FRESH POND

Fresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a "landscape loved to death."Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the yearsand one to which Cantabridgeans and Bostonians have felt an intense attachment.Henry James returned to it in his sixties, looking for "some echo of the dreamsof youth," feeling keenly "the pleasure of memory"; a Harvard studentof the 1850s fondly remembered skating parties and the chance of "flirtationwith some fair-ankled beauty of breezy Boston"; modern residents argue fiercelyover dogs being allowed to run free at the reservation and whether soccer or natureis a more valuable experience for Cambridge schoolchildren. In Fresh Pond, JillSinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond's geological, historical, and political ecology. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting andfishing ground; the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food andwine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men; a summer retreat for wealthyBostonians; a training ground for trench warfare; a location for picnics andfestivals for workers and sporting activities for all. The parkland features anOlmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. The pond itself--a natural lakecarved out by the retreating Ice Age about 15,000 years ago--was a center of thenineteenth-century ice industry (disparaged by Thoreau, writing about another pond), and still supplies the city of Cambridge with fresh drinking water. Sinclair'scelebration of a local landscape also alerts us to broader issues--shifts in publicattitudes toward nature (is it brutal wilderness or in need of protection?) andwater (precious commodity or limitless flow?)--that resonate as we remake ourrelationship to the landscape.