Bill is my brother-in-law and Bill's Pond is what we have built in his backyard over the past four years. Bill is Canadian and grew up surrounded by water, trees and mountains so he experienced a considerable shock when he and my sister married and they moved here. This area, the Llano Estacado, is one of the flattest places on earth and is described as "a treeless, featureless plain that has no natural surface water and receives less than 10 inches of precipitation per year". Since he and my sister moved back here almost 20 years ago he has missed the water/vegetation/animal rich environment that he was used to, and often talked about some day building a large, self-sustaining pond. Several things were already in place to gave him encouragement, and in the Spring of 2000, (as an expression of his happiness over surviving Y2K?) he took the plunge. First of all, he and my sister live on roughly an acre of land, they own the water rights, and there has been a functioning well in place for as long as my family has been here. Second, in the early 80's I was working on a Masters degree in Anthropology, and, for a research project, used a backhoe to dig a hole on their property that was about 6'X6'X8'. I covered it with branches, and for a while used it as a shelter in which I made stone tools. I eventually abandoned the project but left the hole, and when they moved on the property many years later he used it as a dumping place for things he no longer used.
In May of 2000, Bill had a bulldozer operator clean the hole out, then expand it by digging in roughly a figure-8 pattern. The end result was an oblong pit that measured approximately 40' North to South, and 80' East to West. The West part of the hole was about 18' deep and the East part was 16'. After the bulldozer finished, we spend almost six weeks forming the top and sides and preparing it to hold water. After trying a variety of other methods (none of which even "almost worked"), we finally used a medium mil plastic to seal the sides and bottom and held this in place with dirt from the berm as we leveled it. We also ran pipe under the bottom of the berm into the deepest section so that we could pull water from the bottom for use on the lawn, trees, and garden plants. We filled the pond completely during the first week of July, 2000 and have been watching the birth and growth of an incredible (and incredibly out of place) habitat ever since.
We have photos from the very first day to the present and as I learn how to do this I want to show that view of the entire process, but beyond the visual is the mental adventure that this has become and I want to log that also. In activating a process that actually meant different things to both of us we have assumed both the responsibility for an entire ecosystem of living organisms (fish, frogs, birds, deer, rabbits, plants, etc), and a position from which to participate in and learn from an extraordinary situation. We do something constructive for the pond every day (mow, water, plant, clear debris), and use it in some personally beneficial way nearly every day (indulge in serenity, listen to the waterfall, watch the animals in action).
The final part of this first note should be that our oasis has evolved considerably in 4 years but we have allowed very few people to see it. Less than 10 people outside of our relatives even know that it exists. I don't feel guilty about not advertising "pond", or allowing access to the general public, but do feel odd about letting something so amazing go completely unmentioned.
These three photos were taken late Summer of 2003 and aren't really the best ones to start off with but I will have the entire photo story in chronological order before long.