A bike mired in mud became visible after the drawdown of Bare Hill Pond. (Courtesy photos)

Meredith Dewitt and the Dewitt children show some of the garbage they found at the pond.

My kids love to fish. I don’t. At ages 4 and 6, the kids get a huge kick out of fishing off the docks at the town beach. Sometimes, the little fish bite as soon as you put the bait in the water, generating ecstatic screams of joy from the kids. I have a different reaction. My job is to take the hook out. I use a pair of pliers to grab the hook to spare the fish and me any undue discomfort. It was perhaps inevitable that one September evening those pliers got kicked off the dock and sank to the bottom of the pond, ending our fishing season.

The kids and I had been scheming about how to retrieve the pliers from the pond until two weeks ago, when it occurred to us that, with the water level so low due to the recent pond drawdown, those pliers might be sitting on the newly exposed bottom just waiting for us to pick them up. So my daughter and I drove down to the beach to see if we could find them.

We didn’t. But as a beautiful sunset began to take shape over the pond, we discovered something else. Garbage, and lots of it—on the newly exposed pond bottom. There were cans and bottles, fishing line, pieces of plastic, and other regular members of the garbage family. And then we saw it. Out in the middle of the bay, about 100 feet off shore, there was a bicycle lying in the mud. Yuck!

We decided to have a family adventure to see if we could pick up some of the garbage. We brought our trailer for the bicycle and a box of garbage bags to aid in the picking.

No sooner had I unloaded our gear, than I heard my wife yelling for help. I looked up to find her knee-deep in mud and unable to remove herself. Pursuing an enticing piece of garbage, she had walked right into a classic garbage-and-mud people-trap. And there was no getting out of it.

With the help of some strategically positioned logs, insightful coaching from our kids, and some newly discovered muscles on both of our parts, we freed her, and proceeded with our task. Aware now that we were unlikely to be able to remove the bicycle without potentially having to be saved by the Fire Department, we decided to stay close to shore and proceeded toward the docks.

An old automobile axle was exposed after the drawdown of Bare Hill Pond.

In addition to the items mentioned above, we found rusty pipes, golf balls, soft drink lids, bobbers, inner tubes, beach toys, and even an old shoe. Then we found what looked like an ancient automobile axle, then another, and then a transmission. These last items were too heavy for us to move. We also found lots of little blue Styrofoam pieces, as if someone had spilled bags of “popcorn” along the shore.

We made a dent in the mess and had an adventure, but there’s plenty more to do. The drawdown is providing a unique opportunity for all of us to see what’s in our pond and to clean it up in ways we couldn’t do otherwise.