Walking Near the Pond

Finally decided I needed to walk past the fence and see the pond up close. What from far away seemed liked a mess of greenery in the pond, maybe some over growth of moss, up close was this pic below. The photo doesn't capture it completely, but these plants break the surface, but wind way down into the water. In the pic, one can see the leaves within the water; I reached to see how far down the stems went, and they just wouldn't end. There was so much complication and so much depth to these plants. Some had leaves that were pointed, others had smaller ones that fit like confetti in my fingers that had floated up off the plants to the top. These small leaves were also attached to the stems. From far away, these were a bunch of green plants that had compiled or gathered on the surface, and after stepping up to see them, I saw that it was a lot more complicated than that. There was a variety of stems and leaves just on these single plants, and they were rooted in the pond itself, not just gathered on the surface.

There is a wired "bridge" of rocks, pictured below that I ventured out to walk halfway through. I wasn't wearing the best shoes for the job, flip-flops actually, but I wanted to walk on them to see the pond from the center. I took this pic to represent how, from this angle, it doesn't even look like a pond anymore, it looks like a marsh.You can barely see any of the water on this side because it is so full of the same plant material. The water peeks out. I wonder whether anyone would be able to guess just from looking at this picture out of context that this is Rhoads Pond. It's such an illusion-just looking at this pic, it looks like an irrigated field of some sort.

This is the view of the left side while I was still standing on the bridge. You can still see the plant growth, but there is much more water, and the overgrowth is reflected:

I saw these reeds growing right near the edge of the lake, and they were so impossibly soft and beautiful. They were also very inaccessible, you couldn't stand between them they were clumped together:

And finally, a sports ball someone had left/forgotten/dropped on the ground beside the pond: