Our grandfather built this pond by hand, with nothing but picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and hard labor. He spent his retirement days fishing here with his cane pole and can of Catawba worms from the Catawba tree we kept solely for that purpose. The pond is known for its bass fishing, and fishing privileges there are eagerly sought to this day. I spent much of my youth as fishing guide, paddling the flat-bottom boats kept for this purpose. Dan recently found one during a recent drought, buried in the mud which preserved it from decay.

Dan moved C Cooper's old shanty from the main road to here and renovated it into the vacation cottage you see here. Note the scraggly woods behind the house. These woods were deep, thick and beautiful, heavily draped in Spanish Moss before the were harvested for lumber. All that remains is a thin screen of willows around the pond plus a few vestiges of the old-growth woods I remember in the cyprus swamp below the pond.

There were once two alligators Dan brought in from Georgia in this pond. They lived there for years, but he had to remove (kill?) them when they started stalking his dogs when swimming. I keep trying to convince him that the pond would be far more interesting if the alligators still lived there. I also suggested that swans might add some scenic value and control the profusion of water weeds you see in these pictures. Dan thinks Roundup (a weed poison) would be "easier". Shudder.

Just to the left of the frame in the above picture is the original concrete spillway built to handle overflows before they could erode the main earthen dam. The pools at the bottom of this dam attracted small fish and therefore snakes. A few yards downstream I found a huge shape dimly visible in the flowing water. Thinking it was a bass, I shot it. It turned out to be a hellbender, a giant salamander as big as your arm. I gave it to C Cooper, our sharecropper, for his wife Maggie to cook. That seemed completely logical and commendable then, as strange it may seem today. Maggie drew the line at snakes, though.

This picture shows the earthen dam clearly. Not visible is a chimney-like structure with boards that could be removed to drain the lake through a pipe that emerges at the bottom of the dam. The boards leaked so there was a constant flow through that pipe, which attracted fish and thus snakes to hunt. Just ahead of the people on this path, I once found a huge snapping turtle digging a hole for its eggs on the path. This also wound up in Maggie's cooking pot.

Before I grew a brain, every water snake was deemed a poisonous water mocassin and shot on sight. But once I realized it was far more rewarding to capture them alive, I caught a large king snake in a rotten log across the dam in the woods. These are considered "good" snakes since they are constrictors that eat other snakes. It laid eggs which soon hatched into a crop of pencil-thin young. I put these in a large jar in the smoke house with a bunch of recently-hatched hognose snakes, which being considerly larger in diameter I thought would be safe from the young kings. But I soon noticed that their numbers were mysteriously decreasing while the largest king had grown ludicrously fat almost overnight. Wiser now, I transferred him to a separate container with a hardware-cloth grill for ventilation. That snake was so sleek and beautiful, and his enclosure so secure, that Mom broke her firm rule against snakes in the house and let me move him to my bedroom. But his massive meal soon wore off and he slimmed down to where he squeezed through the mesh and disappeared into the house. Mom still tells that tale to this day!

Those willows along the banks were the site of another favorite evening pastime. Those willows sheltered large bullfrogs which my friend William and I hunted for frog legs (no, Maggie didn't get those). The "proper" way to hunt frogs is to spear them with a frog gig, but the overhanging willows interfered. We eventually tried shooting them with hollow point bullets, which didn't work worth very well either. Those frogs always had a jump or two left in them in spite of gaping wounds. One night, we didn't see a water mocassin that was also hunting frogs in those willows until It dropped into the boat betweeen us! Its a wonder that boat didn't sink when I shot it full of holes!

The next two pictures show the earthen dam clearly. The first looks towards Dan's vacation cottage which is on the opposite side from the main farm. The second looks in the opposite direction, towards the rutted road running between the fields and the woods to the farm. At the far end is a grassy parking area, an artesian well with a rusty but still-functioning hand pump, and a small pond that may have been used for raising fish before my time. In the right foreground is a nesting box for wood ducks. There are several of these around the pond.

Dan and I had a diving board near the middle of this picture. I had just learned to drive so we just happened to have the truck with us the day he split his kneecap cartiledge wide open with a machete cutting weeds in the water. Fortunately I could drive him to the hospital, else he would have bled to death walking all the way back to the farm. He bears that scar to this day.

The pictures inside the house include Dan's son Neil (baseball cap) who occupies the farm now, Dan's wife Donna (white blouse), our mother Nancy (blue sweater and pants), mom's sister Hellen (white pants) who also lives at Bethea Retirement Home, and mom's friends, most of whom I don't know well enough to introduce.