Soot's Pond

Soot's pond is shaped like a tear, with spring and rain water flowing in across the top, the southern end, and flowing out a rocky bed due north, the direction John Mosby and his raiders famously advanced. At maximums, the pond is about 75 yards end-to-end and 25 yards across. They say it goes three-to-four yards deep, but I haven’t yet swum it and touched bottom. I will.

On still days the pond water can be clear to near five feet. On rainy days, it is opaque, the color of tobacco spit. Floating in the pond middle, on a sunny day, we may see the swamp monster, a mossy snapping turtle about two feet from snout to tail. He could bite off a toe, or another tender bit. But I think him all-timid — Give me my daily mash of detritus, perhaps a young fish or frog, and move on. Life advances, says the swamp monster, sometimes slow and phlegmatic, sometimes sparklingly fast. There are dozens of black bass and catfish a foot long or so, and hundreds more fingerling, crappie, frogs and whatnot beasts. It is a lovely place. I set there and think, or imagine, or imagine I’m thinking. Sometimes I’m just sating my curiosity with a local whiskey or ale. I watch thoughts and writing snips come in and out, across my brain’s imperfect stage. Great words appear, and they disappear before the laptop is cracked. Writing is best, I guess, when not air drawn, but with fingers on keyboard, or pen to paper. At least it is not lost.

The pond flows out a small vee in the berm, a shallow channel lined with smooth stones and flagellating mosses, and falls into a swale below. When the water flow is high, after a rain or during most of springtime, a second pond forms in the fen, bordered by the stone fence, and shot through with fallen tree, ferns, mosses, other ancient plant and rot. The lower pond is the more scary place, home to snakes, cottonmouth vipers, thick poison ivies, and cutting bramble. In spring it is a thrumming orchestra of peepers — leopard, bull and tree frogs. Raptors and herons fly in and swoop to dine at Soot’s Camp’s ponds, probe the fen, grab and guzzle a small beast, and fly off.

Hummingbirds and bluebirds are constant companions on the granite flat, the house and homestead above the pond. My guests and I tend to stay there, lounging in Adirondack chairs or benches I built. Dogs run here and there, slipping into the pond for a drink or swim. They may return mucky, so we soap their coats and hose them down, pulling out an errant tick or bramble when we can.

A family of coons lives by the pond. I see one or two on occasion, pawing at the algae’d surface from a big rock, maybe grabbing a small turtle or crappie to eat. A large heron swoops in late in the day. She sits in the tree, silhouetted by the gloaming sky. Maybe she’ll swoop down and pluck dinner from Soot’s pond.

A train whistle blows in the background, a mile off, down Leeds Manor, aside Goose Creek. The wheels thrum over the rails and cross-members.

My spirit is soft.