A friend texted on Friday that something weird was up with Town Pond. Turning north at the Woods Lane traffic light, he noticed what looked like the circles made by light rain on its surface. Circling around to park and getting out of his truck, my friend Geoff realized what he was looking at. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of what looked like tropical fish-tank fish, about two or three inches in length, swam near the surface.
“Are you there now?” I asked. “On my way.”
I parked near the graveyard and went down the sloping grass to the edge of the pond. Visibility extended only an inch or so through the pea-green water but that was enough. There were fish everywhere, orange ones, black ones, and ones with orange bodies with black tails. In yardwide schools they came to the surface, feeding, I supposed. On what, I had no idea. More schools dotted the pond all the way to the south end drain.
Geoff and I considered the possibilities. Someone would have had to have dumped thousands of gallons of water along with the thousands of adult fish for it to have been an overnight thing. It must have taken time for the pond to become home to as many non-native fish, but how?
It turned out this was not something that had only recently happened. Chris Gangemi, on The Star’s writing team, knew that the fish had been in there at least since September 2023. He sent photos. They showed the same kind of creature, goldfish-colored but not goldfish-shaped. Somehow, they had survived the winter and thrived.
By chance, a reader recently sent us an undated color photograph of Town Pond after an ice storm. Though the pond surface is open, the trees are coated in brilliant white under a clear blue sky. It was a lovely image but one that I wondered if we would ever see again.