The manager of Pymatuning State Park announced earlier this month that the world as the people of Linesville know it will come to an end on January 1, 2009. On this day, it will officially become illegal to throw anything but specially-developed fish pellets into our beloved Spillway.
According to a Meadville Tribune interview with Pete Houghton, park manager, people have mistaken the Spillway for a larger-than-life garbage disposal. The cupcakes, Coca-Cola and corrugated cardboard visitors have been tossing to the fish have apparently been deemed unsafe for fish consumption and carp health is the top priority of the people at Pymatuning State Park.
While fish pellet vending machines will inevitably boost revenue at the Spillway, which is free and open to the public year-round, I don’t really get why bread and other food products are being outlawed. In the countless visits I have made to western Pennsylvania’s most popular natural tourist attraction, I have seen only two dead carp. I do not think we need to be concerned with endangering a species. Besides, if Darwin were still around, he’d probably argue that “survival of the fittest” is a determining factor in the circle of life and that, from an practical standpoint, Pymatuning State Park ought to pump stale cupcakes into the lake periodically in order to ensure that the weak fish don’t overtake the strong ones and end up ruining the whole economy of Linesville when someone decides to dump a container of egg salad into the Spillway in five years and kills the population in its entirety. Who wants wimpy carp? It’s a matter of population control.
My high school science teacher, himself a lifelong resident of Linesville, once asked if I knew how to make a great-tasting carp. Of course, the answer was no; carp are notoriously tough and flavorless, and I’d never try to eat one because it would feel too much like cannibalism given my hometown’s history. “Well,” he said, “you sand a plank of wood. You cut off the scales and the head and take out all the guts, and then you mix up some paprika and some basil and a little bit of garlic and slather it on there. Then you bake that sucker for 3 or 4 hours in an oven at about 425 degrees, you take it out, throw away the fish and eat the board.”
So since the thousands — millions, maybe — of carp that reside in Pymatuning Lake are not at risk of being overfished and have not been dying by the boatload from eating moldy bread, potential species endangerment has been ruled out as a legitimate excuse for charging me twenty-five cents to throw a handful of nuggets into the gaping mouths of some of Linesville’s more favorable residents. Pollution can’t be the problem, because they’ll gulp down anything you toss to them before it even hits the water. The only thing I can possibly fathom that would excuse such an irrational decision is a humungous payoff from the state of Ohio to draw more visitors to their (much dirtier) side of the lake.
My only advice to tourists planning to visit the Spillway after January 1, 2009 would be to stay home, fill your bathtub with photos of carp and toss in your leftovers to your heart’s content. I hate to say it, Pymatuning, but you’ve really ruined your sex appeal.
0 Responses to “The end of an era”