One recent morning at the pond, I watched a young mother try to get five minutes of peace.
She picked up the blue raft that she had pumped up in the parking lot, eased onto it in shallow water and paddled out toward the rope boundary. Within two minutes she had three children hanging on the edges of the raft like young possums on their mother’s back.
After three or four minutes of that, she abandoned the raft to trudge back to her blanket and pick up a yellow inflatable ring in the shape of a duck. She slipped that around her waist and lazily floated back out to the center of the swimming area. Within three minutes, that also had been usurped by the kids and she had waded back to her blanket. Maybe that was her strategy all along.
So it goes at my neighborhood pond. Ponds are where Cape Codders go when we want five minutes peace. When we don’t want to hassle with beach parking or packing enough gear to outfit a desert expedition. The Cape has over 800 ponds, from tiny to the 743-acre Long Pond in Brewster and Harwich. My pond is middling, too small for anything bigger than a two-seater bass boat but big enough to keep a kayaker happy for an hour or so.
It’s warmer than the ocean – good news in early July although maybe a little too warm by the end of August. I’ve been swimming there for over 50 years, and despite what people say about ponds in late summer, I’ve never had an ear infection I could blame on the pond, despite swimming into late September. I’ve occasionally gone swimming in my underwear as a quick dip during a hot morning’s walk and once or twice in the all-together but I’m not going to discuss that now. I’ve fished it once or twice and canoed around it. My children took swim lessons there back in the day. During one particularly dry summer, the dog and I circumnavigated it along the beachy bits at its edge that are usually submerged, fighting our way through overgrown brambles to the point where I thought we’d be lost and never found.
The snapping turtles live in the depths, and we find them occasionally moving along the road like the prehistoric creatures they are. The ospreys glide overhead. The turkey vultures dry their wings in the fallen trees at the pond’s edge. Early this spring, a pair of ducks took up residence near the beach, although usually they stay clear once the human beachgoers show up.
Ponds have their own gentle rhythm – so much less frenetic than the ocean beach. If you’ve paid $35 to get into the ocean beach, there’s a certain pressure to stay all day. Ponds are handy. No long trudges from the parking lot. If you’re lucky, there’s one within walking or biking distance. And some have bathrooms and picnic tables. If you’re lucky enough to have one nearby you can easily stop by for an hour or two – or even a quick swim when you’re walking or out on your bike.
Here’s how the day goes at my pond: In the morning, toddlers play in the calm, shallow water watched over by mothers and grandmothers and the occasional grandpa. Older kids claim the middle ground, dunking each other or exploring with swim masks. Swimmers with a capital S – outfitted with goggles and caps – stride confidently through the shallows out to the middle to get in their laps. Paddle-boarders and kayakers launch just off the beach. A child with a net pokes around for a good hour or so catching minnows. Older folks – most of them women – settle into beach chairs near the shade, occasionally wandering into the water to paddle around. By late afternoon, the dads appear, tossing kids off their shoulders and expanding the splash zone. And on weekends families pull out the picnics and barbecue and music and hang-out almost until dusk.
You can hear more languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Creole– at my pond than at almost any other spot I’ve found on the Cape. That said, there’s a universal language as a mother stands at the edge of the water, hands on hips and insists that everyone get out of the water NOW because it’s time to go home for lunch.
The other morning, I really admired that young mother’s optimism that she was actually going to get a few minutes without someone asking her for something. As I was leaving, I saw that she had reclaimed the blue raft and was drifting out to the deeper edge of the roped-off area. The kids meanwhile had turned their attention to something in the water.
It looked like she might actually get her five minutes of peace.
