guilty or not

Being the good mother, good enough for two parents, seemed within my grasp. All that remained to complete the wish list for home was a swimmable pond. The deed described a deep spring-fed pond, and a hundred years ago it might have been exactly that. One of my neighbors whose family has been here for generations told me that it was the favorite pond in the valley. In summer, after haying, the boys would park their wagons and hike up to the pond for a swim. “We’d throw off our clothes and jump in, ” he said. “The way it sits, no girls would be able to see us, buck naked as we were. And cold! That spring kept the water icy cold and it felt so good after working hay. We’d lie in the grass afterward, just to warm up.” Our pond nestles in the hill up behind the house. The slopes rise around it on three sides and a copse of apple trees on the other side entirely shield it from view. At its back is a limestone cliff where rock was quarried to build my house more than two hundred years ago. It was hard to believe that anyone would dip even a toe in that pond today. My daughters certainly would not. It was so choked with green that you could not tell where weeds left off and water began. The ducks didn’t help. If anything, they were what you might politely call a major source of nutrient input. They were so cute in the feed store—When I left Kentucky to go house hunting in upstate New York, my two small daughters gave me an explicit wish list for our new home: trees big enough for tree forts, one apiece; a stone walk lined with pansies like the one in Larkin’s favorite book; a red barn; a pond to swim in; a purple bedroom. just downy yellow fluff connecting outsize beaks and enormous orange feet, waddling around in a crate of wood chips. It was spring, almost Easter, and all the good reasons not to take them home evaporated with the girls’ delight. Wouldn’t a good mother adopt ducklings? Isn’t that what a pond is for? We kept them in a cardboard box in the garage with a heat lamp, closely watched so neither box nor ducklings would ignite. The girls accepted full responsibility for their care and dutifully fed and cleaned them. I came home from work one afternoon to see them floating in the kitchen sink, quacking and dabbling, shaking water off their backs while the girls just beamed. The condition of the sink should have given me a clue of what was to come. For the next few weeks they ate and defecated with equal enthusiasm. But within a month we carried the box of six glossy white ducks up to the pond and released them. They preened and splashed. All was well for the first few days, but apparently, in the absence of their own good mother to protect and teach them, they didn’t have the essential survival skills for life outside the box. Every day there was one less duck; five remained, then four, and then finally three who had the right stuff to fend off foxes and snapping turtles and the marsh hawk who had taken to cruising the shore. These three flourished. They looked so placid, so pastoral gliding over the pond. But the pond itself began to get even greener than before. They were perfect pets until winter came and their delinquent tendencies emerged. Despite the little hut we made for them—a floating A-frame lodge with a wraparound porch—despite the corn we showered around them like confetti, they were discontent. They developed a fondness for dog food and the warmth of my back porch. I would come out on a January morning to find the dog bowl empty and the dog cowering outside while three snowy-white ducks sat in a row on the bench, wiggling their tails in contentment. It gets cold where I live. Really cold. Duck turds were frozen into coiled mounds like half-finished clay pots solidly affixed to my porch floor. It took an ice pick to chip them away. I would shoo them, close the porch door, and lay a trail of corn kernels back up to the pond, and they would follow in a gabbling line. But the next morning they’d be back. Winter and a daily dose of duck splats must freeze up the part of the brain devoted to compassion for animals, for I began to hope for their demise. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the heart to dispatch them, and who among our rural friends would welcome the dubious gift of ducks in the dead of winter? Even with plum sauce. I secretly contemplated spraying them with fox lure. Or tying slices of roast beef to their legs in hopes of interesting the coyotes that howled at the ridgetop. But instead I was a good mother; I fed them, rasped my shovel over the crust on the porch floor, and waited for spring. One balmy day they trundled back up to the pond and within a month they were gone, leaving piles of feathers like a drift of late snow on the shore. The ducks were gone but their legacy lived on. By May the pond was a thick soup of green algae. A pair of Canada geese had settled in to take their place and raised a brood under the willows. One afternoon I walked up to see if the goose babies had sprouted pinfeathers yet, only to hear a distressed quacking. A fuzzy brown gosling out for a swim had gotten snared in the floating masses of algae. It was squawking and flapping its wings trying to get free. While I tried to think of how to rescue it, it gave a mighty kick and popped up to the surface, where it began to walk on the algal mat. That was a moment of resolve for me. You should not be able to walk on a pond. It should be an invitation to wildlife, not a snare. The likelihood of making the pond swimmable, even for geese, seemed remote at best. But I am an ecologist, so I was confident that I could at least improve the situation. The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home. I could use ecology to make a good home for goslings and girls. Like many an old farm pond, mine was the victim of eutrophication, the natural process of nutrient enrichment that comes with age. Generations of algae and lily pads and fallen leaves and autumn’s apples falling into the pond built up the sediments, layering the once clean gravel at the bottom in a sheet of muck. All those nutrients fueled the growth of new plants, which fueled the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds—the bottom gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss. Sometimes the process of eutrophication is accelerated by human activities: nutrient-rich runoff from fertilized fields or septic tanks ends up in the water, where it supports exponential growth of algae. My pond was buffered from such influences—its source was a cold spring coming out of the hill, and a swath of trees on the uphill side formed a nitrogen-grabbing filter for runoff from the surrounding pastures. My battle was not with pollution, but with time. Making my pond swimmable would be an exercise in turning back time. That’s just what I wanted, to turn back time. My daughters were growing up too fast, my time as a mother slipping away, and my promise of a swimming pond yet to be fulfilled. Being a good mother meant fixing the pond for my kids. A highly productive food chain might be good for frogs and herons, but not for swimming. The best swimming lakes are not eutrophic, but cold, clear, and oligotrophic, or poor in nutrients. I carried my small solo canoe up to the pond to serve as a floating platform for algae removal. I envisioned scooping up the algae with a long-handled rake, filling the canoe as if it was a garbage scow, emptying it on the shore, and then going for a nice swim. But only the swimming part worked out—and it wasn’t nice. As I tried to skim the algae, I discovered that they hung like sheer green curtains through the water. If you reach far out of a light canoe and try to lift a heavy mat of algae at the end of a rake, physics dictates that swimming will occur. My attempts at skimming were useless. I was addressing only the symptoms of scum and not the cause. I read as much as I could about pond rehabilitation and weighed my options. To undo what time and ducks had accomplished I needed to remove nutrients from the pond, not just skim the foam. When I waded in the shallow end of the pond, the muck squished between my toes, but beneath it I could feel the clean gravel that was the pond’s original basin. Maybe I could dredge up the muck and cart it away in buckets. But when I brought my broadest snow shovel to scoop up the mud, by the time it reached the surface there was a brown cloud all around me and a mere handful of soil in the shovel. I stood in the water laughing out loud. Shoveling muck was like trying to catch wind in a butterfly net. Next I used old window screens to make a sieve that we could lift up through the sediments. But the muck was far too fine and my improvised net came up empty. This was not ordinary mud. The organic matter in the sediments occurs as tiny particles, dissolved nutrients that flocculate in specks small enough to be bite-size snacks for zooplankton.