I noticed the pond beside the highway the first time we drove through the Ozarks. I thought rainwater had drained into the low spot of a pasture. But years later, after I moved to Missouri, I decided it wasn’t run off.

The pond looks like a small-scale model of a swamp. Large trees, native to marshy areas, grow in it. Fallen trees stretch across the algae-covered water. Is it some farmer’s pond gone stagnant? Or is it a creek that was dammed up when the road was built?

“Somebody ought to clean that up,” my eighty-five-year-old father-in-law commented. He was born and raised in the Ozarks.

When I took the Master Naturalist class, I learned about sinkhole ponds. They are caused when a cave collapses. Aquatic plants in a sinkhole pond are diverse. One source I read labels them foreign flora, relic species from the geologic past. That’s a good thing! Is that swampy pool a sinkhole pond? If so, it’s not as significant as Cupola Pond, which is on the National Register of Natural Landmarks and home to the Tupelo Gum Tree. But sinkhole ponds are common in this rugged hill country.

When the old man said, “Somebody ought to clean that up,” I hadn’t bothered to argue a reason for not draining a body of water teeming with life. I believed that his way of thinking would die off in this new century. I’m still hopeful that it will, but my confidence is shaken when I watch people bush-hog their property and complain about the sprouts of persimmon and pine and oak that mar their lawns and “bust up” their asphalt driveways.

“Somebody ought to clean that up.” Will such an attitude lead again to the clear-cutting of the Missouri Ozarks, a landscape that some conservationists have called a “hot spot of biodiversity”? Not if I can convince them otherwise!

–-Sheila Wood Foard

Master Naturalist, ‘04