Wonderland Lake

The virtues of standing still.

It looks just the same as I remember.

Golden scruffy hillsides. The stark winter light. The surface of the lake going from mirrored to matte in the transition from water to ice. The straightaway of the dam on the Eastern side. The expansive meadow at the water’s edge, dotted with Canadian geese taking a pit stop on their southward travels. 

This week I’m visiting my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Today I took a walk around Wonderland Lake, a path I’ve taken countless times before. A neighborhood staple. A watering hole for geese and humans alike. 

You could draw a treasure map of this lake, filled with hidden bounty. X marks the spot where I came home from the hospital and lived for the first year of my life. The house where my parents lived before I was born, with a cedar hot tub and two springer spaniels and a life of their own with friends and work and parties, when they were the age that I am now. 

Here’s the elementary school parking lot where I learned to ride a bike, doing victory laps with the training wheels off. Fuschia helmet tipped comically on my head and glaring gaps in my smile from lost teeth. 

Libby’s house where we gnashed fresh chives straight from the garden, practiced our lines from Shakespeare camp, and mixed Sprite and cranberry juice to recreate the effervescent magical tonic from The BFG. 

Here is where I took art class, learning about ellipses and color theory and composition. Where we nestled among the reeds making sketches of the habitat to reference later for our wildlife watercolors. Afterward we’d share a thermos of hot cider, our fingers nubby from the cold, blunt instruments no longer useful for sketching. 

There’s the house where I’d pick up my teammate for crew practice at 4:45am. The traffic lights changed for us from red to green as we approached each intersection, anticipating our needs with eerie tenderness. 

Ryann’s house where we snuck sips of Malibu rum and cruised the neighborhood on Razor scooters, stayed up late and studied for AP exams and burned CDs with Death Cab songs. 

They say your cells entirely regenerate every seven years. That there are seven dog years for every human year. Other parts of town have changed: buildings torn down, new ones put up, shifting like sand dunes. 

But at Wonderland Lake, time stops. 

Some places have staying power. There is a wisdom in staying in one place, unwavering, for decades or centuries or millennia. Humans do the opposite, constantly in motion from the moment we are born. But a wise old tree or a weathered rock or a street sign choose a spot and commit. They stand steady, the eye of the storm, observing the flux and flurry around them. 

Standing still allows insight into patterns we could never see when in motion. A friend of a friend makes a daily pilgrimage to the Golden Gate Bridge to take photos, rain or shine, holding one variable constant—place—and observing change over time. One day’s photo captures a soaring seagull. In the next, a hulking container ship. A formation of blue angels blurs past in another.

What can we learn by staying still? By holding steady? By returning to these places of stillness? It takes patience and humility to be the spectator and not the spectacle. When am I floating down the river, and when am I on the banks watching the river flow by? 

It is November 2023, and I’m at the lake. A familiar place, a different time. Walking in a winter Wonderland.