Hardy Pond

You pull the car over.  Slowly it rumbles over dead leaves and crackling branches until coming to a rest behind a tree leaning out into the street.  A perfect Secret Parking Spot.

Like an Astronaut, you transfer your Anxieties.  The “Getting Ticketed/Getting Towed”, flows easily into “Forgetting Things”.  (Should you leave a towel on a tree in case the car gets towed? And if it does, should you keep your cell phone with the towel?  Why not throw them into a bag with some water.  And a snack.  Maybe some shoes.)

And then you decide to just get out.  

This funny, hidden patch of water.  “Hardy” Pond, named after a family, but oddly enough, maybe named for its sturdiness.  The ability to always bounce back.  

Like the Charles River, but unlike waterways called “views”, all the houses around have their backs to it.  As if it’s just a forest, or a desert. As if everyone looks past it, and not at it.  If you ever got an apartment within view, you’d sit staring at it with all your lights off.  Every night.

During your MBA classes, you drove here, to escape.  You met another lost soul.  Who tried to convince you the virtues of soup that had mold growing on it.  “I just stir it back up and turn the heat on high.  It’s good for you!  My son disagrees with me.  Calls it disgusting”

You seem to remember the earlier part of the conversation involved the exchange of a few profound ideas.  But you’ve lost everything except for the disgusting soup.

Disgusting soup.  That’s what you imagined the pond to be as a little kid.  Your house was built on the top of the hill, 50 years before you were born.  As a “vacation cabin” for fancy families from Boston. (But there was a couple who lived there, the only owners-the time machine you wish so desperately for could really come in handy to meet them)

Hardy Pond was known as a swimmer’s paradise.  You easily imagine kids skipping down the dirt roads in early April, lilacs blooming like crazy. And they would jump in.  Swim clear across with not a care in the world.

But the entire time you were growing up,all you heard about was pollution.  Drowned shopping carts, covered with weeds.  And you vaguely remember hearing stories of it being “cleaned up” since then.  Dredged, trash removed.  What do they do to the water to purify it?  If there’s no chemical factory, what’s the worst that could be in the water?

As long as you don’t put your head under, you’ll be safe, you tell yourself.  No danger of swallowing, or getting that eye disease that Katherine Hepburn got when she was thrown into a canal in Venice (was that sewage?).  She cried constantly for the rest of her life.

That movie “Ghost Story”, about young college boys in the 20’s, in love with a woman.  She hits her head on a stone fireplace and they think she’s dead.  Naturally, they sacrifice their Model T and run it into the lake, with her in the backseat.  

She revives just long enough for them to see her clutching at the back window.

“I’m still alive”

Why didn’t they jump in to save her?

Before you realize it, your feet touch the wet cold shore.  Lots of rocks and maybe glass, you keep an eye out.  Up to your knees. Makes you more eager to save your feet by starting to float.  Your hips.  There is a brown seaweed floating on the top of the water, stringy like hair, but not as gross.  You clear the water in front of you and soon you find it was only close to the shore.  Deep breath, your breasts and your shoulders.  You keep an eye out for anyone who might be watching you.  Anyone who turns off their lights to look at the water.

The morning is slightly cold, but not so bad.  If you do this at first light, you risk mosquitoes (another reason to get in ASAP), but you avoid the commuters who want to distinguish their days by calling in an emergency.  An Evil Do-Gooder who wants to “save” you from waters where you must’ve fallen in.  You have no desire to be rescued, or to be interrupted.  

Especially if you are going to swim across today.

There are a family of ducks.  They make ducks sounds at you and avoid you, but nothing out of the ordinary.  No sense of alarm, like you are a crocodile.

Crocodile.  Now, you are well aware that is a false fear.  But there are other critters, a snapping turtle would be the worst.  Probably.  Do they always swim underwater? Do they attack unprovoked?

By now, you’ve been doing strokes for a few minutes now.  Flip over to get a new perspective.  Everything looks different now.  The left headlight of your car is barely visible behind the tall grass by the shore.  You are a good way out now.  There’s no easy way to measure the distance, but it’s further than the kiddie area would be. Further than you ventured in your teens.  The first time you swam across Walden was when you were 19.  And even then, you weren’t sure why you waited so long.  Like taking a journey, just put one foot in front of the other.  The main thing to get over was fear.

Don’t think about the turtles.

Next time wear flippers.  They can nip at your legs, but you want to keep all your toes.

You can see the mint green vinyl siding of Joe’s house.  Your Mom’s on-again, off-again, older boyfriend.  He’d been living in that house, 2 houses from the water, since he came back from the war.  The typical American life.  He told that story about swimming in the Charles, and his white shorts being turned into a rainbow color.  Now THAT’s pollution!

There’s another house that has a makeshift dock.  You see a few overturned canoes and fishing boats which somehow give you courage that you are not the pioneer that you’d like to imagine.

Which is better, to go where no man (HA!  Man!)  has gone before, or to just be the first in decades?  

And you continue to wonder if the bigger question today is if you should tell anyone at all?

==

There are a batch of apartments off to your right now.  You look up, knowing you are shielded somewhat by the stand of trees on the unkempt part of the shore.  You walked along that beaten path before.  Some summer time when you were exploring everything by foot, stubborn in your refusal to get a car or a license.  turning every 5 minute errand into a 2 hour workout, but you were happy for the connection to the Earth.  And how it kept you apart from those who made money to fill their cars with.  Back when you were free.

The path cuts behind the apartment complex and connects your neighborhood to the supermarket, and allows you to avoid the series of mini malls which took over the mini-golf and bowling alley of your childhood.  Come to think of it, you could have swum this route before to get groceries.  (How would you have carried them back?)

This distance also seems further than Walden, but you aren’t giving up yet.  In fact, the far side of the pond flows into some drainage pipe, as tall as you are.  Best to avoid that, in case there is a sudden riptide.  Current?  Would it suck you into the sewage system of the town?

No rule about having to touch the other side, really, just enough to find another swimming entrance, should you come back a different way.  You come close enough to the other side to encounter the brown hair moss again, less dense here, somehow.  You cautiously feel around with your feet for the ground and instead of slimy stones, you find a nice squishy sand.  You know this feel from Walden.  The top layer of decaying pine needles. Something you were afraid of as a kid, but nothing that bothers you now.  

You stand, not tired, and not out of the water.  Surveying the shore, like Henry would have done.  There are some deep coves off to one side.  If you were especially curious or had more time, or frankly, if you at least wanted to, you could swim along the shore and explore them.  But, honestly, you’d rather just get back to your car.  Swim straight across, like the way you came.  The road that you carved on the water; patches of moss collected together when you cleared them from your path, and no descernably clear line that shows you came through at all..

So much time has passed, to you it seems like the sun should realize that it is midday.  But loads of people still aren’t even up yet.  From the middle of the pond you can see some roads, but very few moving cars.  And no people anywhere.