by Pat and Greg Fant
Manhattan Beach, East of Sepulveda, summer 1961
I am 10 years old; one of five siblings. Mom has shooed us out the door on a warm, summer day. We do not head for the beach like our wealthier friends who live west of Sepulveda in Manhattan Beach. Instead, we head for the wetlands — the wild, undeveloped land east of Peck Avenue. It is low land, swampy, filled with native plants and lots of living creatures. The grasses are high and the birds are plentiful. It is a paradise for us kids. We take our nets and cigar boxes. Today, we will have a contest to capture the most wonderful, flying insects to mount in our dads’ cigar boxes. By the end of the summer, our cigar boxes will be full of butterflies, dragonflies, moths and other creatures we have pinned and displayed as our summer conquests. Each day we happen upon turtles, frogs, rabbits, and stray cats. Some days, we collect handfuls of wild flowers to bring home and arrange in the various ceramic pots my mom has made and kept on our backyard picnic table. The best days are when we take our summer reading books down to the wetlands. There we can read and dream undisturbed. We watch the clouds drift by. We are only distracted by the rumbling of our stomachs for a noon-time meal. That was the last summer we had to run free in the wetlands.
Fall came. School started. A big developer came in with bulldozers and built a new home development between Peck and Redondo. We saw the grasses mowed down and the native plants disappear from that stretch of land. They left the patch of park we now refer to as Polliwog Park.
I am a grandmother now. I take my granddaughter to Polliwog Park. We still find wild things there that fill us with wonder. This May the lake turtles made their annual pilgrimage on their short, leathery legs out of the pond and up the hill to a sunny, dry resting spot next to the retaining wall of the botanical garden. There they laid their eggs. In August, 90 days later, the baby turtles will hatch. My granddaughter and I will visit the spot and hope to see some of the babies struggling toward the water. The mother turtle must lay her eggs far enough away from the water; so that the babies will be strong enough to swim in the water when they finally make it that far. Nature is forever surprising and adaptive. B
