‘Water, in some respects, is like the Gospel, free, but he who diverts it from its accustomed channels will, in the end, find it expensive.”
These words of excellent wisdom were penned in 1920 by a graybeard named Samuel H. Miller, who grew up in what is now the Baker House, and printed as a letter to the editor in the March 2 edition of this newspaper.
That spring — a hundred Marches ago — the townspeople were in their regular annual uproar about stormwater and drainage, and Mr. Miller (“East Hampton’s oldest resident”) had opinions about the watercourse that had been engineered to bring runoff from the business end of Long Lane to Newtown Lane, “thence into Main Street, into Town Pond, into Hook Pond, and eventually into the Ocean.”
The efforts of the village engineers to manage the flow of water were not going as planned. Sidewalks flooded frequently, and after a heavy downpour pedestrians were in danger of being swept away in the rush like Dorothy in a twister, a watery cascade of carts, dogs, prams, and galoshes.
March has roared in again like a lion and, casting my springtime thoughts to the waterway that runs, sometimes visible, sometimes subterranean, between the Atlantic and the bend in Pantigo Road that used to be called the Hook, I agree with Mr. Miller’s assessment: Human attempts to redirect the flow of nature in its free-wending course — whether we’re talking stormwater, the flow of traffic around a cussed traffic circle, or the shifting flow of sand and tide along the ocean shore — rarely go as Man in his engineer’s cap intends.
Which brings me around to the dredging work being done this month at Town Pond.
Now let us pray that the painted turtles in Town Pond are safely toted away to more remote havens, and that the good old bog swiftly regains its pastoral appearance.
Did you know that Town Pond and its ebbing and flowing loveliness have been political hot topics for a good 200 years?
The pond, like the elm and the windmill, is an emblem of our famous hometown, but the view that greets visitors as they turn onto Main Street has not always been picture-postcard. Indeed, the pond was, in its native state, “hardly more than a mud hole,” to quote a Star reporter from 1906.
I happen to know all this because the pond’s disreputable past — its disheveled and disorderly earlier days — kept popping up as a subject when I was researching a short history of the Ladies Village Improvement Society a couple of years ago. When the colonists arrived in the 1640s, Town Pond was a “miry, swampy waste filled with red cedar trees.” Up until the early 20th century, the “pond” was frequently empty, reduced to a stinking mud bog dotted with goose droppings. Other times, the water rose and flooded the entire stretch of low ground from Pudding Hill to Mill Hill. It was the Ladies who took the matter in gloved hand, outlining it as a pond proper, by the addition of a wooden sill, or curb, and using funds from a summertime horse gymkhana to pay for 10,000 gallons to be pumped in, as needed, from the village water main, “to keep it full and fresh.”
Well, plus ça change, and so on. . . .
The algae or whatever it is that turns Town Pond’s surface acid-green has been a source of indignation and political accusation since the Ladies first decided there was value in the village being beautiful. In 1903, there were complaints of “green scum”; in 1917 a “disagreeable fungus” prompted the L.V.I.S. to send a sample to a scientist for analysis.
I’m curious to see how deep the dredging of the pond will be.
I’m a child of the village, grew up on Main Street, and as such have always been aware that the pond was basically muck covered by a mirror of water, only about a foot deep, at deepest — a lesson many of us learned when we put a skate through the ice. The pond’s shallowness is one of the reasons it’s excellent for ice-skating: You will get wet legs if the ice breaks, but you won’t die.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a soggy-mittened gang would join hands on the frozen pond and make what we called a whip, a menacing formation that, when “cracked,” sent the outermost skater flying across the ice like a cannonball, mowing down everything in its path. I can remember a village police officer telling us to quit it.
There aren’t many kids living in the vicinity of Main Street, these days, which is part of the reason why you don’t often see toy boats raced on Town Pond anymore (the other reason being Xbox). Still, I have dragged my son down there — before he gets too old to be dragged — to test out a flotilla: sailboats, remote-control motor launches, homemade rafts that catch on twigs and leaf debris and get stuck midcrossing. If you let your mind wander, this can be a time-travel experience reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s great metaphysical poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: your watercraft and the shouts of the children joining centuries of children before them.
A lesser but nonetheless worthy poet, one N.L. Edwards of East Hampton, wrote sentimentally about the passage of time around the pond in the pages of The Star in 1906:
‘Twas here we boys did sail our boats,
if perchance we could make them float.
Our uncle made those boats to beat,
their sails were from grandma’s old sheet,
yet seldom did they beat that fleet
At Town Pond.
With flight of time we old have grown.
Many friends of youth from sight have flown.
Some peacefully rest ‘neath mounds of green,
which in this old burying ground are seen,
Near these waters so serene,
Near Town Pond.”
Bess Rattray