Pig Wart Pollywogs

Something from the tackle box:

       Can you catch a sea monster by using a fishhook?  Can you tie its mouth shut with a rope?  Can it be led around buy a ring in its nose or a hook in its jaw?  Will it beg for mercy?  Will it surrender as a slave for life?  Can it be tied by the leg like a pet bird for little girls?  Is it ever chopped up and its pieces bargained for in the fish-market?  Can it be killed with harpoons or spears?  Wrestle it just once – that will be the end.  Merely a glimpse of this monster makes all courage melt.  (Job 41:1-9 CEV)

       I have written a number of stories featuring my grandparents on my Mother’s side of the family, Delmer and Thelma Carr.  These are the grandparents who originally bought a cottage on Long Lake, in Cheboygan County, back when I was a senior in High School.  They bought it to be the place where they would enjoy the warmer months of their semi-retirement, and eventual full-retirement, from farming their homestead on the eastern edge of Ingham County, near the town of Dansville.  This cottage is the same place that I now own, and which is the setting for so many of my fishing stories, both fictional and autobiographical (or some combination of those two).

       I love my place on Long Lake.  It is my spiritual homestead, my safe haven, the place that I always want to be when I’m not there, and the place where I’m always happy to be when I am.  As I enter my own senior citizen years, I fully expect that it will become my own year-round home once I retire from my post as the pastor of the small church downstate, in the town of Lake Odessa, where I currently spend most of my days.  I will forever be grateful to my Grandpa and Grandma Carr for buying the place on the Lake that I love so much. 

       However, despite its use as the setting for so many of my stories, Long Lake plays no part in the actual history of my own childhood years before the age of seventeen or so.  I’d heard of it through conversations with my Grandpa and Grandma, who would go up there to visit their friends and neighbors who did own cottages on Long Lake, but I never dreamed that they would buy a summer home of their own that I could come and visit, and eventually inherit.  But they did, bless their souls, partly to indulge my Grandpa Delmer’s own deep love for hunting and fishing, that passion which I seem to have inherited as completely as I’ve inherited the cottage. 

       Now, eastern Ingham County, where the Carr farm was located, has some great farmland, and my grandparents owned a couple of hundred acres of it.  It was a wonderful place to grow up hunting for ring-necked pheasants with my Grandpa, working the extensive fields and fencerows of the farm behind one of his German shorthair retrievers.  But when it came to fishing, the old homestead couldn’t have been in a much worse part of the whole state of Michigan for it. 

        Aside from a little pot-hole lake about three miles away, off the dirt road behind the Millville store, there wasn’t any fishing that didn’t involve making a big trip out of it.  That was something a responsible hog farmer, like my Grandpa, couldn’t often arrange to do when his two daughters, their husbands, and all of his grandkids, came to share dinner and a day on the farm, which we did just about every other weekend throughout my entire childhood.  You could spend all of the time you wanted spooking up rabbits and birds from lanes and woodlots of the Carr farm, but fishing around there was a much rarer experience.  That being said, there was a place for aquatic childhood adventure right on the farm, a place that we grand kids all called, “the Pig Wart.”

       The Pig Wart was located on the vacant lot immediately to the east of my Grandparent’s farmhouse.  It was a fenced in pen, about five acres in area, which had a substantial depression in the center which collected runoff and drain water from the surrounding farmlands, which were basically as flat as a pancake in any direction you looked.  A lot of water came into that depression. 

       The proper name for the lot was probably, ‘the Hog Ward,’ as my Grandpa did sometimes let a few brood sows, or other Hogs that needed to be kept out of the feeding pens in the main barn, have the run of this securely fenced-in lot.  Having heard the penned-in lot being called, “the Hog Ward,” one of the first grandchildren probably morphed that name into, “the Pig Wart,” which caught the fancy of everyone.  Even my professional farming Grandfather called that place, “the Pig Wart,” as far back as I can remember, and none of us mid-to-late arriving grandchildren ever knew it by any other name.   

       The Pig Wart Pond, which the depression in the middle of the Pig Wart formed from the drain water it collected, could be substantial.  It might be as big as a couple of acres in area in a wet year, and it hardly ever completely dried out, except in the late summer or autumn of a very dry year.  The constant moisture of the Pig Wart pond caused the center of the lot to be the home for a grove of a hundred or more poplar trees, growing up around the edges of the wet area.  In a very wet year the pond would swell to a size that would flood the bases of the poplar trees, giving the whole the appearance of a floating forest, like one saw in movies set in the swamps of Louisiana, or the jungle forests along the Amazon river.  It was a wilderness area ripe for childhood adventure, and all within easy hearing of the shouts of, “Come wash up, it’s time for dinner,” that would come from the farmhouse.  

       In the spring, when the water was at its highest, you could often pole yourself around in the boat if you liked.  The boat was just an old mixing trough, about three feet wide by four feet long and a foot deep, that my brother Joe and cousin Ned had hauled down to the water’s edge for the express purpose of Pig Wart Pond navigation.  You couldn’t stand up in it, but you could kneel or sit while you poled yourself from tree to tree.  The problem was that the trough leaked enough that sopping wet pants were usually the result of even the shortest excursions, and attempts to cross the pond might result in wading back to shore dragging the boat behind you.  Needing to hose off in the yard, before coming into change into dry cloths, was not unheard of.

       As interesting as all of these facts are, they are not germane to the fishing adventure I wish to relate today, other than as background information.  This is the story of what happened, as best as I can recollect it:

       The water in that shallow depression we called our Pig Wart Pond never got more than two or three feet deep, even in a wet year, so it would freeze right to the bottom in the wintertime, that is if it hadn’t dried right out in the fall of a drought year.  This meant that it would not sustain a population of even the smallest of actual fish.  But, being wet most of the time, it did sustain a population of various frogs and other amphibians. Which meant that, at certain times of the year, the waters were alive with fish of a sort, as a myriad of pollywogs and tadpoles swam around on their way to becoming frogs, newts and other swamp critters.  These were always fun to fool around with and fish for as a child. 

       I’m not sure how old I was when we decided that we wanted to keep the pollywogs we’d caught in the Pig Wart Pond that morning.  My oldest cousin, David, was still interested in poking around the Pig Wart with his younger siblings and cousins, which means that he couldn’t have been older than about thirteen, at most, making me about ten, and my younger brother, sister, and cousin, Joe, Joy and Ned, were all between seven and nine.  That sounds about right.

       We’d caught some pollywogs with an old flour sifter that we’d found in one of the sheds on the farm, and we had them swimming around in a feed bucket from the hog barn.  When we got called in to clean up for dinner, David said that we should just dump our catch, or leave them here in the bucket for now, if we wanted to come back and catch more later on, after dinner.  He then headed up to the farmhouse. 

       Joy was for dumping them out now, so they could swim free while we had our dinner. (My sister, a future veterinarian, was a wildlife rights advocate from earliest childhood.)  Anyway, we could always catch and release them again later, if we really wanted to.  Expressing this opinion, she then headed up to the house.

       Ned and Joe thought that they might each like to take a few pollywogs home in a jar.  I said that I thought we could probably get Grandma to let us have a couple of lidded jars for that purpose.  We could bring them down to the Pig Wart and fill them from the bucket after dinner, if we wanted, but maybe it would be better to take the bucket with us up to the house.  Then we could show our catch to Debbie and Susie, who might want to take a few pollywogs home in a jar too.  And that’s what we decided to do.

       Coming up near the back door of the house, we were spotted by Grandpa, who was just coming in for dinner after taking care of some quick chores in the hog barn.

       “Hey you kids,” He said to us, on his way in the back door, “I wondered what happened to my new feed bucket.  Don’t be taking that down to the Pig Wart to play with.  Go hang it back up on the nail where you found it, and leave it there.  Use that old leaky bucket, over by the shed door, for fooling around with.”

       Well, those instructions put us in a quandary.  We couldn’t pour our catch into a leaky bucket, because the water would leak out and our pollywogs would die before we had a chance to show them off to Ned’s sisters, let alone get them jarred up to take home later on. 

       “What do we do now?” asked Ned.

       “I’ve got an Idea,” I said, “You and Joe go in through the kitchen, and then on into the dinning room where everyone is getting ready for dinner.  I’ll go in the back way, up through the spare room.  If I can get around the corner of the living room to the staircase without being noticed, I’ll run our pollywogs up to the upstairs bathroom.  I’ll put a little water in the bathtub and put them there.  Then I’ll come back out the way I came in and run to the barn to put the bucket away, like we were told to.  After dinner we can get our jars and divvy the pollywogs up, and show them to Susie and Debbie too.”

       Surprisingly, I was able to make it around the corner in the living room with the bucket, and then on into the stairwell, without being noticed.  I ran a little water in the old upstairs bathtub and put the pollywogs in, making sure that the rubber stopper was firmly seated in the drain, before going back down and running Grandpa’s good bucket back out to the hog barn.  I ran back to the house from the barn, coming in by way of the kitchen, to wash up like everyone else had.  I was pretty confident that this would all work out just fine. 

       At the dinner table, the subject of taking pollywogs home in jars was brought up.  My aunt Liz and uncle Phil told Ned that he would NOT be bringing any pollywogs home from the farm, for any reason.  There was no place to put and keep them alive once they got back to Grand Ledge.  My parents told my brother Joe that he would NOT be taking any pollywogs home, either.  We had plenty of pollywogs of our own, just a short walk back to Brumm’s Pond from our house.  There was no need to transport Ingham County pollywogs back to Barry County.  In any event, added my Grandmother, she would not be donating any of her canning jars or lids for any such foolish notions in the first place, so we could set our hearts at rest, no pollywogs would be leaving the Pig Wart.  Except, of course, I knew that some already had. 

       Ned and Joe seemed to accept the imposed verdict with no qualms whatsoever.  They hadn’t taken any pollywogs upstairs, or even seen them swimming in the bathtub up there.  Their consciences were clear, and I don’t think either of them gave any of it another thought after that.  But I sure did.

      What could I do?  With dinner over, all of the adults moved into the living room for after-dinner drinks and conversation.  There was no way I could sneak back up the staircase with a bucket now without being seen.  To transport the little squigglers back to the Pig Wart would require full disclosure of my own culpability in the affair, and I didn’t have what it took to do that, so I just kept my mouth shut. 

       Amazingly, no one went upstairs to use the bathroom again that afternoon.  Or, if they did, they didn’t look into the bathtub against the south wall, which would be hard not to do if you were sitting on the stool.  In any event, no one said anything to me about the captive juvenile amphibians living up there. 

       In a little while uncle Phil and aunt Liz loaded David, Susie, Debbie, Ned, and little Amy, into their car for the half hour trip back to Grand Ledge.  My Mom and Dad got Joy, Joe and I, loaded up for the hour’s ride back to Nashville soon thereafter.  I tried not to think about the pollywogs that I’d left in the bathtub too much on the ride home that night, or later on, trying to go to sleep.  By the next day I was doing pretty good at not thinking about them much at all.  By the time we all went back to the Carr farm, a couple of weeks later, I’d pretty much put the whole escapade out of mind all together. 

       My Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t. 

                                                                          Something to take home in your creel: 

 

       I’m pretty sure that my parents knew what topics of discussion would come up on our next trip out to the farmstead.  I’m pretty sure that it had all been discussed over the phone, well before hand.  No one individual was punished, or even verbally reprimanded, over the pollywogs found in the bathtub the evening of our last visit, after we had left and my Grandpa decided he would take a quick bath before bed time.  It was just made very, VERY clear, that all living critters, be they pollywogs, insects, baby birds, or even new kittens found in the hayloft, should ALL be left right where we had found them.  They wisdom of this new edict, as presented to us all, seemed reasonable enough to me, as well as to everyone else, and we all readily agreed to it.