Of the top ten things I wanted in a new house, a pond was not one of them. When we decided to move to our present house, the pond we inherited was a murky-algae-puddle that I envisioned as a future patio. As we began tackling projects, we moved the pond work to the bottom of the priority list, seeking a way to keep it going temporarily until I could hire a bulldozer to fill it in with dirt.
Now, some twenty years later, the pond is still there, a working ecosystem—a labor of love but at times a lot more labor than love. We’ve got snails and fish and turtles and snakes and over on my neighbor’s roof there is a blue heron that looks like an old man that’s bent over, waiting to swoop in for a free fish dinner. And then there is our odd couple, Maude and Claude Mallard. They are all part of the eco-Blunder-household, working parts that find me tinkering out by the pond all the time, fine tuning the system.
Still, taking care of a body of water, even a small one like our four-thousand-gallon puddle, inevitably involves letting the rules of Mother Nature dictate most of the decisions and leaving a lot of wiggle room for her to change her mind. Circulation, fertilizing the lily pads and every other small change can set off a chain of unlikely events. One year our pond was beset by hundreds of dragon flies. Conditions must have been just right for their eggs to mature, resulting in two of our koi growing six inches that summer, no doubt feasting on the dragon insects that are rich in microproteins, probably tasting a lot like steak to the bottom-feeding fish.
When we first moved in, I found that our murky puddle was being filtered by a sump pump that pumped only a tiny trickle of water. In fact, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, I could smell the pond sludge from our backdoor. Being swamped by new house projects, the pond was my last concern, so I quickly changed out the pump and forgot about it until the next morning. When I walked out to see if there had been any change, I looked down into solid orange water. Yep, that’s right… orange! I was horrified. Was this some chemical spill? Should I notify the Center for Disease Control? Was this another Chernobyl? I ran back to the house to call the World Health Organization and hose myself down with Dawn dishwashing liquid, all the while yelling to my wife to call 9ll.
“You’re never going to believe what’s happening to the pond. It’s a nightmare!” I yelled.
Together, we ran out and stood on the pond’s edge, awestruck at the sight of the orange glop that had surfaced overnight. In my head, I thought we were going to have to move again, maybe to a trailer home or a condo, but my wife, ever the voice of reason, was observing a different phenomenon. She noticed the water wasn’t just orange, but a vibrating orange.
“I think that water is moving,” she announced, not a hint of panic in her voice.
I peered intently down, trying not to breathe what I thought was swamp gas off some hazardous scum. The orange water was undulating back and forth like an Etch-A-Sketch, rippling first one way and then the next. Then… YIKES! A pair of beady eyes poked out, and a mouth came up gasping for air.
“FISH! We have fish here!” I said excitedly. Yes, those eyes were attached to one nosy goldfish who hadn’t seen a human since the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979! Then, two more fish broke the surface, then a bunch, and as we knelt to look closer, we realized layers and layers of goldfish were plastered together vying for space, perhaps hundreds of them stacked on top of one another in their confined space.
Our pond, it appeared, was the holding tank for every shape and size of goldfish in Pet Smart’s national inventory. Apparently, they had been breeding nonstop for so many years that they had bred themselves into an orange solid, and now with nowhere else to go, were swimming on top of each other in a bubbling pond caldron.
For a moment, we thought of opening the world’s first orange-only aquatic center, where customers could purchase tickets for the chance to immerse their arm in a kind of solid goldfish Jell-o, a tactile experience we could sell as spiritually and physically healing. We talked briefly, my wife and I, and realized that since Goat Yoga had gone by the wayside recently, people across our nation might find a mental escape here, one that would be trendy yet bring them hope in a fallen world. Yes, we nodded, and we would call it “Goldfish Healing Center for the Restless.”
By thrusting one of their arms into this mass of solid orange fish, patients would succumb to the strange new healing powers of wall-to-wall fish. We also agree that we could arrange to have poems read to them that use the word orange repeatedly, poems that would not rhyme, and these same patients would feel that they felt more tranquil than before they enrolled in the program, and they would leave feeling connected to the world again, and give off a warm and mellow glow.
Organically, that idea fizzling out quickly and my wife and I opted instead to grab our nearby bucket, where we began to scoop out goldfish out by the dozens and hauled them off to release them in a two-acre lake on the grounds of a local State Hospital, where they could recover from years of staring at each face to face. We scooped buckets of thirty of them at a time, some of them bearing markings that were downright scary, markings that could only be produced by a species uninhibited breeding. One of the goldfish spots bore a slight resemblance to the face of Vladimir Putin, and after releasing it in its new home, we believe Vladimir began inhabiting the darkest, coldest part of his new lake home, but we couldn’t be sure.
It was some ten years later, on a cold but sunny day in early March that my wife and I took a walk around the park grounds. As we rounded the lake, we passed the small inlet where we had released our excess of goldfish many years before. Between thin fragments of ice, three leviathans rose slowly to the surface, three of our former abandoned goldfish, now grown to exceptional proportions. This is a true fish story, we thought. Like an armada of orange submarines, they drifted towards us and stared at us with an air of contempt—long gazes that seemed victimized. There was a kind of revenge in their eyes, and my wife and I found ourselves backing away, realizing that it would be only a few more years before these monsters were eight or ten feet long and would be pulling themselves up on dry land to steal small children out of the arms of their parents and drag them down into the deep.
We backed away without eye contact and thought about rolling ourselves up into tiny human balls for protection, but we knew instinctively the goldfish submarines were still looking at us and moving towards us as if to say, “Take us back home where we began. We would rather be big fish in a small pond. Please, please, take us home, back to your pond.”
But we turned coldly away and left them there, not wanting to relive our guilt for kicking them out of our pond and forcing them to find another life. It was just too much guilt from the past, and we realized that forming a new relationship with us was not going to be humanly possible for them either.
Returning home, we gradually were able to bring our own fish population down to a respectable number, around twenty highly harmonious fish, who, like the Amish people, began to work harmoniously together as a wonderful, friendly and simple pond unit and turn what was previously a crowded goldfish slum into a congenial and supportive goldfish community.
As beautiful as our pond is, I have only recently learned how to sit quietly and take in the abundant life my pond attracts and enjoy it. When we go out there now, we talk to the fish and ask them questions like, “How was your day?” and “What are your hopes and dreams for tomorrow?” We stay away from questions like “What’s on your bucket list?” and “Are there any fish you don’t see eye to eye with?” We are very careful about question like that, given their past history, and the unstable fish stories they no doubt have heard circulating below the surface in our pond.
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Jeff “Rip” Bender is a writer/artist who writes about life and has a life that is about his art. While the two skills often intersect, both reflect a zeal for the spontaneous, the curious and most things that are breathing. Always supplementing his stories with constructions and collages, his artwork is held in collections both public and private, both regionally and internationally. He holds an MFA in printmaking from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and a BA in Art from the College of Wooster.
After getting his head caught in a sink as a child, he vowed to avoid all small areas, and currently resides with his wife and cat on a wind-swept plateau in Indiana. He shares his many entertaining, but slightly endearing flaws with his two grandsons, but his greatest accomplishment to date is teaching his cat how to sit. Artistically, he is an multidisciplined person, however he prefers English, and then only in short sentences with one syllable words. His favorite texture and beverage is Styrofoam.