© 2010
In the midst of a summer heat wave, Arlington’s Spy Pond becomes a place of respite, of relaxation and of adolescent nocturnal restlessness. Idyllic to the eye, often a breathless beauty to the sensibilities and a necessity in essence to the body and spirit, the pond brings visitors from numerous neighborhoods and cities, from all walks of life. Business people with an extra ten minutes of time to reflect, mothers, fathers and their toddling children, young adults deep in bikinis, bass fishing lures and books, shamans and healers with their spiritual offerings, teenagers with their weekly loves and/or cheap beer and dogs with their diverse multitude of walkers, companions and poop-baggers all, in some way, call Spy Pond their solace, their mini-vacation destination, their home.
Spy Pond is also home to grey catbirds, largemouth bass, Canada Geese, cottontail rabbits, gigantic carp, snapping turtles, cormorants, coyotes (though probably just a way station for them) and a stop-off for the glorious and sundry great blue heron. Spy Pond is many things to many beings and people and is also the placid and distressed mirror for the human society that seeks its safety and daily jeopardizes its very existence. As has been said, the ocean is downhill from everywhere and, likewise, Spy Pond, catching all of the chemical, physical and social pollution that Arlington has to offer. Our lawns, verdant and green, though still anathema to the safety of the pond, are still being treated with herbicides that still make their way into the once pristine waters. Every rain, heavy or not, opens up new exposures to road oils and heavier flows of flotsam and jetsam plastics of all kinds from the indifference and ignorance of our automotive shipping lanes and local foot traffic. Close observation of the ebbing and flowing of shoreline plant life has revealed a constant undergrowth of often numerous beer cans and bottles left from likely teenage gatherings, with many, many bottles found broken in the shallows in particular places. If it weren’t for the presence of a few condom wrappers, it could be surmised that these parties were completely devoid of any insight, self-reflection or larger social perspective.
The ever-presence of multi-levels of pollution raises rolled eyes assuredly, but many deeper questions in micro and macroscopic perspectives. Spy Pond, in this instance, raises for us the larger question of how our lifestyles, knowledge, ignorance and apathy impact the natural world, which, for the record, is actually every inch of the globe. Upon reflection on the easily observed contradictions exposed by this issue, it would seem that the Pond represents our deepest impassivity concerning environmentalism in a town that would easily call itself “aware”, what with the proliferation of blue plastic boxes every second monday on neighborhood curbs. How does a citizenry of such means and presumed environmental intent allow itself to foul its most prized aquatic jewel in such myopic disregard?
This is not a question for the ages as modern society has relatively recently created for us (and by us) an intricate set of cultural distractions, busy-ness, media consumption and digital communications maintenance and a deification of individualism, that are a constant set of “jingling keys” that keep our eyes off of our own distorted reflections that we would clearly see if we were able to see beyond the paradise we think we have. One cannot see themselves clearly in tranquil waters yet littered with (ironically) bottled water container caps, plastic candy wrappers, dunked donut drink straws and a steady supply of abandoned plastic bobbers, fishing line, foam and plastic bait containers, hooks and lures from the fisherfolk. Or maybe this watery image of ourselves is the clear picture of ourselves that we must learn to engage. If our waters are fouled by our love of convenience and distraction, then so are we.
And what of these nocturnal teenage gatherings, increasing with the heat of the summer, sometimes heralded during “all hours of the night” by numerous loud, unconcerned voices flowing down Linwood Street, Spy Pond’s main artery, tributary crossroad of speeding cars, entitled bikers and little league baseball families, their voices babbling downstream toward the pond, the repository of their need for communal connection, parental separation and the concomitant and dangerous sexual release that some of the physical evidence points to?
“American culture” has glamourized the shoddy, faulty youth initiatory experience of heterosexism, alcohol and hyper-sexualism and whether in the backseat of the mythical ’57 Chevy, the hidden rural woodland clearing or the sloping shores of Arlington’s natural treasure, these alcoholized experiences are often rife with physical, natal and gendered risks, our daughters, neighbors and friends going along for the dangerous ride that culminates in the high school graduated statistic of one in four college women becoming victims of rape or sexual (and/or psychic) attack, exacerbated deeply by the presence of alcohol, legal or otherwise. More directly, what is our concern for the safety of girls, their bodies, their images and ideas about themselves, their self-esteem and spiritual power? Though men and boys are most often the perpetrators in gendered violence, they are also victimized by the assumption and embodiment of imbalances of power within themselves and in the society that spawns them. How does a citizenry of such means and presumed cultural-environmental intent allow itself to foul its most prized communal jewels in such myopic disregard?
Water, to indigenous people, represents and embodies life itself, peace, community, connection and balance, the very harmony that allows us to really see each other, care for each other, providing a safe, secure cultural container for childhood and beyond. Even in our modern scientific data-driven minds we “know” that we cannot live without water. Are we just as sure we cannot live with fouled and polluted water? The indigenous heart recognizes not only the sacredness of water, which doesn’t allow for its degradation or abuse, but also perceives its power to mediate our worst consumptive tendencies and fiery, masculinized acts of commission. This power, when engaged with open heart, is an ever-present healing force yet forgotten by the modern mind and its sublimated emotional nature, held in contempt by the presence of broken glass, baseballs and bottle caps, just under the mirror-surface. This power is no less deeply derided by the presence of carp ridden with DDT and chlordane. This power no less clearly disdained by the adult culture that lets its children find their own social and sexual way on the darkened shores of those gentle waters, unaware of that energetic power, unaware of their own, sparking their way into the infrastructure of the social fears and contempt of the very generations that created them.
The ice cream truck makes its rounds, a scratchy, digital, annoying instrumental version of the Disney (Walt’s bastion of socio-cultural distraction) tome, “It’s A Small World” playing on its very loudspeaker. We have yet to see just how small this world really is, possibly unaware because we participate still so completely and fully in the culture that poisons and defiles its own sustenance and source of life. Without the popular engagement of this industrial and social infection, we may be unable to sense the contradictions that our children present to us in our own midst, the contradictions that our own societal and commercial run-off represent, habits formed and habits forgotten. A disease undetected, a disease denied is a disease that can destroy the strongest of bodies, political, social, spiritual or corporeal. Our inability to see and feel through our own distorted viewpoints may well be the disease born out of this local and universal conflict of disinterest, further destroying the world of water in which we live and Spy Pond itself, the diamond in our rough, imbalanced unconscious.
(all above photos © Ukumbwa Sauti; taken at Spy Pond)
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