It’s the very essence of calm, a still surface of blue-silver water reflecting billowy cumulus clouds above. Large shafts of light pour down through the clouds at angles on the shoreline, creating swaths of light-green trees in the middle of darker pines and bejeweled light on the water.

On a 90-degree humid day, I can feel any momentary hint of cool off the water and even a small breeze. As the wind picks up a slight bit, it produces tiny ripples of movement on the water. Cicadas keep up their steady-buzz accompaniment, throbbing in high volume with momentary pauses.

This is an August afternoon at the Ashokan Reservoir, where things seem to all move slowly and one feels every stir of air. A world of blue-green mountains and water stands still. If you want to see the beautiful, deep fullness of the summer before its customary turn toward autumn and winter, the Ashokan Reservoir provides it. The very mountains, reservoir, and sky seem to say, “What’s the hurry? We’re not going anywhere.”

I’m walking the roadway that contains what locals know as the “Lemon Squeeze,” a crossing over a reservoir dam. The thin two-lane road has been closed to vehicular traffic since September 11, 2001, due to concerns about the security of the dam. The reservoir is a major one in New York City’s water supply system. Thus, the road is now a pedestrian-only place.

It’s an elevated walk that allows a grand view of the play of water, light, and the Catskill Mountains. To the northwest on this August day a light haze covers the most distant mountains, which are edged in slivers of blue. The rolling forest southeast stretches out in the opposite direction from the walkway, and it’s full, soft, and inviting.

Many of us hate August heat, while others thrive in it. Nature itself doesn’t hint of its preferences – it knows only being. So when I feel crabby about the afternoon’s stickiness, I know that the Ashokan will show me a way to be with the hot summer.

It requires, first of all, that I pay more attention to my senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell. The late-summer air can feel oppressive. But stop and smell: there’s sweetness in it, as if August’s growing things are pungent with their own fullness. The sides of the walkway feel festive with the purple wildflowers, golden rod, cream-colored and soft Queen Anne’s lace, and neon-green grasses topped by burgundy red stalks. A yellow moth with green edging alights on the flowers. A lone barn swallow flies in rapid circles above the dam, and then quickly it’s joined by nearly a dozen others.

Constant Variation

Watching silently from the walkway I see ever-changing thick cumulus and wispy cirrus clouds in play with rays of light in the open sky and shining on the mountaintops. It feels like I am watching a series of paintings, and it’s easy to become enchanted with the shifts of light and color, at one moment graying clouds that turn the water a deeper silver and then sunlight that throws bright glints of water in circles. No wonder Monet and other painters returned to the same places again and again to capture them in different light and mood.

On this August day, it was thoroughly sunny and bright where I stood, but off over the mountains, dark clouds appeared to threaten a storm elsewhere. The Ashokan Reservoir is 13 square miles, and at full capacity it can hold 122 billion gallons of water. From the Lemon Squeeze walkway, like the promenade on the other side of Reservoir Road, the expanse of the Ashokan stretches out so wide and far that one can sometimes see, in different directions, two or three cloud and weather patterns at once.

And yet the nearby show kept my attention as much as that far-off vista. Within a short time, the water’s color transformed from shimmering blue to black with pinkish off-white splotches reflecting the clouds, like an abstract painting. A dragonfly glided over the reservoir’s surface for a long distance. The reflection of the cove’s trees on the water’s edge became deeper green.

Then a lone bird, flying low over the water, became a black dot over a reservoir surface made bluish gray under darker clouds. On a hot August afternoon at the Ashokan Reservoir, nature is the master painter.

(This walk continues the seasonal exploration of the Ashokan Reservoir. See also Mindful Walker’s “A Winter Walk at the Ashokan Reservoir.”)