Throughout the story, nature comes across as dangerous, petty, or even actively malicious. The world, according to the narrator, is “full of alarm”: sunstroke, lightning, tidal waves, and the summer sun that “wait[s] to pounce” all present a threat to the residents of the village. In light of these dangers, the Reservoir represents human efforts to dominate part of the natural world. Even the children share this dominating instinct; the narrator wishes to “make [something] out of the bits of the world lying about us,” and when the children realize the creek is “our creek no longer,” they turn their gaze “possessively” on the Reservoir. The reservoir is “the end of the world,” the last piece of civilization before the land gives way to threatening wilderness.
When the narrator at last reaches the Reservoir, she describes the “little […] innocent waves,” which paints the water as tamed and meek. However, it becomes evident that the Reservoir is not an entirely successful conquest of the natural world. The convenience of tap water has not eased the fear of Infantile Paralysis that looms in the village, and the Reservoir has created its own dangers, too: according to the narrator’s mother, multiple children have drowned in its waters. When the narrator sees the Reservoir herself, after describing its “innocent waves,” the narrator gets the feeling that “something [was] sleeping” in the Reservoir that “should not be disturbed.” And yet the children ignore this sense of danger, playing right beside the “DANGER” noticeboard and insisting that they are not afraid. Though the children return home seemingly triumphant, whatever is “sleeping” in the Reservoir—whether that “something” is natural or technological or both—remains unconfronted. Even where nature appears to have been successfully dominated, then, modernization can never eliminate nature’s threats entirely, and in fact it might create new ones.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature vs Modernization ThemeTracker
Nature vs Modernization 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.
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.
Its nose was ringed which meant that its savagery was tamed, or so we thought; it could be tethered and led; even so, it had once been savage and it kept its pride, unlike the steers who pranced and huddled together and ran like water through the paddocks, made no impression, quarried no massive shape against the sky.
We saw [the creek] now before us, and hailed it with more relief than we felt, for [...] it had undergone change, it had adopted the shape, depth, mood of foreign water, foaming in a way we did not recognize as belonging to our special creek, giving no hint of its depth. It seemed to flow close to its concealed bed, not wishing any more to communicate with us. We realized with dismay that we had suddenly lost possession of our creek. Who had taken it? Why did it not belong to us any more? We hit our sticks in the air and forgot our dismay. We grew cheerful.
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…
