Winds Howling

Yesterday Camilla and I crossed a goal off our list: kayaking the man-made “lake” next to the dead mall across the street from us. We used a pair of Intex Challenger K1 inflatable kayaks that Camilla got for Christmas.

I’ve written about this lake, and the island in it, a few times before. It’s not really a lake, but rather a stormwater retention pond, but still the city calls it Lakeside Lake. Within it is Lakeside Island Park, which you can reach via footbridge. All of this is next to Lakeside Mall, formerly a really popular mall, now pending demolition and redevelopment.

Since we were paddling in a bowl of runoff water, the water was totally opaque with sediment and who knows how gross. For the few steps I took in the water, the ground under my feet felt disgusting, like an earth slime between my toes. Fishermen and cormorants alike still seem to find some prey in this water, though. I’ve seen a couple of other people paddling here, but it’s not common.

I usually walk to the island a few times a week, but this was my first time getting onto the water. It was pretty gratifying. I wish it didn’t feel quite as dirty to do, because it’s quite peaceful once you get out into the middle of it. You do feel a bit surveilled by all the houses and apartments and stuff along the shore, but it’s easy to drown that out in the self-satisfaction of being on a kayak while they’re in their house.

Getting on the water gave us the opportunity to probe corners of the lake we can’t see from the island, like proper explorers. We passed through a tunnel to a whole second part of the lake we’ve never been to before. It isn’t easily accessible to us by foot and doesn’t have an island, so it isn’t as cool as the main part of the lake. But it had a different, quieter feel to it, with much glassier water.

Back in the main section of the lake, an up-close look at the shoreline revealed a lot of small decaying infrastructure, like these docks. To pass along a piece of hearsay, it’s because this stuff was grandfathered-in, and now there’s a lot of red tape around doing anything about it.

The water seemed really shallow wherever I stuck my oar down into it — never more than three or four feet. It almost seemed we were going to run aground trying to pass through this chokepoint.

We did run aground at the far north end of the lake, halting our progress toward an alluring tunnel (it’s for the best — it turns out the water was leading underground).

It seemed like a busy day for birds, even by the standards of this lake, where at any given time you can rely on seeing a lot of geese, ducks and a heron or two. We kept seeing blue herons, in particular, over and over, and Camilla got photos of a green heron up in a tree. Some more avian sightings:

Unfortunately, kayaking this lake often doesn’t seem advisable, as the water isn’t something you want frequent exposure to. But it was cool to get a closer look at the far shores, close enough to notice all the random detritus and decaying things and watch the birds living amongst it all. With the redevelopment of Lakeside Mall into “Lakeside City Center,” maybe more people will end up getting curious about paddling into this muck.