Rants from the Hollow

Last Saturday was one of the best days I’ve ever had at the Hollow.

It didn’t start that way. I woke up to a gray and damp day, and by mid-morning, it had started to rain. It wasn’t enough rain to even start refilling the pond, and it petered out. By noon, it had become a lovely, breezy summer day, with temperatures in the low 70s, a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and just enough breeze to be refreshing. It was delicious weather–there is no other way to describe it.

I’d been skunked during the last couple of trips to the Hollow, and last July was an angling dud. This trip, they were biting better, and I got a bit more adventurous in trying out some different lures. Although it was a sunny day, which often seems to discourage our fish, this turned into a day of incredible fishing. After catching a dozen or so bluegills off the dam, I decided to try my luck at the relatively new section of pond that had excavated in the back a few years ago. I loaded up all three fishing rods, putting a small surface popper on the ultralight spinner (with a clear plastic float to give it enough weight to cast), a small jig on the second rod, and the biggest jig I’ve got on the third rod.

I sat on a large boulder that our Amish excavator had placed on the edge of the back 1/3 of the pond, and started casting towards the other hillside, about 30′ across the pond. I caught pan fish on each of the first 5 casts. Noticing that one of those lunker bass was lurking in that section of the pond, I tried the big jig. A large plastic minnow with a single hook and a lead head for weight, the jig was too heavy for the ultralight spin cast rod & reel I tied it onto (I was too lazy to untie whatever was on the medium weight spin cast rod & reel). I cast it across the pond, narrowly missing a fallen tree and the far shore, and started reeling it in. Wham! A bass latched onto it before I’d reeled it in more than 10′. The largemouth don’t really put up a fight like the bluegills and sunfish, but still, catching a 3 pounder in your own pond is a thrill. I wasn’t sure if the 4# test line would pull him out of the water, so I landed him on the shore, grabbed him by the lower lip, and after I finished admiring him, he went back–hopefully to raise up a brood of bass like they did last year.

The beautiful breezy weather meant that it was a perfect day for inner tubing. Admittedly, the pond can get…well, not scummy, but still kinda messy, with an oily film full of dead bug bits, pollen, and whatever comes from the pond up, and the trees down. The best floating requires a light breeze to send the floating film to the far side of the pond, and discourage horse flies. Elizabeth and Kirk, who unfortunately were not with me, are a lot less keen on the organic swimming pool, but this weather would have been perfect for them. I floated around for a while on one of the floats that Steve Towne and I bought 10 years ago when we spent a weekend at the Hollow with our boys (perhaps fitting for the news of that week, the floats are purple, and are labeled ‘Thriller’). I did a bit of swimming, and then dried off to go for a walk to some of the spots I don’t regularly visit.

The western slope of the Hollow was planted with white pine, maybe about 50 years ago. It used to be an intimate little pine grove, with several inches of fallen needles and a lovely Christmasy fragrance. The trees got bigger, and some of them are at least 60′ high and almost 2′ across at the base (log cabin?). We should have thinned the trees, which are too close together, and now sort of messy, but it is still a breezy and relative open part of the Hollow. On days like last Saturday, it has a distinct and pleasant pine smell. Walking through the pines to the southern property line and the upper meadow, I found a sycamore tree that I didn’t know about, bringing the total to 5.

After dad and I cleared the downed tree and stump a couple days earlier, we were able to bush hog the upper meadow, which is a bright but cool and breezy spot. The clearing has been there as long as we own the Hollow, and we’ve been mowing it, on and off, for at least 20 years. There have probably been raspberries all along, but I never really noticed them until the last few years. It seems like the number of berry thickets has increased significantly over the last few years. Certainly the big ice storm and last year’s ‘tornado’ opened up a lot of the forest floor to sunlight, but that doesn’t really explain why the periphery of this clearing should so many more raspberry bushes than it ever has had in the past. I’d been watching the berries ripen all week, and had picked enough to share with my parents a couple days earlier. Saturday, the berries were finally coming into their own. I picked and ate a couple handfuls, and then walked down the trail that we’d cleared.

I finished my walk in the SE corner of the Hollow, going back to investigate whatever animals were living in the ‘cave’. As documented in the previous post, this turned out to be a pair of very large vulture chicks (and presumably their parents). One of the properties near the Hollow used to be called Buzzard Rock, and I thought I’d seen turkey vultures descending into the trees in that part of the Hollow, but I’d never found a nesting site before. That was pretty cool.

We took an evening trip to Coshocton to have a steak dinner with Mom’s cousins, who live in town.  After a very quiet week,  all the frogs in the pond finally started singing, so after a memorable day of simple pleasures, I fell asleep to an amphibious chorus.

All activity in Heiser Hollow revolves around our half acre pond. Its a constant source of aesthetic pleasure and entertainment, hosting countless fish and frogs, and playing guesthouse to an ever-changing variety of visitors (turtles, herons, otters, ducks). You can fish in it, you can swim in it, you can float in an inner tube drinking beer, or you can just stand and look at it. However you choose to enjoy it, the pond remains by far the most interesting part of the Hollow. My parents park their motor home next to it, we pitch our tent on the dam, and if we build something permanent, it will be within site and sound of the pond. There are at least two different varieties of frog–bass and tenor.

We built the pond in 1976. After extensive consultation with the state ag agent, and a series of disappointing test holes, it was decided that the only practical place to put a pond would be several hundred yards up the Hollow, towards the small and intermittent water fall. Although it would have resulted in a much larger pond, the lower meadow where we’d been parking a travel trailer just wouldn’t hold water. As it turned out, the smaller site would be an inspired one. Its only looking back at the pictures from 30 years ago that I can truly appreciate the significance of the engineering effort to build our little body of water. The dam stands 40 feet above the original ground level. It was once a big sterile pit of mud, and now it is thousands of gallons of life It took a number of months to fill with water, and it wasn’t ready to be stocked with fish the first year. That first summer, before stocking it, the pond magically became a haven for tiny tadpoles. Once we’d stocked the pond, these became become bluegill fodder.

Nasty clumps of algae were a problem during the first few years, requiring regular treatment with copper sulfate. Cattails grew up around the edges, which were scenic, but not necessarily healthy for a small pond like ours. However, after a few years, the water became increasingly cloudy, eventually reaching a balance that keeps most of the weeds down, so the pond requires very little maintenance. Willows have been a chronic problem along the face of the dam, but we haven’t seen any for several years.

The pond does leak, and dad had somebody bring in some clay once to try to fix it. It didn’t make any difference, and I’ve decided that the leak is a blessing in disguise. Although it can look pretty sad by the end of a dry summer, a large puddle surrounded by a brown layer of dried mud, the pond is deep enough that the fish are not inconvenienced at all. My pet theory is that the fluctuating water level cuts down on weed growth and the bluegill population. Most years, the dry parts of the pond include numerous depressions that had been created by the panfish for nests.

Unlike most ponds, ours is not surrounded by grass–its in the middle of the woods, which gives it a totally different sort of feel. Although the center of the pond is in the bright sun during most of the day, the sides are shaded by trees which come right down to the water. The elm trees, which are always opportunistic where light is involved, seem OK with getting their feet wet.

A few years ago, the overflow pipe finally rusted through, and dad hired someone to repair it. As long as we were performing surgery on the pond, we decided that we might as well enlargen it a bit. Some Amish guy spent 3 days with a large backhoe, scooping 30 years worth of sediment out of the back of the pond, and continuing a couple feet deeper. One side of the rear of the pond has a very steep hill, but our heavy equipment artist was able to stretch the back and eastern edges out farther, carefully arranging some sandstone boulders around the edges. He also dug a 20 foot long sediment pit behind the pond to catch most of the sand.

Unfortunately, the guy who dug up the dam to patch the pipe wasn’t quite so skilled, and he didn’t do a very good job of compacting the clay when he replaced it. Not only do we have a depression on top of the dam, but the base of the dam has sprung a small but obvious leak. It has been dribbling in this new, visible spot for two years now, and the pond is fuller then ever. I assume that it should be repaired, but how do you know the next guy won’t make it worse? You could drain the pond, spend thousands on lining it with clay, rubber, or some newfangled spray stuff–all of which kills the fish and sets you back 5-10 years–and you still might have a leaky pond. I guess lots of healthy natural things leak. All in all, its a beautiful little pond, leaks and all.