Bloodless Coup

Che and George Will had a baby!

Several years ago, in my ongoing quest to make the outside of my house more livable than the inside, I built a pond in the back yard. I say "I built" but it was really a team effort, involving neighbors, friends, family, and a student of mine whose parents had just purchased twenty rocky acres in central West Virginia and whose dad dreamed of a smooth lawn. Every time it rained, more rocks showed up in his "lawn," nice big, flat ones. So I took my three quarter ton pickup down there and brought back two brimming beds full, and built an above ground, rubber lined, two hundred and fifty gallon pond.

Thus began the saga of the Communist Fish, and George Will.

Down at the local pond shop, the lady who runs the place figured that four fish that were between two and three inches long would be the appropriate population. When she scooped 'em up out of the holding tank, I pointed out to her that she had accidentally given us a fifth, a runty little grey guy, less than an inch long. She said not to worry, that it was a feeder fish, and would be free. Looking at these fish, the one that stood out the most was a beautiful white koi with a red cap, jauntily positioned slightly off to one side.

Che it was.

Then there were the two calicos, virtually indistinguishable from each other. They became Marx and Engels.

The last of the four full-sized fish was eventually the first to die, the other three unaffected, keeping their distance. Perhaps I doomed poor Leon with a name.

But what to do with the feeder fish? A dull, grey balance to the splashy revolutionaries, if small, and a latecomer to the struggle. Hence, George Will.

After Trotsky went, Engels was the next to go. For awhile, Che and Karl swam around, mostly ignoring George, who kept lurking about in the shadows. At one point, he concealed himself so well that he almost got discarded with pond goop , but was quickly retrieved, flopping, from a pile of detritus. Eventually, Karl went too, leaving George, who by this time was quite a bit bigger, larger than Che had been when brought home, and Che, who had doubled in size.

Just over a year ago, something interesting started happening to George. Whether it was maturity, new food, or a change in ideology as dissatisfaction with the Bush administration started to creep into his columns. George started changing color, slowly at first. When spring arrived and the ice on the top of the pond melted and he made his appearance, George was now a vibrant red-orange. And Che was relentlessly chasing George around the pond. This happened for months. I thought that since they were down to two, and since Che was bigger - despite George's new brilliance - he was picking on the little guy. As the summer wore on, I cleaned the pond, got new plants, picked up handfuls of goop from murk, hosed out the clogged filters, adjusted the waterfall. And I never saw anything, until today.

I went out to feed the fish, thinking that this would be one of the last feedings of the season, since once the temperature goes below fifty too many nutrients can build up and make the pond toxic. I also have to disassemble the waterfall and let the water circulate inside the pond, so that passing through the chilled air doesn't make the pump system freeze up, or risk letting the whole pond freeze for lack of moving water in th depths. All this was going through my head as I shook out some floating food, and noticed a couple of lava rocks that had spilled from the pump filter system onto the bottom of the pond. As I reached down to get them, the flesh of my hand a sharp contrast against the greenish black surface of the bottom, a runty little grey fish, about three quarters of an inch long, swam across the top of my hand. Had I not been reaching to the bottom, I never would have seen it.

So, Che and George Will had a baby. Against the odds, perhaps, and several years in the making. I'm hoping that there are others lurking down there in the murk.

Posted by binky at October 6, 2007 01:42 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Gardening