The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [76]
He laughed. “I’m totally winging it,” he said. “Everyone is. What do you think? Do you still have time? Want to take that boat ride?”
Keegan took one of Max’s hands and after a minute I took the other, and we climbed into the boat Keegan kept moored by the glassworks, at the docks where barges had once pulled up to load their wares. I sat next to Keegan near the bow, and Max, bundled securely in a bright orange life jacket, sat between us. The day had brightened and there were patches of blue, but it was still mostly overcast. I hugged my arms against the wind, glad to have my ratty old sweatshirt as we traveled out across the water, spray in our faces as we hit the white-crested waves. We traveled several miles down the lake, and I recognized the point where we crossed the border of the depot land into waters that had once been forbidden.
At first the green hills, forested or covered in swaying grasses, sloped down to the wide shale beach. Soon, however, the landscape began to change, grass-covered concrete bunkers rising out of the land in evenly spaced intervals. Even covered in sod they looked unnatural, rising out of the earth like the steady sound of a machine, like identical notes in the most boring piece of music in the universe. Their hunkering shapes and monotonous regularity made them seem ominous, too. Weapons bunkers, they must be; I’d seen an editorial from 1940 describing the soil as having been “seeded with bombs instead of wheat.” They were empty now, the weapons transferred, but even so I felt uneasy looking at them, the wild, organic beauty of the landscape lost to this precise and repetitious order.
Just past the last of the bunkers Keegan cut the motor, letting us drift with the waves. A cluster of machines, the yellow and orange and vivid green of crayons, stood on the shore. They had torn grass from the earth like a scalp, discarding it on one of the artificial hills, exposing the dark, rich soil. The area they had uncovered was large, and puddles had formed across it in the recent rains, so that in the overcast light it looked barren and uninhabitable; bleak, a quagmire.
“They sure don’t love the land, do they?” Keegan asked. “That’s the first stage of the first development. Not the one your uncle and Joey and Blake want to build, but a different company. We got a court order to have construction stopped temporarily. We’re trying to prove that the sale of those parcels was invalid.”
“I hope you can. You really should look into the groundwater. Because there’s a layer of shale beneath the soil that drains this whole area, and it looks like they’re damaging that here. Plus, the kind of development you’re talking about will strain the whole fragile ecosystem of the lake, which is already under stress. And this whole watershed drains into Lake Ontario, eventually. That’s the thing with water systems. Everything’s interconnected. Everything affects everything else.”
“Really, we’ll have to put you on the committee. I mean it—I called some friends while you were with Max, and it turns out the conservation groups have filed papers about the water table. That, along with the wildlife protection, is their main issue.”
“That’s good. What do you think? Will you win?”
“I don’t know. But here’s hoping.”
He turned the motor on again and took us past the lurid machines, past a forested section of land and a cluster of buildings, to a clearing. Here, the chapel stood by itself on a hill. It was built of red stone; the paint had peeled away from the doors, leaving them a weathered gray. A small graveyard, enclosed inside an ornate iron fence, stood beside it.
“There it is,” Keegan said. “I can’t wait to see the windows all uncovered. It’s a good thing they were boarded up, or we’d have lost them. I’m glad it’s far from the airstrip, too—less chance of damage from vibrations.”
“It looks so strange, here all by itself.”
Keegan nodded. “Believe it or not, the