Day One
It is a fact that without a competitive spirit, nothing can be done in this world. Luckily I have had that ambitious feeling inside of me when I decided one morning to start digging my pond. The timing coincided with my wife’s being away for a few days—enough, I thought, to take on and complete my project. I believe that many of us work more efficiently when we’re by ourselves, without someone asking a lot of questions and making suggestions (usually unsoliticited and unwanted!). My second stimulus was that no rain was predicted for the rest of the week. With confidence and determination, I dressed like I was going to be playing basketball and put the shovel and ax in the wheelbarrel with a pair of thick working gloves. Remembering a Chinese saying that even a journey around the world starts with a first step, I happily made the step out of the garage, pushing the wheelbarrow.
Within moments, I encountered a problem that would continue to plague me: the temperature was 96 degrees and climbing—with high humidity. This was a far cry from the 73 degrees inside the air-conditioned house, where my working spirit was at its highest point. I began chopping and pulling apart rotten trunks and fallen branches, moving them farther back in the forest so I could find my stream’s elbow, which had vanished in the debris. The more I moved piles of dry wood, the more the mess seemed to multiply. I tangled with wild roses, poison oak, and lianas hanging from the trees no matter which way I turned. An hour later, dripping with heavy perspiration and yellow dust, suffering from swollen bruises and bleeding cuts, I realizied I was fighting an uphill battle. It was time to take a break and regroup with better tactics for clearing the area for my fish pond.
To wash myself off and get rid of a few layers of dirt and sweat, I went to the garden hose, neatly rolled around a plastic gadget with a handle for unwinding the hose. After a few cranks, I realized the hose was not only twisted, but also caught in the outside edges of the drum—and the whole apparatus was steaming hot from the sun. Unraveling the hose was another project and took me nearly an hour. By then, no surprise, I had layered even more sweat on myself. I found myself wondering who had invented the stupid and useless thing, but then acknowledged that the inexpensive hose was itself largely to blame. Finally I had the thing in a straight line and held it over my head, sighing with relief as the cold water drenched my hair and flowed down my entire body, taking with it a good couple of layers of grime. As I slurped the refreshing cold water, I looked around—the leaves of my beautiful flowers and bushes were drooping from the heat. I sprayed them and was rewarded minutes later with their perfume. Water nourishes life, I philosophically reminded myself. I left the hose in the shade under the deck, so its water would remain cool, and went to the garage where I pulled off my wet tank top and replaced my sneakers with a pair of green crocs. I grabbed a hand saw and headed back to continue my work of deforestation. Feeling itchy from the poison oak I had uprooted, I remembered Kentucky forests are famous for that irritating plant. Since I am allergic to it, my project could have ended right then, but my dirty skin proved to have a soothing effect, and I went on. What a good idea it was to have changed into my crocs—they were comfortable and could handle the wet, difficult terrain even better than I hoped.
I smiled to myself, thinking that a few years from now young people would probably not even know what crocs were—just as today’s students do not know what the typewriter is and young mechanics who have never heard of a carburetor. I recalled the time when I went to buy a tango tape and none of the young employees at Sam Goody knew what a tango was. When I explained it was a dance, one of them asked if it was an Irish dance, because I might be able to find it in the Irish section.Today a new employee may not know what a music tape is. Another time I was looking for a “gentleman’s valet” and absolutely no employee from any clothing or furniture department knew what it was. One told me that they do not carry books, another asked if that is a perfume and another if that is a drink. What I wanted to buy was a free standing coat rack made of wood, with a little shelf to put my wallet and change. This isn’t so different, I told myself, from today’s military personnel who no longer wear high boots, never mind noisy spurs and shining sword. How ephemeral everything is! Perhaps unsolved hieroglyphs are the names of vanished tools or descriptions of long gone rituals.
After another hour of fighting supple branches and stubborn roots, I was back under the cool deck, shaded by the grapevines, and drenching myself with cool water. Then I went to the garage to get the pickax. The menacing look and weight of the pickax made me feel more confident about my effort to liberate the stream elbow from the jungle. Indeed, armed with the pickax, I demolished just about everything I did not like. But the feeling of empowerment came at an alarming cost—my energy plunged with every swing of the heavy tool. I straightened my aching back and surveyed my work, realizing I had made little progress while each muscle in my body seemed to have its own distinctive pain.
By then the sun was up and the temperature of over 100 F began to pierce the thick layers of tree leaves above me. I looked up and realized that green vines that looked like twisted ropes encircled and crept up each tree trunk, making making deep dents in the bark to ensure a good grip. These strong living ropes were in fact strangling the trees that supported them, while “birthing” countless new young vines that climbed with the same suffocating mission. Looking more closely, I noticed many dead trees that appeared healthy and alive because they were ornamented with a net of vigorous creepers that covered their lifeless trunks and branches. It occurred to me that the countless lianas were my most stubborn enemy by far.
Itching sweat and fatigue forced me to take a break, during which I analyzed the parasitical system of useless vines killing robust trees. There is a striking similarity between healthy and productive humans being invaded and taken over by opportunists and swindlers who little by little attach themselves to a thriving group, posing to help their productivity. Soon, the intruder inches his way to the top of the business canopy and takes over the generous and reliable host, in this case, a thriving tree. The once timid hanging visitor becomes a permanent settler. The climbing lianas, like a certain category of people, are just takers, sucking the life out of their hosts and shading young trees, stopping them from growing. Then, having totally drained the tree which gives up and falls, the vine immediately climbs onto the next tree and the damaging cycle is repeated. Determined to stop that cycle within my small corner of the woods, I headed to the garage for a strong clipper.
Blaming all the broken and fallen trees on the worthless vines, I furiously began to cut them at ground level and got a big kick out of seeing their upper parts hanging and swinging lifelessly in the air. I wondered how long their green color would last without a ground root. Suddenly I realized that building a fish pond was not only about digging, but also about all the things around the pond. Just like anything in life. On a modest level I felt I was doing justice for the beautiful trees that for tens of years could not get rid of their sneaky side-stabbers. However, my proud victory lasted only until the moment I discovered that all the vines’ roots, crawling under the bed of dead leaves, were interconnected! Cutting one did not do too much harm to the rest. In fact I saw other cut vines already connected to younger ones, and other lianas coming from other trees to choke them with what looked like grape leaves. Infuriated, I sat down, forgetting about the poison oak and mosquitoes. Looking closely, I saw how the young lianas had tucked into each crack of the bark, so they would be undetected by someone like me, an enemy.
To fight the consummately interconnected vines would be impossible. Looking around, I noticed that weeds grow faster and healthier than flowers and useful plants, and clearly no drought or storms damaged them. Evidence, I told myself, that evil is sometimes more powerful than good; the bad crop was taking over the fruitful one. Nevertheless, on my little turf I was determined to be in charge and continued to cut the vines and their roots so I could replace them with a fish pond. What a great feeling to be able to do the right thing!
After four hours of effective hard work under the merciless hot sun, I decided to quit for the day, and I cleaned my tools as my father had once taught me. His opinion was that a worker could be judged by how he kept his tools. If they were clean and packed in an orderly way, their owner was a reliable and able worker. I took one more look at my work site, actually at my newly created mess, and I shook my head in disapproval: I had hardly started the job; there was little sign of progress…but there was no water to be seen in the stream bed.
Contrary to what I had expected, I was not hungry, nor thirsty, but I took a well deserved hot shower to eradicate any contamination with poison oak. In spite of my fatigue and many small injuries, I felt great. Like anyone with a mission. I could not stop thinking about clever mimetic and devious ways the vines used to kill the powerful trees. Watching the business news on TV, I immediately spotted the “vines” and the “trees,” represented by the crooked money moguls and the fact that none of the ruined investors killed the swindlers. It is amazing that a thug can kill in cool blood someone for a few dollars, but none of the people who lost millions would shoot the one responsible for so many ruined lives. Instead of acting like righteous cowboys once did when they hanged criminals, today’s victims wait and hope for justice to put the crook in a minimum security prison with a tennis court and swimming pool…From which they will be released for health reasons a few years later, and start all over again. Not that I am advocating vigilantism!
Well, in a few hours, I had done my cowboy part and no lianas were left hanging around my future fish pond. I ate a good soup I’d made and stored in the refrigerator, and went to sleep feeling great about my work. But itching and covered with blisters and bruises, I could not sleep more than one hour at the time. Finally I collapsed and woke up hours later, unable to move because of muscle aches and pain in my joints. No wonder no one wants to dig ponds by hand! Regardless, there is nothing like the first day of doing something destined to bring happiness at the end.
Day Two
Wearing only my boxers and crocs, the next morning I went down to my work site with an unbroken confidence and determination. It was already 90 F. As two brown bunnies jumped away from a bush next to me, I wondered how many other creatures were watching me work— besides the ever present attacking mosquitoes. Before grabbing the shovel, I carefully looked for snakes, since they strike only if you step on them. To my relief, the area looked safe. I saw that there still was not a drop of water in the stream bed even though upstream there was plenty of water.
My working gloves were still wet and dirty and they scratched my hands. Once I grabbed the shovel, though, they molded to my hands in a comfortable way. So, eagerly I began to work along the elbow of the stream bed, digging and unloading one full shovel after another as I looked for water. One hour later, dripping with perspiration and unable to straighten my back, I stopped, breathing hard, and looked around. To my left and right were chunks of dirt that sooner or later I would have to remove again to make room for the pond. Obviously, my main concern was to find water. But I needed a plan and decided to dig a straight furrow across the bend and find the water which somehow disappeared right before reaching my property. In the meantime, the mosquitoes had realized that I was a helpless target.
By now the temperature had risen to close to 100 F. I used the garden hose to douse my head and take a few gulps before returning to digging. Little by little, the removed dirt became moist, and soon, at the depth of one shovel, I found water! It was a “eureka” moment, as if I discovered the first nugget of gold. No wonder the gold rush of California and Alaska attracted so many miners: they felt as I did, but in more profitable way. I kept digging and rationalizing that what was good about water, like gold, was that it always runs to the lowest point and nothing can stop it from doing that. I kept digging and soon, happily, I was standing in mud that seeped into my crocs. It gave me great pleasure that soon changed into continuous suffering. I took a break and another look at my messy work, and realized that I needed a better plan. Obviously, I had to trace the stream’s long main line and dig around it. The line included the elbow, since it contained water. I felt very good about making such a decision that would materialize in useful and economic work. I wondered how many men at that moment were spending their free time working in garages and basements, or digging in their yards.
Because I do not eat breakfast or lunch, I kept on going. I marked the edges of the pond and discovered that in too many places I could not push the shovel into the ground. There were simply too many thick roots and large stones at the surface, which required more effort to fight. The shovel proved not to be the right tool, so I seized the pickax and begin to swing it with all my strength and determination. When the effort to remove stones and roots proved impossible, I decided to go around them and changed the “design” of the pond. But, I realized, I was out of energy and dripping from the hot-moist air. I needed a break. In the meantime, the countless mosquito bites had become itching blisters. The water hose never looked and felt more appealing, and I readily indulged in its cooling properties. Then I sat on the shaded stairs under the deck. Scratching myself all over, I looked at my work, and inspired, went inside the house to get my camera and document it.
I know how to take a picture that can tell a story. Years ago I studied to be a movie director and learned the meaning and value of composition: a photo should show the viewer what is going on. In my case, each picture was to document the progress of clearing the forest, starting with the first shovel as I looked for water, and how I subsequently succeeded in turning a muddy mess into a fish pond and fulfilled a dream
I have a thing about people taking photos without thinking about the setting. On many of my trips, whether in the Rocky Mountains or on the beaches of Florida, in Yellowstone or in Paris and Monte Carlo, I would notice tourists taking pictures of each other with a wall behind them, totally ignoring the incredible scenery around them. Tourists in Manhattan would not direct the camera towards the Empire State Building as a background, but, without thinking, had the traffic in the background. In front of the Metropolitan Museum they would sit for a picture on the steps, which could be any steps in the world, and miss the glorious entrance and what is written above it. They would pictures of their small children standing up above them, practically focusing on the pavement beneath, instead of kneeling in front of the kid so the photo would show what was all around. In brief, each photo should tell a story. In my case, each of my photos would show the creation of the fish pond as an accomplishment of my determination and hard work. Thus I began my photo documentary that would continue for the duration of my endeavor.
I went back to work, trying to cut the thick roots and break the large stones in the stream bed. I realized that my itching came not so much from poison oak as from mosquitoes who found an ideal source of food in my half-naked, sweating body. Now I understood why cows, horses, and other large animals have long hairy tails, and why they can shake each portion of their skin, in order to shake off these shameless bloodsuckers. Since I possessed none of these natural defensive weapons, blisters cover my body, somehow making me dig faster, since sudden moves seemed to keep the annoying buzzers away. Once in a while I stopped to use the end of the shovel or pickax to scratch my back, while hordes of mosquitoes attacked the rest of my body. Of course, the only way to evade these mini vampires was to use the reliable water hose and blow them away with a powerful jet of water. Yet, the itch was still there, getting worse each time I scratched it. I went inside the house and doctored myself with various ointments, all proving ineffective. I realized that I was not a Robinson Crusoe or a frontier man, and sadly I returned to my gruesome work.
While I was dealing mercilessly with the stubborn ground and horrible insects, I remembered that while digging the Panama Canal, an entire French army of 22,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever. By 1889, the entire French nation was in bankruptcy because of minuscule buggers—the insects of Panama. Fifteen years later the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the near impossible task of the canal, and their first task was to eliminate the mosquito infestation of the region. By 1913 when the Panama Canal was finished, another 5,600 workers had died of disease and work related accidents out of an army of 75,000. My point is that it was not a huge elephant, blood-thirsty lion or savage tiger, nor the predacious alligator or crocodile that was most dangerous to men, but the minuscule whizzing mosquitoes that each year killed close to one million people. During WWII, the GIs in the Pacific Islands carried out a likewise successful war against mosquitoes, using some 50 million repellent cans (a few cents each); this turned out to be a decisive factor in defeating the Japanese armed forces. I wondered how many other frail and hard to see insects were out there, able to decimate populations of giant humans. The thought was so depressing that I quit working for the day.
After cleaning my tools I took a hot shower in the hope of washing away all the infestations I had accumulated during my determined work, which so far had resulted in very little. Clearly I needed a different tool to conquer the strongly rooted obstacles hidden under the ground. It was then that I remembered my father digging post holes with a long and heavy crowbar. I jumped in the car and drove to several large and small hardware stores until I found exactly what I needed. Back home, I could not resist going to the pond site and immediately trying out my new heavy tool. Its one end shaped like a narrow blade, it smashed in pieces anything in its way. It was also a great lever, and suddenly I envisioned how the Egyptians may have built their pyramids five thousand years ago.
I have seen many documentaries and have listened to experts about how those huge pyramids were built. Some architects even re-enacted how the stone blocks were cut and dragged to the top of pyramids using rolling logs, and so on. None of those theories had satisfied me, however, because I always suspected that an extra-terrestrial force built those incredible prisms. Or at least, the primitive Egyptians were able to handle multi-task machines of an immense power and sophistication. My out-of-this-world thinking was solidly motivated by a naked fact: look at me, a fairly strong guy with the same tools as the Egyptians, and I could hardly dig a small hole. Thus far it was only a few inches deep and one foot wide.
It amazes me how my mind worked and what kind of ideas I had when struggling, sweating and enduring itching bites, trying to convince myself that countless people before me did much more while experiencing much worse. Probably this is the final wisdom of the Bible: to install humility in ever rebellious mankind who try to adapt to the hardships of life. Indeed, just about other verse of the Holy Book underlines someone’s previous experience that went from bad to worse, just to teach the reader patience and faith in God. No argument there, I reflected that night. Then I called a few friends, complaining about the incurable mosquito bites. From one of them I learned what the Bible didn’t point out: rubbing apple vinegar on the bites calms the itching and cures the irritation in a matter of minutes. Nevertheless, I was not going to ignore the teachings of Bible, and I said to myself: If God made the entire Earth and everything on it in six days, how long can it take me to finish a pond?
Encouraged, I ate my same home cooked soup and thought about the invention of canned food for the Napoleonic armies and the can opener that came 50 years later. I recalled reading a piece of trivia about one of the big reasons the union soldiers won the Civil War: they were provided with canned food. While the confederate troops had to canvas the land to obtain food instead of resting or battling, the Union soldiers were ready to fight at any time—without being hungry and weak. Indeed, as Napoleon pointed out, an army marches on its stomach. Canned food has since become an important “ingredient” of any war, and every soldier develops a lifelong affection for his most versatile gadget, the can opener.
I also wondered why obesity tended to be rampart in the poorer populations. Was it because most donated food for the poor is in a can? Is the canned food responsible that today are more people alive than all humans buried since the beginning of recorded history? During the Roman times the known world population was a little more than 200 million people. During Napoleon’s time the world population reached almost one billion. Famine, wars and sicknesses kept the population in check at 2.5 billion until in 1950. Today there are more t han seven billion people in the world, and that number is rising. How much of this huge increase might be due to the ready availability of food in cans? As the night before, I slept sporadically, not because I was thinking about the problems caused by an ever-expanding world population, but because of the usual mosquito-induced reasons. Obviously there are too many mosquitoes, as well!
Day Three
I woke up unable to move any part of my body, but thanks to the vinegar, itches were gone. To outwit the little bloodsuckers, I decided to work much earlier in the morning, before sunrise, when the air temperature would be the lowest. Dressed only in trunks and crocs, I had a terrible time fitting the stiff, dirty and wet working gloves over my aching hands. When I grabbed the crowbar, I felt an instant repulsion against all I saw around me, basically an awful mess that lacked shape and hope. With my feet already wet as they sunk into the mud, my first and probably healthiest thought was to turn around and leave the spot that was already responsible for so much pain and anguish. I wanted a pond, but not at the price of so much discomfort and pain.
It is amazing how a little detail can go wrong and an entire activity is compromised. In the summer of 1941 when German tanks invaded Soviet Russia and almost reached Moscow, they had to stop for nearly two months to overhaul their engines. The reason: no one in Berlin had thought to provide the mighty panzers with dust filters. Because of the long delay, the Siberian winter caught these Germans in trenches covered with snow drifts, as once again, no one in Berlin had thought to provide the soldiers with winter uniforms. So, small missing items costing a few cents lost the war for the Germans and saved Moscow! And there I was, lacking adrenalin and ready to walk away from my project because of the lack of a small item costing a few cents—a pair of gloves I could have easily replaced at any time! Ironically, even the evil mosquitoes seemed to empathize with me in my state of collapse and left me alone for a while. Stubborning reluctant to buy another pair of gloves, I kept suffering and kept digging.
I reminded myself that probably billions of workers faced a similar task each morning and for the duration of their labor years, and none of them gave up and went home, calling someone else to finish their job. I grew up in a remote village of Romania, where life had not changed in the last one thousand years and where I walked barefoot from April to November. Life was hard in the mountains, even for a child, and I used my back to carry piles of dry wood I had collected in the forest so we could burn them in the medieval stove used for cooking and heating the room. I would plow the garden with a shovel; I was too light to stick it very deeply into the earth and needed to jump on top of it a few times. And look at me now, I thought: life in America since I came 38 years ago had made my hands delicate and my muscles soft. Even though my Carpathian character had little changed, there I was, a shadow of the hardened man who never used to know the meaning of quitting. To my credit, though tempted!, I was not going to allow myself to be defeated by gloves.
A good thing was that regardless of the misery I endured, the idea of being sick never crossed my mind. So, realizing that everything is a state of mind and unafraid of my health going wrong, I kept digging in mud for the rest of day.