Come along with me, let’s fly over an expanse of leafy Cape Cod woods, oaks interspersed with pines. Occasionally the foliage swath is punctuated by a house, or several houses in a row, plus roads like threads of black or sandy brown, and most notably by jewel-like holes in the earth filled with water. Fresh water ponds.
The one we’re aiming for is an almost circular hole in the trees. Just one rock, a glacial boulder, pokes through the surface a couple of feet, in a dry year not at all. This is an intimate pond you can walk around, though in a wet year, that way around is watery.
Here it is: Owl Pond. A jewel of the earth. And when I swim there, I am in three worlds at once: my body in water, the earth around me and as I breathe in, with all my senses, the great dome of sky above.
As I arrive, the branches bend forward over the water as though they were friendly arms, leaves beckoning; below the water ripples. Leaving my shoes and towel on a bench, I go down some steps. The soles of my feet rejoice at the flat sand. Walking further, I come to where the trees have deposited a dark clothy layer of leaves and twigs on the bottom. Wet to the waist now, I’m out from under the leafy canopy and a bowl of clear sky floats overhead. Soon coolness covers my breasts and I am folded into a watery envelope.
Scooping gently with my palms about forty feet out, I move in place like a slow propeller making no splash. Turning, turning, in a circular diorama. Shading and shading, further and further green, the treescape spreads and evolves, foliage without end, Amen. Though hardly at the pond’s actual center, I feel at the mid-point of a universe—or is this water-tree-sky world a kind of temple?
Often flotillas of water striders skim over the surface or dragonflies hover, with their large silvery-blue lace wings or lean yellow-rod bodies. Miniature white blossoms from a low bush release a fragrance of great sweetness. Scanning the shore, I spot the occasional red brush dabs of sumac.
Owl Pond is of the many kettle ponds on Cape Cod, beautiful glacial remnants on a spongy landmass, fed by springs. Various in size and shape, some are beloved and used, others pretty much abandoned. I’ve always loved these ponds; while they don’t have the cachet and glamor of salt water beaches, this might be to their advantage, and mine. Yes, gorgeous shores line this porous, “holey” piece of land, but the ponds offer the intimacy I love.
I’ve often pondered why this one is named Owl Pond. Never have I seen or heard owls here, but all those trees furnish perfect concealment—and I always come in daylight. Perhaps someone did observe many owls here and when it came time to name the pond, her or his story stuck. Or perhaps the roundness of Owl Pond suggests an owl’s eye. There are usually reasons for Cape Cod pond names (Minister’s is located behind a church), so I accept whatever significance this one possesses, happier with its connotations than Snake Pond or Horseleech Pond.
Pondering, I keep treading water, stroking with my hands, watching and listening. Owl Pond fills my vision, fills my thoughts. There is somehow enough time, a feeling I seldom have. I inhale the fragrance of those white blossoms, which mingle with an herby aroma of dry leaves and pine needles. I listen. . . a few bird calls . . . the distant roar of a plane. Staying afloat is as easy as breathing; my arm and leg strokes are responses in a kind of physical litany. Embraced by this gracious fresh water, I give thanks. For this moment Owl Pond is my place in Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”
Thoreau also expressed it beautifully. “The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake…”
Everything seems concentrated at Owl Pond. Or perhaps I am the intense one. Over the years, I have recorded my visits so compulsively that I write inwardly as I walk or swim; the experience is incomplete until the words have taken their places in my journals. Here’s one such entry.
The wind creates rushing nets of ripples on the surface and the clouds move swiftly, intermittently blocking the sun. Floating, I watch a wave of clouds shade the trees all around – then the wave of shade would shift and leaf colors re-intensify like a two-dimensional picture transformed into three, or a black and white photo brightening into color.
One summer my daughter Anne and I swam across Owl Pond. I think we felt a sense of ownership. Watching Anne stroke confidently, I remembered her aged two, in her red swimsuit, sitting in the shallows slapping the water with her palms and wincing at her own splashes. Did she taste it? Another summer, some years later, I swam with my uncle Dudley. Then in his eighties, he was hollow-chested and battle-scarred from his heart operations. Side-stroking nearby I watched his careful, measured strokes, then enjoyed his pleased smiles as we chatted while drying off.
I also hold winter memories, walks there with my father, and one year way back, probably at the holidays, a chilly stroll with my beloved Aunt Ellen. A skim of thin gray ice at the edge, open water further out. I remember the dry cracking sound my boot made as it pressed fragile surface.
“Nothing so fair, so pure…as a lake…lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water… A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above.” Thoreau again.
I wish I could go to Owl Pond some summer evening at dusk and sit in the woods, then watch the greenery turn to dense leafy black and feel cool darkness settle in around me. Perhaps a breeze will stir up soft rustlings in the leaves. I’d sniff honeysuckle, perhaps hear drifts of distant laughter. Then, disturbing the surface as little as possible, I would stroke out to the center of the dark pond world and float there.
I wouldn’t be alone there, either, for somewhere in the shadows there’s a spirit. Probably he won’t reveal himself, for he’s a shy, awkward soul and will be listening as I am. A homely fellow, dressed in the clothes of the 1840s or 50’s, rumpled and worn. Perhaps he’s spread-eagled on the ground or drifting in a boat watching the moon. If I hear a muffled shifting, he may be taking out the joints of his wooden flute and breathing into it, for I think his sounds, his notes are something I’ve always heard, consciously or not. Yet when the owl flies over, Thoreau’s flute falls silent and “whoo whoo” overlays the notes floating in the dark.
Fantasy aside, Thoreau is a persistent though quietly spoken ghost who walks with me, as he has done with many others. Perhaps he knew me before I knew him, as I learned pond life for myself while living by Minister’s Pond as a teenager in Eastham. He’s spoken in low but earnest tones whenever I’ve gone to Owl Pond over the years, saying “Hold this, it is precious and wonderful…” And now, though appalled at how urban Cape Cod’s environment has become, I think Thoreau is still saying. “Find whatever you can of the earth and know it as fully as possible.”
Swimming in memory, I return to Owl Pond. Again and again.
