Norway Pond is not like the other ponds and lakes scattered around my small New Hampshire community. Those other waterbodies are pristine, with clear, deep water and long, wild stretches filled with loons and nesting eagles. Their shores lead to mountains and hidden peninsulas, islands dotted with pink-blooming spoonwood, and elephant rocks you can dive off.
Norway Pond is filled with tea-colored water, bluegills, painted turtles, and lily pads. It is small, warm, and shallow: a good place to get a leech.
But I’ve given my heart to this 40-acre drop of a pond. This is where my three children learned to swim, their chubby toddler cheeks puffed out like fish as they practiced putting their faces into the cool water on a hot July day. It’s where my daughter and I paddled out to watch Cygnus and all the other summer constellations take to the sky, while a beaver gathered saplings on the shore. Once I even fell in love here, with a man who swam through slivers of ice on his April birthday. And it’s where I came to wash away the heartache when it was all over. At Norway Pond, my two sons teach me how to cast my rod and set my hook, again and again.
My family has made a habit of this place. We wander along the pond’s edge and its adjacent rocky brook in all seasons, searching for what feels untethered to the human world. In autumn, we chase the Canada geese from the beach, like hounds on a hunt. During winter days, we skate, swirling on top of black ice laid out like the Milky Way. Come spring, we snuffle along the shoreline like bumblebees, burying our noses in the honeyed odor of trailing arbutus and trout lilies. We nip the first sweet blueberries of summer off the shrubs like bears, curling our lips over the juicy sweetness. We stand in the water, still as great blue herons, waiting for the silvery minnows to nibble our toes – and then, like raccoons, we rake our fingers across the sandy bottom, trying to catch them barehanded.
We hop from rock to rock, following the stream up and up until we come to an expansive grassy marsh, which rolls out between mountains like a long, green tongue. Along the way, my boys scout for fishing holes and I search for otter sign. As we meander around the curvy banks, I smell the otter haul-out before I see it: an earthy odor, thick with fishy musk – a smell that excites both my dog and me. I know this mound of scat is not meant for me, but I am picking up the message. I am breathing in what is untamed and animal. I would give anything in this moment to be an otter and lay myself down in this stinking pile, marking myself as undomesticated and free.
Right here in the middle of Hancock, New Hampshire – a tidy and proper New England village – we’ve gone wild.
We are not the only ones. Come along Hancock’s Main Street, the one road through town, and look down past the church’s curved horse sheds and the town sledding hill, and you’ll see the pond. No matter the season, people are here. Fishermen, kayakers, swimmers, skaters, cross-country skiers, and dog walkers. The pond draws us all in.
On hot days in summer, the pond’s soft, silky water offers cool sanctuary. Swimmers float on their backs as the heat drifts away from their bodies. Swallows skim the surface nearby, turning and diving, then popping up again, their heads breaking the water’s surface like sleek mink. Children, shiny with water, crouch along the sedges and stalk slippery green frogs. Not so different from the painted turtles that bask along the pond’s edges, people drift in tubes, soaking in the sun as if to store it for the coldest winter days. When a northern water snake weaves through the water, we freeze like prey. One little boy whispers, “I didn’t even breathe when it swam by.”
This pond reminds us that – in challenging times and good ones – life goes on, the world unfolds, and we are not alone here. In these moments at Norway Pond, we are in kinship with the whiskered hornpout, the blue-winged damselflies, and even the glittering northern water snake. We remember that we were once wild, untamed, and free, too.
Susie Spikol is the community program director for the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock, New Hampshire.