Brothers practice-casting into the dirt–We need to be ready for our trip to the ponds!
I’ve done a lot of absurd things in my span of fifty (plus) years. Some of these strange acts retain positions of prominence in my memory. One such undertaking occurred early in my life, combining three bored, young brothers in summer, a bare spot of earth behind the garage, and some shovels–can we guess the result? A big hole, five feet deep, of course. Why? I have no idea, but we gouged out the scar in the earth over the course of mere days.
This odd little melodrama became a three-act aquaculture (fish farming) play when these same bored boys achieved inspiration from the Whole Earth Catalog (our copy was missing a few pages). With our own big-dig now lined with plastic and filled with thousands of gallons of hard-won deep well-water, the second act opened at the location of five little ponds on Fillick Creek, in the middle of a pasture owned by the Lindstedts. With their permission, of course, we spent many a summer day traipsing down to the creek bottom, from weeds to reeds, all the while keeping a weather eye out for rattlesnakes and water moccasins. After one particularly successful fishing venture, we departed with plastic five-gallon buckets full of blue gill and bass destined for their new lake-on-a-hilltop home.
A growing season elapsed, during which we tackled the challenges of feeding our ichthyoid captives: how to keep the water clean and provide them with oxygen (a homemade motor-driven pump to filter and aerate our pond), and what to do when the water freezes over in the winter (hope for the best).
Act Three: A year has passed. The fish have grown, the pond smells of sewer. The solution—drain the little lake, climb down into the remaining six inches of fish poo stew, and retrieve the fish. I had the honor of cleaning the harvest, and my mom dutifully fried up the results. Our feast that night consisted of one heaping plate of fried bluegill and bass with a suspiciously muddy flavor.
The good capitalist in me would calculate the cost of the resources required to maintain our fish farm, the time and labor involved, and the opportunity cost of not doing something else. From that perspective, the curtain of our play lowers over total failure.
Yet I remember the whole enterprise otherwise. I recall the time spent with my brothers, accomplishing something that felt significant, the hours spent with my dad tinkering and building the aerating and filtering systems required to keep the fish alive, and most of all, the joy of watching little fish attack a worm dangled over the water, a silvery flash from dark depths, a splash, and the sense of triumph that fish must have felt. Not all absurdities end in failure.
