ALL THAT WINTER, they watched it. Someone had cleared a rectangle of snow from the frozen pond, or lake, whichever it was, that lay at the northernmost side of their neighborhood in Ypsilanti where the streets began to yield to farms, and at one end of the ice they placed a hockey net. But it was a fickle winter that year, so that it warmed a few degrees and then plunged again, causing the ice on the lake, or pond, whichever it was, to melt a little, then harden, loosen its grip on the net allowing it to sink a few inches, then grasp it immovably once more. By spring it would be under water, and so they watched it all winter, enjoying the comicalness of it but also waiting for the summer adventure it would bring.
That was Jed’s idea. “That’s one of the deeper parts,” he told Matt. “We don’t know how far down it goes or if we’ll be able to find it again by diving for it, so we better mark the location now.”
“Triangulate it,” Matt suggested.
“Triangulate it,” Jed agreed.
On a day when it was too warm to walk on the ice, they stood on the shore and located the net using landmarks. They marked the oak tree on the south side where, standing in front of it and facing north and pointing straight ahead, you lined up the hockey net. Then the same with a knot in a maple branch on the other side. They placed a large rock perpendicular to the imagined line that ran between these two trees and the net, and pounded a tent stake into the ground in case somebody moved the rock. On a day when it was cold enough they walked out onto the ice — unnecessarily, perhaps, with a rope around each boy’s waist and another boy holding the rope from the shore — to ensure the same calculations lined up to the markers they’d made on the land. The net had sunk ten or twelve inches by then. No amount of chipping or hacking at the ice with a hatchet could free it, not without the risk of opening a bigger, expanding break that would plunge it and them under.
So they waited, passing the time with snowball fights or sledding or, when the sun warmed the snow so that it was indistinguishable from the mud, playing Atari or Dungeons & Dragons at Matt’s house and watching all the adventure movies they could find on the VCR at Jed’s house or at their friend Tim’s house which had cable. Matt suggested, “We should see if we can get Raise the Titanic out of the video store.”
“What’s Raise the Titanic?”
Matt told them. “That’s a good idea,” Jed said. “Maybe that’s how we’ll do it. With balloons.”
“Yeah, but not… party balloons. Those aren’t strong enough. Maybe… does anybody have an inflatable raft?”
They all agreed they’d check with their dads and in their garages and basements for an inflatable raft. Meanwhile, they learned the video store didn’t have a copy of Raise the Titanic, so Matt got the book out of the library, read it, passed his notes on to Jed and the rest of the gang, Tim, Tim’s brother Sean, Bill, Otto and Luke.
One evening near spring break as Matt was finishing some homework at the kitchen table — not finishing it so much as half-assedly trying to conclude some math problems — he asked his mother what was the difference between a lake and a pond.
She said, “I thought you were doing math.”
“I am. This is just something I want to know.”
“That’s why we got those encyclopedias, so you can learn this stuff on your own. Go look it up.”
Frowning, Matt finished his homework and went to the place by the stairs where they kept the encyclopedias. He liked reading them, actually, but he was usually a little frustrated by the details of things he wanted to know that were left out. For example, they could tell you who the Gurkhas were and how they came to be associated with the British and Indian militaries, but not why they had such distinctively shaped emblematic daggers or what made them such good soldiers. He had to go to the library for still more books about that, and while they were informative and some of them thrillingly illustrated, he wished some books would at least try to tell him everything he wanted to know the way a person would. Like, he wished he had asked his dad. His dad would have told him to consult the encyclopedias, too, but he would have at least first taken a shot with an answer.
Anyway, the encyclopedias said that generally speaking ponds are smaller than lakes, shallower, and are often created as a result of things people did, like building dams or rerouting rivers and creeks, but that there were other similarities between lakes and ponds, such as vegetation and wildlife, that made the differences less discernable. He and Jed got the chance to ask their dads about this specific pond, or lake, whichever it was, a short time later.
It had grown warm enough that the men in the neighborhood began to gather in someone’s garage, drinking beer and listening to music or a game and filling the garage with conversation and smoke. It seemed there were always at least half a dozen of these creatures available to congregate, sometimes more, and most were dads whose activities overlapped through their kids’ school or sports, or church, or some other formal or semi-formal fraternal society such as the Elks Lodge or the VFW. Drinking Budweiser or Coors from a two-four on the concrete floor or a refrigerator in the garage dedicated to that purpose, occasionally taking a shot of whiskey or tequila, smoking and talking were the agenda, and they would rotate amongst the various garages or pole barns and discuss such things as neighborhood gossip, sports local and national, their jobs, people of their own generation and what had become of them, pop culture current and past, especially reminiscing about the ‘60s when most of them were teenagers, cars, tools, small engines, home repairs, landscaping, what the idiots in Ann Arbor were doing, what those idiots at EMU were doing, what the idiots in Lansing were doing, and who knows what else. Breaking into their conversation was easy for a boy; the men were only too willing to include him the same way they’d let a child have a taste of a beer.
That’s when Jed, Matt and Tim asked the dads in Tim’s dad’s garage about the pond, or lake, and the hockey net, submerged now, as the Saturday afternoon spring sun chased late winter shadows over the rims of the roofs in the neighborhood that bordered the woods and the farms. The soundtrack, Foreigner, Loverboy, Bob Seger. Someone’s dad said, “Well a pond is just a smaller lake, isn’t it?”
“Is it, though?” asked Tim’s dad. “I think I’ve been on some ponds that are as big as lakes. Barton Pond is big. They sail boats on it. And where was that place out by Dexter we went fishing last year, Jim? That was a pond, right?”
“No, that was a lake,” said Jed’s dad. “Maybe it’s got to do with the depth.”
“Well how deep does it have to be to be a lake? Cuz there’s some parts of that place the boys are talking about that are pretty deep.”
“How deep?”
“I don’t know that it’s ever been accurately sounded, but didn’t somebody say it was 25- to 30-foot deep in some places?”
“I mean, it’s got fish in it.”
“Well, a pond’s got fish, too, don’t it?”
“Does that thing even have a name? The place the boys are talking about?”
“Heard some people call it Vreeland Lake.”
“Okay. So it’s a lake, although it’s nowhere near Vreeland.”
“Well, I’ve heard some people call it LeForge Pond.”
“Then it’s a pond? Although it ain’t nowhere near LeForge.”
Jed’s dad asked, “Bob, you’ve lived here the longest. Either of those sound right to you?”
This was the dad of one of the high school kids in the neighborhood that did not run with Jed and Matt’s gang. He said, “Well, my dad called it Rockwood Lake on account of it’s near Rockwood Street but he also called it Trash Pond and told us not to eat the fish outta there.”
Cynical, raspy, mustache laughter. “Well there you go, boys,” said Matt’s dad. “Clear as mud.”
In summer, the streets and houses that had been seen through the branches of the winter’s leafless trees were concealed by the unfolding of the trees’ great wings and the shaking out of their feathers. The surface of the winter water that lay like a dirty coin, like a slab of mausoleum marble, broke apart and liquified into a green-black window. Summer. The lives of those American boys slipped into the warm stream of vacation that is every boy’s reward for endless hours of scholastics. Their minds no longer measured time except as an inexhaustible supply of freedom. By mid-June it was warm enough for swimming. Jed’s house was the closest, and had a canoe under a tarp on the grass by the fence. So they carried this and some salvaging tools to the water for their project.
“We’ll take turns paddling the canoe,” Jed instructed. “Wear your life jackets. The diver can sit in the middle. We’ll need three guys on the shore to put the boat in the right place.”
They agreed Jed was the strongest swimmer, but so was Tim, and since they couldn’t fit four in the canoe Jed and Tim hung onto the sides while Matt and Bill paddled. Sean, Otto and Luke took up positions on the grassy, stony shore where they’d left their markers, and they shouted back and forth from the shore to the awkward flotilla, to attempt to place the canoe in the right place over the sunken net. “This way!” shouted Sean, waving his arm. “Back this way a little!” countered Otto. Stroking the paddle, Matt wondered, “Are we lined up between them?”
“I think so?” replied Bill.
“Maybe we should stretch a rope across the water from Sean to Otto.”
“I don’t think we have enough rope.”
They didn’t have an anchor, either, but between Matt and Bill gently caressing the water with the paddles, they could keep the canoe softly spinning in the approximate spot indicated by Sean, Otto and Luke.
Only the head, shoulders, and part of one arm of Jed and Tim were visible above the waterline. “Who’s diving first?” Tim asked, but Jed was already gone, ducked under the water with the speed of a soap bubble and the grace of an otter. He reappeared a few seconds later not far from the canoe and swam back to it, gripped it once more. “Find it?” Matt asked.
Jed shook his head.
“How far down does it go?” Tim asked.
“At least eight feet, I think. More probably.”
“Let me try.”
Matt said, “Don’t hit your head on the canoe when you come up.”
They made several more dives that day, shouting back and forth between the canoe and the stations on the shore. “Did you find it?” “No!” The guys on the shore wanted a turn in the canoe so they eventually switched positions. Jed and Tim continued to do most of the diving. Matt gave it a try. The day had grown late and the afternoon sun didn’t afford much visibility under the water, calculations he’d have to remember to make later, but even so what he could see as he knifed his way down with spearing, spreading hands and frog’s legs was darkness permeated by floating translucent spots and, beyond that, the undulating tips of tall vegetation that beckoned to him like the tentacles of some primordial beast, like a D&D monster called a mind flayer or some ambassador of death, and the truth was he was kind of scared to dive further. Another calculation they’d have to make if they were ever to find that net.
They repeated this expedition several times over the next couple weeks, not every day but whenever the mood took them. On a subsequent attempt, they used the canoe to stretch twine from the oak tree to the maple tree so that they could more accurately position their diving platform. Someone’s dad found an old underwater flashlight in someone’s garage and loaned it to the expedition, which helped a little though it didn’t cast much light. With it, the boys could skim the tops of the seaweed and probe those sunken forests for signs of the net.
Then one triumphant day, Fourth of July weekend, Jed surfaced from a dive to declare, “I touched it!”
“What’d he say?” Matt called from shore.
“He said he touched it!” relayed Bill from the canoe.
“Don’t move!” Matt shouted. Then to Otto and Sean, the other guys on shore duty, “Move to where Jed is and point! Mark that spot!”
It was about six feet from where they’d started looking. Matt helped Otto untie the twine from the maple and walk it further up the shore so that Jed, where he was treading water, could grasp it and say, “Here!” They look turns diving to have a look at it with the aid of the July sun and the flashlight. It was ten or twelve feet down and concealed by vegetation and muck that had meshed with its netting. Rarely before or since has a piece of garbage so resembled a treasure. “Time to raise the Titanic,” Jed announced.
It took a few tries to secure a rope to it, which involved Jed diving with the rope in his teeth joined by Tim who held the Tekna flashlight so Jed could see what he was doing. A brief argument occurred on the surface among all of them, current or former Scouts, about which knot to use, but in the end it was a somewhat random combination of loops. When they had it tied, they used the canoe to carry the rope to the shore. Then, shaking the water free, it was time to pull.
With each boy taking a grip on the rope like a tug of war team, and seeking purchase in the grass, they heaved. They weren’t expecting the resistance they got, so they rearranged themselves to put Tim, the strongest, on the end and redoubled their efforts. “Heave!” The rope strained, and after several tries, there was movement, but they could not free the net. “Like a loose tooth,” someone observed. “You can feel it wiggling.” They had most of them fallen in love with profanity in the third grade, an affectation that had worn off now that the oldest among them was about to enter the eighth grade, but even so they employed some of their choicest epithets in straining at the rope, until final Matt lamented, “God dammit, this mother fucker just won’t come loose. And we’ve come all this fucking way.”
It was nearing dinner time, and they discussed leaving the project until tomorrow. “Let’s ask my dad if we can use his truck with the tow hitch,” Jed suggested. Wet with the moisture of lake, pond and effort, they went in search of him.
They found him and several other dads in someone’s garage celebrating lawns freshly mowed and edged and the long weekend. The soundtrack, Billy Squier. “What’s going on, men? Did you raise the Titanic?”
All the kids talked at once. The dads in their cut off jean shorts and tank tops nodded and smiled, amused and impressed. Jed said to his dad, “So I thought if you could tie the rope around the trailer hitch we could use the truck to pull it out.”
Calculating, Jed’s dad said, “Maybe we better take a look,” and stuffed a “roadie” — a can of Coors — into his back pocket and followed the boys, now visibly excited to the point of bouncing, out of the garage. In their wake, the other dads followed, likewise grabbing roadies to accompany the open ones they were already holding and marched in leisurely procession through the summer lanes. Other dads, putting away tools or scraping grills, paused to enquire, “What are you doing?” And being told they were going to “raise the Titanic,” they dropped their chores to grab beers of their own and follow while some of their wives came to the side door to wonder, “Where the hell are you going? It’s almost time for dinner!”
The lake or pond that greeted them lay placid and reflective in the afternoon sun. There were no overt signs of stubbornness in the way the water held the long white rope that lay on shore and disappeared into its depths. “We could get the truck up here, right, dad?” asked Jed as his and the other dads surveyed the situation. “Well, I think so…” Jed’s dad answered absently, but to the other men he suggested, “Maybe before we bring the truck up here we oughtta see if we got enough muscle between us to just pull this sucker out.”
“How much rope we got?” wondered Tim’s dad.
Before long, the dads had assembled into the same tug-of-war formation their sons had used. They tied the end of the rope around Bob, the biggest, after a brief argument about which knot to use. Then as many men present as could get their hands on the rope took a grip and curled the rope around their fists preparing to pull while other men stood and laughed and cracked beers and watched while some kids mingled with the men to grip the rope and others dove into the water or launched the canoe to see if they could observe the rope moving. “Ready?” said Jed’s dad. “One, two, three, HEAVE!” The men and the boys grunted and pulled and the water yielded a bit of rope before clawing it back.
“Son of a bitch,” said someone’s dad. “That fucker’s in their pretty good.”
“Bull shit,” said another. “We don’t need that truck. Come on, let’s try again.”
With another cry of one, two, three, heave, they gripped and pulled, only this time when they moved the rope out of the water, they dug in with their feet and refused to give it back. The other men stepped on their cigarettes and put down their beers to join in, sweat springing to the brow of everyone in the crowd as they yelled and cursed and hauled and fought the lake for possession of the rope and the net, and a child in the water shouted excitedly, “We’re doing it!” as the water gave up more of the rope and now the red rim of the hockey net broke the surface and accelerated toward shore, bringing with it the white skein of its netting entwined with yard-long tendrils of mud-encrusted seaweed and creating small waves as it beached, and the assembly raised their arms in triumph.
Fresh cigarettes were lit in victory. Someone jokingly tried to reenact the pose of the soldiers at Iwo Jima. “I told you we could do it,” said a man. “We did it!” said a boy. “We raised the Titanic!” Someone wondered, “Does anybody know who it belongs to? Should we shove it in someone’s yard?”
“Ah, leave it here,” suggested Jed’s dad. “Probably belongs to one of these houses out here and they’ll come back for it.”
“Who knows?” said the man they called Bob. “Maybe they’ll clean it up, put it out on the ice again in winter, and we can do this all over again next year.”
Someone fetched a soccer ball and now they, men and boys alike, were taking turns defending the net. A sibling appeared to ask, “Are you guys coming to dinner or what?”
***
In the eighth grade, Matt and Jed had to take biology. Matt liked the class although he was always more interested in English, history and social studies. The biology teacher was a man younger, it seemed, than Matt’s dad. Later that year, the biology teacher would be the one to take the eighth-grade boys aside for sex ed., and everyone was dreading it. But in the meantime, they were learning about environments. One day, in the classroom, heads bent over some work while, outside the classroom windows, leaves orange, yellow and red trembled in an autumn breeze, Matt asked the biology teacher what was the difference between a lake and a pond?
The biology teacher in his John Lennon spectacles iterated the things Matt already knew and added, “Some people think it has to do with the height and placement of the vegetation under the water.” He mimed with one hand the surface of the water and with another the angle of sunlight. “If the sunlight can touch the vegetation, it’s a pond. If it can’t, it’s a lake. But the truth is, nobody can really agree on what exactly constitutes the difference between a lake and a pond, so it’s all kind of arbitrary.”
Though he kicked himself for not knowing this word, Matt asked, “What does ‘arbitrary’ mean?”
The biology teacher said, “It means you make it up as you go.”
— CHARLIE KONDEK
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit, where he still lives with his family. He works in the crime and literary genres, and his stories have appeared in Black Cat Weekly, Hoosier Noir, The Saturday Evening Post, BULL, and elsewhere. He can be found at CharlieKondekWrites.com.