The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

Splitting two acres off a farm in Iowa is not a handshake, no matter how good the handshake is. You need a surveyor to walk it and draw a plat, and the county has to approve and record it.

Vern knew a surveyor out of Creston who had done half the splits in the county. He came out in February and walked the pond with a rod and a little machine on a tripod, his breath smoking in the cold.

The survey cost me $2,400. The abstract and recording and the rest of the paperwork came to another six hundred and change. Vern gave me a recorded easement down his field lane so I could drive to my own ground.

We closed at the title office in Corning on the first of March. I signed my name eleven times. Vern signed his four. When it was over, he shook my hand like I was a grown woman buying land, which I suppose I was.

“Your grandpa would have liked this,” he said in the parking lot. “He’d have liked it a lot.”

I sat in my old Impala for twenty minutes after he drove away. I did not cry. I just sat there and held the folder of papers on my lap and looked at my own name typed on the plat.

We built the dock in March, on the first stretch of days that stayed above freezing. The water was cold and low, and the bank was bare mud where Vern’s cows had been coming down to drink for three years.

Vern had a post driver and a pair of chest waders that leaked at the left knee. He drove four treated posts into the muck while I stood on the bank and handed him things and told him he was going to catch his death.

“I’ve been catching my death since Eisenhower,” he said. “It hasn’t caught me back.”

He cut the boards on a sawhorse in the pasture with a circular saw run off a generator. I nailed them. He showed me how to set the deck screws so the boards would not cup, and how to leave a gap so the rain would drain.

The dock was twelve feet long and four feet wide. A little longer than Grandpa’s. It did not lean. When we finished it, Vern walked out to the end and bounced on his heels.

“She’ll hold,” he said. “Better than his did. Don’t tell him I said so.”

I strung barbed wire on steel posts around the pond with the fence stretcher from his shed. That was another two thousand dollars in wire and posts and a gate, and it took me four weekends on my days off.

When the fence was done, the cows stood at the wire and looked at me like I had personally insulted them. Vern laughed until he had to sit down on the tailgate.

The cattails were mostly gone. Three years of cows wading in and out had trampled them down to nothing along the east bank. Only one stand had held on, a little thicket at the dam end where the water was too deep to wade.

I knew those were Grandpa’s. There were no other cattails on that pond, and there had been none before the summer I was nine.

So in April, when the ground had thawed and the new shoots were just coming, I took a spade and a five gallon bucket and went down to the dam end in a pair of muck boots and Grandpa’s old work gloves.