Roadblock VIII
Split Lake is the one interesting location for nature-loving sightseers within a hundred miles of town. The lake is located in the middle of a meadow full of wildflowers. Split Lake is the one interesting location for nature-loving sightseers within a hundred miles of town. The lake is located in the middle of a meadow full of wildflowers. It is called Split Lake because a large dam divides it into two portions with different water levels. When Phoebe first saw it as a child, she called it the split-level lake. The inn itself, a recent construction, is tucked away behind a small copse of birch trees on a slight elevation at the outer edge of the meadow. In warm weather one may sit at an outdoor table and see the lake through a gap in the trees. I preferred to be inside the inn, however, and Anita, for once, complied with my request without argument. I am not sure why; perhaps she was simply too preoccupied with what we had just experienced to make an issue of our sitting indoors on a day when the weather would have allowed us to be outdoors. A waiter bestowed hand-printed menus upon us. I was waiting to argue with Anita about the food. I was always delighted when Anita ordered lake trout, which she inevitably did at this place. I detest fish. I mean, I do not willingly eat them, though I think they are perfectly fine swimming about in water as they were intended to do. Anita and I argued about fish whenever possible, she informing me of the health benefits of eating them and I insisting that those benefits were offset by the high levels of pollution in the water where most fish spent their brief lives. It was a ritual, this arguing about fish, and I was about to begin the first verbal assault when Anita said,[This article is incomplete in Pentrace's own source database -- it cuts off mid-sentence at this exact point. Checked against the earliest available Wayback Machine snapshot (2015) and found the same cutoff already present, so the rest of the article appears to have been lost before any archiving took place and could not be recovered.]