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Here are the other two pieces:
A Jewish Education
“Honey, I will give you the 30 dollars for the Seder.” My mom waved her chopsticks at me to emphasize her point. I may have introduced her to Vietnamese cuisine, but her skill with chopsticks outstripped mine. She deftly fished a morsel of shrimp from the lemony dish that rested between us.
“Thanks, Mom,” I replied, shifting positions in our booth. Palm fronds and an ostentatious fish tank blocked us completely from other diners. My mom, a short, plump, utterly formidable woman with the same thick dark hair I inherited, waited for more. “That’s really nice of you - but it’s not just about the money. I wouldn’t have anyone to go to Hillel with.” A partial truth.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” she said, popping the shrimp into her mouth. “It’s so important for you to stay connected with the Jewish community, especially while you’re away at school.” I hid a smile.
“I’m not religious,” I said. “It’s all or nothing with those kids; you can’t just go once in a while. They’re all friends with each other.”
“So find a friend who’s like you, and go over together,” my mom said, green eyes flashing. She’s a lawyer and has a response for every excuse. I took a sip of water and wiped my mouth with my napkin.
“Look, Mom, here’s the thing. Going to the Seder really doesn’t mean much to me. I’ll come home for the first night of Passover because I like being with the family; I like the food. But it’s not like I believe the prayers or anything. It’s not like I have to go to a Seder or God will smite me down.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
*
My mother said that in 1998, she saw white, winged angels rise to the ceiling as she kept vigil by her dying mother’s hospital bed. She said the vision gave her peace as she grieved, and after my grandmother’s funeral she started going to our synagogue, the Reform congregation Temple Shalom, a lot more. She read lots of books with uplifting titles and attended Shabbat Services regularly and signed up for a Torah study class; she joined countless temple committees and was eventually elected to the Board of Trustees. Every year she forced the family to leave for High Holy Day services an hour early so we could get good seats near the front, then she wandered the aisles of the synagogue to mingle with friends while my dad and my sister and I - who never went to services unless compelled - waited awkwardly in our stiff, freshly-ironed Temple outfits. My mother became, in a word, a regular.
But she kept eating shellfish. She kept running errands and watching TV and flicking light switches on Saturday, kept wearing pants and tank tops, kept ordering in pizza on Friday nights. She served the pizza on the same plates we would use the next night for chicken. We have always had one set of dishes in our kitchen, one refrigerator, one dishwasher - just like her Reform family did when she was growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her family was large but tight-knit, intimate. For the Burgers, being Jewish meant being part of a Jewish family. Being part of a Jewish family meant sharing big noses, irreverent laughter, irrational fears, and gossip about the new family that just joined the synagogue. I know it pains my mother even now that we live in Boston, a full three hours away from her father and siblings. Last fall, we visited my grandfather at his new, handicap-accessible, high-rise condo, which is on the same street as the congregation of which he’s been a member for 60 years. He showed us the view from his seventeenth-story porch, pointed to the modest colonial a few blocks away where he and my grandma raised their children. If the weather were clearer, he said, we would be able to make out the apartment where he was born.
“Yep,” Pa said. “This is home.” My mom took his hand in both of her own.
*
When my father was growing up an hour away in Hartford, Connecticut, his Orthodox family kept three sets of dishes: one for meat; one for dairy; and one very special gold-rimmed china set for Passover. His parents were German Holocaust survivors, working class and uneducated, but they scrounged up enough money to send him and his brother to yeshiva - Jewish day school. Generations of Bernhard boys had studied Jewish ritual in Berlin until they were old enough to work at the family bakery, and my grandparents refused to let the tradition die simply because they had crossed an ocean. At yeshiva, my dad learned to write, speak, and understand the Hebrew language. He also learned to hate ritual. After college - he was the first member of his family ever to earn a degree, - he put his Hebrew skills to use when he worked on an Israeli commune, known as a kibbutz, for six months. When he returned to America, he lost whatever interest in Judaism he may have had. He stopped going to services, stopped fasting for Yom Kippur, stopped eating matzo on Passover. When my mom takes us to temple, he wants to sit far in the back so no one will notice when he falls asleep. The tallis, or prayer shawl, he wore when he became Bar Mitzvah lies folded in an obscure drawer of his desk, yellowing along the creases. The only vestiges of his former life are the occasional Hebrew curses he hurls in moments of anger.
Once we were driving on the highway when a flashy SUV cut in front of my dad to reach the exit.
“Lech! Lech l’cha zel!” my dad called out the window as the SUV sped away, shaking the broad fist that would have served him well if he had chosen to pursue the family business. I asked him what the expression meant. “Lech l’cha zel?” my dad chuckled. He kept his eyes on the road; the afternoon light cast a shadow on the sloping, hooked nose he’d passed on to me. “That’s what the rabbis used to yell at us when we misbehaved. It means ‘go to hell.’”
*
It was my mother who supervised my religious education. She does not know a word of Hebrew herself; when she was young, girls were rarely encouraged to study Torah. My mom determined that things would be different for me. She enrolled me in Sunday school two years before I even started kindergarten, so once a week we would drive to temple and I would color in pictures of Moses and the Ten Commandments. As the years passed, lessons became more interesting: we learned the stories of the Old Testament and the reasons for the Jewish holidays. We were taught that the Jewish “God” was eternal, formless, all around us and within us but at the same time nowhere at all. I remember trying to imagine this God, but always visualizing a pale fat man sitting in the clouds, looking down on Earth with a frown on his face. I remember being terrified of death and asking my teachers what happened to us when we died, because my Christian friends all said everyone went to heaven or hell. My teachers replied that Judaism was ambiguous on this point, had no concrete conception of an afterlife. They said we lived on in memory, in the hearts of our children and our children’s children, after we died. I found the answer insufficient.
In fourth grade, my religious education intensified when I joined the alef class, named for the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, of my temple’s Hebrew School program. I went to temple two afternoons per week, where well-meaning but highly incompetent Brandeis students tried to teach us to read and write the ancient language. I liked the elegant, curved letters of the strange new alphabet; I liked the novelty of reading from right to left; I liked the idea of vowels that floated above and clung to the bottoms of consonants. Most of all, I liked that, after just a few short months, I was able to pick up a prayer book and struggle through the chants that had formerly washed over me.
I remember attending a Shabbat service shortly after this revelation and watching with scorn as my mom flipped to the back of the prayer book for the transliteration of the v’ahavta - a prayer I could now read in Hebrew - and listening with contempt as she mispronounced the words whose cadence I had mastered. Yet like my mother, I had no idea of the meaning of the prayer until the congregation read it out in English. Hebrew school did not teach us how to speak the language; it only taught us to sound out the words. You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your being. The congregation chanted in unison. Set these words which I command you this day upon your heart. I looked over at my mother. She was swaying slightly, chanting with her eyes closed. Teach them faithfully to your children. Clearly she had memorized the words long ago. Speak them in your home and on your way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. A wave of disgust swept over me. The words meant nothing.
*
Three years later, at my Bat Mitzvah ceremony, I stood in the same synagogue before all of my relatives and chanted more words that I could not understand. From my position behind the bimah, or podium, I trembled in my brand-new navy blue dress bought special for the occasion. I fiddled with my neatly manicured fingernails but tried not to touch my blow-dried hair. Looking out over the dark wood pews of the congregation, illuminated by stained glass windows, I could see my mom’s family, the Burgers: her father; her two brothers and their wives and children; her sister and her husband and children; various elderly cousins whose names I didn’t know. All of my mothers’ siblings married Jews and all raised their children - there were ten first cousins total - Jewish. Laura and Eddie, the youngest and oldest siblings, were still members of the same congregation in Bridgeport where they had grown up; in fact, both served terms as the temple’s president. Mine was the eighth coming-of-age ceremony in the family, so the Burgers knew the drill. They were relaxed, smiling, whispering to each other. A few rows back sat my father’s brother Ronnie with his wife, an Armenian-Italian woman who made lasagna on Christmas Eve, and their two young daughters, who were raised celebrating both Christmas and Chanukah, believing nothing. All four looked stiff and uncomfortable; the girls kept readjusting their matching dresses.
Months earlier, the cantor had given me a recording of herself chanting my Torah portion, Bo. I had studied it diligently, memorizing every trill and inflection until I could recite all 10 verses without once looking at the words. The lines came straight from the middle of Exodus: God has just decided that he will kill all of Egypt’s first-born sons as the tenth plague, and pauses to dictate to Moses how the Israelites should prepare and consume the sacrificial meal of lamb - the meal that would eventually become the Passover Seder. From the bimah, I chanted the lines flawlessly, though my heart was pounding in my throat and my hands were trembling. Afterwards, my father gave me a gruff hug that mussed up my hair and said “Mazel Tov, Stephanie. You made it through. Nothing to worry about now.” My beaming mother kissed me, eyes shining, and said “You were wonderful. My little girl is a woman now.” Later, she read the English translation of my portion to the congregation. I remember: You shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time.
*
The clear fragrance of freshly-snipped parsley mingling with the pungent aroma of ground horseradish; the curved opacity of a hardboiled egg; the sound of matzo cracking and plates clinking; the acidity of red wine on the tongue - all conjure memories of a Seder, of the Seder, the one meal that is the same every year, for all time, so that sifting through my recollections of past Seders, I can grasp only sensations, nothing concrete. Every year I rejoice in the comfort of familiarity. Time is cyclical like the seasons, round like the egg on the Seder plate. My father distributes the Haggadot, the Seder prayer books. He is the Master of the service, a fact he’ll remind everyone of as many times as he can throughout the evening. He likes to rush through the prayers, often omitting pages at a time, to get to the “Festive Meal” at the end; he slows down and reads the Hebrew only when my mother - the real Master - admonishes him.
It’s hard to blame my dad, knowing what waits in the kitchen: gefilte fish, chopped liver, and matzo ball soup, all made from scratch and ready to be served; brisket and sweet tsimmes and potato kugel heating in the oven; soft, chocolate-flecked Mandelbrot for dessert. The menu never varies. This is why I love Passover: tradition, heritage, family. Knowing that my mother has made the same chicken soup that her mother made before her and her grandmother before that. God is irrelevant; no one knows if the Exodus even took place. I will chant the Four Questions and dip parsley in salt water and chew horseradish until my nose stings and my eyes water, but I’ll do it because I love tradition, not because worshipping God means anything to me. My father is reading the parable of the Four Sons: The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?!” By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental. You, therefore, blunt his teeth and say to him: “It is because of this that the Lord did for me when I left Egypt. If you had been there, you would not have been redeemed!”
*
By the time I graduated from high school, my outward expressions of Jewishness had dwindled to a few traditions like the Seder and Yom Kippur services. I called myself an atheist, scoffed at the idea of God, rolled my eyes at anyone who believed in God. No educated person, I maintained, could seriously expect mere prayer to have tangible benefits. I think my mother, the most highly educated member of her family, placed faith in prayer. She had struggled in vain against my efforts to distance myself from temple, nearly dragging me onto the board of the youth group and always asking if I would go to services with her. For my mother, I stayed in Hebrew school through senior year but only because the class met just once a week starting in eighth grade. Even as I drifted away, my mother was rising in the ranks: several board members asked her to run for president. Just before I left for college, my mom looked up Brown on the national Hillel website.
“Look at this, Steph!” she said. “Brown is 25 percent Jewish. It’ll be so easy for you to make some more Jewish friends, finally.”
“Mom, that’s terrible logic,” I said, cramming a stack of T-shirts into one of the suitcases that littered the floor of my room. “Newton South was over half Jewish and apparently that didn’t do the trick.”
“Well, maybe you’ll find more in common with Jews in college than you do here,” my mom said. “Make an effort; go to community events and try to learn something. You don’t want to end up like your father. There’s not a spiritual bone in that man’s body.”
“He doesn’t seem to mind.”
*
In the Vietnamese restaurant, I pushed a mound of sticky rice around my plate with my chopsticks. I was home for Spring break after seven months at school. My mom and I were supposed to be out to dinner to catch up and spend time together, but the conversation was rapidly turning into a prolonged nag about my lack of enthusiasm for Judaism.
“How can you look at something like a beautiful sunset, and then tell me you have no conception of God?” my mom said. “Doesn’t it fill you with a sense of wonder?”
“You just outlined the Design Argument,” I replied.
“Excuse me?”
I sighed. To my surprise, I found myself enrolled in a Religious Studies class for second semester at the recommendation of an adviser. We read the views the great Modern Western philosophers like Hume and Kant and Nietzche held about religion. The class was changing my perceptions about the meaning and definition of religion, about the idea of God. I still fought against the classical conception of God and certainly against the way Judaism presented this idea, but I was no longer sure I could call myself an atheist.
“The Design Argument says that the world is so perfect and complicated that only an intelligent being could have created it,” I told my mom. “Like, because the world exists, it must have a cause for existing, and the cause must be intelligence.”
“And you don’t believe that?”
“No. I think it’s baseless. Makes too many unfounded leaps. People think intelligence must be so important just because they happen to have it.”
“Then what do you believe?”
I paused. I could say I believed in evolution. I could say only the individual could define his own idea of God. I could say I believed in objectified morality or universal consciousness - or that I felt the need to reserve judgment on any abstract matter.
“I don’t know.”
“See!” my mom cried. “You are a Jew.”
Now it was my turn to say “Excuse me?”
“Steph, do you know what Israel means?” I searched my brain, reaching back to Hebrew school days. I remembered the story of Jacob, one of the forefathers of the Hebrews, wrestling with an angel and subsequently changing his name.
“Yeah, it’s ‘one who struggles with God, right?’”
“Exactly. You’re supposed to question and wonder and struggle. It’s okay not to have all the answers. You can still be a Jew.” I smiled and rolled my eyes once again.
“A Jew with chopsticks.”
The Path to the Pond
I’m not going to tell you how to get to Duck Pond because I don’t want you to know, because I don’t want anyone new to know or else the pond will become just like any other Cape Cod beach, crusted with tourists and cigarette butts and trash. I go to those beaches too; I swim at the ocean beaches with thundering waves and vast sweeps of coarse sand and I explore the marshy dunes and shell-rich shallows of the bay beaches. My favorites are the Wellfleet ocean beaches because the dune cliffs leading down to the shore are hundreds of feet high, so high that by the time you’ve clambered to the bottom of the path the rumble of the waves has swelled to a roar and when you look up the cliff, you can’t see any sign of civilization. You’re surrounded by sea, sand and sun. Only too many kids ignore the path and the erosion warning signs and half run, half slide down the cliffs to the beach below. You can see where they’ve slid from the dark scars in the cliff; you can see the rusty mounds of sand they leave at the base of the dune. Every summer there are more mounds; every year the cliffs seem shorter. I’m afraid that one summer I’ll go back, and they’ll be gone.
I have the same fear about Duck Pond, which is why I’m not telling you how to get there. Like Wellfleet’s other kettle lakes - Great Pond, Gull Pond, and Long Pond, too name a few - you can find Duck Pond on a map of the Outer Cape. It’s smaller than the others, and rounder - a perfect coin. Unlike the other lakes, Duck Pond does not lie tangent to a road. It has no convenient parking lot for the minivan and the trunk full of blow-up toys; it has no lifeguard chair, lake house, or dressing room. It is alone, isolated, nestled in the middle of the coastal woods. Duck Pond feels ancient and at the same time ageless, unaffected by the passing years.
In terms of geology, Duck Pond - indeed, all of Cape Cod - is brand new. The peninsula formed during the most recent ice age, around 25,000 years ago, when a giant continental glacier was retreating north along the primordial coast of New England. The disintegrating glacier left behind an inorganic trail of rocks, sand, dirt, and ice, a trail that would eventually solidify into Cape Cod, a trail so infertile that, millennia later, the Pilgrims would stay for only a few months before moving their godly settlement up the coast to Plymouth. Like the other kettle ponds, Duck Pond formed around 12,000 years ago when one chunk of ice left by the glacier melted, causing embedded debris to collapse into a deep bowl that would later fill with water. The original pond probably had an irregular shape, but thousands of years of gentle waves coaxed the soft, sandy borders into its current perfect kettle. Besides allowing the pond to shape-shift, the sandiness of the surrounding earth keeps the water crystal clear and pure while helping the short, hardy scrub oaks and pines that have adapted to the Cape’s barren soil to flourish.
It’s those trees, with their gnarled, grasping roots and impenetrable thicket of branches, that have kept most tourists and vacationers away from Duck Pond thus far. Route 6, the two-lane highway that bisects Wellfleet’s ocean side and bay side, runs less than a mile from Duck Pond’s shore, so the distance itself should not present an inconvenience. In fact, the entire spit of land, one of the narrowest sections of the Cape Cod peninsula, measures less than two and a half miles from ocean to bay. Most lakes, and even some rivers, would swallow the whole town. It’s hard to call any part of an area so small isolated. Yet I call Duck Pond isolated because you can’t hear Route 6 from its shore, can’t hear anything but bugs and breeze as you descend the long, wooded path to the water. I call Duck Pond isolated because the crowds haven’t found it yet.
My family found Duck Pond 15 years ago, the first of countless times my parents would rent a Wellfleet cottage for our week-long summer vacation. When the owner finished showing my parents around the house, my father, already impatient with the traffic and bustle synonymous of Cape Cod in August, asked him where he could take the family to get some peace. The owner obligingly wrote out directions to Duck Pond. The very next day, my parents plunked me and my then-toddler sister into the station wagon and, after an hour of wrong turns and backtracking through bushes, found the pond.
Of course, I don’t remember that first trip - or the second or the third or any individual visit to Duck Pond, really. My memory is a collection of the experiences my family has had over a decade and a half of summers. We almost always go to Duck Pond at the same time of day, under the same circumstances: we’ve spent hours at the ocean, and by late afternoon we’re ready for a change of pace. Salty and sunburned, we lay out towels in the car to keep the upholstery from getting sandy. We make a quick stop at whatever house we’re renting that year to rinse the salt water, harmful to Duck Pond’s delicate ecosystem, from our bodies, and then we’re out the door again. We’re usually irritable on the drive to the pond; the hours of sun have worn us out. My parents argue about whether to stay in or go out for dinner; my mom chastises my sister for wearing SPF 15 sunscreen instead of SPF 30; my sister and I fight over who will get the first shower when we get back to the house.
But when my dad makes the turn from the smooth asphalt road to the unmarked, unpaved path, unnoticeable to anyone who doesn’t know where to look, that leads directly into the woods, all quarreling ceases. We’re silent, holding our breath for a few seconds, waiting to see if this time our two-wheel drive will succumb to the trench-like ruts and potholes of the path. Overhanging branches scrape both sides of the car; other than that, all we can hear is the shifty breeze in the low scrub oaks. The sudden absence of traffic sounds spurs us to hush our own voices when we speak again. We’re out of the sun now, sheltered by a canopy of green. My dad switches off the AC and rolls down the windows. The drive to the pond, which might take 20 seconds on Route 6, takes 15 minutes as we creep along at three miles an hour.
The sign nailed to a lonely, weathered old post says “Duck Pond Parking Lot.” It refers to a small area just behind that was cleared of trees maybe a few decades ago. Most of the trees have grown back now and form natural barriers between the spaces - there are about six of them, eight if the cars are small. But squeezing is not an issue: I have never seen the lot filled. My dad parks and applauds himself for his skill, and we all get out, conscious of the clunk of the doors as they slam in the silence. We can’t see the water yet. We find the foot trail and follow it deeper into the woods, past the blueberry bushes, straight for a while and then suddenly, sharply downhill. Round the bend and, finally, we catch our first glimpse of water sparkling through the trees. Hearts quicken and paces too, and soon my sister and I are running, flip flops smacking roots and pine needles, down the hill to the water’s edge. Some years there’s a little sandy beach, but if it’s been a wet season the water laps right up against the roots of the trees. Either way it doesn’t matter; this isn’t like the ocean beach where we spend 15 minutes staking out a square of sand with a picnic blanket and umbrella. We throw our towels, flip flops and shorts in a pile at the base of a tree and surge into the water without a backward glance.
It’s warm from the sun so there’s no need to inch in skittishly like we do at the ocean, warm and so clear that we can see our feet and the schools of minnows even when we’re in up to our shoulders. I always start grinning when I’m in that far, and soon I’m laughing out loud and I’ve got to dunk my head under a few times to assure myself that I’m really there, present in the moment, taking in Duck Pond and everything it’s offering. I come up for air and float on my back, allowing the sun to dry my face. Looking straight up, I see only blue. If I stretch my neck to the side, a rim of green comes into view; swim in a circle, and I see that the rim extends in a perfect sphere. I lie in water, surrounded by woods. I hear the lapping in my ears, and my own breathing too; I feel the silky touch against my bare legs and arms. This is peace. And then my legs are above my stomach and my arms are flailing and I’m inhaling water because Deb has just jumped on my chest. But I’m laughing so it’s okay.
Last summer I was back at Duck Pond, laughing in the water, only this time the sun had set and Deb was home in Newton and the water was touching a lot more than my arms and legs. At some point I got old enough to plan my own vacations - miniature vacations, at least - so in July five of my friends and I took time off from our jobs as waiters and lifeguards to spend a weekend camping in Wellfleet. As the only one who had ever been to Wellfleet, I assumed the job of finding a campsite and planning our activities. I picked a site in the same woods as Duck Pond. We drove down on a Friday afternoon, pitched the four-person tent that we were sure would be roomy enough for all six of us, and cooked a dinner of extremely smoky chicken over the campfire. I had told my friends about the pond when I first made the reservation, and Kate and I had joked about sneaking out at night to go skinny-dipping. As the sun set and we scrambled to wash our dishes in the fading light, everyone was too nervous to bring up the idea again. But a few hours later we were all cozy in our sweatshirts and tipsy from the bottle of vodka that Rostic had smuggled from his house and giggling around the embers of the fire and Rostic said “So are we going?”
Sonia and Kate and David and Katy cried “yeah!” in unison and they were all ready to get up and go, but then I wasn’t sure because it was so dark and nearly 1 a.m. and I didn’t know if I’d be able to follow the path without sunlight. And there are skunks and raccoons in the woods, and maybe strange people too. And maybe, just maybe, I didn’t want to share the secret of Duck Pond with so many people who might not understand how special it was. But in the end they convinced me; they dragged me to my feet and David promised to hold my hand the whole way there. At first I took him up on the offer, but by the time we had left the campsite and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the pond, I found some courage. I even carried one of the flashlights and led the group along the path, watched the bobbing circle of light illuminate roots and branches. That was all I could see because the trees obscured the sliver of moon. I heard my breath and the giggling of my friends. I smelled brine in the air, a cool sea breeze settling down in the woods and making its way back to the ocean. I didn’t get us lost once. To my surprise, every twist, pothole and fork of the path had ingrained itself into my memory, so that reaching the pond on foot in the dark was no more challenging than finding it in broad daylight.
This time the shore was almost upon us before we saw the water through the trees, and then only because it glimmered in the cool glow of a crescent moon. Our steps quickened and our giggles grew louder; finally we reached the shore and we turned off the flashlights and we took off our clothes. Standing by my sweatshirt and sneakers crumpled on the ground, I wrapped my arms around my chest and doubled over in silent laughter at the thought of being outside, in the dark, naked. I laughed at the feeling of breeze in my bellybutton, between my thighs, on the small of my back. I had never even worn a bikini before, and now I was wearing nothing at all. I realized that my fear had vanished.
“Ready guys?” said Kate. “Let’s do it on three. One…two…three!” We weren’t supposed to look at each other, but I did anyway and saw five other pale bodies, blue in the moonlight, hurtling from the trees into the water with a splash that echoed in the silent woods. Even though it was too dark to see much, the girls held one arm across their chests and one between their legs; the guys cupped both hands in front of their crotches. The water was cooler by night, but not too cold and still soft and clear, and we didn’t slow down until it hid our bodies from view. We dunked our heads under to see what it felt like to have every part of your body touching water. We paddled out until we realized our feet could no longer touch the bottom - a frightening and exhilarating realization because we couldn’t see the drop-off coming.
“Watch out, guys,” Rostic said. “I have to pee.”
“No!” I cried. “This water is pure - no one pees in it. That’s what people do at the other ponds and that’s why the other ponds are so disgusting.” Rostic laughed. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. One person cannot destroy Duck Pond, but many people, discovering it over decades or even just years, may desecrate the pond that took nature centuries to form.
I swam away from the others a bit and floated on my back, as is my custom. Tilting my head so my ears were completely submerged, I looked up into the night sky, finally visible now that we weren’t under the canopy of trees. I gasped. Never, ever had I seen so many stars: they speckled the indigo just like the freckles flecked my face after a day at the beach. And bisecting the stars, a strange, bright cloudy line that I’d read about but never seen - the Milky Way.
“Look!” I cried. “You can see the Milky Way. It’s our galaxy, guys. This is insane.” More splashing ensued as necks craned upwards to see the phenomenon so novel to teenagers raised in the glare of city lights. A few moments of respectful silence, of rapturous “ahhh’s,” and then the laughter picked up again. But I floated for a while longer, feeling the water caress my stomach and spine and wondering to think that, after so many years of reliable sameness, Duck Pond had something new to teach me. I can only hope that it will survive, pure and unadulterated, to teach me more in years to come.
A Jewish Education
“Honey, I will give you the 30 dollars for the Seder.” My mom waved her chopsticks at me to emphasize her point. I may have introduced her to Vietnamese cuisine, but her skill with chopsticks outstripped mine. She deftly fished a morsel of shrimp from the lemony dish that rested between us.
“Thanks, Mom,” I replied, shifting positions in our booth. Palm fronds and an ostentatious fish tank blocked us completely from other diners. My mom, a short, plump, utterly formidable woman with the same thick dark hair I inherited, waited for more. “That’s really nice of you - but it’s not just about the money. I wouldn’t have anyone to go to Hillel with.” A partial truth.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” she said, popping the shrimp into her mouth. “It’s so important for you to stay connected with the Jewish community, especially while you’re away at school.” I hid a smile.
“I’m not religious,” I said. “It’s all or nothing with those kids; you can’t just go once in a while. They’re all friends with each other.”
“So find a friend who’s like you, and go over together,” my mom said, green eyes flashing. She’s a lawyer and has a response for every excuse. I took a sip of water and wiped my mouth with my napkin.
“Look, Mom, here’s the thing. Going to the Seder really doesn’t mean much to me. I’ll come home for the first night of Passover because I like being with the family; I like the food. But it’s not like I believe the prayers or anything. It’s not like I have to go to a Seder or God will smite me down.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
*
My mother said that in 1998, she saw white, winged angels rise to the ceiling as she kept vigil by her dying mother’s hospital bed. She said the vision gave her peace as she grieved, and after my grandmother’s funeral she started going to our synagogue, the Reform congregation Temple Shalom, a lot more. She read lots of books with uplifting titles and attended Shabbat Services regularly and signed up for a Torah study class; she joined countless temple committees and was eventually elected to the Board of Trustees. Every year she forced the family to leave for High Holy Day services an hour early so we could get good seats near the front, then she wandered the aisles of the synagogue to mingle with friends while my dad and my sister and I - who never went to services unless compelled - waited awkwardly in our stiff, freshly-ironed Temple outfits. My mother became, in a word, a regular.
But she kept eating shellfish. She kept running errands and watching TV and flicking light switches on Saturday, kept wearing pants and tank tops, kept ordering in pizza on Friday nights. She served the pizza on the same plates we would use the next night for chicken. We have always had one set of dishes in our kitchen, one refrigerator, one dishwasher - just like her Reform family did when she was growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her family was large but tight-knit, intimate. For the Burgers, being Jewish meant being part of a Jewish family. Being part of a Jewish family meant sharing big noses, irreverent laughter, irrational fears, and gossip about the new family that just joined the synagogue. I know it pains my mother even now that we live in Boston, a full three hours away from her father and siblings. Last fall, we visited my grandfather at his new, handicap-accessible, high-rise condo, which is on the same street as the congregation of which he’s been a member for 60 years. He showed us the view from his seventeenth-story porch, pointed to the modest colonial a few blocks away where he and my grandma raised their children. If the weather were clearer, he said, we would be able to make out the apartment where he was born.
“Yep,” Pa said. “This is home.” My mom took his hand in both of her own.
*
When my father was growing up an hour away in Hartford, Connecticut, his Orthodox family kept three sets of dishes: one for meat; one for dairy; and one very special gold-rimmed china set for Passover. His parents were German Holocaust survivors, working class and uneducated, but they scrounged up enough money to send him and his brother to yeshiva - Jewish day school. Generations of Bernhard boys had studied Jewish ritual in Berlin until they were old enough to work at the family bakery, and my grandparents refused to let the tradition die simply because they had crossed an ocean. At yeshiva, my dad learned to write, speak, and understand the Hebrew language. He also learned to hate ritual. After college - he was the first member of his family ever to earn a degree, - he put his Hebrew skills to use when he worked on an Israeli commune, known as a kibbutz, for six months. When he returned to America, he lost whatever interest in Judaism he may have had. He stopped going to services, stopped fasting for Yom Kippur, stopped eating matzo on Passover. When my mom takes us to temple, he wants to sit far in the back so no one will notice when he falls asleep. The tallis, or prayer shawl, he wore when he became Bar Mitzvah lies folded in an obscure drawer of his desk, yellowing along the creases. The only vestiges of his former life are the occasional Hebrew curses he hurls in moments of anger.
Once we were driving on the highway when a flashy SUV cut in front of my dad to reach the exit.
“Lech! Lech l’cha zel!” my dad called out the window as the SUV sped away, shaking the broad fist that would have served him well if he had chosen to pursue the family business. I asked him what the expression meant. “Lech l’cha zel?” my dad chuckled. He kept his eyes on the road; the afternoon light cast a shadow on the sloping, hooked nose he’d passed on to me. “That’s what the rabbis used to yell at us when we misbehaved. It means ‘go to hell.’”
*
It was my mother who supervised my religious education. She does not know a word of Hebrew herself; when she was young, girls were rarely encouraged to study Torah. My mom determined that things would be different for me. She enrolled me in Sunday school two years before I even started kindergarten, so once a week we would drive to temple and I would color in pictures of Moses and the Ten Commandments. As the years passed, lessons became more interesting: we learned the stories of the Old Testament and the reasons for the Jewish holidays. We were taught that the Jewish “God” was eternal, formless, all around us and within us but at the same time nowhere at all. I remember trying to imagine this God, but always visualizing a pale fat man sitting in the clouds, looking down on Earth with a frown on his face. I remember being terrified of death and asking my teachers what happened to us when we died, because my Christian friends all said everyone went to heaven or hell. My teachers replied that Judaism was ambiguous on this point, had no concrete conception of an afterlife. They said we lived on in memory, in the hearts of our children and our children’s children, after we died. I found the answer insufficient.
In fourth grade, my religious education intensified when I joined the alef class, named for the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, of my temple’s Hebrew School program. I went to temple two afternoons per week, where well-meaning but highly incompetent Brandeis students tried to teach us to read and write the ancient language. I liked the elegant, curved letters of the strange new alphabet; I liked the novelty of reading from right to left; I liked the idea of vowels that floated above and clung to the bottoms of consonants. Most of all, I liked that, after just a few short months, I was able to pick up a prayer book and struggle through the chants that had formerly washed over me.
I remember attending a Shabbat service shortly after this revelation and watching with scorn as my mom flipped to the back of the prayer book for the transliteration of the v’ahavta - a prayer I could now read in Hebrew - and listening with contempt as she mispronounced the words whose cadence I had mastered. Yet like my mother, I had no idea of the meaning of the prayer until the congregation read it out in English. Hebrew school did not teach us how to speak the language; it only taught us to sound out the words. You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your being. The congregation chanted in unison. Set these words which I command you this day upon your heart. I looked over at my mother. She was swaying slightly, chanting with her eyes closed. Teach them faithfully to your children. Clearly she had memorized the words long ago. Speak them in your home and on your way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. A wave of disgust swept over me. The words meant nothing.
*
Three years later, at my Bat Mitzvah ceremony, I stood in the same synagogue before all of my relatives and chanted more words that I could not understand. From my position behind the bimah, or podium, I trembled in my brand-new navy blue dress bought special for the occasion. I fiddled with my neatly manicured fingernails but tried not to touch my blow-dried hair. Looking out over the dark wood pews of the congregation, illuminated by stained glass windows, I could see my mom’s family, the Burgers: her father; her two brothers and their wives and children; her sister and her husband and children; various elderly cousins whose names I didn’t know. All of my mothers’ siblings married Jews and all raised their children - there were ten first cousins total - Jewish. Laura and Eddie, the youngest and oldest siblings, were still members of the same congregation in Bridgeport where they had grown up; in fact, both served terms as the temple’s president. Mine was the eighth coming-of-age ceremony in the family, so the Burgers knew the drill. They were relaxed, smiling, whispering to each other. A few rows back sat my father’s brother Ronnie with his wife, an Armenian-Italian woman who made lasagna on Christmas Eve, and their two young daughters, who were raised celebrating both Christmas and Chanukah, believing nothing. All four looked stiff and uncomfortable; the girls kept readjusting their matching dresses.
Months earlier, the cantor had given me a recording of herself chanting my Torah portion, Bo. I had studied it diligently, memorizing every trill and inflection until I could recite all 10 verses without once looking at the words. The lines came straight from the middle of Exodus: God has just decided that he will kill all of Egypt’s first-born sons as the tenth plague, and pauses to dictate to Moses how the Israelites should prepare and consume the sacrificial meal of lamb - the meal that would eventually become the Passover Seder. From the bimah, I chanted the lines flawlessly, though my heart was pounding in my throat and my hands were trembling. Afterwards, my father gave me a gruff hug that mussed up my hair and said “Mazel Tov, Stephanie. You made it through. Nothing to worry about now.” My beaming mother kissed me, eyes shining, and said “You were wonderful. My little girl is a woman now.” Later, she read the English translation of my portion to the congregation. I remember: You shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time.
*
The clear fragrance of freshly-snipped parsley mingling with the pungent aroma of ground horseradish; the curved opacity of a hardboiled egg; the sound of matzo cracking and plates clinking; the acidity of red wine on the tongue - all conjure memories of a Seder, of the Seder, the one meal that is the same every year, for all time, so that sifting through my recollections of past Seders, I can grasp only sensations, nothing concrete. Every year I rejoice in the comfort of familiarity. Time is cyclical like the seasons, round like the egg on the Seder plate. My father distributes the Haggadot, the Seder prayer books. He is the Master of the service, a fact he’ll remind everyone of as many times as he can throughout the evening. He likes to rush through the prayers, often omitting pages at a time, to get to the “Festive Meal” at the end; he slows down and reads the Hebrew only when my mother - the real Master - admonishes him.
It’s hard to blame my dad, knowing what waits in the kitchen: gefilte fish, chopped liver, and matzo ball soup, all made from scratch and ready to be served; brisket and sweet tsimmes and potato kugel heating in the oven; soft, chocolate-flecked Mandelbrot for dessert. The menu never varies. This is why I love Passover: tradition, heritage, family. Knowing that my mother has made the same chicken soup that her mother made before her and her grandmother before that. God is irrelevant; no one knows if the Exodus even took place. I will chant the Four Questions and dip parsley in salt water and chew horseradish until my nose stings and my eyes water, but I’ll do it because I love tradition, not because worshipping God means anything to me. My father is reading the parable of the Four Sons: The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?!” By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental. You, therefore, blunt his teeth and say to him: “It is because of this that the Lord did for me when I left Egypt. If you had been there, you would not have been redeemed!”
*
By the time I graduated from high school, my outward expressions of Jewishness had dwindled to a few traditions like the Seder and Yom Kippur services. I called myself an atheist, scoffed at the idea of God, rolled my eyes at anyone who believed in God. No educated person, I maintained, could seriously expect mere prayer to have tangible benefits. I think my mother, the most highly educated member of her family, placed faith in prayer. She had struggled in vain against my efforts to distance myself from temple, nearly dragging me onto the board of the youth group and always asking if I would go to services with her. For my mother, I stayed in Hebrew school through senior year but only because the class met just once a week starting in eighth grade. Even as I drifted away, my mother was rising in the ranks: several board members asked her to run for president. Just before I left for college, my mom looked up Brown on the national Hillel website.
“Look at this, Steph!” she said. “Brown is 25 percent Jewish. It’ll be so easy for you to make some more Jewish friends, finally.”
“Mom, that’s terrible logic,” I said, cramming a stack of T-shirts into one of the suitcases that littered the floor of my room. “Newton South was over half Jewish and apparently that didn’t do the trick.”
“Well, maybe you’ll find more in common with Jews in college than you do here,” my mom said. “Make an effort; go to community events and try to learn something. You don’t want to end up like your father. There’s not a spiritual bone in that man’s body.”
“He doesn’t seem to mind.”
*
In the Vietnamese restaurant, I pushed a mound of sticky rice around my plate with my chopsticks. I was home for Spring break after seven months at school. My mom and I were supposed to be out to dinner to catch up and spend time together, but the conversation was rapidly turning into a prolonged nag about my lack of enthusiasm for Judaism.
“How can you look at something like a beautiful sunset, and then tell me you have no conception of God?” my mom said. “Doesn’t it fill you with a sense of wonder?”
“You just outlined the Design Argument,” I replied.
“Excuse me?”
I sighed. To my surprise, I found myself enrolled in a Religious Studies class for second semester at the recommendation of an adviser. We read the views the great Modern Western philosophers like Hume and Kant and Nietzche held about religion. The class was changing my perceptions about the meaning and definition of religion, about the idea of God. I still fought against the classical conception of God and certainly against the way Judaism presented this idea, but I was no longer sure I could call myself an atheist.
“The Design Argument says that the world is so perfect and complicated that only an intelligent being could have created it,” I told my mom. “Like, because the world exists, it must have a cause for existing, and the cause must be intelligence.”
“And you don’t believe that?”
“No. I think it’s baseless. Makes too many unfounded leaps. People think intelligence must be so important just because they happen to have it.”
“Then what do you believe?”
I paused. I could say I believed in evolution. I could say only the individual could define his own idea of God. I could say I believed in objectified morality or universal consciousness - or that I felt the need to reserve judgment on any abstract matter.
“I don’t know.”
“See!” my mom cried. “You are a Jew.”
Now it was my turn to say “Excuse me?”
“Steph, do you know what Israel means?” I searched my brain, reaching back to Hebrew school days. I remembered the story of Jacob, one of the forefathers of the Hebrews, wrestling with an angel and subsequently changing his name.
“Yeah, it’s ‘one who struggles with God, right?’”
“Exactly. You’re supposed to question and wonder and struggle. It’s okay not to have all the answers. You can still be a Jew.” I smiled and rolled my eyes once again.
“A Jew with chopsticks.”
The Path to the Pond
I’m not going to tell you how to get to Duck Pond because I don’t want you to know, because I don’t want anyone new to know or else the pond will become just like any other Cape Cod beach, crusted with tourists and cigarette butts and trash. I go to those beaches too; I swim at the ocean beaches with thundering waves and vast sweeps of coarse sand and I explore the marshy dunes and shell-rich shallows of the bay beaches. My favorites are the Wellfleet ocean beaches because the dune cliffs leading down to the shore are hundreds of feet high, so high that by the time you’ve clambered to the bottom of the path the rumble of the waves has swelled to a roar and when you look up the cliff, you can’t see any sign of civilization. You’re surrounded by sea, sand and sun. Only too many kids ignore the path and the erosion warning signs and half run, half slide down the cliffs to the beach below. You can see where they’ve slid from the dark scars in the cliff; you can see the rusty mounds of sand they leave at the base of the dune. Every summer there are more mounds; every year the cliffs seem shorter. I’m afraid that one summer I’ll go back, and they’ll be gone.
I have the same fear about Duck Pond, which is why I’m not telling you how to get there. Like Wellfleet’s other kettle lakes - Great Pond, Gull Pond, and Long Pond, too name a few - you can find Duck Pond on a map of the Outer Cape. It’s smaller than the others, and rounder - a perfect coin. Unlike the other lakes, Duck Pond does not lie tangent to a road. It has no convenient parking lot for the minivan and the trunk full of blow-up toys; it has no lifeguard chair, lake house, or dressing room. It is alone, isolated, nestled in the middle of the coastal woods. Duck Pond feels ancient and at the same time ageless, unaffected by the passing years.
In terms of geology, Duck Pond - indeed, all of Cape Cod - is brand new. The peninsula formed during the most recent ice age, around 25,000 years ago, when a giant continental glacier was retreating north along the primordial coast of New England. The disintegrating glacier left behind an inorganic trail of rocks, sand, dirt, and ice, a trail that would eventually solidify into Cape Cod, a trail so infertile that, millennia later, the Pilgrims would stay for only a few months before moving their godly settlement up the coast to Plymouth. Like the other kettle ponds, Duck Pond formed around 12,000 years ago when one chunk of ice left by the glacier melted, causing embedded debris to collapse into a deep bowl that would later fill with water. The original pond probably had an irregular shape, but thousands of years of gentle waves coaxed the soft, sandy borders into its current perfect kettle. Besides allowing the pond to shape-shift, the sandiness of the surrounding earth keeps the water crystal clear and pure while helping the short, hardy scrub oaks and pines that have adapted to the Cape’s barren soil to flourish.
It’s those trees, with their gnarled, grasping roots and impenetrable thicket of branches, that have kept most tourists and vacationers away from Duck Pond thus far. Route 6, the two-lane highway that bisects Wellfleet’s ocean side and bay side, runs less than a mile from Duck Pond’s shore, so the distance itself should not present an inconvenience. In fact, the entire spit of land, one of the narrowest sections of the Cape Cod peninsula, measures less than two and a half miles from ocean to bay. Most lakes, and even some rivers, would swallow the whole town. It’s hard to call any part of an area so small isolated. Yet I call Duck Pond isolated because you can’t hear Route 6 from its shore, can’t hear anything but bugs and breeze as you descend the long, wooded path to the water. I call Duck Pond isolated because the crowds haven’t found it yet.
My family found Duck Pond 15 years ago, the first of countless times my parents would rent a Wellfleet cottage for our week-long summer vacation. When the owner finished showing my parents around the house, my father, already impatient with the traffic and bustle synonymous of Cape Cod in August, asked him where he could take the family to get some peace. The owner obligingly wrote out directions to Duck Pond. The very next day, my parents plunked me and my then-toddler sister into the station wagon and, after an hour of wrong turns and backtracking through bushes, found the pond.
Of course, I don’t remember that first trip - or the second or the third or any individual visit to Duck Pond, really. My memory is a collection of the experiences my family has had over a decade and a half of summers. We almost always go to Duck Pond at the same time of day, under the same circumstances: we’ve spent hours at the ocean, and by late afternoon we’re ready for a change of pace. Salty and sunburned, we lay out towels in the car to keep the upholstery from getting sandy. We make a quick stop at whatever house we’re renting that year to rinse the salt water, harmful to Duck Pond’s delicate ecosystem, from our bodies, and then we’re out the door again. We’re usually irritable on the drive to the pond; the hours of sun have worn us out. My parents argue about whether to stay in or go out for dinner; my mom chastises my sister for wearing SPF 15 sunscreen instead of SPF 30; my sister and I fight over who will get the first shower when we get back to the house.
But when my dad makes the turn from the smooth asphalt road to the unmarked, unpaved path, unnoticeable to anyone who doesn’t know where to look, that leads directly into the woods, all quarreling ceases. We’re silent, holding our breath for a few seconds, waiting to see if this time our two-wheel drive will succumb to the trench-like ruts and potholes of the path. Overhanging branches scrape both sides of the car; other than that, all we can hear is the shifty breeze in the low scrub oaks. The sudden absence of traffic sounds spurs us to hush our own voices when we speak again. We’re out of the sun now, sheltered by a canopy of green. My dad switches off the AC and rolls down the windows. The drive to the pond, which might take 20 seconds on Route 6, takes 15 minutes as we creep along at three miles an hour.
The sign nailed to a lonely, weathered old post says “Duck Pond Parking Lot.” It refers to a small area just behind that was cleared of trees maybe a few decades ago. Most of the trees have grown back now and form natural barriers between the spaces - there are about six of them, eight if the cars are small. But squeezing is not an issue: I have never seen the lot filled. My dad parks and applauds himself for his skill, and we all get out, conscious of the clunk of the doors as they slam in the silence. We can’t see the water yet. We find the foot trail and follow it deeper into the woods, past the blueberry bushes, straight for a while and then suddenly, sharply downhill. Round the bend and, finally, we catch our first glimpse of water sparkling through the trees. Hearts quicken and paces too, and soon my sister and I are running, flip flops smacking roots and pine needles, down the hill to the water’s edge. Some years there’s a little sandy beach, but if it’s been a wet season the water laps right up against the roots of the trees. Either way it doesn’t matter; this isn’t like the ocean beach where we spend 15 minutes staking out a square of sand with a picnic blanket and umbrella. We throw our towels, flip flops and shorts in a pile at the base of a tree and surge into the water without a backward glance.
It’s warm from the sun so there’s no need to inch in skittishly like we do at the ocean, warm and so clear that we can see our feet and the schools of minnows even when we’re in up to our shoulders. I always start grinning when I’m in that far, and soon I’m laughing out loud and I’ve got to dunk my head under a few times to assure myself that I’m really there, present in the moment, taking in Duck Pond and everything it’s offering. I come up for air and float on my back, allowing the sun to dry my face. Looking straight up, I see only blue. If I stretch my neck to the side, a rim of green comes into view; swim in a circle, and I see that the rim extends in a perfect sphere. I lie in water, surrounded by woods. I hear the lapping in my ears, and my own breathing too; I feel the silky touch against my bare legs and arms. This is peace. And then my legs are above my stomach and my arms are flailing and I’m inhaling water because Deb has just jumped on my chest. But I’m laughing so it’s okay.
Last summer I was back at Duck Pond, laughing in the water, only this time the sun had set and Deb was home in Newton and the water was touching a lot more than my arms and legs. At some point I got old enough to plan my own vacations - miniature vacations, at least - so in July five of my friends and I took time off from our jobs as waiters and lifeguards to spend a weekend camping in Wellfleet. As the only one who had ever been to Wellfleet, I assumed the job of finding a campsite and planning our activities. I picked a site in the same woods as Duck Pond. We drove down on a Friday afternoon, pitched the four-person tent that we were sure would be roomy enough for all six of us, and cooked a dinner of extremely smoky chicken over the campfire. I had told my friends about the pond when I first made the reservation, and Kate and I had joked about sneaking out at night to go skinny-dipping. As the sun set and we scrambled to wash our dishes in the fading light, everyone was too nervous to bring up the idea again. But a few hours later we were all cozy in our sweatshirts and tipsy from the bottle of vodka that Rostic had smuggled from his house and giggling around the embers of the fire and Rostic said “So are we going?”
Sonia and Kate and David and Katy cried “yeah!” in unison and they were all ready to get up and go, but then I wasn’t sure because it was so dark and nearly 1 a.m. and I didn’t know if I’d be able to follow the path without sunlight. And there are skunks and raccoons in the woods, and maybe strange people too. And maybe, just maybe, I didn’t want to share the secret of Duck Pond with so many people who might not understand how special it was. But in the end they convinced me; they dragged me to my feet and David promised to hold my hand the whole way there. At first I took him up on the offer, but by the time we had left the campsite and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the pond, I found some courage. I even carried one of the flashlights and led the group along the path, watched the bobbing circle of light illuminate roots and branches. That was all I could see because the trees obscured the sliver of moon. I heard my breath and the giggling of my friends. I smelled brine in the air, a cool sea breeze settling down in the woods and making its way back to the ocean. I didn’t get us lost once. To my surprise, every twist, pothole and fork of the path had ingrained itself into my memory, so that reaching the pond on foot in the dark was no more challenging than finding it in broad daylight.
This time the shore was almost upon us before we saw the water through the trees, and then only because it glimmered in the cool glow of a crescent moon. Our steps quickened and our giggles grew louder; finally we reached the shore and we turned off the flashlights and we took off our clothes. Standing by my sweatshirt and sneakers crumpled on the ground, I wrapped my arms around my chest and doubled over in silent laughter at the thought of being outside, in the dark, naked. I laughed at the feeling of breeze in my bellybutton, between my thighs, on the small of my back. I had never even worn a bikini before, and now I was wearing nothing at all. I realized that my fear had vanished.
“Ready guys?” said Kate. “Let’s do it on three. One…two…three!” We weren’t supposed to look at each other, but I did anyway and saw five other pale bodies, blue in the moonlight, hurtling from the trees into the water with a splash that echoed in the silent woods. Even though it was too dark to see much, the girls held one arm across their chests and one between their legs; the guys cupped both hands in front of their crotches. The water was cooler by night, but not too cold and still soft and clear, and we didn’t slow down until it hid our bodies from view. We dunked our heads under to see what it felt like to have every part of your body touching water. We paddled out until we realized our feet could no longer touch the bottom - a frightening and exhilarating realization because we couldn’t see the drop-off coming.
“Watch out, guys,” Rostic said. “I have to pee.”
“No!” I cried. “This water is pure - no one pees in it. That’s what people do at the other ponds and that’s why the other ponds are so disgusting.” Rostic laughed. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. One person cannot destroy Duck Pond, but many people, discovering it over decades or even just years, may desecrate the pond that took nature centuries to form.
I swam away from the others a bit and floated on my back, as is my custom. Tilting my head so my ears were completely submerged, I looked up into the night sky, finally visible now that we weren’t under the canopy of trees. I gasped. Never, ever had I seen so many stars: they speckled the indigo just like the freckles flecked my face after a day at the beach. And bisecting the stars, a strange, bright cloudy line that I’d read about but never seen - the Milky Way.
“Look!” I cried. “You can see the Milky Way. It’s our galaxy, guys. This is insane.” More splashing ensued as necks craned upwards to see the phenomenon so novel to teenagers raised in the glare of city lights. A few moments of respectful silence, of rapturous “ahhh’s,” and then the laughter picked up again. But I floated for a while longer, feeling the water caress my stomach and spine and wondering to think that, after so many years of reliable sameness, Duck Pond had something new to teach me. I can only hope that it will survive, pure and unadulterated, to teach me more in years to come.