not yours

Clearly, I was powerless to haul the nutrients out of the water. Fortunately, the plants were not. A mat of algae is really nothing more than dissolved phosphorous and nitrogen made solid through the alchemy of photosynthesis. I couldn’t remove nutrients by shoveling, but once they are fixed into the bodies of plants they can be forked out of the water with the application of biceps and bent back and carted away by the wheelbarrowful. The average phosphate molecule in a farm pond has a cycling time of less than two weeks from the time it is absorbed out of the water, made into living tissue, is eaten or dies, decomposes, and is recycled back to feed yet another algal strand. My plan was to interrupt this endless recycling by capturing nutrients in plants and hauling them away before they could once again be turned into algae. I could slowly, steadily deplete the stores of nutrients circulating in the pond. I’m a botanist by trade, and so of course I needed to know who these algae were. There are probably as many kinds of algae as there are species of tree, and I would do a disservice to their lives and to my task if I didn’t know who they were. You wouldn’t try to restore a forest without knowing what kind of trees you were working with, so I scooped up a jarful of green slime and took it to my microscope with the top screwed tightly to contain the smell. I teased apart the slippery green wads into tiny wisps that would fit beneath my microscope. In this single tuft were long threads of Cladophora, shining like satin ribbons. Wound around them were translucent strands of Spirogyra, in which the chloroplasts spiral like a green staircase. The whole green field was in motion, with iridescent tumbleweeds of Volvox and pulsing euglenoids stretching their way among the strands. So much life in a single drop of water, water that previously looked like scum in a jar. Here were my partners in restoration. Progress was slow with pond restoration hours squeezed between years’ worth of Girl Scout meetings, bake sales, camping trips, and a more-than-full-time job. All moms have treasured ways to spend the few precious hours they have to themselves, curling up with a book or sewing, but I mostly went to the water, the birds and the wind and the quiet were what I needed. This was one place where I somehow felt as if I could make things right. At school I taught ecology, but on a Saturday afternoon when the kids were off at a friend’s, I got to do ecology. After the canoe debacle, I decided it was wiser to stand on the shore with a rake and stretch out as far as I could reach. The rake brought sticks draped in Cladophora like a comb matted with long green hair. Every stroke of the rake combed up another sheet from the bottom and added to a quickly growing mound, which I had to get out of the watershed by moving it downhill from the pond. If I left it to rot on the shore, the nutrients released in decay would return to the pond in short order. I flung the wads of algae onto a sled—my kids’ little red plastic toboggan—and dragged it up the steep bank to empty it into the waiting wheelbarrow. I really didn’t want to stand in the mucky ooze, so I worked cautiously from the edges in old sneakers. I could reach out and dredge up heaps of algae, but there was so much more just beyond my reach. Sneakers evolved to Wellingtons, extending my sphere of influence just enough for me to know that it was ineffective, and thus Wellingtons came to waders. But waders give you a false sense of security, and before long I reached just a little too far and felt the icy pond rush in over their tops. Waders are darn heavy when they fill up, and I found myself anchored in the muck. A good mother does not drown. The next time I just wore shorts. I simply gave myself up to the task. I remember the liberation of just walking right in to my waist the first time, the lightness of my Tshirt floating around me, the swirl of the water against my bare skin. I finally felt at home. The tickles at my legs were just wisps of Spirogyra, the nudges just curious perch. Now I could see the algael curtains stretched out before me, much more beautiful than dangling at the end of my rake. I could see the way Cladophora bloomed from old sticks and watch diving beetles swim among them. I developed a new relationship with mud. Instead of trying to protect myself from it, I became oblivious to it, noticing its presence only when I would go back to the house and see strands of algae caught in my hair or the water in the shower turning decidedly brown. I came to know the feel of the gravelly bottom below the muck, the sucking mud by the cattails and the cold stillness where the bottom dropped away from the shallows. Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge. One spring day my rake came up draped with a mass of algae so heavy it bent the bamboo handle. I let it drip to lighten the load and then flipped it onto the shore. I was about to go for another load when I heard a wet smacking from the pile, the slap of a watery tail. A lump was wiggling in a frenzy below the surface of the heaped algae. I picked the threads apart, opening the weave to see what was struggling within. A plump brown body; a bullfrog tadpole as big as my thumb was caught there. Tadpoles can swim easily through a net that is suspended in the water, but when the net is drawn up by the rake it collapses around them like a purse seine. I picked him up, squishy and cold, between thumb and forefinger and tossed him back into the pond, where he rested, suspended for a moment in the water, and then swam off. The next rake came up in a smooth dripping sheet studded with so many tadpoles that they looked like nuts caught in a tray of peanut brittle. I bent and untangled them, every one. This was a problem. There was so much to rake. I could dredge the algae out, slap it into piles, and be done with it. I could work so much faster if I didn’t have to stop and pick tadpoles from the tangle of every moral dilemma. I told myself that my intention was not to hurt them; I was just trying to improve the habitat and they were the collateral damage. But my good intentions meant nothing to tadpoles if they struggled and died in a compost pile. I sighed, but I knew what I had to do. I was driven to this chore by a mothering urge, to make a swimmable pond. In the process, I could hardly sacrifice another mother’s children, who, after all, already have a pond to swim in. Now I was not only a pond raker, but also a tadpole plucker. It was amazing what I found in the mesh of algae: predaceous diving beetles with sharp black mandibles; small fish; dragonfly larvae. I stuck my fingers in to free a wiggle and felt a sharp pain like a bee sting. My hand flinched back with a big crayfish attached to my fingertip. A whole food web was dangling from my rake, and those were just the critters I could see, just the tip of the iceberg, the top of the food chain. Under my microscope, I had seen the web of algae teeming with invertebrates— copepods, daphnia, whirling rotifers, and creatures so much smaller: threadlike worms, globes of green algae, protozoans with cilia beating in unison. I knew they were there, but I couldn’t possibly pick them out. So I bargained with myself over the chain of responsibility and tried to convince myself that their demise served a greater good. Raking a pond provides you with a lot of mental free space for philosophizing. As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse. But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil. At first I hauled carts of freshly raked algae, but I soon realized that trundling hundreds of pounds of water was hard work. I learned to heap the algae on the shore and watch it dribble moisture back to the pond. In the following days the algae bleached in the sun into light papery sheets, easily lifted into the wheelbarrow. Filamentous algae like Spirogyra a n d Cladophora have a nutrient content equivalent to that of high-quality forage grasses. I was hauling away the equivalent nutrient load of bales of good dairy hay. Load after load of algae domed up in the compost pile, on its way to making good black humus. The pond was literally feeding the garden, Cladophora reborn as carrots. I began to see a difference in the pond. A span of days would go by when the surface was clear, but the fuzzy green mats always returned. I began to notice other sponges for my pond’s excess nutrients in addition to the algae. All along the shore, the willows reached their feathery red roots into the shallow water to troll for nitrogen and phosphorous to pull into their root systems to become leaves and willow withes. I came along the shore with my loppers and cut the willows, stem by swaying stem. Dragging the piles of willow branches away, I was removing storehouses of nutrients they had sucked from the pond bottom. The brush pile in the field grew taller, soon to be browsed by cottontails and redistributed far and wide as rabbit droppings. Willow responds vigorously to cutting and sends up long straight shoots that can tower over my head in a single growing season. I left the thickets away from the water for rabbits and songbirds, but those right at the shore I cut and bundled for making baskets. The larger stems became the foundation for garden trellises for pole beans and morning glories. I also gathered mint and other herbs along the banks. As with the willows, the more I picked, the more it seemed to grow back. Everything I took moved the pond a step closer to clear. Every cup of mint tea struck a blow for nutrient removal. Cleaning the pond by cutting willows really seemed to help. I cut with renewed enthusiasm, moving in a mindless rhythm with my loppers— snick, snick, snick—clearing whole swaths of shoreline as willow stems fell at my feet. Then something, perhaps a movement glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, perhaps a silent plea, made me stop. In the last stem left standing was a beautiful little nest, a cup woven sweetly of Juncus rushes and threadlike roots around a fork in the tree, a marvel of homemaking. I peered inside and there were three eggs the size of lima beans lying in a circlet of pine needles. What a treasure I had nearly destroyed in my zeal to “improve” the habitat. Nearby, the mother, a yellow warbler, flitted in the bushes, calling in alarm. I was so quick and single-minded about what I was doing that I forgot to look. I forgot to acknowledge that creating the home that I wanted for my children jeopardized the homemaking of other mothers whose intents were no different from mine. It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want. I piled the cut brush back up near the nest in some semblance of the protective cover I had destroyed and sat on a rock, concealed on the other side of the pond, to see if she would come back. What did she think as she watched me come closer and closer, laying waste to the home she had carefully chosen, threatening her family? There are powerful forces of destruction loose in the world, advancing inexorably toward her children and mine. The onslaught of progress, wellintentioned to improve human habitat, threatens the nest I’ve chosen for my children as surely as I threatened hers. What does a good mother do? I continued to clear out the algae, let the silt settle, and it looked better. But I went back a week later to a foamy green mass. It’s kind of like cleaning the kitchen: you get everything put away, wipe off the countertops, and before you know it there are drips of peanut butter and jelly everywhere and you have to do it all over again. Life adds up. It’s eutrophic. But I could see ahead to a time when my kitchen would stay too clean. I would have an oligotrophic kitchen. Without the girls to mess it up, I would be longing for leftover cereal bowls, for a eutrophic kitchen. For signs of life. I pull my red toboggan to the other end of the pond and start to work in the shallows. Immediately, my rake gets stalled with a heavy load of weeds that I drag slowly to the surface. This mat has a different weight and texture than the slippery sheets of Cladophora that I’ve been dredging. I lay it down on the grass for a closer look and spread the film with my fingers until it stretches into what looks like a green fishnet stocking—a fine mesh network like a drift net suspended in the water. This is Hydrodictyon. I stretch it between my fingers and it glistens, almost weightless after the water has drained away. As orderly as a honeycomb, Hydrodictyon is a geometric surprise in the seemingly random stew of a murky pond. It hangs in the water, a colony of tiny nets all fused together. Under the microscope, the fabric of Hydrodictyon is made up of tiny six-sided polygons, a mesh of linked green cells that surround the holes of the net. It multiplies quickly because of a unique means of clonal reproduction. Inside each of the net cells, daughter cells are born. They arrange themselves into hexagons, neat replicas of the mother net. In order to disperse her young, the mother cell must disintegrate, freeing the daughter cells into the water. The floating newborn hexagons fuse with others, forging new connections and weaving a new net. I look out at the expanse of Hydrodictyon visible just below the surface. I imagine the liberation of new cells, the daughters spinning off on their own. What does a good mother do when mothering time is done? As I stand in the water, my eyes brim and drop salt tears into the freshwater at my feet. Fortunately, my daughters are not clones of their mother, nor must I disintegrate to set them free, but I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven? Hydrodictyon is a safe place, a nursery for fish and insects, a shelter from predators, a safety net for the small beings of the pond. Hydrodictyon— Latin for “the water net.” What a curious thing. A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it. But right then my job was reversing succession, turning back time to make these waters swimmable for my daughters. So I wiped my eyes and with all due respect for the lessons of Hydrodictyon, I raked it up onto the shore. When my sister came to visit, her kids, raised in the dry California hills, were smitten with water. They waded after frogs and splashed with abandon while I worked at the algae. My brother-inlaw called out from the shade, “Hey, who is the biggest kid here?” I can’t deny it—I’ve never outgrown my desire to play in the mud. But isn’t play the way we get limbered up for the work of the world? My sister defended my pond-raking with the reminder that it was sacred play. Among our Potawatomi people, women are the Keepers of Water. We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf. “Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers, ” my sister said. “We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations.” Being a good mother includes the caretaking of water. On Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons, year after year, I would go to the solitude of the pond and get to work. I tried grass carp and barley straw, and every new change provoked a new reaction. The job is never over; it simply changes from one task to the next. What I’m looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in. Skating in winter, peepers in the spring, summer sunbathing, autumn bonfires; swimmable or not, the pond became like another room in our house. I planted sweetgrass around the edge. The girls and their friends had campfires on the flat meadow of the shore, slumber parties in the tent, summer suppers on the picnic table, and long sun-washed afternoons sunbathing, rising on one elbow when the gust of a heron’s wings stirred the air.