In the dead of winter, I often find it necessary to pull out some of my favorite summer memories. It warms the bones – reminds me that there is a time of year that doesn’t punish you every time you step outside.
Unfortunately, I lost the best kind of summer days with adulthood, and I haven’t been able to find them since – the kind of days that were long and lazy with hardly anything to do and plenty of time to do it in. I remember one day in particular, I was working hard at accomplishing nothing and trying my best to not get caught at it, when my sister ran up all a fluster and told me Grandpa wanted us at the settling pond. Now. On Grandpa’s farm, we lived by three rules. First, when Grandpa told you to come, you came. Second, when Grandpa told you to scoot, you scooted and third, at all times and in all places, it was in your best interest to avoid Grandpa’s notice altogether.
But obviously on this day I had been caught, so I hightailed it over the wooden fence, across two pastures and under three hot wires to the pond. We had various cousins loitering here and there on the place, and I saw they were being rounded up too, so obviously Grandpa had something momentous in the works. We pushed and shoved each other as we climbed up the pond’s steep bank, until we all stood at the edge looking down into an empty hole. There was no pond. Grandpa had drained it dry, leaving behind a sludge-filled pit. But the bottom of the pond was not still. It writhed, wriggled, slapped and crawled. The water was gone, but Grandpa’s trout remained.
As I understand it, Grandpa never had a body of water he didn’t stock with fish. Never mind that he had six commercial fishponds filled full to brimming with spotted trout; his settling pond was stocked too. Of course, a settling pond’s job is to settle itself full, and that day, Grandpa had decided it was time to backhoe it out. That left the problem of all the frantic, teeming fish that had been kept in by the grate left choking on the black mud, fanning it into themselves with pink gills. Grandpa’s solution to the problem was us.
I have no idea if he had thought through the logistics of moving the fish for even a second before he was in crisis mode – forethought was not necessarily his style. But Grandpa was never slow to act when action was called for, and he ordered us all into the pond. My sister had on a pair of new white shorts, if I remember right, but it didn’t matter. Grandpa told her she could go into the pond with or without the shorts, but she was going in with the rest of us.
I cannot adequately describe the smell at the bottom of a settling pond, full of fish, and moss and fish byproduct, and I hesitate to graphically describe what we were plowing through, but it definitely sticks to my memory. In the moment, Grandpa didn’t give us leisure to ponder on the state of our personal hygiene. “Quit horsing around,” he barked, his way, I guess, of describing our gymnastics as we frantically tried to find a foothold. “Hurry up and catch those fish!” Just as if it were as easy as that. Just as if those acrobatic fish were Idaho potatoes, patiently waiting for us to pick them up and throw them into the 5-gallon buckets he was holding.
Ever tried to grab hold of a muddy fish with muddy hands while slogging around in the bottom of a sinkhole? It’s real fun. I’d lunge forward in a spray of slime, grab a totally freaked-out fish, and it would shoot out of my hands like a rocket banana launching out of its peel, heading skyward with astounding slippery force. It’s amazing how high a fish can fly when friction is not a factor. Of course, I was also contending with cousin arms, elbows, knees and feet to the face, and I could only half see what I was doing. I had mud up my nose, mud caked in my ears and mud pasted under my eyelids. As we tore up the bottom of the pond, it got so murky, we couldn’t see the fish at all. We would spot frantic movement and slosh after it, moving in slow motion after fish that burrowed and jumped at warp speed. We gradually developed a plowing process that was somewhat successful, pushing a wave of fish toward the shore with our outstretched arms in a tsunami of gills, scales and flapping tails.
Grandpa was less than impressed with our efficiency. He encouraged us to “get a move on” with great vigor and a vocabulary so expressive it reminded me of farm rule No. 4: Never repeat what Grandpa says when you are at church or school. As soon as we had filled his buckets, he’d take off running to dump the fish in another pond and come back for more. The filling and dumping and filling and dumping seemed to go on for hours, and we were starting to fossilize when the mud finally stopped moving and settled into a calm morass – still, silent and fin-free.
I climbed the bank slowly, as heavy with mud as a mammoth, and Grandpa sent me to wash off in another fishpond. I jumped in with a splash and found myself swimming in a whirlpool of speckled trout, the fish rushing around me in a slow, circling tornado. Without a doubt, that summer day was one of the best days of my life.
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