Imagine you are a student in the Advanced Studies Program and want to take a quick swim before dinner starts in fifteen minutes. Turkey Hill Pond is fifteen minutes away, so your only option is the Lower School Pond. It is right by your dorm, a perfect location. Its cool temperature and grassy beaches offer the perfect escape on a hot day. But, Tom Bazos, former ASP director, created a rule prohibiting swimming in the Lower School Pond in 2007. He did not want a repeat of what happened to Ashley Ardinger.
Ardinger attended ASP during 2007 as a student in the Biomedical Ethics class where she immersed herself in the St. Paul’s community immediately. “My friends and I were pretty athletic, so six of us decided to go swimming,” said Ardinger. They chose the Lower School Pond, which was, as Bazos said, “determined to be safe due to the current, depth, and accessibility.” This presumption would soon prove incorrect. Ardinger and her friends paused as they arrived to the pond. “It looked kind of cloudy and just plain gross,” said Ardinger. As she and her friends examined the water, “one of them decided to push her off the dock and into the pond,” said Colby Maldini, who also attended the program in 2007. Ardinger remembers feeling a “sharp pain” in her left foot that she assumed was caused by trying to kick back to the surface. She continued to float on her back until she eventually noticed her friends shouting at her. “They kept yelling at me to get out of the water. I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, what the heck is chasing me in here?’” Her friends pulled her out and held a towel over her waist so she could not see her legs. “I knew something was wrong, but I just didn’t know what because I felt perfectly fine.” After help arrived, “security and a fellow student escorted Ashley to the hospital,” Maldini said. Along the way, she caught sight of her foot. “I could see the bone in my left pinky toe. It was just slashed open.” When Ardinger jumped in the pond, her feet, as Maldini said, “touched the bottom of the pond, where broken glass cut her foot open.” After spending seven hours at the hospital, Ardinger received 17 stitches before returning to campus.
Two days later, Ardinger noticed that she had a mysterious condition. “I had these red lines running up my legs. It looked like a weird sunburn.” Ardinger was not worried about her symptoms, but her friends convinced her that she needed to return to the hospital. Ardinger was admitted and diagnosed with acellulitis, an infection caused by bacteria from the pond. Had this infection gone untreated, it would have eventually reached her lymph nodes and may have killed her.
Despite her near-death experience, Ardinger remains positive. “It was fun. When I look back at my time at ASP, this makes me laugh. I remember my time here because this happened.” However, Bazos did not share the same view. To ensure the safety of future ASP students, he created a rule prohibiting swimming in the Lower School Pond and had, as he said, “the area by the docks dredged to avoid future foot injuries.”
This rule is still enforced today by the current ASP Director, Michael Ricard. Ricard “expects everyone will follow the rule. The information sent home before the program made what was expected as behavior perfectly clear.” This rule is especially important because the pond threatens, as Ricard said, “students’ safety. Also, the pond does not offer a high quality of swimming and there are plenty of other options available,” such as Turkey Hill Pond.
The next time you want to go swimming, do not simply settle for the closest water source. Take time to consider the potential risks. Despite the water lilies and beautiful atmosphere surrounding the pond, there could be something dark and dangerous below the surface. There is no way of knowing what is lurking at the bottom underneath all the muck.
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