Secret, Impossible, Miraculous

I was twelve years old when I told someone about the pond. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. My parents had told me to keep it secret a hundred times. But it was summer and I had friends for the first time, real friends, the kind that would hang over the back of their chair in class to talk with you and always shared their gum. For the first time, I was part of the clique already formed for group projects, instead of waiting in humiliation for the teacher to assign me.

Life was finally looking up. I was liked, I was included, and I loved it - and I knew that the coming summer would be the death of all that. We would start middle school in the fall, and I knew that a friendship of less than a year would not survive that step. I had absolute certainty that I would be forgotten by the time everyone started on their summer reading.

As you all know, back in 2068, it took a lot to get kids to come over to your house in the summer. The heat was so intense that it felt like choking sometimes to even look at the wavering pavement outside. But a secret, impossible pond? When there were barely any lakes anymore, and the rivers had turned to creeks? That could do the trick.

So yes, I told them about the pond. Xavier was undoubtedly the coolest of us, so I told him first. It backfired though - he was the kind of cool that was skeptical of anything cooler. So he really didn’t believe me, but laughed in that scoffing way and said, “Yeah, even if you have a pond, there’s no way it’s still there in summer. I’m not frying to see a hole in the ground, man.”

At the time, I was desperate. Xavier was part of our friend group, but only part time. He was an unusually successful floater between groups, and sometimes hung out with Nate Williams and his friends. Those guys were the elite. If I could get in with them, I wouldn’t have to worry about middle school. You can carry a ticket like that for life.

So I said, “It’s definitely there. My parents built a shed, you know, to keep it covered. It’s huge too, it’s been there since my mom was a kid.” When he still looked disinterested, I added, “But yeah, I’m definitely not allowed in there. We’d have to sneak in anyway.”

That caught him, as I knew it would. What twelve year old can resist the opportunity to sneak? Before I knew it, the news had spread - not just to my little group, but to some of the girls and even the venerable Nate Williams. Everyone wanted to come over to my house, to see my impossible pond.

The thing is, I’d lied about not being allowed in there. My parents loved that pond, and they wanted me to love it too. They had been kids when their own parents used to take them out hiking and swimming. I grew up hearing stories of summer camps and national parks. It broke their hearts that they couldn’t give that to me, that the world they’d known and loved was gone.

There really was no hope of that anymore. It was so warm now that even up here in Alaska, it could get up to eighty degrees in January. The only traces left of glaciers were kept in museums and labs. There was no snow anywhere.

Worst, according to every parent, there was no swimming. Beaches were now either too protected, crowded, or dangerous to visit. Pools and baths were a thing of the past. Water was just too scarce.

So our pond really was a miracle. My grandfather had built the shed over the pond when my mom was in college, around when the winter began to disappear. By whatever grandfatherly magic there is, that shed had kept the pond alive through the worst summers anybody had ever imagined. My parents took care of it religiously, even feeding it from our own precious drinking water supply.

And now, it was to be my very own circus show, my ticket to the popularity I always wanted.

So it came to my thirteenth birthday party that summer. It was a brutally scorching July, but everyone showed up anyway. We were thrumming with excitement, and for once, my parents’ house was full of sound and movement. Mom and Dad were being run ragged, passing out juice and cake, and even though they were obviously happy for me, I could tell they were getting dazed.

We used it. Drove them crazy until finally my mom said, “Alright kids, why don’t you all go play in the basement.”

“Can we watch a movie?” I asked, innocently as you please. “The new Transformers?”

She put on a truly painful smile. “Sure, kiddo. Have at it.” And that’s how I made sure she wouldn’t check up on us any time soon.

My friends were duly impressed. I’d planned the getaway flawlessly, from the proven parent-repellant blaring at full volume to cover us, to oiling the sash window ahead of time so we could sneak out into the backyard. I think I worked harder on that scheme than I’ve ever done so for anything since.

Ultimately, that’s what shamed me the most. I didn’t realize my mistake while we were having fun. None of those kids had ever been in a pool of water, so of course they went crazy. Instead of being careful the way my parents had taught me, they crashed right in and right through.

I remember thinking then that this is what a hurricane must feel like, to have no way to redirect it but just stand there and let it happen to you. The water had splashed everywhere, out of its natural bed and into the dry, cracked ground around it. Most of the rest of it had soaked into their clothes. Torn and limp lay the delicate grasses that my parents had nurtured with such painstaking care. Mud was everywhere.

For all my forethought, I’d completely failed to consider what came after. Facing my parents was the easy part, when we’d trooped back inside with soaked and muddy clothes. My mom had taken one look and left wordlessly for the shed, while my dad took care of sending everyone home.

They never talked to me about it. Mostly because they must have been too furious and sad to do anything about it, but partly also because we all knew the futility of punishing me. I was too busy punishing myself.

It was only when I almost lost that pond that I realized what it meant to lose a piece of nature. I realized then what it was my parents had lost, not just in their miracle pond but all the miracles of their childhood. Water, snow, forests, and cold. They’d talk often about what cold smelled like - not the artificial freezer smell, but natural cold. They would never have that again, and neither would I. It would always be, “Do you remember…?” and that memory would one day die with them. That was the hard part.

That pain stayed with me. It changed me.

I spent the whole rest of the summer in that shed, doing what I could to save the pond. Our clothes had soaked up so much of the water that there was only the barest film of it left. So I drank only juice for weeks and skipped washing whenever I could, instead feeding every ounce of water I could scrounge to the pond. I patted the rich, protective mud back into place, straightened up the little plants and smoothed the moss. And I never begrudged having to always ask for the key to the new padlock.

It was the height of summer and we feared that even the magic grandfather shed could only do so much. But it held up, somehow. Though badly damaged and shrunk to a fraction, most of the bed dried and cracked to match the rest of the surrounding earth, it made it through.

School started eventually. I entered middle school, and I got into a fight with my friends. They wanted to see the pond again and I told them it couldn’t handle another visit. That’s when they started calling me a hippy and went back to ignoring me.

It surprised me how much it didn’t matter. I’d learned a worse pain and it felt like such a small thing, then, to sit at lunch alone. That didn’t last long, either. Word spread that we had a pond, and though it meant we had to install a fence to stop trespassers, it also meant new friends sought me out, people who also felt that pain and wanted to do something about it.

I started something real for the first time, then. Teachers who’d gardened as kids helped us recover the dried pond bed. I asked people for help, and soon, kids were passing me small bottles of their rationed water at lunchtime. Xavier’s mom, surprisingly, was a local reporter, and he told her about it all. Soon, with the local stories being run on it, we got a call from the mayor. The city was donating some gallons to refill and restore the pond, bigger than ever before.

That was seventy-four years ago and I still feel that fire today. I didn’t want to live in a world that could only cling to the barest remnants of a puddle. I wanted what my parents had, and their parents before them. So I dedicated my life to climate control, to fighting the runaway carbon problem. That’s why I joined and eventually led the EPA, and made it a force to be reckoned with. We would not back down, and we would not rest until we’d secured a legacy for our own children.

As you all know, we’ve made strides that our grandparents probably never thought possible. Ponds aren’t miracles anymore, and people can walk outside in summer again. Actually walk and play! But that’s not why I called you all here.

Folks, I called this press release because when I woke up this morning, I smelled something that I never had before. At first, I thought - you know, I’m old, is this nose going now? But no, my wife smelled it too. She turned to me, her face all screwed up, and asked me, “Do you smell that too?”

And I remembered my parents’ voices, early in the morning in those sweltering winters, talking about what cold smelled like. “Like if blue and white could breathe into you,” my father called it. I breathed it in and went to the window to look outside.

Folks, I tell you, this morning, that pond was frozen. It’s the twelfth of January, 2142, and our community pond in Anchorage, Alaska was frozen. I went out to step on it and I slipped and I broke my collarbone! And it was so cold out there that I could barely even feel it! My wife will tell you I was crying because of the broken bone, but I’m telling you, I cried because I just couldn’t believe it.

We did it. We brought winter back. And I owe it all to my secret, impossible, miraculous pond.