The Pond

At some point in the mid 70's, the pond at 204 Lora Lane, where I grew up, decided it was sick of being a pond. It was not going to take it anymore. It was through floating around feeling sorry for itself, secretly praying for an ice age or cataclysmic meteor strike; through placidly letting turtles and frogs and leeches and god knows what else lurch around in its guts. Why couldn't it join the swingin' 70's sexual revolution? This pond was coming out of the closet: it wanted to be a flowery meadow.

Or maybe a damp marsh. A small strip of rich dark soil would be fine. An empty hole in the ground. Whatever. Anything but a pond.

So, like a boy who decides he was "born in the wrong body"might first grow his hair out--a small step toward a big change--the pond grew its weeds out. And out. And out. And just as a father might have a hard time accepting Junior as a tranny, my Dad could not stand those weeds, and he tried everything in his power to kill them.

First, he experimented with herbicides. Dow Chemical was just up the road, and the Vietnam War had just ended a couple years earlier. So Dow was in need of new customers, and my Dad was in need of having some stuff killed deader than shit. Let's party! Yet, as it turned out, despite being able to exterminate North Vietnamese by the countless thousands with their products, Dow couldn't make a dent in those weeds. My Dad would scatter the Death Pellets in one area of the pond and the weeds would slowly retreat. But no sooner would he turn around to sprinkle another area than they'd start creeping back.

It was weed whack-a-mole, and Dad's deadly chemical mallet wasn't cutting it. That's when he called upon his three small human mallets--named Rip, Laura and Tom.

Here's how Operation Dad-What-The-Hell-Were-You-Thinking worked. He fashioned two floating wooden platforms (to call these things rafts would be an insult to rafts everywhere. These were like rafts' retarded second cousins) out of long slabs of ply wood with low rent carpet on top and thick Styrofoam material on the bottom. Rip, Laura and I would get on these things with straight rakes and make our way out to the middle of the pond. This was no easy task because we didn't have oars. We just had rakes. Try paddling with a rake sometime. See how far you get. In order to move once we got far enough out that we couldn't push off the bottom, we'd have to walk very slowly to one end of the slab, then run really fast (if you can call three quick steps a "run") to the other end to try to make it move in the opposite direction of the way we were "running." Transportation-wise, it made the Flintstones' car look like the space shuttle.

Once we reached the middle of the pond, we would pull the weeds up with the straight rakes and pile them on the slab. Then, when we couldn't pile weeds any higher without sinking, or when the stench of sun-roasted weeds became unbearable, we made our way over to the edge and dumped our take on the shore. And because we couldn't do the running thing with weeds piled up in the middle, we were forced to row with the rakes. In the course of all human history, how many people do you think have rowed across a body of water using a straight rake as an oar? I'm guessing 3.

Because I was only about 8 or 9 when this stunningly inept plan was put into action, I have few vivid memories of it. But I do remember a certain occasion when Rip, Laura and I went out together. Rip, being the oldest, was the reluctant captain of the slab, pulling in the bulk of the weeds and giving the orders. Laura, the first mate, was clad in a pretty pink bathing suit. She looked better than us, definitely. But she didn't smell any better. We all instantly smelled like watery rot once the first load of muck covered weeds came out of the water. But Laura did her best to pull her weight. Being the youngest and weakest, not much was expected of me. I spent most of the time sitting cross-legged at one end of the raft, just trying to stay out of the way.

After about an hour of hauling, Laura started losing steam. She was struggling to pull in her haul, hunched over the edge of the weed-barge, clinging to her submerged and seemingly immovable rake. As it would to any normal teenage brother, the sight of his sister teetering over a body of water proved irresistible to Rip, so he pushed her in. And believe me, this was not a body of water you wanted to go swimming in. It was turtle friendly, but turtles are the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches. They could survive an underwater nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, the innumerable fish my Dad had tried to introduce into the pond either got instantly dead, or worse yet, just went missing. Eaten by the pond. Or maybe mutating below, growing tusks and foul tempers. And while the toxic Dow agents hadn't made a dent in the weeds, they probably weren't really good for your skin. Might make you shiny. Like Day-Glo.

Laura scrambled out of the water and back on the raft and was understandably furious. But, being a solid first mate, she eventually picked up her rake and got back to work. Probably ten minutes later, Rip pushed her in again. This time, after struggling back onboard she defiantly declared, "if you push me in one more time, I'm going to swim to shore and you can just---" Rip pushed her in before she had finished her sentence. And Laura just floated there for a second, like a little piece of pink gum floating in a vat of brown toxic stew. And then she did the unthinkable. She actually made good on her threat and swam for home. Rip and I watched her the whole way; pulling herself onto shore, striped with brown muck, weeds in her blonde hair, marching resolutely up the lawn and in through the basement doors and out of sight, presumably to find Mom and lodge a complaint. Rip and I exchanged looks, silently agreeing that what Laura had done was worthy of admiration, and then he got back to work.

I thought of this incident the other day when I was driving to Wisconsin. I had a long conversation with Laura on the cell phone. She has had a pretty rotten couple of months. And we talked about Rip, who has been working like mad to keep the company healthy and afloat. And suddenly there we were again. Rip the reluctant captain--now of industry rather than a makeshift raft. Laura the sturdy first mate, getting pushed around by outside forces, nevertheless bound and determined to stay in control. And me, sitting quietly, trying not to make waves.

We may not have the sturdiest ship, but we're a damn fine crew. Shiny, too.