I have lived in West Tisbury for almost 64 years — what is there not to love? I have lived in the house we built on the north side of Look’s Pond for 54 years, and although I can no longer enjoy the activities in and around the water, I can still see it, and my memories are vivid.

We had lived on this 3.3-acre plot of land next to this three-acre pond for almost 10 years before I thought of it as anything but a body of water to swim in, to skate on, to fish from and to admire as beautiful scenery. But in the mid-1960s I discovered that it was much more than that. As a small valley it started as a meadow where farm animals grazed — it was good pastureland because a brook, grandly called the Tiasquam River, ran through it.

But a few years ago — 1665 to be exact — 23 years after the first settlement on the Vineyard was established by Thomas Mayhew Jr., Benjamin Church built the first gristmill in the town of West Tisbury. At that time, Church dammed up the Tiasquam River in two places, which turned the meadow into a pond in order to run the mill.

Only four years later, he sold the mill and the property around it to Joseph Merry, who operated it until 1675, when he sold it to Tristram Coffin of Nantucket. In turn, Coffin’s grandson, Jethro, who inherited it, sold it to Thomas Look. The pond was owned and operated by the Look family for 162 years, until 1877, and it has been called Look’s Pond ever since.

David Look, the final owner of the mill, removed the building to use for other purposes. Finally, the dams rotted away, and once more, the pond reverted to a meadow, again occupied by farm animals.

My husband’s parents bought the property in the 1920s and had the dams rebuilt, and again, the pond emerged. Before Johnny’s mother sold the property in the mid-1960s, she gave us about three acres on the north shore of the pond, and we built our house there in 1957. By then we had three small children and we dug out a small swimming hole near the smaller dam. Then we built a wooden dock stretching 10 feet out into the water. Our children, Jack, Deborah, and Sarah, learned to swim in Look’s Pond, and we kept a small rowboat in which they could go fishing, or, more likely, catch small painted turtles to play with for a couple days before returning them to their natural habitat and catching more. In the summer we often had up to almost a dozen West Tisbury children splashing around our swimming hole.

Our life, until the children and their friends grew up, was centered around this lovely body of water. We watched for the red-winged blackbirds to arrive in the spring to build nests in the low bushes around the edges of the water, and in the early summer, when the water of the shallow pond warmed up, we could see the heads of the painted turtles — and occasionally that of a snapping turtle — pop up to look around as they headed for a large rock at the western end of the pond. This was where they climbed out and basked in the sun — an area the children named Turtle Rock.

In winter — and the winters seemed colder in those far-off days — the pond would quickly freeze, and it was a meeting place for those of our friends who spent many happy hours skating on its surface. Thus it was, until the mid-1960s, just an attractive addition to the beautiful piece of land we had chosen to live on the rest of our lives. Then, in order to finish my education and belatedly earn my BA, I took on a project to discover what this pond was hiding from us. I wanted to learn everything I could about the lives of all the creatures that lived around the pond — and in the pond. I gathered books about pond life, a microscope, an aquarium, a long-handled net and a pair of tall wading boots.

Beginning in early March of 1964, every morning, weather permitting, and after Johnny had gone to work and the children were off to school, I donned my boots, grabbed my net and oars and headed toward the little boat in which I mostly drifted around looking for things to catch in my net. Later on I took a couple of jelly jars to get samples of the water. Back at the house I would put a drop of pond water on a glass slide and observe through my microscope what was in that drop of water.

The word ecology was pretty new in the 1960s, and I soon learned that what I was doing was studying the ecology of Look’s Pond. This branch of science is the study of all organisms and how they interact among themselves and within their environment. I called it My Year of Discovery. I discovered what kinds of birds liked to live near the water, the secretive animals I had never noticed before — otters, muskrats, the turtles when they came ashore to lay their eggs, the tadpoles and the different kinds of frogs they turned into. I identified the plants and trees that grew as close as they could to reach the water, and then — then I discovered what was in the water that I couldn’t see except through my microscope. That was fascinating, but alarmed me — how many of those copepods, ostracods and protozoa had we swallowed while splashing around in our swimming hole?

It was a wonderful adventure as I followed the seasons for almost a year. I hatched tiny snails from eggs I had gathered and put into my aquarium, and learned that they could be right-shelled or left-shelled. I found tiny black slimy things on the underside of small rocks along the edges of the pond. They were called planaria — flatworms, some only half an inch long, with triangular flat heads and two tiny, beady eyes. These weird little creatures had the ability to grow back into two flatworms if they were cut in half. I know, because I tried it. I found out that the dragonflies we see flying around pond water spend the first year of their lives crawling around the bottoms of those ponds, looking like ugly dragons. Thus, their name. Then there were the surface bugs, skimming along above the water on their daddy-long-legs (sometimes called Jesus bugs because they walk on water) and the water-boatmen who use their front legs as oars to propel themselves through the water. They each carry a bubble of air with them so they can breathe while under water. I never tired of watching the whirligig beetles that endlessly whirled in circles on the surface of the water.

One of the most interesting insects that I found on the bottom of the pond was a caddisfly in its pupal stage. Although adult caddisflies only live for a few weeks in order to breed, and can often be seen flying around outdoor lights, this underwater bug, after hatching, begins to spin itself into a silky cocoon which it then covers with tiny pieces of sand or sticks, or even teensy pebbles to protect its soft body. The first one I found looked like a crawling log cabin.

Learning about the lives of all the flying and crawling and swimming creatures in Look’s Pond has proven to be a lifelong education, teaching me how important it is that we respect all the living things around us, because they depend on us and we depend on them. It has been truly a wonderful place to live my life.

 

Shirley Mayhew’s Seasons of a Vineyard Pond, is sold at the Bunch of Grapes.