Well, That Was Fun While It Lasted
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not real bright first thing in the morning. Every last creature in this house takes advantage of this fact.
Just ask the cats.
Ever tried herding cats? Ever tried herding cats when you're sleep-deprived and groggy and haven't even thought about coffee yet? It's delightful. And by "delightful" I mean "C'mon over some morning and I'll teach you some new curse words." Every morning I try to herd the cats down to the basement so that I can leave for work without them destroying the entire house. Max is the angel, so he just goes on command, but Powder and Ali translate "go downstairs" to "let's play Ring Around the Rosie." I run around in circles all around the house, clapping my hands and pleading with them to just go through the basement door. Pleeeeeeeease.
It was after a particularily harrowing game of Ring Around the Rosie that I found myself standing out by the pond, staring at the water. Something was off. Something wasn't right. Something was . . . missing.
If I had two working brain cells at 6:30 am, I would have known what the problem was immediately. Instead, it took me about five minutes.
There was a fish missing.
The BIG fish was missing.
I was still operating in a time zone often referred to as Dumb O'Clock, so the fact that a 40-pound fish was missing sent me into a weird sort of thought process. "Did he jump out of the pond?" I thought. The fish was seven years old and had never been a jumper before. We've had jumpers. They don't last a year, let alone seven years.
"Did something get him?" Yeah. I'm sure it's feasible that some random guy got hungry and decided to go fishing in our pond. Maybe the Koi was cooking on a grill at that very moment? It couldn't have been an animal because the pond is surprisingly well reinforced against such kinds of attacks. (One of these days I'm going to find a dead raccoon floating in that pond because in might be possible to get in, but grabbing something and getting out? Not. A. Chance.)
Still wading through my fog of not-awakedness, I started walking all around the pond. "It's not like fish can grow legs and just walk away," I thought.
I had that part right. Arnie had not walked away. On a whim, I opened the filter box. There he was. A large round peg that had someone managed to cram its way into a small square hole.
Just to paint the picture for you, the filter box for our pond is fairly large--maybe two feet across? It's the black thing at the bottom of the photo. It holds a huge pump which returns the water up to the top of the waterfall, two big filters that keep crud from getting into the pump, and a tall skinny plastic basket. The basket sits at the front and is designed to keep living things from going all the way into the filter box and ending up in the pump. Frogs in particular like to challenge the system and commit suicide, but the fish that live in the pond are all too big to get past the basket. Heck, most of the fish are too big to get through the itty bitty opening into the filter box.
Arnie was too big to get into the filter box. As in, I stood there staring at a dead fish trying to figure out how he could have possibly gotten in there. I'm not all that good at geometry that early in the day, but even now I still don't get it. It's like he somehow managed unhinge his jaw, fold himself in half, and then shrunk himself a few inches, but then went back to normal size once he was on the other side of the opening.
Once I was certain the fish was dead, it occurred to me that I needed to figure out how to get him out of the filter box. Except, I couldn't. He was . . . REALLY stuck. Picture Chris Farley in the little coat. THAT was how crammed into that basket the fish was.
I did what anyone in my position would do. I thought to myself, "This is why I'm married," got into the car, and drove away. Leaving problems for the husband, FTW!
Of course, when I got home later this afternoon, I wondered if I had actually seen what I thought I had seen. Mr. Husband wasn't home yet, so I wandered back to the pond. Yup, the fish was still missing. And, yup, he was still in the filter box. That whole thing where fish don't suddenly grow legs and walk away was terribly inconvenient right about then.
The husband eventually returned home and took care of the . . . uh . . . "problem." He has assured me that the fish inadvertently committed suicide. He somehow got his giant self into that filter box and couldn't figure out how to get out. There was evidence of thrashing and such, which SUCKS. If we had known, we could have intervened. Maybe we could have slathered him in Vaseline or installed one of those beepy things that goes off when a truck backs up or had air traffic control direct him. Something. Anything.
And now I'm REALLY pissed we went and picked him up from the pond store.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Reader Comments (8)
Weird. Sorry about your fish.
aw :( Poor fish! So sorry. What a freaky thing!
So sorry to hear about Arnie! I remember when I moved to the Burgh from Miami we had a koi as well (whole 'nother story - suffice it to say my son won it when it was small and we were told it was a goldfish. Yeah. Sure.) We had Dude for 4 years so he was a good size (@ 8' plus tail) and it was really out of the question to transport both him and the cat in the car for 24 hour drive. So, we donated him to the South Miami Library Koi pond. My son (8 at the time) had a few of his friends help him "free Dude" and he used to stop by every time we went back to look for him.
I'm so sorry. Poor Arnie. Animals do the strangest things sometimes.
I saw this on twitter, and I have to admit, I'm sad. I followed his adventures and it was such an epic journey for fish and family! Maybe it was foul play. Maybe a raccoon put him in there as pre-revenge for a fallen comrade to come....
Very sad. :-(
I'm sorry about Arnie. He was a kick ass fish & I hardly knew him.
Oh, the joys of pond ownership. But why did it have to be Arnie? Poor fish.