Years ago, it wasn’t there. Years ago, when the lake was much larger and had not yet begun to fill in with silt, what is now a patch of land, heavy with trees of many shapes and sizes, was once clear lake water, reflecting blue sky. But when upstream silt flowed downriver and filled in parts of the lake, when that silt rose up above the water and slowly turned into fertile soil, when the weeds sprouted, when the bushes began to grow, when the trees took over and blotted out the sun for all the underbrush and smaller plants, what once was water became a forest, thick with natures proliferation of scraggly scrubs and sturdy structures reaching for the sky.