FOOD FOR THOUGHT
My brother Arnold recently reported to me about a well-meaning soul named William Stoner, who lives down in San Marcos, Texas, just outside Austin. This gentleman would stop by the Quail Creek Golf Club every couple of years. He'd don his snorkeling gear and jump into the ponds on the course and retrieve wayward golf balls. According to course officials, he'd collect as many as 3,000 balls at a time, a testament, I suppose, to the quality of golfer who frequents the Quail Creek Golf Club in San Marcos, Texas. But I digress.

Anyway, this guy swapped the recovered balls for 10 cents apiece. Not megabucks, but like my mother always said, 3,000 dimes is better than a sharp stick in the eye. I don't know how long this guy's little balls-for-dimes exchange was going on, but Mr. Stoner apparently thought that he'd played fair long enough. He thought it was high time he started utilizing every advantage he could. And that's where he started getting himself into trouble.

I don't know how many of you have ever been in one of those golf course ponds before, but let me tell you from first-hand experience that it's not like Grand Cayman-style scuba-diving or anything. They're murky, they're dark, they're muddy. And there's always a forest of weeds growing out of the bottom, making it an uninviting prospect to go searching around in the murky, dark and muddy waters. (Now THERE'S a band name for you…"Opening tonight for Murky, Dark and Muddy Waters will be Sheppard's Pie!")

COURTESY OF ANDREW SPENCER Isn't Andrew Spencer just the most clever fishing columnist in this issue?

So back to Mr. Stoner. Ol' Bill, as I was telling you, decided that he was sick and tired of swimming around in the weed-filled ponds of Quail Creek Golf Club, so he decided to do something about it. He drove across the state line into Arkansas.

Incidentally, kids, as a little sidebar here, if you're ever in Texas, do yourself a favor. Don't cross the state line into Arkansas. Nothing good will come of it. After all, there is a reason that Texas doesn't fall into the Gulf of Mexico, right?

And now back to our story. William Stoner, acting in direct opposition to my sage advice, entered Arkansas and purchased what he thought was a surefire cure to his vegetarian nightmare. He bought some grass-eating fish.

Your Honor, I really didn't think that there was anything wrong. I just thought it was a segue.

Friends and neighbors, these fish that my boy Will brought back from the cultural black hole that is Arkansas were Asian grass carp. They eat marine vegetation like it's going out of style, so it's not entirely unheard of for people to put them in lakes to control vegetation. The problem is, when they run out of grass, they start eating other fish. And the way these things reproduce makes rabbits look like Tibetan monks. So you can do the math here. You take two carp, you put them in a closed-in lake. They make a lot of little carp, and they all start eating like gangbusters. Long story short, you end up with a lake full of carp and nothing else. And then things get really ugly when the carp start feeding on themselves. Of course, things take a turn for the barbaric when the alligators discover that the carp are in the lake. "Asian grass carp in a lake" in alligator-speak loosely translates as "smorgasbord."

And mind you, on a golf course, having a pond that's full of Asian grass carp and some overfed alligators isn't necessarily that big of a deal from a golfer's perspective. But if you're actually thinking in terms of the environment, it's a bad idea. And if you're thinking of it in terms of being the poor guy who has to jump in and race an alligator to a golf ball, forgetaboutit.

When you boil it all down, changing a marine environment - be it in a lake, a river, ocean, whatever - is a bad idea. And it doesn't matter how insignificant a change it might seem. It's all related, and one change brings on another, which brings on another and so on. No matter how good or noble your intentions, when you start making changes, you start doing damage.

There's been a lot of talk recently about environment altering ideas here on Nantucket. A lot of people are throwing around a lot of money to convince a lot of other people that their ideas will work. And I don't care if it's moving sand or installing wind turbines, it's all got side-effects. The simple fact is that when you take an environment - in this case, a marine environment - and you start changing things around, you never know what unintended consequences are going to arise. And it doesn't matter how great your intentions are. Sometimes you've gotta think with your head AND with your heart.

Think of "Jurassic Park." Granted, it's fiction, but the idea holds true. You've got the most carefully thought-out scientific ideas brought to bear in a completely controlled environment with the most hi-tech and sophisticated of security measures. And what happens? Mother Nature changes the rules on you. Nature evolves in order to get its way, it seems, no matter what we do to change it or alter it.

Granted (again), the change might not be obvious right from the start. The smaller and more enclosed the environment, the more immediately noticeable the change, and the larger the environment, the longer it might take to show up. In the case of an ocean, it's a big body of water, and it might take a long time to see any damage. But it'll be there, regardless of whether we can see it or not.

We only get one shot at this thing, kids, so let's think long and hard before we do anything that we can't reverse.

Tight lines. I