There is a pond nestled back in the woods in east central Illinois that is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s not very big, maybe an acre or so, but it’s quiet. Rimmed with old growth forest that reach all the way to the water’s edge, it sits in a bit of a horseshoe shaped valley. To the north, a small drainage wash from the higher ridge-line above feeds the reservoir when it rains enough. At the southern end of the water, and the open end of the horseshoe, there is a treeless damn that holds the water in and breaks up the forest. To the south of the damn, the land falls away into a steep ravine with a small creek a the bottom of it that feeds into Whet Stone, the prominent creek in the immediate watershed on this plot of 137 acres. From there, the water drains into the Embarrass River to the west.
On all sides of the pond but the southern end, the tree-covered land slopes upwards, and when you float to the middle of the water and look up to the sky from your back, the trunks seem to stretch all the way to the clouds.
The pond was dug by my family. And it was truly a family undertaking. Everyone worked on it. My mother fondly remembers toiling away with my grandfather (her father-in-law) during the digging. They would work until midday and then stop for a Pepsi. Always a Pepsi. Never a Coke.
My uncle almost lost his leg to that pond. One day while running a chainsaw to clear away trees so that ground could be broken and the hole could be dug, my uncle’s thigh and the teeth of the saw blade became one. He remembers riding in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s truck (his father) on the way to the hospital 30 minutes away, turning talcum-powder-white and trying to keep his lunch in his stomach while my grandfather employed him to not bleed on the seat.
The pond is a marvel. A man made marvel. Beautiful and horrible all at once. It’s a scar on the landscape, one that will remain for sometime, but the damn on the south end of the pond that holds the water in will eventually give way to the natural rhythms of water and time—erosion.
And the whole thing will be for naught. The old-growth white and red oaks—organisms that had been on this earth much longer than my family had known of this land’s existence— that came crashing down for the puddle that would provide water to my grandfather’s home— they will have fallen in vain.
I have spent hours upon hours at that pond. It’s where I learned to swim and how to catch a fish. And how to eat a fish I’ve caught, too. I fell in love—more than once— on late summer afternoons under the gentle sway of the towering oaks moved by the velvet warmth of a midwestern summer breeze. I’ve picked wild blackberries from the south slope of the damn and let the warm, rich juice run over my hand and down my arm before stuffing them in my mouth. I’ve swam naked at midnight under the stars of a new moon sky, and then dried out by a fire on the bank.
I have done a lot of living at that pond.
One summer, my best friend and I decided to build a dock on the water. For years, a pontoon boat that belonged to my uncle had slipped into disrepair as the seasons passed and took their tole on the sad vessel tethered to the bank. We were seniors in high school and had grand notions of the perfect place to bring our friends to drink cheap, contraband beer. So we started to dismantle the boat as it floated there on the water.
We stripped it down to the pontoons and aluminum deck beams. We loaded the carcass of what we had dismantled into the back of my dad’s pickup and drove it into town where we disposed of it in a number of dumpsters down back alleys. A real shady deal.
Next we went to the lumber yard and purchased sheets of plywood and some rugged exterior paint. In a day’s work, we had a floating dock that we could maneuver with the help of an oar (and for a brief time an ancient trolling motor wired to a car battery) to any place on the water.
For two seventeen year old boys, it was an engineering miracle, and one we were not shy to show off to our peers.
The completion of our floating party barge stoked the fire in our minds. Next we would build a rope swing. This would be a bit bigger of an endeavor. One that required diesel-powered machines to aid in moving a telephone pole about 800 meters down to the water’s edge. We made it as far as digging the hole and getting the pole next to the hole.
The abandoned infrastructure project still sits where we left it, littering the woods next to the water.
—
When my father and his brothers decided to sell the land, and the pond with it, a piece inside of me broke free and floated out into the middle of that cool water of my youth. That was two years ago now. In the time since then, I went out into the world and lived my life, traveling the western and eastern United States and Ireland. But a piece of me still floated out in that pond, lapping up and down on the water stirred by a western wind. I would think about it often when I would scroll through photos on my phone and come across a snapshot of a largemouth I’d caught from underneath a low-hanging branch near the bank. I felt the hole that had formed within me, the piece of me that had already left and floated out into the murky water. I guess that’s why when the sale of the land was finalized a few weeks ago, I didn’t fall under the wave of grief I saw swelling on the horizon. The one that swept my mother and sister away. It had already come and gone and taken a piece of me with it.
I went back this spring to visit before the closing of the sale. My father and mother where going back out to my childhood home to gather any last minute possessions that had been forgotten — collecting years of dust in the time since either of them had lived there. We spent about a week driving the 8 miles between town and the land. And at the end of each day when we had finished working, I would walk up to the pond and fish. On one of those days, I had the best outing I’d ever had on that water. I couldn’t keep the fish off the end of my line.
And that’s how I’ll remember that pond. The fish are still there. The water is still there. Maybe I’ll go back to visit again someday. It was never mine anyway—it was never any of ours. The oaks, maybe. But no one else’s.
I just got to spend some time there and watch the seasons change and the earth spin on — which is fine with me.