Terry Baquet on koi & Katrina
“Losing a koi pond during Hurricane Katrina”, Terry Baquet’s brief retrospective on the destruction of his koi oasis during Hurricane Katrina, appeared in my feed this week. I’m not sure when the original written post was published at Verite News, but the piece that caught my eye was the recent publication of an audio reading at that same publication, read by Mr. Baquet himself.
(The written version is great. The audio version is superior, in large part because Mr. Baquet’s voice with his polite, restrained New Orleans accent is perfect for this medium.)
The way Mr. Baquet describes his pond, it sounds like a thing of beauty with a length alone that’d make it stand out from your average backyard pond:
[S]plitting the yard in half was a 60-foot-long by 6-foot-wide pond filled with hundreds of Japanese koi. There was even a bridge to get to the other side of the yard. When the owner stomped on the bridge the koi would gather to be fed. There were hundreds of them — and they were huge.
Assuming it was 3-feet deep, that’s about 8,000 gallons. (For perspective, here’s an 8,000 gallon outdoor pond of a similar nature found on Reddit.)
His depiction of returning to the property for the first time in the weeks post-Katrina will resonate with anyone who has ever seen their pond flooded out:
When I arrived home there was about a foot of water in our raised house and nearly four feet still in the street. I went to the yard. I cried as I looked out over downed trees and standing water across the yard. Only the highest point of the arc of the bridge was visible. There were no fish that I could see.
Can you blame him? I’ve cried at disasters to my pond that pale in comparison to the devastation Katrina caused. Our ponds are our oases.
The impact of a disaster, natural or man-made, isn’t something you necessarily think about when you’re relaxing at your pond. Who wants that negative energy when you’re surrounded by fish, water and plants?
At the height of the Florida summer one year, a neighbor from whom I lived downhill was lounging with his family in their above ground swimming pool when it exploded. I happened to be standing in my driveway at the time after, ironically, having just finished giving it a robust cleaning: blowing, edging, weedwhacking, pressure washing…the works.
Suddenly from behind me I heard a large crack followed by the sound of rushing water. Turning around, I saw tens of thousands of gallons of chlorinated, sweaty pool water pouring down the hill into my driveway.
The whole thing lasted about 30 seconds. Once it was done and the reality of what occurred had set in, the first thing I did was run to the pond…knowing already in my heart what I was going to find. Probably the same thing, on a much smaller scale, to what Mr. Baquet experienced wading through those chest high waters.
When I got to the pond it was worse than I’d expected. Not just pool water runoff, but huge amounts of dirt and sand and plant matter that the rushing waves had carried down…all of it in the pond. The water level had risen so high it was overflowing. The pumps were already clogging up due to all the debris. The few fish I could see poking their heads out from the murky depths looked on as if to say, “Why….?”
I was devastated. And yes, I wept. The gravity of the whole situation, encapsulated in one image of my beautiful oasis turned to a nightmare.
Not to mention: I’d just had the pond’s yearly “deep clean” less than a week before. It’s an annual tradition that we very much look forward to in this house: Cameron and his team from The Great Oasis come out, put all the fish into a big exterior holding tank, and pressure wash all the rocks so everything looks fresh. The results are stunning.
Unfortunately, the timing here meant I only got to enjoy it for a few days before all the great work was undone. The fates were not smiling on my pond on this date.
But it ended up being OK. With the help of The Great Oasis, we got the pumps functional again and most of the debris cleared out. Even if the pond looked as though our deep cleanout had never happened.
A couple of smaller fish disappeared in the chaos…most likely consumed by mud, eaten by a predator, or swept away in the overflow. Like Mr. Baquet, I never found any bodies so was left to speculate.
Unlike Mr. Baquet, whose family voted to turn their pond into a swimming pool when all was said and done…no such vote was held in our home. Today our pond is thriving.