Failure of the Day: The Nature, As Usual

For the long weekend, we got a little inspired to go into it, my nemesis, the Great Not Indoors. Not far into it, mind you, and not for very long, but into it nevertheless. Mountain Lake park is about 10 blocks from our apartment, near 12th Avenue. I’ve been there a few times, but Chris had never seen it and it is pretty cool after all that there’s a secret lake right there, and it was a nice day and we were going to that area anyways to get Star Wars slurpees, so we figured we might as well go look at the Nature.

And it’s pretty, there’s no arguing with that. It’s not very convenient though. We found a nice bench overlooking the lake and settled in. Chris was a little put off that our bench didn’t have cup holders and I would have preferred that it was entirely encased in a nice sterile glass booth, but we made do.

We immediately spotted a very big orange carp, which I named Pete, and group of little brown ducks. Chris said that it is a well-known fact that carp eat ducks and so we were about to witness a bloodbath. But then a family of tourists came up and started staring at Pete and that warned the ducks away. That was disappointing—nothing spices up the Nature like some good ole survival-of-the-fittest action—and Chris got very annoyed that all those people were looking at OUR carp.

Then pigeons became an issue because a lady at the next bench broke out a bag of breadcrumbs, so we took our cue to move along. We walked along the shoreline—all 20 feet of it—but then some insane girl actually rolled her pants up and waded into the lake and we had to flee in revulsion. It’s one thing to get the Nature on your shoes…but to get it on your actual feet? Horrible! We scurried up to Clement Street and ate some pizza that was pretty lousy (I miss the Front Room!) but at least was not full of dirt and leaves and itty bitty gnats like the Nature was. Viva Civilization!