Becoming Lake Shakamak

Boat dock at Lake Shakamak, Jasonville Indiana.

When I was a young teen my parents began to rent a cabin on a scenic lake in a state park in Indiana for a week during summertime. Lake Shakamak looked like a spindly hand, it’s four finger tributaries created when the state damned a small river and created the three lake system. Shakamak had about 30 cabins on the outside of the pinkie near the cement tennis courts and boat rental shack, and swimming was relegated to the area between the thumb and index finger. The lake was known for fishing and a huge, 30 foot tall diving tower in the swimming area. We would stay for a week, away from the city and cable television, unable to be found while hiking, fishing, swimming and generally getting away from the world. As much as my family had camped and hiked, from Yellowstone to Yosemite, to me, this became our family camping place.

Shakamak is the northernmost in a series of 3 lakes that include Lenape and Kickapoo

Some social scientists claim that place is defined not as much by a specific location, but what we as participants do in a place. A particular ice cream shop becomes important because it’s where we went as a child, or this grocery store is where I buy my produce, or Lake Shakamak is where our family went camping. These actions in a space become the deciding factors in what people call a sense of place. Geographer Allan Pred claims that “Places are never ‘finished’ but always ‘becoming’.”1 We embody within places a certain importance because of what we do there, and what we do there is always evolving. Maybe eating habits change and I only shop at the farmers market co-op, or the ice cream store closes and another store takes its location. Those places have changed to me, and become entirely different because of the change.

The idea becomes increasingly problematic when we begin to contemplate the world of live feed video chat rooms. The proliferation of programs like Skype only highlight the place based quandaries that come with advancements in technology. With Skype, a live video feed is taken from the video camera on your computer and traded with the live feed taken from someone who you call, giving a real time, face to face conversation with friends across the world. But where does the action of a Skype conversation actually occur? Geographer Nigel Thrift believes that places are constructed by people doing things, and in a sense are constantly being performed.2 So where does the performance of a live feed or Skype conversation happen when the location is merely a crisscrossing of video and internet?

These are questions that social scientists and geographers will have to tackle in the future, especially with the increase in online role player games and virtual reality worlds. Some believe that these sites will eventually diminish the role that place has in the construction our self perception because they allow for actions and performances to happen in a place outside of a real world location. New definitions of place will have to be created, just as place itself is being constantly redefined as we live in it, to take into account this phantom place, located in a cloud, transmitted and intangible.

Christening the ginormous diving tower... Why do memories sometimes look like old Kodachrome photos?

But the here and now, the world outside of the virtual, is always changing, and sometimes in ways that we can’t control. This seems to be a reason to create an alternate world, one that can be regulated. But I don’t want to be the god of a virtual Lake Shakamak, I have my own memories of that place, that time, and our cabin overlooking a beautiful Indiana forest and lake. However they were molded by my own personal perception, and however they have weathered through time, they exist to me in a much more real way than anything that could be called virtual.

1 Place, A Short Introduction, Tim Cresswell, 2004, p. 35
2 Cresswell, p. 37

Photographs courtesy of the Indiana DNR