Dan’s Papers October 8, 2010 danshamptons.com Page 26
Pond
(continued from page 19)
along the shore of the pond. The lots sold for millions. And so the residents, so proud of these very valuable lots, carefully groom them with the best landscaping money can buy, leading right down the front lawn and into the water. The whole situation came into the news eight years ago. One day they woke up to find that the pond was bright red and all thick with some sort of gooey seaweed with the consistency of noodle salad. Nobody could go in there, that was for sure. Actually, it was not for sure. The authorities said it might look really bad but it was completely harmless, just a natural blooming of algae very happy to be where there was a
lot of nitrogen and phosphates. Looks bad. It’ll go away on its own in a month or two. Of course the residents around the pond did not want to wait for it to go away on its own. They formed an organization determined to deal with this problem in their pond. They did not call it the Mill Pond Committee. They called it Friends of Princess Noadonah Pond because although its been listed on all maps for the past 300 years as Mill Pond, there was a time, apparently, when an Indian princess, tired from walking alongside the pond, sat on a rock and took her moccasins off to wiggle her toes and rest up awhile. Naming the pond after her had a nice ring to it.
1267516
Anyway, the residents were visited one day by the salesman from a company called Solarbee that sold giant six-foot tall 10-foot diameter solar-powered paddling devices that would, when the sun shone, stir the waters of the pond thus annoying the algae enough as to make it go away. They had done this elsewhere. They had before and after pictures. They said the real problem was that there was no oxygen at the surface of the water. All the oxygen was down at the bottom. They would churn it up. There was a cost to this, of course. It would not be cheap. It would cost $20,000. But the residents ponied up to have one. Or, well, three. This got to be in the news because in order to put something this size into the pond on a semi-permanent basis (May to October), you’d need a permit from the Town Trustees. They applied. They got one. The company brought in their paddle stirrers and set them up. And the residents spent the next summer looking out at the three noisy paddle stirrers and noting that nothing was any different, except that besides the red tide algae which still hadn’t gone anywhere there were now paddle stirrers blocking the nice view. The Committee did this for the next two years to no further effect except to put more money in this company’s coffers. The company said one year was not enough. They said the paddles had to move faster. They said they needed bigger paddles. It was all in vain. This past summer, with the red tide back once again, the committee has come to a different conclusion. They are saying they want to shoot the fish in the pond. They will need a permit for that for next spring, so they are applying this fall. Their logic is that the richness of all the goop in the pond has been a real windfall for this very hardy and very aggressive but non-indigenous fish called a carp. Some of them, in fact a whole lot of them, have been sneaking up from the Mill Pond Estuary which is just to the south of the pond, which lets out (and in high tide lets in) the water from Mecox Bay and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. Not only have they been sneaking up, but because they are hardier and nastier than anybody else, they are driving all the regular fish, who can’t stand the red tide either, away. (The carp have teeth. The others don’t.) So it is the carp’s fault. The carp eat wildly in Mill Pond. They poop in Mill Pond. And so the so-called natural circle of life goes around and round. Shoot the carp. Meantime, another voice has spoken up about the pond. A photographer, going out in the rain, has taken pictures from an overflow coming down concrete sluiceways from a nearby potato farm has sent lots of pesticides (new pesticides much less harmful than those we used to use), down the sidewalks and culverts and into Mill Pond to make the soup in there even worse. And so, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say, so it goes.