

We walked into an open space that was eerily empty. The buildings were enormous and reminded me of some combination of the buildings in Chaplin’s Modern Times with a touch of the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Maybe a little Malick-like awe in there, too. In front of one of these government buildings was what looked like an enormous stone sculpture, but it might have been for some water-conveying purpose I didn’t understand. And near this sculpture were a series of large open grates, and you could hear the machines churning somewhere deep beneath them.

It was a happy and sunny day filled with adventure, but if I’d come there in another mood, I might have thought these grates were there to keep people from falling into hell.

Julie and I took turns lying beside the grates, feeling the machinery roaring somewhere far below. Each had a different sound signature. And while I was lying there I was staring at the clear blue sky, and I realized how infrequently I do that these days. As a kid, it seemed to happen all the time. But now I only lay down and look at the sky once in a great while. I’ll bet I can go a year or two without it happening.

It was a little scary, but also thrilling—I remembered how much this perspective make me feel like a tiny speck of nothing in the universe, which produced some anxiety but also a palpable feeling of wonder. I need to be doing this more regularly.