Volunteers breathe new life into old lagoons

FRANKFORT, Ind. -- Barney Avery just wanted a place to fish.\nThree years later, with a little help from his friends, Avery has turned a trash-strewn haven for weeds and vandalism into an inviting spot to fish or to just sit back and enjoy nature.\nSituated north of Frankfort, about a mile west of State Road 75, two 5-acre ponds known to area residents as "The Lagoons" were created around 1970 to collect run-off water from the Del Monte plant. While the plant faded into Frankfort's history, the ponds remained, attracting vandals, garbage and a few hard-core fishermen.\n"I knew something was back here," Avery said recently from the edge of the west pond. "I could see people fishing, but I'd never been back here."\nA neighbor piqued Avery's curiosity about the lagoons.\n"He was cleaning fish," Avery said. "I asked, 'Where'd you get them fish?' I figured if he could go back there and catch fish, I could too."\nBut getting there was tricky, he said. Roads were overgrown with weeds and filled with mud holes. But he quickly devised a solution.\n"We just started bringing clippers and cutting away," he said. "We'd make us a fishing hole, we'd come back and somebody would have it. So we'd go make another one, come back and somebody would have that."\nHe laughed as he often does in telling the lagoons' story, beginning "about five mayors ago," as he measures it.\n"This has been bad for every mayor we've had," he said. "What do we do with it back here? Fix it up? Patrol it? Or just go on about your business? All the mayors worried about it. But there's interest now."\nAvery describes his undertaking as "a learning process," which picked up steam two years ago when he returned from wintering in Florida.\nHe asked Frankfort Parks Superintendent Tom Brant what could be done about the fishing hole. "He said, 'I can't do nothing. It's not in our budget. We don't have any money,'" Avery said.\nSo Avery volunteered. Brant gives a lot of credit to Avery for his continued work at the site.\n"He's done a fabulous job back there," Brant said. "People go back there and fish. For a family, it's a nice area."\nCurt Emanuel of the Clinton County Extension Office has loaned Avery a hand from time to time. He agrees with Brant on both counts.\n"I can't say enough about the job he's doing out there," Emanuel said. "I don't think a lot of people realize there's that kind of place to go in Frankfort. It's really nice."\nAvery points to the area he cares for with a sweeping gesture. Gone are the weeds, the rubble and the filthy water of the past.\n"I have a lot of people come up and thank me," he said. "What you see now got accomplished through donations."\nHe notes that about 120 individuals, businesses and organizations have contributed both money and physical labor.\n"The county's helped some, running their grader," he said. "And I can't do anything without the waste treatment guy."\nBesides cleaning up segments of the 46-acre property, Avery keeps its waters stocked with a substantial supply of fish -- blue gill, crappies and catfish, among others.\nAvery tosses a couple of cupfuls of fish food onto the west pond to demonstrate the extent of its fish population. Within seconds, the pellets vanish from the top of the water, gobbled up by the pond's hungry inhabitants.\nYears ago, an underground system carried wastewater from the Del Monte plant to the holding ponds. Today well water flows first into the west pond, then into the east pond through an underground pipe. Evaporation keeps the water at a depth of about seven feet.\nAdjoining the lagoons on the north is a 30-acre wetland that used to be as full of water as the two ponds, Avery said. His dream is to see it full of water again. He also hopes a portion of the grounds will be landscaped, then equipped with picnic tables, guardrails, handicapped-accessible piers and a shelter house.\nTo that end, he is working with Brant and Emanuel in applying for grant money. In the meantime, Avery will keep coming out almost every morning from early May to around Thanksgiving, maintaining the water's algae and oxygen content, picking up trash and feeding the fish.\nHe often returns late in the day, too.\n"I don't know if I'm sentimental," he said. "But in the evenings you hear the leaves rattle and blackbirds out there singing. I could sit back there by the hour listening to them."\nAvery, a former farmer and retiree of Eli Lilly of Lafayette, jokes that Betty, his wife, thinks he spends too much time out there, but volunteer caretaker to the lagoons is a job that suits him.\n"I'm at a point in my life where I'm retired and ought to be doing something," he explained. "When I wasn't involved back here, I was sitting in my chair, putting my feet up and watching TV. Bored."\nAvery laughs again and adds, "This changed my schedule."\nStill, he says, he wouldn't mind finding someone to help, someone who'd take an interest as he has.\n"Some place out there," he said, "there's somebody who would like to do it, I expect"