I agree with Gus.

For over 50 years I lived on the edge of Look’s Pond, off Music street in West Tisbury. In the mid 1660s only the Tiasquam River ran through the valley on its way to Tisbury Great Pond. Then a grist mill was built and the stream was dammed to provide a pond which powered the mill. After 162 years, the mill was abandoned. Gradually the dams rotted away and once more the noble pond turned back into a narrow brook in a weedy, swampy meadow in which cows from a nearby farm grazed.

When my husband’s parents bought the property in the early 1920s, they restored the dams and the pond returned. It no longer served a business purpose, but became a lovely setting for several houses built around it. We enjoyed the trout that we caught from its waters, and even the herring that found their way up to the lower dam in early spring.

Nature prevailed and after awhile pickerel replaced the trout. A couple more ponds were built between Look’s and Tisbury Great Pond and the herring could no longer reach our dam, which now had a herring ladder to help them into the pond.

The loss of the trout and the herring did not diminish our pleasure in Look’s Pond. Our children learned to swim in it, we had skating parties during cold winters and reveled in the wildlife along its shores, in the air and even in its waters.

In the early 1960s I undertook a year’s study of the pond to fulfill requirements for a bachelor’s degree, which I had abandoned in order to get married in 1947. Ecology was a new word 50 years ago, and I learned that I was investigating the ecology of Look’s Pond. Ecology is defined as the relationship between all living things and their environment.

I worked with binoculars, a microscope and a butterfly net to catch things underwater. I set up an aquarium in my dining room to put them in so I could observe their movements, and a terrarium to put the tadpoles into when they turned into frogs. My equipment included a long pair of rubber boots so I could wade along the shores and a small rowboat so I could capture painted turtles and whatever else came up in my butterfly net. Not a very scientific endeavor, but I kept a journal and recorded what I saw. In 1973 my journal was published as a book called Seasons of a Vineyard Pond.

The visual delights were many — the various ducks and especially the Canada geese that flew into the pond to rest or feed, an occasional otter, the young painted turtles that would thrust their heads above the surface every once in awhile, the red-winged blackbirds and other species that nested in the bushes around the water, the cattails and wild iris that grew half in the water and half out, the duckweed on the surface of the pond and the jewelweed beside it. What amazed me most, however, was the life in the waters of the pond, some of which can only be seen with a microscope. Tiny though they might be, some even invisible to the naked eye, they are all part of the cycle of life we live in. I learned a lot that year.

Destroying a pond is probably not a big deal in these days of destroying whole countries, but I got a hint of how devastating it can be. In December 1964, a neighbor who controlled the Look’s Pond dams on his property decided to dredge Look’s Pond — not for ecological purposes, but for his own. He removed the boards from the dam and over the next few days Look’s Pond disappeared. What was left was three acres of mud, into which the turtles and frogs I had so carefully studied had buried themselves to escape the cold winter. The pond was left in this state for five months, just days after I had finished my study. And all life in the pond perished, as it will if the Mill Pond is drained.

How do you balance the lives of a few brook trout against all the other wildlife in the Mill Pond— the ducks and geese who use it as a way station, the swan family, the otters that are a delight to watch, and the children who line the banks every spring when the pond is stocked with fish for them to catch?

Shirley Mayhew lives in West Tisbury.