Lion by the Pond

Sometimes what passes for common knowledge isn’t really knowledge at all! Sometimes the impossible is true and other times it is the lack of fantasy that blinds us to glimpses of the impossible.
Many years ago in a place not far from here, the impossible made believers out of two young boys and the tale of the encounter wrapped the all-knowing adults in an inescapable cloak of astonishment.

Summer 1965.

There was a pond at the end of a long dirt road and this particular pond had formed in a huge sand and gravel operation that in its prime, supplied much of the gravel and sand that was used to put Route 91 across the Connecticut River Valley.
Millions of cubic yards of sand were trucked from the site in huge hopper body dump trailers, the kind where the bottom of the body tapers like a funnel and they don’t really even need to stop to disgorge the load.
Day in and day out these monster trucks rumbled into the sand bank where they met even larger bucket loaders of the kind you usually see only in pictures of mines, with tires that stand ten feet high and the likelihood of being incidentally crushed without interrupting the flow was very real.

This sand bank, on the western edge of Easthampton, chosen for whatever reason as the source of the new highway, was a little unusual as sand banks go both by where it was and what was under it but none of this was known to the engineers who picked that particular hill and the unusual nature of the place only became evident after the hill was gone and level ground had given way to an ever deeper scouring of the earth.
Huge trucks came and went and millions of tons of sand moved to a new home eight miles away and the Connecticut River and its oxbow lake would never again meander freely across the valley.
Tens of millions of tons of sand and more millions of tons of rock blasted off the side of Mount Tom made sure of that and a great wall rose in the valley and all the while, the land of the sands former resting place dipped lower and lower until water stopped the roar of the giant trucks.
Water the giver of life, mixed with sand in the middle at first then slowly growing in width and depth and moving out to cover the road once belonging to the thundering trucks.

Maybe it was the waters warmth that made the pond a magnet for life!
Warmth, yes, in fact very warm and the why of the warmth had to do with what was under the pond which no one, even the engineers, had thought about. This pond lay on a crack in the Earth that marks the spot where the formation of the Connecticut Valley split the ground, forming the Connecticut Rift Valley just before the Atlantic Ocean itself started to open.

A long time ago, yes, but what came up through the crack, carried an energy whose release carries on for millions of years and the heat from the Uranium and Thorium that accompanied the Lead that lines this particular crack, still generates heat at depth in the Earth.
This pond, stripped of its glacial sand, sits directly on top of the same vein of Lead that is found in the Loudville Lead Mine.
In fact, miners were digging into the hills just beyond edge of the sandbank and this pond until after the Civil War.
Even in Winter, water was very slow to freeze in the pond despite the shallow depth.
Robins, Bluebirds, salamanders and an occasional frog were common all Winter.
Slightly warm water is better than ice and that made the pond a scene of constant visits from the wildlife around it.
Mostly you saw tracks, big tracks that belonged to very big dogs, monster deer or maybe in hindsight moose. Little tracks made by things that left tracks like a tiny alligator or just trails of mud where some huge snail like thing bulldozed its way to the pond and then there were bird tracks, huge bird tracks that could only have belonged to a pterodactyl or something larger.
The boys never did get to see a pterodactyl but in the end they saw something better!
Who’s going to get there first?
Let’s race to the pond!
The race was on but in truth it was a friendly race because you can’t talk to somebody if you’re out in front of them, so yes, you go like hell but try to keep even with your friend so that even though you’re going too fast to talk, you can still see the other person grinning and that’s half the fun.
Down the dirt road hell bent for adventure and the pond is just around the corner and the boys are grinning ear to ear and then “My god” and they stand on the brakes. Drinking with its head down on the near side of the pond was a lion. 
Not a large house cat, not a bobcat nor lynx, no, this thing was huge, a lion at least four feet in body from nose to tail and when it jumped a moment later, its tail stuck out another half a body length and then this thing of a dream-time was airborne for fifteen feet landing in the middle of the road right in front of us then airborne again for twenty feet and across the road and up again for I don’t know how far and in the woods and gone.
We had barely stopped when the lion reached the woods and “Did you see it? Oh my God” over and over was about all we were capable of at the time.
We ran down to the pond and there they were; huge prints of a monster cat and we tried to think of some way to lift the prints and take them back to my friend John’s house to show his father who was an avid hunter and would we thought, recognize them.
Well mud is mostly water and picking up water doesn’t work too well so we raced back to John’s house to tell his dad and get him to come look at the tracks.
He wasn’t impressed!
“You kids saw a bobcat or something” then said flat out, that he didn’t want to walk the quarter mile to the pond. 
“There haven’t been any Mountain Lions around here for a hundred years, so you saw a bobcat or something” and so, despite our pleas, he wanted only to relax and go across the street to have a weekend beer with his neighbor and another friend.

Maybe it was the magic of the pond or maybe just coincidence but the friend of the neighbor and fellow drinker of beer was a man named Jim Adamski who happened to be the local game warden and later that afternoon all three men were to be gathered on the back deck of the neighbors house.
John’s father dodged the rest of our numerous questions with “Why don’t you tell your story to Adamski the game warden, as he is coming over this afternoon.
We were thrilled at this possibility and assumed the warden would know of such things so when they had all gathered as planned on the back deck of the neighbor, we walked over and told the warden what we had seen.
He wasn’t impressed!
He told us “ you must have seen a bobcat or somebody’s big house cat as there aren’t any lions here and haven’t been for a hundred years”.

Maybe it’s magic or Karma or maybe a more powerful form of wisdom that we don’t understand but as soon as he uttered the words, “There aren’t any lions around here for a hundred years”, time stood still for a moment.
There was a field behind the house holding the three men.
This field went far back behind where we were sitting with the edge of the woods close to us on the left.
Before Jim Adamski had finished his sentence regarding the lack of lions, the lion walked out of the woods behind the warden and continued across the field towards us.
I saw it, John’s father saw it and uttered “jesus, what the hell”. His words stopped all other conversation and everyone turned to look at what Matt was looking at; the lion in all its glory.
The lion walked right up near us, maybe fifty feet away, stopped, turned to look at us and sat down on its rear legs.
“My god” from the neighbor, “what the hell” again from John’s father but no comment from the game warden.
After at least a minute, the lion stood up, looked at us again then stretched and continued across the field into the woods.
As the cat started to leave, John’s father nodded towards it with a quizzical look and asked his friend Adamski, “What’s up with that”?
Resignation in the face of truth is honorable and the warden leaned back in his chair, took a sip of beer and told a story that had the effect of leaving John’s father and the neighbor with their mouths hanging open.
“The cats been living all summer down by Camp Cook in Easthampton” “He’s eaten all the rabbits in town and I think he’s decided to hunt elsewhere” “I’ve been monitoring him all summer and actually saw him walk under a woman sunning herself on the deck of her pool and she never saw a thing”.
 Johns father, a little annoyed at his friend’s subterfuge asked “Why did you say there weren’t any lions” “Well I didn’t say there weren’t any lions, I just said they weren’t living around here, meaning here”.
That’s bull, why wouldn’t you say they’re around here?
“Well, the answer may bother you as a hunter, because if they are living here and breeding here then they become an endangered species and must be protected and how do you protect something that has a range the size of Massachusetts and what restrictions on building or hunting do you have to put in place to protect the animal”
The subject was then quickly dropped and that was the last time we saw lions by the pond but the warm water is I believe, still there and the Uranium or Thorium that warms the earth in that area isn’t going anywhere anytime soon so maybe lions will again find that place to their liking.

Dave Demarey