The Pond
After buying the old farmhouse at the end of one March a number of years ago, I quickly went around to its back to look at what I had really purchased it for. Because, although the house was very old and pretty in a vernacularly plain way, the property upon which the house sat was the real gem to me. Sloping just that side of gentle as an expansive amphitheater of lawn down to the woods below, it swirled around outcroppings of gray rock and pistachio-colored lichen. It passed two or three ancient apple trees and went through a proscenium formed by opposing copses of enormous white paper birches; their tallest arching branches meeting high above the lawn’s center stage like it was nature’s gothic doorway.
As I took stock of my newly purchased out-of-doors, I imagined how the old farm’s horse-drawn carts would travel upon the flat ribbon of trail that switch-backed midway across the slope. The trail now just evidenced by a terraced snaking path of grass.
It was in contemplation of all this when I noticed a few large mossy rocks, boulders actually, and a strong squish beneath my feet. Small percolations of spring water were rising to the lawn’s surface which then ran beneath my feet and across the descending lawn in broad sheets. There were six or seven of them spread over a small distance, all converging down the slope creating a larger fan of wet lawn. I could barely contain my excitement. An onlooker might have seen my muted jump for joy. Becoming instantly obsessed with visions of what my soggy lawn fan could become, I rushed up to the kitchen and impatiently plucked out a very large serving spoon. I began scooping out a few spoonfuls of ground which to my surprise released even more water from just beneath the grass. My mind and hand started feverishly having their way with the spoon and ground as I fantasized what must certainly be a torrent just below the surface. When I eventually bent the spoon's handle I came up with a plan: I’d merge all the springs into a stream that was to tumble, froth, and foam as it swept all its way down to the woods and for that I was going to need a shovel.
Trading in spoon for spade, I excavated around the springs. As the water emerged and descended the slope, I guided it all by creating rills which now were running through sand, silt, clay, pebbles and rock; by converging the rills I swept the space with greater fans of water which started dissolving the loam and sandy pan. I was being abetted and courted at the same time
With each passing spring, for a bit of years, I had the same sculpturing process of dialogue.
When I wanted something to go a certain way, I discovered some of the springs did not like my bullying, domineering nature so they instead stubbornly stayed submerged beneath thicker mud and bigger stones. At these times I relented, letting them have their way because even though I knew my plan was a good one it would only happen so long as I didn’t force the issue upon Nature. I had faith Nature would eventually understand and agree with me in the end. It was only that Nature didn’t know it yet I mused imperiously. For my part I also knew it would take days and days with weeks and weeks of digging, sloshing, negotiating, arguing with , submitting to, but occasionally dominating the subterranean ocean I was sure I now was in charge.
And the stream I created was indeed there... sort of. Considering it had all the water I could summon from its headwaters, all the water it was ever really to get all year, in fact, because it was Springtime....I realized I had produced a small but respectable brooklet. I was reluctantly pleased in a way. I ran the sixty yards or so up to the house and into the kitchen. I looked through the window toward my birch tree theater and the lawn’s new onstage star: My stream.
At first I thought I actually saw it, but it turned out to be a rock. So I squinted. I wanted to believe my eyes saw what ended not really being there but what they wished was there: the stream. A stream. But it was only as the day went on and the shift of the sun as it was beginning to set did I then see the glimmers of backlit water. So, it really was there. Only I would have to wait till the sun’s position in the sky was just so. Or, I could resort to binoculars and see it anytime. But neither option was satisfying. A revision of my plan was therefore needed.
I wanted to see water. I wanted to see water from every room that overlooked the back yard, and that meant from nearly every room in the house. So my dream remained uncompromisingly lofty as I ate dirt realizing my resources were much more meager than anticipated.
A vision is a vision and what does one replace a vision failed than with yet another vision? A new plan: To be a pool. The water and I thought it so clever a solution and so easily done. I had already done the harder work by succeeding in having the springs obey me (with some tacit compromise of course) and they did great work by forming a runnel for me (I could now admit my stream was no more than a largish runnel). All I’d have to do now is direct the runnel to a basin and contain the water where it could reflect what was above. For what is water really good for apart from drinking, if not for reflecting sky and trees around it? In a day or two of digging there it was. It worked too. Not only did it reward me with little ripples upon its surface at times, but those ripples could also be seen from my kitchen window- that perch and seat of judgement of whether my vision was realized or not. I saw it. True my pool was small. Only three feet by four and just about eight inches deep. But it had unwittingly been shaped like an eye that grew silver, gold, and occasionally hazel when the clouds allowed the sky to peek through: an eye of liquid that mirrored a hovering birch branch or flying bird. An eye in the landscape. I rested and thought about how my vision turned out to be an eye.
Spring ran on into summer and newer larger leaves on the birch added green to the eye while greater warmth of the air stole water from it. My eye was shrinking and shrinking fast. It then dried up. It would certainly fill with a hard rain, spill over even, but cruelly return to a dark socket of dirt.
I realized I was new in this place. Nature was not unconditionally permeable to my exact ideas, occasional insolence nor impressed by my groping ideas of landscape design. Evaporation, this foe, was now newly abetted by a retreating water table both absconding with my water and probably having its ineluctable way with it deep below the surface. I became jealous and grieved.
I knew I must win back the heart of my vision. Scheming and plotting, I would resort to any trick to fool Nature into giving me what I felt was rightfully mine. But I also knew Nature had a vested interest and owned more than half of my venture’s shares. I figured I’d better have Nature, either fully representing itself or by proxies, sitting with me by the water table at the next board meeting.
I found I could only enter the water table’s lair, by digging deeper and farther down the slope. I figured I could minimize water loss by making the basin wider, longer, and deeper, yielding a substantial volume of water to resist evaporation. In a rush of mind I felt I might even unearth more springs! It would now be a pond.
I invested in tools: A pick (a girlish one with a red handle), shovels, wheelbarrows, pails and rope. I was enticed from the more superficial layer of gravel into the deeper moist sand of the capillary fringe, that singular interface with complete saturation. And I was rewarded occasionally when rain filled the bottom of my basin with a few inches of delightful muddy water that actually stayed there.
One summery day, after a such a drench, I noticed a wood frog investigating me. It was bobbing in the water and looking directly at me. I was charmed by an acknowledgment such as this and so grateful, yet I did want the frog to understand ( I also knew the rest of Nature would be listening) that “I’m digging this for you, you know.” But the frog just appraised blankly like frogs are wont to do.
“That’s right. I pressed. I promise you a home”. And with that I felt I had the final word and continued my work. The frog stayed put, bobbing while I dug the rest of the day filling buckets of earth and water and dumping them on the shores. And when it would occasionally disappear I took care not to accidentally evict this dear to whom I had just promised a home.
My digging intensified greatly. I dug by moonlight. I dug in rain, I dug when I cried. I dug while I sang. I’d slip and fall down digging- getting up just to fall into the mud again. I was called flat out crazy by some. A lunatic. For digging under a full moon? Well, I needed the moon’s opinion too. Besides, it was so kind to illuminate my venture.
“Why don’t you just get somebody with a back hoe to dig it out for you?”.
A back hoe? NO! I’m the one having this conversation with my soon-to-be-pond, not a man with a machine. Not that I didn’t give the back hoe idea a thought myself when feeling impatient. But I knew I couldn't do that.
The winter cold would return but that did not dissuade me from digging and dredging. The running water also continued its cooperative nature by not freezing making my work much easier. Water and gravity helped me dig in the ice and snow as it melted and softened all of the ground it permeated. I could take out the ground in chunks of ice. I was often thankful and praised the water.
But while the pool was shaping up to become a rather large basin of mud and ice I began helplessly to see it as a cesspool. I started thinking that the honeymoon with my vision was over and I started seeing my vision as a displaced cesspool. But I was to keep that just to myself and that allowed me to continue digging.
One day I was expecting the UPS man to arrive with a package. After I heard he’d arrived, I ran up to the house in my muddy work clothes, my hair and face smeared with variously watery fresh clay and caked on loam. I greeted him cheerfully and for some reason told him not to mind my appearance. That I was only in the middle of “cleaning the bathroom”. I don’t know how he responded because by the time I finished my words I was bent over in hysterics and next he was gone. That’s what Nature was doing to me. Making me submit to uncontrollable giddiness and taking public liberties with bathroom humor.
Because the emerging pond had become so ugly that winter, come early spring I petitioned the pool to be festooned with wild flowers I planned to start from seed. Yet it became clear the cesspool was not itself anymore. It had in its own way groped towards me as bits of native greenery spontaneously emerged around it. It was more defined and rich. It acknowledged its own depth... five feet. It submitted to its own length.... twenty five feet and nearly as wide. I stopped digging and looked. The silt settled. It was actually becoming something, a something I had been vaguely seeing only in my mind’s eye for several years now. I felt I both knew it intimately yet was detached and astonished by it. It was a wonderfully familiar alien.
As a coda I channeled the excess run off from the pond down a small but effective cascade of rocks. It gurgled. I planted more flowers all around to give it a crowning glory. I tidied up. I admired it, I meditated upon it, I was mesmerized by it. I almost slept with it.
One late May afternoon, when I could not think of anything more to do, I sat with my back against one of the mossy boulders under which so many of my springs emerged. The sun had started to make its descent through the trees and refracted light hit the water which reflected, refracted, and projected the imaged ripples across the flat face of one of the giant stones now acting as a screen reflecting the pond to itself. As the pond beheld itself and while I beheld the pond I noticed a frog beholding me beneath a marsh marigold blossom. It stared directly at me and ballooned its membranes. My work was done. I said to the frog “See? I told you I would make a place for you to live”.
I was satisfied. I had kept the pledge to all involved, to all who signed up or were conscripted. As the sun drew further down, I stood and walked up the slope of lawn, through the proscenium of birch, turning often to see what the pond looked like from as many angles and altitudes that inspired me. There was a particular rich shadow of chartreuse and mysterious contrast to the land that only the middle of May can bring to Connecticut. The air was exuberantly soft, yet dry, cooling, fragrant and clear. I reluctantly said so-long to the pond and entered the house to make my way to the kitchen window where my husband was standing waiting for me. Over the sink we looked out from my perch of judgment. There it was. A true tarn of limpid spring water peering through “Nature’s Gothic Doorway”.
It was during my contemplation and my husband's momentary departure from the sink when I caught sight of a large splash followed by actual waves hitting the pond's shores. Some very large frog I thought. Maybe even a bull frog. Instead, through the birches, I saw a duck. By the looks of it, a female. Presently came another duck. A colorful male. Any colorful male duck was a mallard to me but this one was graphically painted in remarkably beautiful shades of caramel, red, purple- iridescent- rainbow, emerald green, indigo... all outlined in a bright white. Seeing it broke my trance and I called my husband back to look.
He said "That is the most beautiful duck I’ve ever seen, I wonder what kind it is”.
“A mallard”, I said.
“Oh no it’s not” he said. “That is the most beautiful duck in the world”.
Since neither of us knew what kind of duck it was, I decided to identify it with the help of a bird book that came with the purchase of the house. It took no time to identify it as a wood duck. The first line of text describing it as:
"Considered by many to be the most beautiful duck in the world...”
Now, had I a vision of digging a pond so that two utterly unfamiliar birds would find it and swim and take up courtship activities there every morning and evening for two weeks at the end of that May, I never could have done it. Nature took control over the reveal while making sure I would know it was pleased by our cooperation. I was given a gift of a vision I could have never envisioned.