Just as the Reservoir provides the town with water, it is a source of inspiration for the local children’s imaginations. The narrator imagines it as “a bundle of darkness” with a sleeping beast beneath its waters and “great wheels which peeled and sliced you like an apple.” Yet this fear doesn’t stop the children from exploring the Reservoir––in fact, it does the opposite. The mysterious Reservoir and its surrounding stories stir the children’s curiosity, demonstrating how curiosity can inspire exploration even in the face of fear. When some of the children argue against exploring the Reservoir, it is the accusation of cowardice that convinces them to go anyway. The narrator acknowledges the group “ha[s] not quelled all our misgivings,” yet they still “set out to follow the creek to the Reservoir.” Immediately after noting her “misgivings,” the narrator’s curiosity spikes, and she spends much of the walk puzzling over what the Reservoir actually is. By immediately following fear with curiosity, Frame links the two, indicating how fear of the unknown can actually fuel the courage to overcome those fears.
Throughout the story, fear and excitement blend together. When the children run home from the Reservoir, they imagine “darkness overtak[ing]” them, and for the rest of the journey the narrator imagines the horrors that might befall the children as they run. Yet, when they do return home, the children laugh at their parents for being “out-of-date” and “afraid.” The curiosity that fear inspires allows the children to face their fears, and by confronting the source of their anxiety, they overcome the fear entirely. This childlike curiosity gives the children an advantage over their parents by prompting them to explore what their parents withdraw from in fear.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fear, Curiosity, and Exploration ThemeTracker
Fear, Curiosity, and Exploration Quotes in The Reservoir
And for so long we obeyed our mother's command, on our favorite walks along the gully simply following the untreated cast-off creek which we loved and which flowed day and night in our heads in all its detail [...] We knew where the water was shallow and could be paddled in, where forts could be made from the rocks; we knew the frightening deep places where the eels lurked and the weeds were tangled in gruesome shapes; we knew the jumping places, the mossy stones with their dangers, limitations, and advantages; the sparkling places where the sun trickled beside the water, upon the stones; the bogs made by roaming cattle, trapping some of them to death; their gaunt telltale bones; the little valleys with their new growth of lush grass where the creek had ‘changed its course,’ and no longer flowed.
Our lessons came by post, in smudged print on rough white paper; they seemed makeshift and false, they inspired distrust, they could not compete with the lure of the sun still shining, swelling, the world would go up in cinders, the days were too long, there was nothing to do, there was nothing to do; the lessons were dull; in the front room with the navy-blue blind half down the window and the tiny splits of light showing through, and the lesson papers sometimes covered with unexplained blots of ink as if the machine which had printed them had broken down or rebelled, the lessons were even more dull.
Perhaps we would have to sleep there among the pine trees with the owls hooting and the old needle-filled warrens which now reached to the center of the earth where pools of molten lead bubbled, waiting to seize us if we tripped, and then there was the crying sound made by the trees, a sound of speech at its loneliest level where the meaning is felt but never explained, and it goes on and on in a kind of despair, trying to reach a point of understanding. We knew that pine trees spoke in this way.
We were lonely listening to them because we knew we could never help them to say it, whatever they were trying to say, for if the wind who was so close to them could not help them, how could we?
Oh no, we could not spend the night at the Reservoir among the pine trees.
What is it? I wondered. They said it was a lake. I thought it was a bundle of darkness and great wheels which peeled and sliced you like an apple and drew you toward them with demonic force, in the same way that you were drawn beneath the wheels of a train if you stood too near the edge of the platform.
In the Reservoir there was an appearance of neatness which concealed a disarray too frightening to be acknowledged except, without any defense, in moments of deep sleep and dreaming. The little sparkling innocent waves shone now green, now gray, petticoats, lettuce leaves; the trees sighed, and told us to be quiet, hush-sh, as if something were sleeping and should not be disturbed — perhaps that was what the trees were always telling us, to hush-sh in case we disturbed something which must never ever be awakened? What was it? Was it sleeping in the Reservoir? Was that why people were afraid of the Reservoir? Well we were not afraid of it, oh no…
