Pleasant Pond

Your humble narrator remembers…

New Hampshire has lots of ponds and rivers. They are everywhere. Living in the Western US, it’s easy to forget just how common ponds in New Hampshire are, and how beautiful they are. New Hampshire has ponds the way Arizona has canyons.

One of my favorite ponds was Pleasant Pond. It was a medium-sized pond of maybe sixteen acres. There was a fair amount of vegetation around the edges, so there were lots of frogs and turtles. When I was younger, I loved snorkeling there.

Once you got away from shore, you would see old logs on the bottom the pond. The logs lay perpendicular to the banks, stretching from the light of the shallows off into the blackness of the deeper water, and then out of sight into the murk. Some folks said that those logs were from the Hurricane of 1938, which downed lots of trees, and that people had put them into the water for future salvage. The logs always gave me a sense of foreboding, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the way they faded into the darkness.

One warm summer evening, my sister and I went out to Pleasant Pond to snorkel. We had stopped about 50 yards from shore, and were treading water in our swim fins, enjoying the coolness of the water.

Being her older brother, and perhaps not always the nicest of people, I was trying to frighten her with tales of freshwater sharks.

I told her about the Bull Sharks of Lake Nicaragua and of the Zambesi River, and how far from the ocean they would swim. No effect on her at all.

I upped the ante, mentioning the Matawan Creek shark attacks, which occurred some sixteen miles from the ocean. No real reaction. Think of all the rain we had last week, I said, swelling the rivers! Veritable highways to the ocean! Never mind that Pleasant Pond wasn’t in a river…

None of this had any effect on her, she just laughed and rolled her eyes. Yeah, right, tell me another, she said. It was hugely disappointing.

Okay, time to change tack. I decided I’d next try tales of crocodiles, captured as pets and released when they had grown too large and savage for their owners.

As I worked on a plausible story, a huge black fin snapped up out of the water in front of me, cutting along the surface with a ripping noise and spraying along for about a yard before disappearing back into the dark water.

I’d worked myself into such a state trying to come up with a good story that I was more than half-believing the stories myself. When the fin appeared, I gave off a high-pitched scream and practically levitated up and out of the water, falling back in with an awkward splash.

I felt quite sheepish as I realized, embarrassingly slowly, that I had just terrified myself with my own swim fin. In front of my little sister, whom I had been trying to scare. My sister knew immediately what had happened, and was laughing so hard that she was probably at risk of injuring herself.

I think that she has reminded me of this incident every time I have seen her since then.