LESSONS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A HAND-DUG POND
In the woods just beyond the fence line and close to the hand-dug pond, white-tailed deer are breathing heavily in REM sleep. The rushing sub-whistle exhaling through their long snouts gives their position away.
Standing in the drizzling dark, I listen to the deer and the soft rain, hoping against hope that the chronic drought that has been with us since December will end with a two-day soaker. Rain for the garden. Rain for the old pasture. Rain most of all for the pond and the two lonely frogs who are languishing in the last puddle at the six-foot depth mark.
Down there, down where the frogs are holding out in an inch of fluid, there is only clean sand. It is a sediment layer that only a glacier with a 100,000-year pedigree could grind up and then sweep into place with meltwater. Over the last 35 years, I have dug down into that sienna-colored sand with a shovel, wheelbarrow at the ready, and have fashioned a waterhole 32 feet by 16 feet at the widest margin. Much of the pit in the ground is four feet deep, some of it five, and just a fraction is down to six. But if the drought does not break and the pond remains empty, I’ll liberate more sediment and expand the five and six-foot depths a good deal so the exposed water table can attract more resident frogs.
A hand-dug pond? Why, why do such a thing? Crazy!
Life without constant vigorous physical movement is purgatory, surely. Sitting at a desk in a cubicle in a corporate warren in the ‘80s nearly cost me my sanity.
I’d walk around and around and around the pasture after work in an attempt to tidy up the chaos in my drafty barn of a brain. At the very lowest point in the three-acre field there was moist ground that sustained a few plants that liked wet feet. One evening, waging war against a corporate panic attack, I took a shovel down to the wet spot and began to dig into the firm organic mud that passed for topsoil there. All these years in, I have yet to stop.
A few wheelbarrow loads were all it would take each evening to quiet down my soul. The digging pumped up the pulse, the respiratory rate, too. The muscles of my upper torso craved the work. God love a fool, I actually loved the physical toil. Still do.
But there was more to it than the appeal of brief hard labor and liberation from corporate drudgery. As I peeled away the inches, the geological story and biological signature of the valley were revealed. And my youthful, amorphous world view began to round into something more focused and igneous firm. That was well worth digging for.
Within the first few years, I had removed enough muck-like topsoil to create a sizable vernal pool, a temporary waterhole that formed each spring and was much prized by salamanders and frogs that couldn’t withstand the pressure of predation from fish. Deeper still, and blue heron began to call on the little drink of water, looking for the increasing band of amphibians so it might have a morning meal. Doves, often in pairs, came to refresh themselves, one acting as sentinel while its mate drank and bathed. Other songbirds followed. Deer began to leap the fence to bed down near the pond at night.
When heavy rain filled my artificial pool to brimming and the season outflow stream swelled sufficiently, crawfish and small fingerling fish managed to find the pond and tried mightily to gain a toehold. Ugly dragonfly nymph and water beetles patrolled the depths. Water skaters owned the surface tension, bats the airwaves and the mosquitoes over the water at night.
In fairly short order, a new micro-environment evolved and with it came the flurry of wildlife. Watching the arrival of the creatures, I became convinced that a single human being could have a dramatic positive impact on the animals and plants that share our world by doing something as simple as providing a source of open fresh water. We humans put such intense pressure on other species that once we bring into the forests our homes and autos, our boom boxes, fireworks, powerboats, lawn chemicals and fertilizers, and all other manner of commercial gewgaws, we invariably push out the wildlife to the margins and render extinct whole species, as well.
But the hand-dug pond reversed the damage done.
Every day now, my wife and I look for the wild visitors. What denizen has come calling today? Rabbits are back with a vengeance. They need a drink in these drought conditions. They’ve found the pond. Big pileated woodpeckers set up shop in the lightning-killed white pine. Black river mint has spread from the garden and is now a force to be reckoned with near the water’s edge. It loves the added moisture.
The pond became a time machine. I could drive it with a shovel. Once below the topsoil and chiseling through the subsoil, I could leave the present behind, and cut down through the past, several thousand years with each foot of depth. Exploring that past was also much needed relief from the Bud-Lite mass globalization culture.
Down two to four feet and lithic garbage from a dying glacier ice pup littered the underworld. A hard matrix of pressure welded sand and erosion-round rocks made the going difficult without a pick. This agglomeration had once been outwash offal from a glacial remnant that had stayed behind as the continent-straddling Laurentide ice sheets retreated to the north as climate warmed quickly at the end of the Pleistocene. Our little farmstead sits at the very bottom edge of the horseshoe-shaped ridge that makes up a classic glacial cirque valley. The huge ice chuck that remained in place ground away at the landscape for several thousand years and coughed up untold millions of smooth stream-polished stones and cement-like sandy grit tough enough to resist the pick ax. Every one of those millions of stones is under my feet. Every damned one.
At five feet the subsoil changed abruptly to the clean sand that allowed water table water to seep up through it and filter it at the same time.
In 1799, when the original house was constructed, a hand-dug well was sunk thirty feet away from the foundation. The rock-lined hole probably bottomed out at ten feet or twelve feet below the soil surface. It was dug one bucket load at a time. The digger must have stayed in the hole hour after hour while someone at the surface emptied each earth-filled bucket and passed the receptacle back down on a rope for another load. When the digging stopped and the sediment was allowed to settle out, the first family in this valley would have been able to haul up a bucket of pure, clean water at any time to quench the thirst. And they would have had a powerful thirst, too, because they would have also hand-dug the home foundation.
Not a soul alive on this continent now understands the fantastic effort expended by the first men and women who came into the country 300 years ago to carve a small farmstead out of a forest filled with trees four to five feet in diameter. The pond puts me in touch with that Herculean effort. We sit at computers now, sell things from air conditioned storefronts, commute endless hours by car in a given lifetime, and call it all progress. We exchange our salary dollars for inexpensive Asian junk that finds its way into landfills in a fortnight, and we take comfort in that. Not me. I long for hand-hewed beams, hand-turned fertile garden soil, a hand-dug pond. You know, things of permanence.
Give me the mint quietly expanding its turf beyond the south bank of the pond, the ovenbird in the wild highbush blueberries nearby to the west, the newts with their feathery gills, and the dragonflies of August that spent most of their double lives in the depths of the pond. Bestow upon me the legions of late summer crickets that feed the fat frogs and toads before they hibernate as the cold comes on. And let the deer alone to snore through their long snouts after they’ve had their last drink for the day and need a protected place to bed down undisturbed.
