Not long ago, I found myself in a crowded lecture hall surrounded by grim men and women sitting before specimen jars brimming with an alarming assortment of scums and growths in brodo. We had come to this annual Pond Management workshop at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, because we all had ponds that were sick in one way or another—choked with weeds, clouded with algae or, in my own case, lacking in the defining characteristic of a pond: water.

Each of us had brought along a specimen of our troubled waters in hopes that the assembled experts—an excavator, an ecologist, and a hydrologist—might know how to heal our ponds. And not just our ponds, for as anyone with a sick one knows, a malfunctioning pond casts a pall far beyond its shores, ruining whole landscapes and, in time, its owner’s psychological well-being. For the last few years my own spirits have risen and fallen with the surface of my pond. Imagine my mental state at the end of a dry summer when it doesn’t even have a surface.

Photo: Andy Roberts

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