I had the strangest experience last week. From where I work, I can see the lake, and one day, there was, as if from nowhere, a huge crane and a platform with steel girders standing vertically from it, as tall as the trees. I couldn’t see what the crane was hauling, but it made me sad. There’s this lovely, unbroken stretch of lakefront, and now there was going to be something built there, too.

It had me thinking about how little there is still completely left to its own devices, when it comes to nature, about the recent controversy of a privately-owned skywalk–you know, one of those glass decks that juts out of the side of a mountain–built in a Canadian national park. About how, even in our refuges from commerce, we seem to add commerce.

I’d resigned myself to a new structure forcing its way into the shoreline, wondered how it would look, whether it would stand as tall as the girders, as the red crane swung back and forth.

And then, later in the week, I caught sight of a barge. Then another one. I focused on my work, and looked up again. Suddenly, the thing I thought was so intrusive, the thing I thought was so permanent, was being towed away into the water.

So you never know.

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