STILL BEING MADE
A reflection from the Upper Watch on altered water, unfinished ground, and arrival
Date / Moment: July 19, 2026, evening
Location: The Place / Upper Watch
Type: Reflection
I spent most of the day at the computer working on The Fishery That Would Not Stay Made.
It was unexpectedly cool for July. I wore a sweater inside and kept it on when I stepped outdoors, unless I was standing directly in the sun. It would have been a good day for outside work, but I was too caught up in the page to leave it alone.
By evening I needed to step away from the screen.
I had been at the computer for at least eight hours. I had taken a few short breaks, but the page was essentially all I had done that day.
That day was not the whole of it. I had been working toward this fisheries page, in one form or another, since I came here in 2022.
As I got up, I thought about the last time I had spent years returning to a landscape through a computer, and hours at a time inside it.
It was when I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
I carried that thought outside with me and walked onto the Upper Watch.
Construction is still underway here. Lumber, tools, disturbed earth, scraps, and unfinished work lie directly below me. Beyond them, the water caught the sun and looked settled.
It is not.
The fisheries records were still running through my head: the attempt to change this system into something else, the poisoning, stocking, and management required to create a particular fishery, and the continuing work needed to keep it from becoming something different again.
With Red Dead Redemption 2 already in my mind, I looked through the trees toward the water below me.
For a couple of years I played it as a role-playing game. Most of the time my character was partly Native and kept to himself near Wapiti. Eventually I bought a house that felt more like a cabin, somewhere between Wapiti and Strawberry, near the transition between the cold and snow of the higher country and the mud around Valentine.
Through a screen, I had built and inhabited a version of the place I imagined I might someday want.
Now I was standing at the Upper Watch, looking through the trees at water below me, and realized that I was seeing something close to what I had once seen on that screen.
Except this was real.
And reality carried the alterations with it.
There was no pristine country waiting for me inside the game. Its landscape was already occupied, divided, and changed before my character entered it.
There is no pristine place waiting here either.
The pond was raised. Its fish community was killed and reconstructed. Roads, houses, and structures followed. The ground below the Upper Watch is being changed again now.
By me.
The water beyond the construction looked complete only because I was viewing it from a distance.
The same could probably be said of the life I once imagined through the screen.
I did not arrive at an untouched place.
I arrived at a place still being made.