Edward Myers
The pond rests in a hollow halfway down the slope right where the meadow meets the woods. A spring keeps it filled; an outlet notched into the opposite rim empties the overflow through a narrow trench and down the steep hillside. Eighty feet in diameter, this artificial mini-lake is so well landscaped that it looks completely natural. The water and the setting are lovely in their own right, and this tiny ecosystem is congenial to wildlife that wouldn’t be present here otherwise––minnows, peepers, newts, dragonflies, and frogs. The pond seems to have been in this place forever. Its presence out of sight from the house makes it feel separate and mysterious, a realm distinct from both the meadow and the forest.
There’s one other aspect that draws me. When my wife and I took the ramble that first sparked our desire to purchase this property, I immediately perceived the pond as a splendid spot for a meditation shack. I could go down there daily during good weather to sit in stillness. I could meditate in a quintessential Buddhist setting. Of an evening, I could contemplate the moon.
*
The old pond —
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
––Matsuo Basho (1644-1695) (tr. Robert Hass) 1
*
Even during our first summer of living here, Edith and I conclude that the pond is sick. The water has grown turbid; the smell is heavy. A few feet below the surface, wispy aquatic plants have bloomed in great profusion. Wild irises mass along the far shore like tourists waiting on the dock for the Nantucket ferry. Frogs are clearly thriving in that environment, but I see no signs of the trout and perch that Paul and Doris, our predecessors on this property, had stocked during their years of ownership. When autumn arrives, maple and ash leaves stream down from the nearby trees, float on the surface for a week, then sink out of sight. I gradually begin to grasp what I’m witnessing. These changes are all part of eutrophication, the natural sequence of changes that will gradually fill in, dry out, and convert the pond into merely another part of the meadow. The pond isn’t really sick at all; it’s just . . . changing. From Edith’s and my standpoint, however––the standpoint of human beings intent on maintaining an attractive pond on their property––the process amounts to a terminal disease. It’s advancing rapidly. By our second summer in Vermont, the water has grown dense with aquatic plants and smells more and more fetid.
The issue quickly moves beyond diagnosis to treatment. We consider the options. Chemicals are one possibility. Algaecides would quickly wipe out the bloom, but they would also sterilize the water, poison most other plants, sicken or kill many animals present, and potentially endanger people and creatures downstream from the outflow. The State of Vermont has rightly banned this type of treatment. What, then, are the alternatives? I pose this question to our neighbor Jeff, the local excavation contractor who dug the pond for a previous owner back in the 1970’s. “Well, you could always muck it out,” he tells me. What would that involve? “You’d pump out the pond and get an excavator down there to scrape out the plants. Then you’d let the rain fill it up again.” The cost? “Oh, maybe a couple thousand dollars.”
The cost is too great. Many other projects have precedence. At least three dozen tasks on our to-do list are more urgent than upgrading the pond.
Yet the situation continues to deteriorate. By late summer, the water has turned a hazy green-brown. Worse, it looks less like water than algae in aspic—a vastly intricate mass of vegetation, soft and filigreed, with a transparent substance encasing it. To call this a dying place would be inaccurate. It’s very much alive. Mosquitoes, water striders, dragonflies, and other insects clearly thrive here. Minnows dart about in the shallows. Frogs reveal their presence by their calls—cut cut cut cut—and by their abrupt leaps into the pond when I approach the shore. But these critters are clear signs of a transformation that we still hope to forestall and, if possible, to reverse.
*
That summer is the hottest ever recorded in the United States and a time of severe drought in most of the country. Although the temperatures are lower in Vermont than elsewhere, the weather is still unpleasant. Edith and I find the heat stressful despite knowing how much worse the situation is nearly everywhere else. Late in August, however, the dry warmth gives me an idea. Why not simply drain the pond and leave it empty for a while? The water weeds would die in the dry heat. That in turn would solve most of the problem––or would at least slow the process of eutrophication. When I cross paths with Jeff again, I ask him about this scenario. “Yeah, you could do that,” he states in his gravelly baritone. He even offers an approach that would be simpler and cheaper than using the rented pump I’ve proposed for managing the task. “Just put a one-inch hose into the pond, start a gravity feed, and siphon the water over the edge and down the hillside.”
That’s what I set out to do. At the local hardware store I purchase three twenty-foot lengths of flexible plastic hose and some coupling devices to link the pieces. My plan: immerse the hose in the pond to fill it, drag one end up the bank, and throw that end over the down-hill side to get the water flowing. In practice, the task isn’t quite so simple. The pond’s shore is steep and slippery. Just reaching the water’s edge is much trickier than I’ve expected. I could easily slide into the pond and have trouble getting out. Rather than risk a potentially dangerous situation, I find a long branch, tie it to one end of the hose, throw the rest of the coil into the pond, and use the branch as a handle to help me dip the open end. By repeatedly scooping water, I plan to fill the hose until it sinks altogether. Then I’ll cap the open end with one hand, drag it up the hillside, fling it over the edge, and start the flow. But this approach turns out to be much harder than I’ve expected. Filling the hose is difficult. Dragging it up the slope drains most of the water back into the pond. I never succeed in starting the flow.
After brooding over this initial fiasco, I abandon the effort and go to bed. An insight dawns as I fall asleep: I’ll run a garden hose down to the pond. Using it to fill the exhaust hose will be quick work. How quick? The next morning, all I have to do is pirate every length of every garden hose from every part of the property, purchase another hundred feet of hose from the local hardware store, connect all these separate segments, and run the assemblage downhill from the house to the pond. Not so quick after all. My initial experiments are promising, however, since filling the siphon hose takes only about two or three minutes. The problem is what happens next: getting one end of the hose up and over the pond’s rim without letting the water inside it drain back into the pond. Trying this on my own isn’t effective, so Edith and I attempt a two-person gambit.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I explain. “I’d like you to stand right there by the edge of the pond. Hold your end of the hose pointing upward.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll stand up here by the rim and fill my end of the big hose with the garden hose. When I say Go, drop your end into the pond.”
Edith nods.
As we hold our respective ends of the big hose to form a large U, I proceed to pour in water from the garden hose.
“Go!”
Edith throws her end into the pond at exactly the same moment that I throw my end over the pond’s rim onto the hillside.
Water gushes out of the outlet and down the hill. Eureka! . . . sort of. After a minute or two, the flow diminishes to a trickle and then stops.
We try the sequence again. No go. We try again. No go.
Plans A and B have now achieved the same result: nothing. The pond continues to fill from the spring and to drain from the outlet. A few minnows dart about near the shore. Now and then a frog belches in its lair of irises. Insects skim above the water.
*
Cold, wet leaves
Floating on moss-coloured water
And the croaking of frogs—
Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.
––Amy Lowell, “The Pond” 2
*
A book I acquire—Tim Matson’s Earth Ponds: The Country Pond Maker’s Guide to Building, Maintenance, and Restoration—confirms that my concern about eutrophication is valid and that attempting to slow the process is worthwhile. “Taking the water out of a pond can be an effective vegetation control method,” Matson writes. “Algae and aquatic weeds cannot live without water, and when the pond is dried out, much of the vegetation dies.” Even a partial drawdown can make a difference. But Matson goes on to state that algae and weeds “are more effectively eradicated after complete drainage during both warm and cold weather.” 3
These comments inspire a further gambit. Mid-November, during an unusual dry spell, I decide to roll out the artillery. From a local equipment rental service I acquire an industrial-strength pump for the weekend before Thanksgiving. It’s a Wacker Neuson—a gasoline-powered diaphragm pump that, in the words of the manufacturer, “can move anything that flows.” Most often used for draining construction sites, this machine is probably underpowered for drawing down an entire pond, but running it for a few days seems a worthwhile experiment. I tow it down the hillside in a little wagon hitched to our Husqvarna lawnmower. I set it up with the twelve-foot “hard hose” immersed in the pond and the thirty-foot canvas outlet hose draped over the pond’s southern rim. Starting the pump without difficulty, I watch with satisfaction as it begins to work. The black rubber intake hose jolts from the force of the pump’s suction. The outlet hose quivers and pulses as water heads uphill and over the edge. I walk up to the rim and see the nozzle gushing onto the slope. Surely this device will make quick work of the task.
Edith comes down the hillside somewhat later to inspect my handiwork. After watching the pump gush tan water for a minute or two, she asks, “Is it— working?”
“See for yourself.”
“Looks like it has a ways to go.”
“We have to start somewhere, right?”
She spares me a response.
Six hours later, I can tell that my optimism has been foolish. The surface
of the pond has dropped by only five or six inches. While it’s true that the circumference of the pond will narrow as the water level drops, accelerating the decline, it’s also true that the process is taking much longer than I’ve anticipated. I have a belated impulse to estimate the pond’s volume. I find some calculators on the Internet and quickly run the numbers. The answer: about half a million gallons. An old pump like the Wacker Neuson can move about eighty gallons per minute. Running twenty-four hours a day, the machine would take more than four days to eject five hundred thousand gallons. But I can’t run the pump ‘round the clock; limited daylight in November will curtail the time available. Sixteen days of pumping is more like what I’ll face. The pump’s rental fee is forty-eight dollars per day. This is ridiculous. I conclude that the experiment has been worthwhile, but less to remove the water from the pond than to drain the delusions from my own mind.
Plans A, B, and C have now failed. I execute Plan D: I give up.
Buddhism includes a long tradition of imagery about ponds. Zen poems, especially, include frequent references to the pond as a locus of meditation and as a metaphor for consciousness. In his collection of Chan (Chinese Zen) poems, Charles Egan describes the origins and nature of this approach to imagery: “Chinese poetic images appeal to the senses, primarily the visual, and are most often drawn from the natural world. . . . [T]he poems reveal a heightened sensitivity to the meanings of ordinary objects, for since the dharmadhātu [the fundamental ground of consciousness] is present and complete in everything, virtually anything can be a trigger to enlightenment.” Egan then offers a Tang-era poem by Hanshan as exemplary of the Chan use of metaphor:
My mind is like the autumn moon,
As fresh and pure as a jade pond.
But nothing really compares with it—
Tell me, how can I explain?
Egan provides this commentary:
The moon and pond each carry both general and Buddhist associations. . . . The moon and pond form a polarity with the multivalent enlightenment message. On one level, the bright round moon obviously alludes to the light of prajñā wisdom that dispels ignorance. . . . The shining jade pond is a combination metaphor: as the Awakening of Faith has it, still water is the enlightened mind, revealed when the wind (of ignorance) dies and the waves (modes of mind) cease . . . ; the water then becomes a bright mirror, reflecting things as they really are. . . . 4
Does this commentary, or the poetry behind the commentary, or the sutras behind the poetry, suggest that I will benefit more fully from meditating at a pond’s edge, or by meditating upon the pond itself, rather than somewhere else? Am I more likely to gain wisdom while meditating there than, say, in front of the compost heap . . . or perhaps down in our musty basement? Is a locus of beauty and calm inherently more spiritual than a plain, uninteresting place? Is it possible, even, that the compost heap or the basement would be more effective in helping me disengage from preconceptions?
On the other hand, who am I to dismiss the notion that meditating beside a pond can offer inspiration, even some sort of grace? Surely legions of Buddhist monks can’t be mistaken.
The body of water on Hyland Hill is an ordinary pond. It is, however, what Edith and I now find entrusted to our care, and it deserves its own share of attention. Having never owned a pond before, I decide that no matter how small and humble, this is the one I should focus on. I start spending time there several times each week, so much the better to perceive it, observe it, value it, and start to understand it.
The pond in autumn: the water full of fallen leaves—first a wide swath of yellow-orange-red fabric on the surface; then a three-dimensional cloud of more muted color that gradually sinks over a period of several days; then a layer of detritus fading to a uniform muddy hue on the bottom. The surface then clarifies and fills once more with sky.
The pond in early winter: frozen perfectly flat, the surface pure white with fresh snow, this expanse marred only by a single set of animal tracks—fox? fisher cat?—perfectly bisecting the circle.
The pond in late winter: frozen hard now after a January thaw and the subsequent drop into subzero temperatures. The surface is so intricately crazed that in the evening light, patterns there mimic the complex angles of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”—or should that be “Nude Falling Down an Icy Staircase”?
The pond in early springtime: open water again, devoid of weeds and allowing me to see six or eight feet into its depths. The floor is brown-gray with matted leaves. I spot no signs of fish or other wildlife. A few water bugs veer about like tiny speedboats.
The pond in late spring: blooming anew with intricate water plants. Most striking isn’t what I see, however, but what I hear. This is the season of peepers—Pseudacris crucifer—the small forest-dwelling frogs nicknamed for the males’ mating call. One nature guide describes the call in this manner: “. . . [T]he spring peeper has a high-pitched call similar to that of a young chicken, only much louder and rising slightly in tone. They are among the first frogs in the regions to call in the spring. As a chorus, they resemble the sounds of sleigh bells.” 5 To my ears, the chorus sounds more like a one-note stretto fugue, a high B-flat entering and exiting in countless voices.
*
The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!
––Matsuo Basho (tr. Alan Watts) 6
*
In May the pond reveals itself in a way that Edith and I hadn’t noticed before. Odd, wispy skeins of an unknown substance—shimmery and narrow, like discarded lengths of nylon hosiery—float near the irises that are now resurgent along the shore. Nearby are blobs of a different substance, silvery gray-green, at once granular and gelatinous. We have no idea what we’re looking at. Algae of some sort? Rotten leaves? Then, looking closer, I see that both masses contain hundreds of pea-sized, bubble-like chambers. “These are eggs!” I shout, startling Edith. The pond, we now realize, is a frog incubator.
We do some research that week and learn that the substances we’ve spotted are frogspawn—masses of eggs that the females have laid in the water. Each mass contains between five hundred and two thousand eggs. The visibly distinct globs indicate that two separate species are reproducing here. Given the several adult frogs we’ve spotted along the shore, one species appears to be the mink frog (Rana septentrionalis). The other species—which we haven’t seen but have heard in profusion at dusk each evening—is almost certainly the spring peeper. What will be the “yield” from so many eggs? We have no idea. One thing seems certain: if last year’s efforts to drain the pond had succeeded, we would have killed the adults that are now propagating. Since frog populations are rapidly declining throughout the world, drawing down or fully draining this pond would have contributed to an environmental problem.
After making this discovery, Edith and I walk down to the pond each day to monitor the developing brood. Both types of frogspawn—the wispy skeins and the gelatinous blobs—look different with each successive visit. The skeins elongate and thicken. The blobs expand, grow rough in texture, and shift in hue from gray to a repulsive, snotty green. When we look closely at the blobs, we can see a tiny black squiggle at the center of each pea-sized egg. Some of the squiggles are moving. Embryonic tadpoles! The water will soon teem with hatchling frogs.
The pond in summer: the green water dark and hazy, the irises dense on the far side, the surface almost granular with leaf debris. Despite the buggy, dank nature of this environment, I continue to go there almost daily. I take a one-quart plastic jar with me one afternoon, fill it with water, and return to the house. Having purchased an inexpensive microscope at a toy store, I examine a drop of this broth under magnification. I’m surprised by how little I see in the field of vision: a few ciliated micro-critters, a couple of shimmering paramecia, and many brownish flecks of deteriorated leaf matter. I feel immediate and intense disappointment. Is this all? Shouldn’t there be more microscopic— action?
Then, pulling away from the viewfinder and looking at the liquid in the jar, I realize that there’s plenty going on here . . . but not on the microscopic level. What’s happening is visible with the naked eye. Half a dozen water bugs the size and shape of wheat berries race around underwater, as urgent and reckless as bicycle messengers in New York City. A dozen quarter-inch-long crawdads crawl about on the bottom of the jar. Most startling are hundreds upon hundreds of mystery creatures, each no larger than the dot on the letter i, hovering throughout the liquid. Collectively they resemble a cloud of gnats, only aquatic and far smaller. It’s impossible for me to guess how many animals are going about their business in this jar. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number exceeded a thousand. If a thousand of these creatures inhabit a single quart of water, and if the pond contains half a million gallons . . .
I watch them for a long time. Then I carry the jar back down the hillside and pour the contents back into the pond.
Should Edith and I attempt to forestall the drift toward eutrophication? Is this process something we can slow, stop, or even reverse? Or is it like our own aging—a normal sequence of events that takes place regardless of our efforts, resentment, or lamentation? Perhaps resistance is futile. Perhaps the pond is destined to change. The shore will contract and the water will evaporate; the fish will die, the frogs will die, the newts will die; the water bugs, the crawdads, and the aquatic gnats will die; the algae and the irises will die; but voles, beetles, worms, grass, ferns, wild strawberries, and maple saplings will move in and take over until the once-aquatic ecosystem will become just another part of the forest. Why should I struggle against this transition? Simply because I have a preconceived notion of what the pond should be? Because I want to build a meditation shack beside the pond? Maybe it’s best to relent.
So be it.
Then, abruptly, this decision leads to an insight. Whatever comes of my project to construct a meditation shack—which, I decide, I should delay at least until next spring—there’s nothing to prevent me from meditating here and now. Isn’t that the point? Start where you are. Inhabit the moment. Face the world without preconceptions. Forget about the shack: the flat boulder near the west bank is flat enough to serve as a good meditation spot. The pond is still the pond. The irises are the irises. The trees and birds and frogs are the trees and birds and frogs.
I’ll make this boulder my bench. I’ll settle in. I’ll wait for the sound of water.
Notes
1 Basho, tr. Robert Hass. [from “Basho’s Hokku,” by David Landis Barnhill http://www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/barnhill/es-244-basho/bashos-hokku.pdf]
2 Lowell, Amy. “The Pond” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D’Andelot, Esquire.
3 Matson, Tim. Earth Ponds: The Country Pond Maker’s Guide to Building, Maintenance, and Restoration. 3rd edition. Woodstock, Vermont: Countryman Press, 2012.
4 Egan, Charles (translator/editor). Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
5 “Northern Spring Peeper—Pseudacris crucifer” in The Cleveland Museum of Natural History online:
http://www.cmnh.org/site/ResearchandCollections/VertebrateZoology /Research/Treefrogs/NSpringPeeper.aspx
6 Basho, tr. Alan Watts. [from “Basho’s Hokku,” by David Landis Barnhill http://www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/barnhill/es-244-basho/bashos-hokku.pdf]
Edward Myers is the author of twenty-two published books to date: five novels, four nonfiction books, and thirteen children’s novels. He was born in Denver and raised in Colorado, Mexico, and Peru. After attending Grinnell College and the University of Denver, he has worked in a wide variety of professions and trades, including inpatient health care, emergency medical services, carpentry, cabinetmaking, and freelance writing. He currently lives with his wife in central Vermont.