The Pond

This place belonged to him. It was his place. Call it whatever you wish. Sanctuary. Oasis. This specific location, this patch of soil and grass and marvelous maples, land stationed here for millions of years in all the varieties time entails, neat lines marked out by latitude and longitude and manufactured plot lines, whether it be in plain view or buried beneath ice, no one held quite the same adoration for it as he has. Ever.

To him this place resembled the resilient sprawl of a well-imagined heaven, having served of such particular purpose during those formative years, this period when adults yammer on to their youthful counterparts about the process of growing up through a consistent spillage of alleged knowledge, touting procedural techniques and all that, the prototypical human training period to be conducted, and then somehow such organized lessons come to an endpoint, a moment where age takes hold, settles in, and how a person then crosses this threshold to find themselves standing upon the banks of an opposite world. It is during this early collection of years where real value gains steam, justifiable importance becomes recognized, and not necessarily importance in the measures of men from their premeditated societal standpoints, but rather a far more incalculable attribute of imagination, creative wonderings and whimsical meanderings, an ode to a manifested soulfulness running so rampant a child might get their hands on an excess amount, retaining enough so they might stash some away for the days down the road where it’ll be cherished to the full capacity. This being what had happened with him. Exactly. Days had been full of playful adventure. Invented conquest had held a firm reign over the sinister and shallow teenage dreams sitting on deck, let alone the mismanaged and malevolent adult themes lurking out further amongst the darkness. Right here had been the sight for vivid dreams of being eight and nine and ten. And these were the same ones then transformed into the quiet editions of twelve or fourteen, when the adolescent yet relish in this account of acknowledging simple pleasures in a more careful, private way, hoping such childish endeavors go unnoticed and thus unjudged by the more serious factions of peers and parents.

This specific incident of memory presents in curious cringe upon the back of his neck, a hair-rising endeavor and not at all unexpected occurrence, just a fury of invitations bound to a fleet of feelings moving along a westerly wind taking thrash at his hair, whirling it in violent desperation, drawing congregations of scraggly dirt-riddled strands ever closer to the rise of a barb wired fence surrounding the wildness of the property. There is a crunch to the gravel which persists as it presses pebbles from rubber soles into the soft sand edges of the road. Feet are kept on their move and a residual tug yanks the soul perpetually forward. It is done to the same pulse as his physical movement, step after step, these methods having gotten him through much, all of it really, never letting him down as he’s come to realize, nothing having ever been succumbed to, not yet, not fully at least, and all of it tickling at his psyche with each infuriating bend to a set of brittle, aging knees. All of this ambiance ropes him back to a time stretching far beyond the confining measures of this hideous realm he’s now trapped inside. He’s no Billy Pilgrim, a notion he finds as unfortunate. His is a life obligated to boundaries and parameters. Rules. It directs itself as an equation of sorts, something to figure out, there having to be a solvable methodology to it, or so he expects. A riddle inside the smells. The sights. The sounds. It is one single, minuscule variable being all that has tripped him up. It is time he has taken issue with, this menacing component prowling in the clouds, making all the world an unvisitable paradox unless one is willing to cozy up with the current click of the clock’s hand or seek out refuge in the vivid filmstrips of a solemn mind. It’d been a problem he once looked into cracking, really delved into, having bought notebooks and markers and the whole lot of institutional goods to manage it, but then again, he’d never directed the numbers in quite the right order as to gain headway on the math.

He stands right on the edge of the dirt road just now, toes in the weeds, staring off into lily pads and off over a thick coat of neon algae mimicking the movement of the water as if it were a picturesque foam glued to the top of a freshly poured summer beer. Summers here were what he remembered the most. The sputtering start of a tractor and the crack of freshly released carbonation from a can of Stroh’s. Ernie Harwell blaring through staticky speakers to within earshot of a bale of hay that held up his yet miniature frame. A Darrell Evans home room. The bologna-mayonnaise combination. He cannot stop himself from staring at the little red handle which opens the roadside gate. A simple, protective piece of plastic brings back a flood of history. Just how many hands? How many feet have marched past this threshold? He can hear the pond by this point, hear the splash add ripples to the water as something slips off a downed tree trunk to take to its business underneath. Their heads are always made to be visible for only a brief moment, popping up for air and then back down again, putting a dimple into the green sheet. Marbles under a blanket. These were the ancestors of his past excursions of glory, or it might be conceivable to believe some of them are the same beings yet. It was possible, he’s convinced himself, for one or two of these reptilian streams of consciousness to still be here in the flesh yet carting around memories of him during those days. Same claws, same tails, same shells skirting across the water. He’d read these lords of muck and swamp could maybe reach the ripe old age of fifty. Fifty was yet a number off in his future. Murky green with colorful rims, reddened on their backsides, checkered lines just swimming around for the duration of decades. Little baths to be had upon sundrenched logs, collecting heat from a towering fireball millions of miles away just like we all do. Winter naps to be nested in the thick mix of an icy mud. He’d grown to adore them for whatever it was worth, perhaps even admired such a stationary existence, an acceptance of such fate. The ability to climb back into oneself when you needed protection from an exterior world. To be born, to live, and then to die within the same acre of land. Never yearning. Never caring. Never wondering. By whatever strings the universe tugged for him, year after year after year, it was this place and these creatures his mind kept wandering back toward.

This whole ancestorial connotation has served complex issue for him. It’s been an evolving problem. It’s not just the human aspect, but that of the turtles which has consumed him as well. The human concept has become too much familial obsession for his liking. Pride and obligation and duty. Too much responsibility. Too many details rising from the ashes to attach themselves to his story, demanding they ride alongside to a future date and then be reinstalled inside the next generation. It is a pressure he insists he does not need to feel. As it is, he is quick to tell you of his hatred for such thoughts. For fan clubs and the ra-ra attitude of the modern day. There is too much preoccupation about who a person is, or claims to be, and it too often comes down to a series of opportune facts having nothing to do with who you really are anyway. It is all posturing and presentation these days. There is something demeaning to the human condition inside this show-and-tell society, people always trying to prove their worth, spinning their stories into acts of courage and virtue. Why can’t he be alive and have it stop there. To just be. This is what the turtles do. They dive, and bask, and they eat. They sunbathe and remain free from the traps of policies and regulations and social security numbers. As a human being allotted this sole shake at existence, there seems to be a plethora of chores tacked on along the way. He takes a thin moment to feel the air swarm over his extremities. A swing hangs from a nearby tree and it bounces with each oncoming gust. It has no problem keeping momentum. A rectangle piece of lumber, maybe two-by-eight with two holes and two ropes; just the way a swing ought to be. He maneuvers through the gate, lifting the little red plastic handle carefully even if the electricity has been off for years, setting it back in place behind him with a certain gentleness, as if giving credence to the age and importance and fragility inside the meaning of the item. It is like an artifact from a distant era. It is a piece for his own personal museum.

The barn yet appears alive. Tall and strong and still from a distance. Rot has worked down into the base of the exterior boards, giving the world advance notice to an onset of problems, leading a person to recognize how initial impulses based off quick glimpses are not something to, well, bet the family farm on. It has weathered much, both in the measure of time and elements, and it is beginning to hold a worn-out appearance on this same natural shade of grey he’s always remembered it wearing, only now sporting larger gaps and with bigger cracks adorning its faces. Distinguished and resilient, it towers over the field surrounding it. It has always been difficult for him to believe how it had once been brand new. How it had been built for real use by busy hands and aching muscles, living and breathing humans who had put in significant time and effort to erect something meant to far outlast their own earthly inhabitance. Burnt energy resulting in a deep slumber. How none of them could probably envision a future where it would serve only ornamental purpose. It now sits still and empty, on display with a menacing solitude; dissatisfied, unfunctional and purely decoration. He is lucky to remember how it stood during its day, its hay day, albeit in the latter portion of its career, when the cows yet wintered inside, down the grade on the side facing the pond, in the lower portion. He could yet envision them lined up in front of their feeding troughs, back at a time when the building had been full of things, tools of a trade, and back before it had been reduced to a shell. This shell undertone feels like a nod to the pond dwellers, how generation after generation have lived mostly unnoticed in its morning shadow. How the shell is only purposeful if it is protecting something of importance located inside. A stray tear starts a course only to be interrupted by an index finger at the crest of his cheek. It is only a matter of time before the mind becomes overwhelmed, and thus the body follows suit. But then again, everything and anything is only a matter of time.

Moisture has built further around the eyes. He has not known what for. In a general sense, sure, of course, he could make reason of it. He understood. Crippling nostalgia. Loved ones having moved to underground cages. The tick of a moving clock which never faulters, never works itself out of commission. But he hasn’t been able to really peg down the specifics of how, right now, right here, why he’s been struck by such an ominous form of sadness. He had come here hoping to be happy. He had figured a smile to replicate its former signature form at the initial sight of a forgotten past. Instead, it is a familiar foe twirling its axe before him, just a more distant rendition than the emotional gauntlets which typically do him in. In a life full of avenues drenching him in melancholia, this version right here has driven up lazy, quiet and been perched upon the hillside to oversee the fullness of the event.

The sun is settling upon the tips of the trees behind him. Leaves rustle in their newfound shadow. He takes a minute to remember the water on this side of the road as well. The pool over by the barn was a pond in every sense of the definition. Gritty and slimy, lined by sinking muck banks with cattails and cow patties positioned around them like strategic enemies you were born to elude, all the novelties a high-quality pond should offer. The rendering across the street was a more coldblooded affair. A true swamp with trees rising all the way through it and little sunlight navigating its way to the surface. He’d wandered over that way on a few occasions during his youth. During the times when the turtles over on his side of the operation had grown too leery of the boy with the net. This is how he’d imagined it, them congregated around the rocks at night, guarded by bullfrogs, holding some underwater council meeting to determine strategy. And then he considered how the population on the other side of the road might not have gotten the memo, been issued no warning and therefore wouldn’t be quite as guarded and prove more catchable. This tactic had never provided much in terms of success. It had never provided the same level of intrigue or production or pleasure. It had been cold, dark, and colorless, and most of all, a debilitating waste of time.

In the background here, back on his side of the street, there are hills which roll. It is gorgeous land. The movement is nothing mountainous, but it displays progress, holding enough presence to provide adequate shape to visible land. It is enough to elicit a peaceful venture, to engage the mind in nooks and crevices and alternate vistas. Tall grass grows upward from a tilted earth, and he swears he can yet make out the pair of tracks where the tractor had once worn the earth down to an unyielding dirt. He’s certain of it, pleading with himself to a point he can see the land concave ever so slightly upon the tips of waist-high weeds by mere will. There is no way his eyes will not oblige. It is what he wants to see, and therefore the subject is not up for debate to the optical sensors. These paths he focuses on had once been pressed to a depth deemed insurmountable for something as simple as time to erase. They had been as signature as the highways which brought him up here each weekend, a welcomed retreat from the land of parallel houses and asphalt driveways by which his weekdays played out. But that had been back then. Back before he had grown to hold a putrid displeasure for that arrangement of life. Not the childhood portion itself per se, but the portion where you grow up and they expect you to take on the reins of a similar fate. To pass it on down the line. Setting up shop in subdivided lots inside monotonous, safe neighborhoods as if this were the new version of a family business. To push strollers and punch clocks. He had opted for the road instead, never spending too much time in one place. For moving on. For settling himself into makeshift camps with firepit rings built of piled-up split stones to heat temporary outdoor homes each evening, and he’d come to do so to a measure of successful survival for the better portion of the previous decade. He’d seen everywhere this continent had to offer, from the roadside views to the backcountry panoramas which took days to reach, sights so beautiful your mouth was sewed shut and your body rendered weightless by their overwhelming authority. There had been elk and grizzly bears. Moose and wolves. Predators and prey in all their forms. The preference for places over people was strong in him, and the company of animals in the backdrop far outweighed any proposed pleasure of conversing with his own species. His days were spent scribbling away in journals, how he’d come to make his modest living, keeping himself busy conjuring up tales when not inhaling the words of a tattered paperback. Nights were for whiskey on the rocks, contemplation, and the exploration of memories. Those firepits had always reminded him of his grandfather. The man had been a split stone savant. It had been his life’s work. The proof was all around him. He grew up staring it in the eyes. Up here, and back in his mother’s basement at his childhood home. These physical manifestations yet existed in a slurry of places. In a strange way, despite ever holding residence up here, this place was the last place which had ever felt like home to him, the final innocent frontier of a life, an opposing twist to how everywhere kind of felt like home to him now. It was the last untarnished inkling of a feasible paradise as he recalled it, or so he yet developed the idea in his head. The last thriving homestead before the war, before life had been lined up and placed before the firing squad, done so before his very eyes, never again to be what it had been destined to become.

He knows he’s being melodramatic. He knows this idea of being alone or feeling alone has enough running against it that any half-witted lawyer could compile the evidence, argue it, and walk out of court an easy winner. People have endured much more, much worse, and this point is one he’ll be quite clear on. He does not want pity, but it doesn’t change things either. He’d felt whatever he’d felt, and this saturation of feelings had all hit him with a near immediacy, a sledgehammer over the head right upon his parents’ divorce. Collateral damage as it had been noted at the time. But it was not collateral damage at all, it was the death of something more prominent than a marriage. It was the death of his family, and the death of everything he’d ever known in the process. It was a severe sense of solitude that filled the leftover space, the detrimental realization of having to navigate this place all by your lonesome. It was like the Dodgers moving from Brooklyn, leaving the crowded, sensible city streets for the promise of sunshine and better weather. Either way, your team was just gone, and it didn’t matter why or how or even that the same players were still around but just in a different location with a slightly altered uniform. The point was that each coming summer there was less and less to look forward to. Something important to you had been stolen via selfish act. Life, in a singular moment, had become an individual performance. He knows it all sounds like common sense now, similar as to how the rifle goes bang, how you become aware turmoil is an inevitable structure, an unavoidable obstacle, but back then against the chorus of family and community, all the promises of the way things were, the public and private cries of connection, of perfect presentations, any notion of a personal upheaval had been relegated to a faint murmur upon the far reaches of a distant closet. And then it had shot forefront and center. Just like that. Like a turtle plucked from the pond by a blonde-haired boy with muddy shoes and a net to be moved from its pleasureful pond into solitary confinement, locked inside a galvanized bucket on the bench of a picnic table with a single hunk of granite and three inches of water tossed inside. He felt guilty about it. Terrible about it. He cried over repeated action of his youth. It was this method of thought alone by which he learned to thrive against the silent reaches of stretched out trees and breathable air. He’d learned all he needed to learn by one action. Whether it be alpine lakes or battered shorelines, foggy tides rolling out in during the evening hours to reveal a land once hidden beneath water, he held an embattled stance of destiny alongside the bitter taste of the journey which led him here.

He looks over at the house. He misses back when it was brown and yellow. It is still a home, still lived in, but the owners now are more part-time dwellers. It is a country cottage as they call them. He likes this proposition much more than having a lake house, if he were interested in that style of life of course. If it were him in the position to choose, he’d arrange it this way. There is little in terms of desire for him to go inside again. Ever again. First off, he isn’t the type to go knocking upon a door to share stories with strangers. Plus, he can yet draw the house from memory, probably down to the incremental measurements of the walls. Within an inch or two even. He could place all the doors and windows in the correct positions. Put all the pictures back up on the wall where they belong. Still order the birds in the light box located on the south wall to their designated branches. He can do all this even though he hasn’t been inside for fifteen years. He prefers not to see it changed. The memories inside are much more valuable in their sleeping silence. They have a more conversational and human tone to them this way. Out here, the reflections are more precise, pristine, and soaked in sunshine. The outdoors is always changing, whether with the seasons or otherwise. It is always changing and yet always staying the same. He wonders if this idea of destiny is true, if spending so much time out here is what has fueled this introspective persona, and thus how any other life wouldn’t have worked out for him no matter what else might have come to happen. If walls and floors and ceilings just trap the mind, box it up, limit its potential to see the world in any of its alternative arrangements. He wonders if the deep chest freezer is still in the entry way. Or if he might yet smell his grandmother cooking fresh eggs on the back stove. Any more talk of this would only serve to depress him, and thus he moves his eyes from the back porch over to the pond to catch a few dimples erasing themselves over the surface courtesy of his head’s quick jaunt.

There are truly more stories here than a person could catch and bag, collect and collate, try to organize on paper. They travel like bullets, zipping past at a speed where he can hear them rummage through the air as they slide by in hurried haste. All this sound occurs but he can never quite reel in a glimpse. Nothing happens with the eyes. The glimpse comes in the aftermath, and it is a pure act of imagination, like popping the top off a memory and allowing a thorough ingestion to be had by the mind. You take out the same effort you put in. It is all just bits and pieces of a once endured past which gets thoroughly worked into something resembling reality. This is what life is. And it does this, goes by, day after day, until all of it gets let out to pasture, or so the expression goes.

He is embarrassed to admit it. He feels as if he should be embarrassed at least. When he listens to himself say it inside his head, this reason he has come back this time feels ridiculous reason. But the truth is the truth, and it is the turtles which have summoned his return. This idea of turtles that is, or this idea of very specific ones indeed. Of past turtles. He’d grown curious one afternoon, sitting on a rock somewhere on the Columbia River, on the Oregon side of things, tipping away at a beer when one had walked right up, straight in front of his feet, stopped, pushed its little head out, almost giving it a nod his direction, and then kept on its way. Almost as if it were a ‘how ya doing’ episode. That had been all it took, and by evening he was loaded up in his van, driving back in the direction of Michigan, state after state disintegrating into a rearview, thinking about these shelled creatures’ mile after completed mile, knowing he’d needed to offer up apology. He’d been remembering all sorts of things about this place. About those days, all the details which had been erased or forgotten by the fury of mindless minutia the brains gave up the good seats for. A weeping willow with a chain link backstop draped from a massive branch just upon the edge of the pasture fence sparks a thought. It was here where he stood to play catch with his father, and it was here where family members would stand to watch a boy work his magic over the pond. There was a stone fireplace off in the yard that doubled as third base. A gas pump next to the driveway by the garage served as first. A well and a windmill decorated the southern portion of the yard. It all played back in clear memory here in the driver’s seat, and he could yet smell the odor of a smoking burn barrel upon the edge of a basketball court.

It was mostly features about the pond he’d become fixated upon however, trying to recall the specific contour to all its banks, and then to arrange all the shapes and sizes of his past captures in this infinite bookshelf inside his mind. A total number was being sought out. It was definitely in the hundreds. Twenty-six was the record per his recollection. Twenty-six turtles on one, single summer Saturday that he had relocated from quaint pond to temporary cage. He wanted to know if they were still out there, not the twenty-six in the cages necessarily, but just any inhabitants in general. There was a need to know inside him that they hadn’t held another secret meeting and then decided the square footage had grown inadequate, voting to switch neighborhoods in aspiration of some additional swimming room and a more esteemed school district. He was in near panic mode over nobody holding down the fort in his absence. The rising heads had served relief when he noticed them. It was true testament to how time ticks away, but how not everything has to change, or at least change completely.

He dropped the weight of the backpack from his shoulders. It was the overnight type and not the style you carried to and from class during the educational years. It was the type which had been built for adventurous excursions into the mountains, for nights on end in the wilderness with tent and sleeping bag straps. It was the type of backpack you were meant to get lost alongside. It could hold books but was meant more for the likes of Kerouac and Vonnegut than McGraw-Hill. There were little pockets placed sporadically over its surface. Places to hold a knife or a lighter. A bottle of water here and there. A whistle had been built into the clip over the chest. A large pocket had been organized upon the rear of the pack, accessible by passages on both sides. Perhaps its purpose had been designated for clothing, or any of the larger items a person might claim to need on a journey, but its intention had probably never been a net. Either way, he’d picked one up along the way, a fishing net somewhere in Minnesota and he’d crammed it in, stowed it away on the inside where just the handle poked through an unfinished zipper. He looked at the situation in more depth while stopping for rest in Wisconsin. It seemed so large, like he was cheating. It had a massive loop and a sturdy metal handle. It hadn’t been like what he worked with before. As a kid, he had been sent out with a butterfly net and tennis shoes. A thin wooden dowel with a mesh end containing little depth. And he’d been asked NOT to get dirty, this never being a real possibility. With each step of his shoes, he had to consider the level of punishment to be leveled down on him. He had to contemplate the ramification, the duration of what type of talking-to he was destined to endure. It had slowed him but never stopped him. And the butterfly net had made the job just difficult enough. It had given the turtles a fighting chance to plot their escape.

The bank yet has a sink to it as he steps closer to the edge. It sunk way back when as well, back when he weighed a measly sixty pounds, and now pushing two hundred it seems to shrink to the exact same measurement. He had tossed the fishing net in a rest area trash bin shortly after he’d entered the state of Michigan, wanting to go old school when he got here, wanting the occasion to be era specific and historically accurate. He picked up a butterfly net in the town of Grand Haven, keeping the journey along the coast the whole while, taking in views of the big lake whenever the chance was offered to him. The van had been parked up on top of the hill, up on the shoulder of the paved country highway intersecting the dirt road the property was located on. It was more incognito up there even if it wasn’t really incognito at all. It was left up there to enjoy the former hayfields he’d told it about on the cross-country trip, spilling about the times he rode along while the men and the machines did the work. Real work as he’d been taught. No slinging of bullshit or phone calls or paperwork. Good, old-fashioned labor as it was done back in the day. Once he closed the driver’s side door he took notice of the pines he’d planted as a child. They now towered toward the clouds. Wild blackberries he’d picked growing up still outlined the eastern edge of the property. He hiked the backpack onto his shoulder and placed the keys in his pocket, getting to doing what he’d spent much of his life doing, walking along, moving forward.

It was here on the banks, leaning over the water, when he remembered the more significant difficulties attributed to the turtle catching endeavor, of how these creatures really prefer the depth of the pond’s center. How it could be hours upon hours of standing there just waiting for some poor sap to get close enough to dry land to be within human reach. And although he was bigger now, a larger arm span at his disposal, it was really just the matter of a few feet of advantage he’d gained over thirty-plus years. It did him little in terms of holding any considerable benefit at the craft. There were a few chance encounters to be had here and there, some real stretch and pray type of gymnastic inspired dips of the net. No turtles had brought to the surface after a solid hour of working the banks. He paced the shoreline from along the fence toward the base of the barn, over and over, making the whole loop a time or two but still sticking the areas he remembered as being fruitful decades ago. He’d become disheartened by his lack of success. One measly turtle was all he needed. He just wanted to pull one up, apologize, explain the situation and ask for the message to be passed along, then place it back in the water and let go. This, he felt, would be enough to pacify the yearning, appease the soul, and alleviate the guilt.

A sound emanated from the barn. It had been enough to cause concern in him. The younger version of himself would have fled, went into hiding, but he’d found his curious nature to move him to the threshold of entry. No door blocked entry into the main chamber of the building. He liked the way the word chamber sounded as description. There was no apparent reason for the noise. His eyes searched upward, exploring the annals of a loft where bales of hay used stack-up like game pieces. Eyes matched. In all its stillness, he could make out the form of an owl perched upon the center rafter. It made no event of his introduction. Silent, it held its ground as if a statue. The remainder of the barn served the definition of absence. It was absent movement, goods, of things of any nature. But he could now attest to how it was not empty. In fact, it was a home. A snake slithered beneath a rotted piece of frame and out the east end. A blue racer. The owl did not move. This place was home to much and many. Empty was never really a thing in this world. Alone was never really a thing. Space and energy and time all converges into something. This thought washed over him. It made him feel good, full, more connected. He was part of the earth if nothing else, a part of this esteemed lineage of not just human being, but of nature itself. He grabbed the end of his little butterfly net tighter and rushed from the barn, sprinting down the hill toward the edge of the pond. Little heads popped up above the water as if awaiting his arrival. He tossed the net to the side. He kept at it, feet sinking in the mud. It was up past his calves by now, step after step he continued, little movements, as he’d always done, until he was close to where they came up for air. He was close enough to where they live. They were sharing space. He moved an arm off his right side. Soft, slow and gentle; he dipped it in to just the right depth, right where the turtle sat collecting its oxygen. He closed his hand around the shell, noticing its heft as he lifted it from the water. It was an old girl; this he could tell. Big. At least nine inches in length and a face which dripped of history and wisdom. There was no panicked pulse back into its shell, no scrappy claws demanding freedom. It just stared back into his eyes. And then he knew. He knew. He could not explain it with any fathomable words, no scientific evidence to be touted about, but he knew. He had been here before. They had. These two beings. Once upon a time. Long ago. And now they were both back at home.