Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Two Boat Pond

Now this is just strange.

A few miles out of Gold River, there is a pond beside the highway. Just another of hundreds of nondescript water holes in the rainforest; half swamp, half brownish water, shallow enough to wade if the bottom is solid, which I doubt. There's no pathway to the edge, anyway; the water starts somewhere under a hardhack thicket. It's probably full of leeches or mosquito larvae.

Last March, I was driving by slowly, rubber-necking, looking for ducks, or I would never have seen the boats. There were two of them; foot-long, two-masted, flat-bottomed wooden boats, anchored at either end of the pond.

In March, the hardhack was bare, the grasses brown. Dead trees line the pond, their roots drowned in the wet winters.

We passed the pond again a couple of weeks ago. I had to stop and see if the boats were still there. One is. The other has disappeared; foundered and buried in muck, stolen by a curious bear, retrieved by someone in hip waders?

Boat # 2, in June. The grass is green, now, and the hardhack has leafed out. Otherwise, nothing has changed.

I took a series of photos to make a panorama of the ghostly trees on the far shore. There were too many conflicting colours, too many variations in the light as I turned. A black and white is closer to what I saw than a colour photo.

Boat # 2 is at the far left. Last March, boat # 1 was in the corresponding position on the right.

Who put the boats there? Why? How? I wonder.

3 comments:

  1. they look like something someone who likes woodcraft would make. The look beautifully made, to scale. I imagine making them and placing them here is more enjoyable that putting them on a shelf in the house

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  2. I wonder if you can see them on Google Earth maps

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  3. Yes. I think someone had a lot of fun making them and getting them into the pond. I found the pond on Google maps, but the boats weren't there. The map photos could be several years old.

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