The Reunion (II)
	A trip back to Boston and Lower Brewster Pond on Cape Cod would be more than a simple chance to fish for Chain Pickerel again. Lower Brewster Pond was, 25 years ago, unique unto itself. That it was only two hours from metropolitan Boston, and in the center of a major summertime vacation massing of the whole east coast from Washington to Portland, Maine, was even more amazing. The pond, several hundred acres in size, was almost perfectly round except for the funnel leading to the outlet at the grist mill, a left over melt puddle from the last ice age. It was totally surrounded by private land, but with only three cottages set back in the trees on the bluff of the pine covered dune that encircled the lake. Public access, not that anyone seemed to care, was up the outlet at the grist mill and water wheel, a historical site complete with parking lot and information sign. The inlet came down from the south through a break in the dune from Upper Brewster Pond. The outlet, funneled to the water wheel flume, broke over either a natural dam, or some pilgrim work project, dropping about ten feet in a series of little pools. The name of the flowage escaped me. By New England standards it was probably called a river, or maybe even an international waterway. In the northwest it might, by stretching it, be called a "crik". One could jump over it every ten feet or so. At the base of the mill and water wheel circled a knee deep picturesque splash pool about twenty feet in diameter, rimmed with a hand-fitted rockery and stirred perpetually by the side entering creek and the drippings from the usually stationary water wheel. The paved road from Brewster bridged the outflow of the splash pool, which trickled almost insignificantly down the remaining slope to an unseen brown salt flat a hundred yards away, and diluted through its tidal squiggles, into Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic. The pond then was the last minor puddle in a flowage that snaked across the cape from several much larger, more developed lakes. I once, only once, walked up the inlet a few hundred feet and burst frighteningly onto a huge lake churned with water skiers, dotted with rafts and docks, and rippling with the sound of kids swimming and splashing, all those stimuli that cause a fisherman to wince and dodge and retreat, which I did. But the pond's last position made it the closest to the ocean, and that insignificant outflow in fact, to my amazement, represented a critical link in the energy and life in the pond.
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