Leave It To Beaver

Small tree cluster on Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York
Small tree cluster on Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York

The water level on Eastman Lake was way up, so high that the little foot bridge at the south end of the trail was floating. Along the shore we spotted the stumps of a few trees that beavers had just taken down. You can see some bite marks at the bottom of these small trees above. We assumed the fallen trees had floated to the out flow of this manmade lake and had jammed it up so we tried to find the overflow drain. We walked entirely around the lake and never found the outlet. It’s somewhere down along Lakeshore Boulevard.

I was thinking about how civilized the designers of the park were, creating these beautiful manmade lakes over a hundred years ago. And then the line from “Hearts and Minds,” a 1974 documentary about the Viet Nam war, popped into my head. I think it was a clergyman, maybe a priest, in Viet Nam talking about the invasion while it was going on. Something like, The US treats us like savages. We’ve developed our civilization over 5,000 years. They’re the ones who are the savages.

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