Odds are good you know about the Edgewood Park Duck Pond, a fittingly pond-like appendage of the West River.
As for the pond’s river-like sister, the Long Pond, odds are, well, long. It’s a wilder, more treacherous and, for most of the year, more invisible place, obstructed, physically, by foliage, bramble and mud and, psychologically, by ticks and mosquitoes.
In mitigating those barriers, winter is Long Pond’s most inviting season, though risks remain. Last week, the stairs down to the pond from street level were more like a ski slope. I fell on the very first step, then twice more traversing the often steep and slippery embankment along the pond’s southern edge.
At no point was I more than 30 lateral yards from Chapel Street, yet at times I felt as though I’d walked deep into an enchanting marsh. Long Pond’s water was a bright silver mirror with dark timber serpents slipping quietly through the water. On the bank, the bramble’s teeth were sharp as ever, but so was their beauty. The latter quality was never in question among the three Canada geese gathered at the foot of a grove of cattails or the raft of ducks keeping a careful distance.
Even they had chosen the Long Pond, not the Duck Pond, and, having now experienced both for myself, I couldn’t blame them.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
