We called it Spectacle Pond, but maybe that’s just a name we neighborhood kids made up. All I can find now on maps of Lexington is a tiny, roundish pond smack in the middle of a slightly oversize lot in a residential development in an area once known as Blueberry Hill.
The tiny pond, as I remember it, had steep banks on one side and a marsh on the other. Surrounded by trees and thick bushes, it was hard to get to. Despite its suburban surroundings, its inaccessibility allowed it to remain wild, except in the winter, when the neighborhood kids would swarm the place for pickup hockey games and pirouette practice.
All the kids claimed the pond was bottomless, and nobody ever said there were fish in it, but I knew better. The first time I skated there I could see bluegill sunfish in the shallows, under the clear ice, scurrying away from my shadow. I spent the rest of that 10th winter of my life waiting for the ice to melt.
We had moved to Lexington from Argentina, where I had spent my first eight years. There were five of us: my parents, my two sisters, and me. I was the middle child, assigned either by personality or birth order the role of being the family mediator. It was tough, considering that my older sister was smarter, taller, and meaner than me, and that my parents were constantly fighting.
We were loved and well provided for, but the constant, loud yet secretive battles waged by my parents behind their closed bedroom door were agonizing. I look back in wonderment not so much at my survival but theirs. My parents, a straight woman and a gay man, were able to find a shared path and remained married for almost 60 years.
In those difficult preteen years, Spectacle Pond became a home away from home. I cleared a path through the brush to avoid the spongy, smelly marsh. I found a little dry spit jutting into the deep end of the pond where the catfish lived and where I could cast into the shallows for the bluegills. I occasionally took a fish or two home to eat but stopped when I realized I was catching the same fish over and over again and was at risk of losing them all. I began thinking of them as my friends and even named the bigger fish.
The spit became my living room. The single tree that remained there was a twisted red cedar that hung over the water, its S-shaped trunk providing a comfortable seat that allowed me to ruminate while watching for my bobber to twitch.
When the fishing was slow, I would wander the pond’s edge. I found frogs and toads along the muddy shore and newts under rotting branches. One afternoon, while stirring the mud looking for tadpoles, I discovered some small mysterious organisms. I gathered the tiny white creatures in my worm bucket to show my science teacher, who told me I had discovered a bed of freshwater clams.
I found myself thinking about that pond recently while watching the evening news and reeling from the coverage of brutal wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the threat of war in the South China Sea, the latest random shooting, and, of course, the seemingly never-ending, mean-hearted buffoonery of a former president. I was trying to remember any other time in my long, mostly happy life when I felt so exposed and defenseless. Memories came to mind of poling my flats boat over the shallow, gin-clear waters of Florida Bay, of fishing in a magical pool high in the Cascade Mountains, and of casting a baited worm and plastic bobber on a bright windless afternoon from a muddy, brush-choked bank and feeling like I might be the first person ever to catch a fish in Spectacle Pond.
I realized I have survived a succession of difficult times by finding in each case my own emotional oasis, a place to ride out the storm. Each of my refuges has involved water and fish, nature and solitude. If fishing is my religion, it is because I once found a tiny, muddy, perhaps nameless pond as my first church and pastor.
But one sunny early spring morning in 1962, on the cusp of my 14th birthday, I visited the pond to see if the ice had cleared. As I circled the shore I noticed huge clumps of jelly-like growth just below the surface. The pond was silent and eerily still. No bluegills patrolled the shallows. No turtles or frogs stirred the surface. Looking closely at the base of the blooms I saw catfish, algae growing through their gills, gently swaying in the now fatally polluted water.
The pond’s demise was also its last lesson to me: never take for granted the beauty and freedom with which we have been blessed. But it also asks something of me now.
As I watch the news and witness the human-wrought destruction besieging the world, I know having an oasis is not enough to sustain us through the choking hatred, greed, and ignorance that fuels it. We will always find places to heal, but the Spectacle Ponds of the world demand that we use the power freedom gives us to safeguard their very existence.
