This past winter my travels took me up to Rhode Island, the place where I was born. The first night I was home it snowed a great deal and after a long night of drinking and socializing with old friends I found myself walking on the frozen ice of Johnson's Pond. Johnson's pond is in Coventry, the town that I grew up in and I couldn't help but recall the many childhood memories that my family and I made for ourselves on it's muddy banks.
Johnson's Pond is a great big pond. My town of Coventry was considered sort of a hick town when I was growing up. We had a lot of lakes and woods and most of the men were blue collar. The one "upscale" community, Wood Estates was on Johnson's Pond and my grandmother had a home there and a little patch of beach sand. Down at the lake we had a little screen house with plumbing and a couple of docks, a small fishing boat and a pontoon boat. Every Independence Day we would load up on the boat and watch the next door neighbors display of fireworks.
It seems that no matter where3 you were in my town, you had access to the pond. It was huge. I recall the warm summer days growing up with Tim when we would scape through the leaves and catch worms, or stay out past sunset and catch night crawlers with our flashlights. We would sit out on the dock all evening catching sunfish and hoping for a bass while listening to the Red Sox on the radio. Just boys being boys. Every once in a while my father would wake us up really early and we would row the row boat way out onto the lake into the underpopulated areas and reel in bass until the sun came up.
There were tons of activities on the pond. My family would have family reunions and we would play horseshoes while the older folks sat in the shade and played cribbage. We would take turns riding out amongst the older kids on the jet ski's or jumping off the end of the dock doing cannonballs. Once a year the next door neighbor on the other side would do a water ski show and I was always amazed to see the pyramid.
Every once in a while a bad thing would happen out on the pond. One year during the firework display a man got his arm blown off by a mortar. My Uncle Donald (who I am named after) died on that lake during his graduation. He was 17 years old and he went out to retrieve a ball and never came back. And there was always the stories of drunk high school kids driving out on the ice to do donuts in their cars and falling through. We never thought about it when we were bridge jumping, but we were lucky as well, because once a year someone would take a dive off of a bridge and break their neck. There were huge alligator snapping turtles in the lake as well and fisherman were know to lose a finger due to the ferocious grips of the turtles jaw.
Whether it was through tragedy or fun the pond was a big part of my growing up and it held many life lessons for me and my little brother. I learned to ice fish on the pond. It was also here that I learned how to swim. I am really grateful for all of the boyhood adventures and memories that I have growing up on this giant lake in the nation's smallest state. Before the age of 12 my youth was sort of like Huck Finn, we lived in a town full of lakes and woods and we were always hiking around looking for Bigfoot and catching fish. From an early age I had access to a canoe and fishing poles and I used to love to skip school and listen to the RedSox on the radio while fishing the lakes. No matter how crazy life got in my teenage years, I have great roots which stem from my youth and my days frolicking about on Johnson's Pond.
~tilly
