One day last week, Kathy and I took some time off and spent several hours at one of our favorite ponds: a small, clear, kettle-hole pond hidden deep in the Wellfleet woods.
When we got to the pond, the morning mist had burned off and the day had turned sunny and pleasantly warm.
We walked from the informal parking area across a boardwalk through a small wild cranberry bog, bordered with pogonias and adder’s mouth lilies. The pond shoreline, with its open spaces, tall pitch pines, blueberry and bayberry bushes, cedar fencing and hemp matting placed along the shore, looked like an inexpensive but tastefully-done stage set.
We sat in our beach chairs, reading and watching hero darner dragonflies flitting across the calm blue surface of the pond. After a while, Kathy worked up the courage to go into the pond, and I followed after. The water was no colder than the ocean in August – which is to say, not all that warm.
As we went in, green frogs and bull frogs leapt out from the shoreline into the water, sending out widening ripples. Occasionally a fish would rise to the surface, also setting off expanding circles across the surface. When two of the expanding, concentric circles of ripples intersected, we witnessed that strange phenomenon: the two waves appeared to pass through each other without any observable effect on either one, as if both of them were insubstantial, immaterial forms, like a ghost passing through another ghost. I knew I could easily look up the physics of this. And there also seemed to be a metaphor here – something about consciousness and the body – if only I could grasp it. But I was “off duty” then and could just let the intersecting ripples cross and go on their merry, unanalyzed, unarticulated way.
One of the pleasures I get from the Cape’s natural features is coming upon earlier accounts of them by older writers, part of what I call “the tradition of observation” that is so rich here. Edmund Wilson, the famous literary critic and Wellfleet resident, was also a devotee of this pond. He discovered it in 1948, and gives this wonderful impression of it in his Journals:
“I felt about the place a wildness unlike anything one finds in the ponds we frequent. It was as if it existed for itself, as if the frogs and the orchids flourished and perfected themselves, had their lives, for their own satisfaction. Nobody came to see them. They did not have to be on their guard against being picked or caught (the frogs were not troubled by our presence, but, after a moment, went on with their singing). There it was, walled in, complete in itself, absorbing its summer days, lying open from sun to sun, with the ponds bending water lilies and water grass, frogs and turtles, pickerel and perch, in their unplumbed, unfished-in depths.”
This pond, like all Cape ponds, is more visited now than it was in Wilson’s day, but I was glad to think that, nearly seven decades later, it has managed to retain its essential character and mystery. Most of all, though, I was glad that this had been such an ordinary day.
