THE DIGGER

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A pond adds both beauty and value to a country home. Here's a way to create one without resorting to expensive and soil-damaging heavy equipment.

A Stream Pond That Carves [and Cleans] Itself

by Tim Matson

One summer I swam in a stream pond in the second curve of an oxbow in Abbott Brook. The flow had chiseled into the bank, sweeping out a 20-foot bowl, then doubled back where the roots of a poplar grove held the bank together. Rebounding sediment had settled into a sandy beach on the shallow bank. You could swim all day against the current and never get anywhere.

This stretch of brook with its whirly-pit was one of the brightest lures when the surrounding land was deeded to a young family from California. Lee Ann and Mike turned salvage from an old carriage house into a post-and-beam saltbox near the bank and counted on the pond for household water and summer baths. One summer afternoon, with some help from their daughter Heather, they laid up a stone dam to deepen the basin to six feet. They chopped down a poplar to bridge the brook — great for hanging by the knees in the free current. But with autumn rains came a tide of silt that filled the little pond, and ice and spring snowmelt crumpled the dam.

Just south, Dave and Victoria built a silo house out of dismantled Army barracks trucked from Michigan. It was a memorial to thrift and sixties sentiment. Really monumental were their cellar sauna and front-yard pond. The sauna was a real beauty. Clear cedar boards lined the interior, and two racks of slatted benches crisscrossed the room. A mail-order sheet-metal stove burned with cheery red cheeks near a knee-high window that peered over a rocky brook. During tower construction David and Tor had let the brook run loose. With the house together, they looked around and decided to make a pond. They built a stone dam and shoveled silt out of the basin. The dam was laid up loose enough to pass the flow and contain a pool. It filled deep enough to inspire David, after a midnight sauna, to climb the ladder to his tower roof and leap for the dark pond below. But spring came with runoff that punched out the dam and swept in a load of silt — a nuisance for the rest of us and potentially fatal for David.