Lake Awareness

It was a fabulous Memorial Day weekend and it seemed as though everyone had the same idea as myself: Go to the Lake of the Ozarks! However, it's amazing to visit such a site after having some of the new found knowledge I do now. Truly "good times" can bring on lake abuse.

So what is lake abuse? As I watched several of my friends work on jet skis with very novice expertise, I couldn't help but wonder how much oil and gas they managed to spill into the lake. Even though this was not their intention, it still qualifies as lake abuse. If you look around the lake you can see a lot of people doing the same. I have to wonder who actually has a good working pwc these days that is properly maintained. Not many.

At night I watched as someone shot nearly 100 bottle rockets into the lake while the neighbors across the way decided it would be hilarious to dump gas into the water and light it on fire. Again more lake abuse.

So what am I getting at? I guess I'm trying to say that even though I started out as a water conscientious person before, the AmeriCorps Clean Water Program has taken my awareness of clean water to the next level. I'm asking everyone else to do the same. Let's start thinking about what we're doing on the next level, even if it's just a one weekend trip where we come into contact with water or if we have lived there our whole lives. It's summer time and that's no excuse for us to start being water abusers.