Antonielli's Pond is a far western westside pond, surrounded by fields and a farm and an industrial waste factory and the train trestle and a mobile home park and new apartments. Perched up on the windy start of our North Coast. People go there to bird watch and drink beer. Or maybe drink beer and bird watch. I've seen fishing. And just down the road, tractors already grading for a 113,592 sf of businesses and apartments. Still, for now, it's a good back up place to run the dogs around, if you don't mind the pitbulls and beer drinkers and traveling folk who use the train trestle to hop the cement train for a ride north. An appealing thing about Antonelli's is there's no rules there. Which means lots of beer cans, but no rangers to piss on the parade.
It's all about the timing there. When you're bringing high speed mayhem to a pond, you sort of want there to be no bird watchers around because of, well, the mayhem. The beer drinkers, I don't worry about. They've never been able to catch us. On an evening with good timing, it's just us and the birds and the bunnies and all the stuff that lives in the pond and makes weird noises. I don't know jack about birds. I just know there's all kinds of seaplane style birds out there in the water, and they all make funny noises and flutter about. Maybe some of it is frogs, and maybe some of it is stuff that lives in the pond we don't even know about. Can anyone say industrial waste factory next door?
My dogs don't really swim so much, but stick a bird in a body of water, have it flap some wings around, make some gutteral woo woo honk honk sounds, and all of a sudden, we have swimmers. Although swimmers might be too generous of a word. More like leapers off of docks into murky waters necessitating being pulled up by tiny little collars onto mud when they're stuck in the deep end. Does that count as swimming? It's slimy, it's wet, and it's possibly not nice to the wildlife. Probably not nice to the wildlife. But it's a big pond. I figure there's room for all of us, and I sure like crazy dog watching better than bird watching.
Because one dog, not naming names if your name is Otterpop, has to leap off the broken old dock thing, into muddy, vine coated water after some invisible, bullfroggy noised apparition, does that mean others amongst you, Gustavo, have to follow suit? Like a soggy, wet slime suit on a day when I pulled the dog crates out of my car and dogs are riding on upholstered car seats. And where there's no way for feverishly dogpaddling little dogs to climb out unless someone goes down and yanks 'em back in. Some dogs who are perfect citizens, they know better. Stay on dry land. Understand the whole sinking dynamic. But the swimmers, just hell yeah and leaping and then having to figure out the whole swimming thing until a nice lady, such as myself, runs to the edge and fishes 'em out.
It's a breezy, bright evening, after a long weekend at work, and I just stand on the path for a while, and watch the dogs race around, fast as they can. Try to not look at the apartments. Not look to towards the mobile homes. Not look up at the manufacturing backlot of whatever it is they make next door. If I squint, I can just see trees and fields and that blur of black until it's time to go home.
2 comments:
Looks like fun! I didn't notice any beer drinkers or sleeping bums in the photos...must have been an off day.
It's in the timing at the pond. An enjoyable place to drink beer by day, but for some reasons more vacant at nightfall from the campers.
I suppose, in the shadow of the willows, it is muddy and slimy and damp, and the fields around it are so open and exposed. And it's far on the edge of town, away from services and liquor stores and things that people need.
A roving RV culture though, rusty RV's held together with string and old tape and shoelaces from ancient army boots, sprouts up on the pond road at night and disperse in the morning. RV's that we don't see at the dog shows, ones without stellar maintanance records, that sometimes get left along the side of the road until they just rot away.
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