Fakification of the lake

Lake Delton, the 260+ acre artificial lake that drained completely over the space of a few hours during a flood back in 2008, bounced back quickly and began to attract tourists again. The lake is hardly the only or even most important attraction around here, but it is considered part of the natural beauty of the Dells area. We locals were somewhat amused at how quickly the necessary road repairs -- MAJOR road repairs -- got done when the business owners in the area pushed for help. We also noted that other badly-needed road repairs elsewhere at the time remain still undone four years later. Whateve.

At any rate, those same business owners apparently decided that the natural beauty of the lake was not beautiful enough. So a few weeks back, they hired a company to dump blue dye into the lake to make it "more aesthetically pleasing." You know, a sort of tummy tuck for the lake. It cost the taxpayers of Lake Delton just under $30,000 and the aesthetically pleasing effect was supposed to last less than a month under the best of circumstances.

Full disclosure: I am not a property owner or registered taxpayer of Lake Delton, although Lake Delton does help fund the library where I used to work. Thanks, guys!

One of the board members who approved the dye -- passed as an emergency measure! --owns a big attraction on the lake, but he claims that his decision had nothing to do with his vote. He says he would naturally recuse himself from voting on any issue that affected his interests. Harrumph! If you believe that, you may wonder why he did not do so on this vote, which obviously was going to affect his business. Whateve.

This is all part of the fakification of natural beauty. The real lake is greenish due to real things like algae living in it. And it is a dull green, not a pretty emerald green. So we will just tweak it a bit, photo-shop it, if you will. There, blue! Ta-da. For a month. Or maybe only two and a half weeks. But hey, think about all those tourists who were here during the two and a half  weeks who got to see a blue lake.

It is easy to see where they got the idea.The dells area has beautiful natural rock formations along the river. That is why the place has attracted tourists for well over a century. Today the dells also has a lot of not-so-natural rock formations, made out of plastic and such, some of which have not-so-natural waterfalls cascading down them. Many of these waterfalls are colored blue, and I suppose the owners believe the contrast of the blue water and the earth tones of the fake rock outcroppings add to the aesthetic experience. Could be, could be. I must admit that the blue water looks to me more like the overflow from a Tidy Bowl toilet, and I honestly believed that the color was a side effect of something they had put in the water to keep the fake rock faces from getting splotchy with algae. And maybe in that case, they do. But the lake dye job, we are assured, does not kill the algae.

Someone involved in the lake project reportedly said that killing the algae that causes the unwanted green in the water would just be treating the symptom, not the cause. If that makes sense to you, I suggest you ponder it for a while. Dyeing the water blue is not treating (covering up) the symptom, because ...?

Well, the property owners on the lake seem to be okay with it, although some of the comments are a bit odd. One owner says he pays three times as much taxes as non-lake property owners, so it is only fair that those taxes go to make his view better. For two and a half weeks, that is. I don't know. If it is in fact not helping the general public but only the property owners (and the people they charge to look at the pretty phony blue lake for two and a half weeks), shouldn't the entire bill be footed by the lakefront property owners? If ever there were something that sounds like it should be funded by private enterprise, this might be one of them.

One can only hope -- and reasonably so, given the efforts of groups to prevent it -- that this sort of thing will not spread here. Think how much prettier the dells on the river would  be if the trees were more autumnal in the fall. Perhaps we could go out and paint those brown leaves a pleasing red and orange. Or we could carve interesting figures into the rock formations to make it easier for tourists to see what the shape is supposed to be. And how much fun would it be to have a wrecked pirate ship run aground at Blackhawk Island? Or if we stocked the island with black hawks to fly around over the boats? Or what it the Sugar Bowl actually had a giant spoon sticking out of the top?

God, who presumably made the trees and the rocks and even the water and algae in Lake Delton, preserve us!

Incidentally, although the story of the dye job was all over other news outlets in the region and in the state, our local paper reportedly did not deem the event newsworthy. Mmm.

Fakification: Synonym for Disneyfication.