I went to the Reflecting Pool because, as a certain American naturalist once said of a different pond, I wished to “live deliberately” and “see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
I doubted that it had much left to say. The Reflecting Pool, the half-mile-long, knee-deep mirror of water that runs to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, has become our nation’s latest national metaphor. In early June, it became choked with algae after President Trump ordered it to be drained, repainted “American flag blue” and refilled. Soon the paint began peeling away in large flakes.
The pundits came like flapping carp: The pool, they said, reflected presidential vanity, or corruption, or ineptitude, or a tasty paradox (the man elected to “drain the swamp” had instead created a bog), or the triumph of governmental opacity over transparency. Mr. Trump blamed “Radical Left Vandals, people who truly hate our Country.” The more likely cause, experts said, was “new pond” syndrome — what you invariably get when you leave a large, shallow body of water to stew in the sun — and the hydrogen peroxide that park employees had added to kill the algae. By last Sunday, the matter was Officially Over: “The Reflecting Pool is now in full use,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The criminally made algae is gone.”
By Monday, when I visited, a chain-link fence had been erected around the entire site, with a hundred-yard buffer in most places. The sun was high, the air a broth fit for diatoms and dinoflagellates. At the World War II Memorial, tourists in shorts sat along the edge of the central fountain with their feet in clear water, rejoicing in the mist. The Reflecting Pool, behind the fence and through the trees, was invisible. Thoreau came to mind again: “One might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond,” he wrote in “Walden.”
At the base of the Lincoln Memorial, however, the fence came to within a few feet of the pool, and one could still gaze down its length at the Washington Monument and its inverted, shimmering ghost, which on this day had taken on a yellowish cast. Along the near edge, contrary to proclamation, there drifted small rafts of bright green algae, most likely Scenedesmus or Desmodesmus, two common types of phytoplankton known to colonize freshwater pools.
“Slime can actually be like gems,” Curt Stager, a biologist at Paul Smith’s College and a self-described “fan of algae,” told me over the phone. “The kind of algae that’s living in the Reflecting Pool now are like little emeralds with little spines on them.”
As a bright blue dragonfly skimmed low across the green flotilla, it struck me: In our rush to discern a reflection, we have overlooked the plain surface truth, the eternal and omnipresent marvel that are algae. Blithely we dismiss them — “pond scum,” “sea slime,” “seaweed,” “bladderwrack.” (Urban Dictionary also offers “gunga,” “greenshpun” and “Blob Dylan.”) Yet algae are the most original and persistent life among us; they appeared early on Earth and fuel our continuing existence.
Here a reader might fairly ask, “Um, algae — are they plants?” The scientific answer is no, with asterisks; taxonomically, algae are “a grab bag,” Dr. Stager said. Most are single cells; a few, like kelp, are multicellular. Some move, some don’t. Most are microscopic, some not; the single-celled Caulerpa taxifolia grows underwater in yardslong fronds. Most are citizens of the independent kingdom of Protista. All photosynthesize.
Scientists have described 50,000 species of algae, but there could be a million. They are red, brown or green, depending on the wavelengths of light they have adapted to capture; some glow in the dark. A few, the bad apples, release toxins that can be deadly. Far more are constructive. Red algae provide the cement in the world’s coral reefs. The calcium in coccolithophores, single-celled phytoplankton, produced the white cliffs of Dover. Phytoplankton is to Earth’s waters what grass is to land: pasturage for more complex organisms and the foundation of food webs, ecosystems and the human food supply. As a whole, algae generate half the oxygen we breathe, and their bodies, subjected to intense heat and pressure over millions of years, are the oil and the gas we burn.
Indeed, algae’s legacy includes humanity itself. By 3.5 billion years ago, Earth’s waters no longer merely reflected, as photosynthetic cyanobacteria (formerly known as blue-green algae) teemed on the surface of shallow seas: New Pond 1.0. Green algae emerged with dedicated internal storage bins — chloroplasts for photosynthesis, a cell nucleus for DNA — and, 500 million years ago, gave rise to land plants. Fins, limbs, spines, brains, people. Even now we share roughly one-third of our functional DNA with algae. So that’s us, or some fraction of us, in the Reflecting Pool.
After the Fourth of July celebrations, Mr. Trump has said, the pool will be re-drained and re-repaired and “will again be in perfect shape.” That seems unlikely. Because of its sheer size, the Reflecting Pool has always struggled with algae and the need for their removal.
“It’s in this terrible gray zone between being a lake and a pool,” Dr. Stager said. A lake is deep, has circulating water and harbors fish and ducks that keep algae in check. A pool would be small enough to nuke with chlorine. “It would be one of my nightmares as an ecologist to wake up and be in charge of that thing,” he said of the Reflecting Pool. “The scale of what you would have to do to keep it dead but beautiful, the scale of the toxicity, is just horrendous.”
“I think we should admit that it is not a pond, it is not a lake, it’s a monument,” he added. “It’s meant to be a mirror. Maybe we should pave it and put a mirror on it.”
Better, I say, to cede the Reflecting Pool to the algae. Let us step away and let the protists run it. This would be a new kind of monument: dynamic, alive, its borders open to spores of every kind and color, home and testament to Earth’s original founders. Gazing across its waters to the rippling obelisk, I saw ambling waves of green, I saw the primordial melting pot.
I was also melting in the heat. Near me at the fence, a man was explaining to his two young children that the Reflecting Pool had been disrupted by “people protesting.” He presented it as a lesson in proper protest etiquette: “Remember that when you go to protest, don’t be messing it up for everybody else.”
Thoreau’s protest entailed moving to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, where he conjured his own reflecting pool. It is “a lake of light,” he wrote. And later: “It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
What our Reflecting Pool lacked in depth, it matched in multifarious hue. Like Thoreau, I beheld “a clear and deep green well, half a mile long.” I beheld, too, “a vivid green” and “a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green” and “a matchless and indescribable light blue” and even “a yellowish tint near the shore.” Verily, I thought, “it is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown.”
A voice to my left interrupted my reverie. “It’s so murky you can’t even see the paint job,” a woman standing nearby said to her grown son. “It doesn’t even reflect!”
