Dream Pond: Just Add Water. Then Add More.

101 Michael Pollan Not long ago, I found myself in a crowded lecture hall surrounded by grim men and women sitting before specimen jars brimming with an alarming assortment of scums and growths in brodo. We had come to this annual Pond Management workshop at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, because we all had ponds that were sick in one way or another—choked with weeds, clouded with algae or, in my own case, lacking in the defining characteristic of a pond: water. Each of us had brought along a specimen of our troubled waters in hopes that the assembled experts—an excavator, an ecologist, and a hydrologist—might know how to heal our ponds. And not just our ponds, for as anyone with a sick one knows, a malfunctioning pond casts a pall far beyond its shores, ruining whole landscapes and, in time, its owner’s psychological well-being. For the last few years my own spirits have risen and fallen with the surface of my pond. Imagine my mental state at the end of a dry summer when it doesn’t even have a surface. The problem begins every year around Memorial Day, when the water level falls as precipitately as a draining bathtub, by as much as a foot a week. You can almost see it happen, all but the sucking clockwise swirl. In a wet year I can count on a respectable puddle through the summer, but most years it drains completely, leaving me with a quarteracre , twelve-foot-deep crater in the middle of my backyard. Frogs have to pack up and leave, a file of startled refugees making their way across the road to the neighbor’s pond. My neighbor has the wet kind. As reliably as it empties out in summer, the pond steadily and mysteriously fills every autumn, rain or shine. By winter I gaze out on a lovely sight: a glistening lozenge of ice resting in a grove of ash and white oak. As I write, the pond actually boasts a surplus of water; its spillway has leapt noisily to life, and all seems right with the world. And so it will remain until the plug is pulled in June, always the cruelest month in my calendar. Dream Pond: Just Add Water. Then Add More. 102 Ecotone: reimagining place I had gone to the workshop hoping to break this dismal cycle. After listening to lectures on eutrophication, invasive aquatic weeds, and the virtues of regular draw-downs and applications of glyphosate, one by one we shared our stories and then watched as the experts held our sorry specimens to the light. They lifted and fingered each clump of glop, expertly sniffed the different scums and ventured their diagnoses. This woman was suffering from a bloom of algae that a UV inhibitor might cure; that fellow was afflicted with South American waterweed, a recent escapee from the aquarium trade. Oh, what I would have given for a problem like that! If the neighbor ’s grass is always greener, his pond is always wetter: every problem in that room, however dire, presumed the presence of water in quantities I could only dream about. When at last my turn to testify came around, the bearded ecologist held my sample up to the light and pronounced my water admirably clear—”gorgeous” is the word he used, a careless cruelty I can’t very well blame him for. When I stopped him to say that the problem was one of quantity not quality, that my pond had no water, the room murmured in pity. My pond is beautifully sited, if I may say, so that in August I must gaze upon its emptiness not only from the dining room, but also from the studio where I work, which I carefully oriented to take advantage of the anticipated water view. Mine is an obstreperous wedge of land, hilly and strewn with glacial debris, and I thought that a tranquil view of water would have a calming effect on my workday. As it turned out, I now look up from my computer screen to behold an abyss, a view that only an existentialist could...