About three miles from the house is the Liberty Reservoir. It’s an artificial lake that provides water to Baltimore. It being a pretty day–clear blue sky, temperature around eighty-five–I packed a bag with notebook and pens, grabbed a towel, and drove out to the reservoir. I wanted to get some writing done while communing with nature.<\/p>\n
The road into the lake was closed off, so I parked in the visitor lot (as had many others), grabbed my bad, and jumped the barrier. I had to hike into the lake.<\/p>\n
It was about a mile and a half to the lake. For the first thirty seconds after I’d jumped the barrier across the road I had second thoughts–perhaps this wasn’t<\/i> a good idea. Hearing voices along the road eased those fears, and passing a couple of their way out eased them completely. I hiked around a bend, then around another, and at the top of an incline there was a fence. I jumped the fence, and a well-trod path led me through what seemed to be a Christmas tree farm to the water’s edge. I laid out the towel, sat down, and fished out my wriitng materials.<\/p>\n
It had taken about twenty minutes to reach that spot from the car.<\/p>\n
I wrote three pages over the next hour. A character I anachronistically named “Dirk”–I needed a name, stat, and that was the first thing that came to mind. After about an hour I had a visitor; a man came down the path with his black Labrador. They stayed for a few minutes–the dog wanted to pull him out into the lake, and finally the man tired of that.<\/p>\n
It was relaxing just to watch the wind blow across the water. It was the right place to write–I was writing a scene set at sea. It was quiet, too. Though the highway ran across the lake about three quarters of a mile off from my position I barely noticed. Finally, my arm cramped up, and I needed to stretch. I skipped stones across the lake.<\/p>\n
There’s a common mistake people make when skipping stones. They look for flat stones. Usually, flat lightweight<\/i> stones. There’s an obvious problem here. When you put the spin on the stone, a flat lightweight stone will curve and tumble rather than fly true. Then you’ll get maybe<\/i> one skip if you’re lucky. The key to a successful skip is not the angle. What you need is a heavier stone, one with a single flat side. Spin the stone parallel to the flat side and the stone’s weight will keep it stable in flight, giving you multiple skips.<\/p>\n
Another fifteen minutes skipping stones and I was ready to hike back out to the parking lot. All in all, it had been a perfect outing. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About three miles from the house is the Liberty Reservoir. It’s an artificial lake that provides water to Baltimore. It being a pretty day–clear blue sky, temperature around eighty-five–I packed a bag with notebook and pens, grabbed a towel, and drove out to the reservoir. I wanted to get some writing done while communing withContinue reading “On Skipping Stones”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[1143,4102],"class_list":["post-1091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-skipping-stones","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}