If you sat behind the “No Fishing” sign at Pullum’s Pond, you could catch all the blue gills you wanted and not break the law, my friend Karen told me.
I was, maybe 9-years-old, living in Clearfield, Utah, prior to the development of Lakeside Square just west of the pond site.
K—‘s logic suited me fin in those days before I became too squeamish to bait my own barbed hook with a fat grub foraged from beneath a mossy log. Sometimes I didn’t even bait my hook, but merely dangled it loosely into a school of swarming fry in hopes of snagging tail or fin. Whipping back my makeshift rod, I’d drag out a flat bony sunfish with gills rippling in and out like red-tinged louvers.
I never kept any fish for more than a few seconds. After admiring the oily iridescence of its quivering sides, I would tenderly release my scaly catch, holding my breath lest the hapless creature should turn belly side up. Usually, the freed fish recovered instantly, zigzagging off in a silvery ripples that remained imprinted in my mind like jet streaks on the sky.
Pullum’s Pond and its surrounding swamps were a fantasy land retreat to my city dweller’s mind. Just down the street from Cherry Hills, our tract of tidy brick ramblers with postage-stamp yards, it provided a cool oasis from the asphalt and concrete of suburban existence.
Some folks said the pond, fed by natural springs, was bottomless. I wondered about that, but still I was too cautious to try swimming there—never even waded, though sometimes I picked black raspberries along the woody banks or gathered slimy black snails from the mucky driftwood-clogged perimeters.
K—-‘s little brother, T—- “Tagabout,” sometimes threw a whole handful of snails against the side of their garage upon arriving home. We’d watch the resulting splash of black ooze down the bricks and feel sad. Just a little. Next time we went to our pond, we wouldn’t let T—- go with us we’d say. But he always did.
We had a tree hut down there where we spent lethargic hours linking tubes of hollow snake grass and dandelion stems into necklaces and bracelets. If you wore one for more than 20 minutes, someone told us, you would turn into a snake.
Once we made T—- wear snake grass on his wrist for three hours, but he was still T—- when he took it off. He continued to tag around after us until we told him his tongue was beginning to fork. Then he ran home to look in the mirror.
K—- was good at climbing trees, and sometimes she’d shimmy up the gnarled trunk of the “bird nest” elm and peek into clutches of mud and sticks for signs of life. Once she accidentally dislodged a tiny speckled robin no bigger than a walnut shell. We watched its gaping mouth open and close in a silent scream, as we repeatedly tried to put him back to stay.
When a bulldozer came and filled in the marsh, we were devastated. But that rumbling yellow enemy of earth and rock was just the first of many to come. On the opposite shores of Pullum’s pond, the unassuming trailer park with its overgrown willows seemed to vanished overnight, as the bright shops of Lakeside Square rose up like a red curtain to the past.
Banished then from my childhood sanctuary and banished from my childhood, I no longer go to Pullum’s pond to fish or play. I go to Lakeside Square to buy flowers and books and groceries. Occasionally, I see a movie there.
But sometimes, when I peek around the buildings that separate me from my long ago sanctuary, I see a silvery zigzag flash beneath a green-mirror surface of water, and I know for sure there is no bottom now to Pullum’s pond.
(Note: Even Lakeside Square has faded since this was written around 1982. No grocery store, no movie theatre, just a row of nondescript businesses in what is now a low-commercial rent district. Time marches on.)
