The Pond

On praying at the water's edge.

by Ben Birnbaum

Most days, I circle the pond twice. I don’t time myself and I’ve never measured the pathway’s length, though I have a fair idea that a circuit is a mile and some decent change.

I just walk.

I once read a magazine story about the author William Styron in which he said that he undertook a daily walk along backroads near his home “religiously.” Reading that, I realized that I too walk religiously, which is to say, as one would pray: quietly, regularly, steadily — hoping for nothing but to complete the prayer suitably, and hoping for everything.

Walking in the dark beside the tremoring waters of the pond, a phrase from the Bible sometimes comes to me. It’s from Genesis 1, the first chapter of the first book I ever read with serious intent. V’ruach Elohim m’racheft al p’nei hamayim is the way it runs: And the rushing-spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.

Thoreau performed a popular lecture titled “Walking” that was not really about walking but about the superiority of wilderness and about America’s West-leaning destiny. The essay that he made from the lecture was posthumously published and is a favorite of tree-huggers and interrupters of economics conferences, but not of mine. Its scorn of farmers and surveyors, its distaste for “East” and pavement (even pavement laid for walkers), and its adoration of lichens and the “Red savage” remind this Jew of what a nation of wood-sprite admirers and patrons of volk morality can get up in our time. Still, he was Thoreau, and he turned out some good lines, including, “In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”

Not that I don’t feel the pond’s pagan pull. Stepping out into the sudden sunwarmth on an April morning, I am quite ready to fall to my knees. So too on February mornings when the icecap that covers the pond shudders and groans above the trapped gods of summer.

But idolatry isn’t my game. I may walk religiously, but I don’t go to the pond at dawn to worship. I go to take the place’s benefits and lessons. I go to discharge my obligation (to self, loved ones, and doctor) to do something about exercise. I go because I have woken many mornings in my grown-up life feeling that the sheriff is hard on my trail, and I find I can shake him and his grim posse in a circuit or two of the pond (and temporarily loosen as well the sticky tendrils of my unremembered but bloody crime). I go because when geese cry oy vey as they lift their weight into the air, they remind me of my great-uncles rising from the table. I go because the pond is perfectly graceful, each of its movements and gestures inherent and true, and this is worth a man’s thought once a day. I go because Psalms, another book of childhood, speaks of the righteous man who “shall be like a tree planted by streams of water, that bringeth forth its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither.” I go because once in a soaking cold downpour beside the pond I found myself laughing as I imagine a wise man laughs and then I came across a young woman walking toward me, and she was laughing as well. I go because walking in the dawn, I see dreams and ghosts: John Updike coming through the mist once (what should I say? I thought), and Ella Fitzgerald (she was walking with a friend), and Calista Flockheart pounding by in a drizzle and disappearing around a bend, leaving a trail of scent, like fine steam, in her wake.

I have also encountered for brief moments my lost friend Amanda, my oldest boy who now lives in another city, my favorite sister-in-law, Amy, and my lost stepfather David, his hair bright and thick again, and brushed back like the hair of a man out for a night on the town in the 1940s. I almost turned to ask if he knew all that had happened since he left us.

I go because I once saw a boy of 10 or 11 being pushed along the path in a outsized stroller with his arms stretched out and his contorted face raised to heaven in what seemed like joy. I go because melancholy is a sin, and there is no evidence of it at the pond in the morning. I go because the dog wants me to go. I go because I sometimes find fathers and sons walking, and I miss my young sons and my lost fathers. I go because on some mornings I can look at the far bank over the water as I walk and see places I used to walk. I go because I truck in symbols all the day long until I’m sick and tired, and when you see cerulean blue through a hole in the gray clouds over the pond, it’s not a symbol of a damned thing. I go because when I was a boy and young man I woke early every morning to pray in community.

Sometimes at the end of my walk, I put Kate in the car and go back down the hill to the pond, and I stand and let the waters run in front of me until I feel I have just about disappeared.

Ben Birnbaum is a poet and essayist in Boston, where he edits Boston College Magazine. His essay “The Rebbe’s Dream” is included in Best American Essays 2001, and his essay “Why I Pray” is the opening song of God Is Love, the anthology of best spiritual essays from this magazine (Augsburg Books).