“Look,” Mark told me, spreading his arms a little to emphasize the scale of my problem. “I can tell you exactly how much that’ll cost. I’ve got a guy coming up - today actually - from Chicago to work on a 2007 Prius. He’s staying overnight at the Holiday Inn. Tax, labor, everything figured in… that’ll run you 4,238 bucks.”

I raised my eyebrows subtly, nodded in a way that guys who know things about cars surely nod. Mark surely couldn’t see the sweat pooling in my armpits, wasn’t aware that the balance in my bank account was scarily similar to the four-digit number he had just named. And he definitely didn’t know that I had an ace in my sleeve.

“Let me call my dad and get back to you,” I said.

The erasure of my savings account was not something I envisioned when Isaac and I loaded a 20-gallon tank, a bucket, a piece of plywood, and a dumbbell into my trunk two days before. We were on the hunt for prime pond water and didn’t have far to go. Lake of the Isles, while not technically a pond, had plenty of shallow areas that are pond-esque, and was only a few minutes away. Isaac and I had the windows down, enjoying the spring breeze, when I careened around a corner.

THUNK.

“Oops,” I remarked. “Guess things are bumping around back there.”

“Sounds like it,” Isaac agreed.

Someone smarter than the two of us (college graduates, I might add) would have quickly realized that “things bumping around” might be less than ideal when one of those things is a 20-gallon aquarium. Someone even smarter than that (and those of you with a PhD might have seen this one coming) would realize that putting an unsecured heavy metal dumbbell in the trunk alongside a 20-gallon aquarium is a recipe for disaster.

But ignorance is bliss, so Isaac and I continued merrily on our way, murmuring a little “oopsie” every time another crash came from the trunk. We arrived at our pond mucking location, opened the trunk, and let out a gasp.

Thinking back, it’s a small miracle that the aquarium wasn’t more broken. In fact, only one side was completely cracked into a bunch of jagged pieces. That didn’t matter. I had truly put the “dumb” in dumbbell, feeling a strange amount of empathy with the dull piece of iron still sitting in the trunk. Isaac was doing the little laugh he does when something isn’t going well.

Broken Tank

Isaac tried to duct-tape the cracks. It didn’t work.

In between smacking my forehead with my palm like a poorly written comic book character, I tried to salvage the situation. At the back of my mind, nestled among my few functioning neurons, was the knowledge that there was a pitcher full of toad tadpoles on my kitchen counter.

“We’ve still got the bucket,” I reminded Isaac.

Together we knelt by the side of the lake and scooped muck and gravel into the bucket with our bare hands. With the feeling of the tepid green water on my arms, I was feeling better already. There was only one thing that could cure me of the blues.

I slipped off my shoes, hiked up my shorts, and waded in. Instantly I was transported back to countless days slopping around the lakes of Madison or the Northwoods, looking for frogs, crayfish, and other critters. My heart rate slowed to normal. I stopped smacking my forehead.

Reaching down, I grubbed up some algae-covered aquatic plants and popped those in the bucket. Isaac then filled it with water teeming with the movement of countless freshwater plankton. Isaac held the bucket of pond goop on his lap as we drove home, which was obviously another stupid idea, and one for which I should’ve learned my lesson back in 2018.

It was junior year of high school, and I wanted to add some fish to my science teacher’s aquaponics system. I caught some bluegills from the lake, filled a plastic grocery bag with water, plopped six bluegills into the bag, tied it shut, and got a ride from my dad to school in the Prius (back when he still drove that bucket of bolts). We had pulled up to the school when I decided to check on my little fish buddies. They were alive! So alive that they jumped out of the bag, taking most of the water with them, and flipped and spasmed all over the car, saturating the fabric with a fish-goo smell that returned on especially hot days for years to come.

So, it was with a measure of mild, grateful surprise that I pulled into the driveway this time around with only a splash or two of water on the seat (and Isaac’s shorts). Job done. The tadpoles would have a slice of pond ecosystem, and I would just have to bite the bullet and buy a new aquarium. After all, I had borrowed the one I broke, so unless I wanted my coworker Kat to put out some sort of bounty on me, I needed a replacement.

And luck was on my side: the exact tank I had broken was half-off at PetSmart. I ordered it for pickup the next day, set my pond gunk on the front porch to settle, checked on my pitcher of tadpoles, and slept easily that night.

The next morning, I downed some breakfast, hopped in the 2006 Toyota Prius, turned it on, and sighed with an unsurprised resignation reserved for every owner of a falling-apart car. All the dashboard lights were on: the tire pressure light, the brake light, the check engine light, the ABS light, the VSC light, the LMNOPQRS light, and a great big red exclamation mark that I had never seen before.

Prius Lights

Aw, man.

I took three deep breaths. I turned the car off. I took another three deep breaths. I turned the car on – and the lights were still there. At least the engine was starting, so I rolled down the block a few feet. No weird noises, or acrid smoke. I figured something was wrong with the electronics. I was right, which didn’t make me feel better as I forked over $180 to the auto-shop for them to confirm what I already knew.

“The hybrid battery is dead,” Mark told me.

I complained to my dad over the phone about it outside the shop. “They want 4,000 bucks to replace it.”

“Shoot,” he said. “Those batteries are supposed to last the lifespan of the car.”

“I mean, it is at 205,000 miles. Which is why I have another idea. There’s this guy Brad that I found online, who will put in a refurbished battery for $850. Would that be stupid?”

“Well…”

My dad talked me through the pros and cons. Pro: cheap. Con: a refurbished battery won’t last as long. Pro: I don’t give Mark another cent of my damn money. Con: Mark, I’ve had it up to here with you. Just because I don’t know anything about cars, doesn’t mean you can give me that smug attitude, demanding hundreds and thousands of dollars – Pro: After that incident with the wheel bearing almost falling off on the highway, I should’ve known better than to go back to your fraudulent, scam of a shop you –

After a little more thoughtful analysis, I called Brad in Richfield and made an appointment for the refurbished battery replacement. Problem solved, although the $850 was going to set me back a little more than the $25 for a new aquarium. The aquarium! In all the hubbub, I hadn’t figured out a way to go pick up the new aquarium, which was waiting for me at PetSmart.

I called up PetSmart and explained the situation – the car battery failure, my frustration with Mark, how Brad was coming to save the day. I was on the phone with the nice lady, looking at my purchase confirmation on the PetSmart website, when something caught my eye.

“Wait. Can I seriously get an aquarium DoorDashed?”

The lady assured me that yes, I absolutely could, at no additional cost. I thought for a moment about the consequences of the gig economy, how unequivocally insane it was that I could get an entire aquarium delivered the next day by someone whose pay was directly dependent on how large of a tip I chose to give. I just hoped they weren’t riding a bicycle or a moped.

With the new tank secured (thanks to the horrors of the 21st century economy) I finally had a home for the tadpoles. At first, I could only fill the tank with the bucketful of pond gunk, but over the next few weeks I collected more lakeweeds and buckets of sludge, using repurposed milk jugs to add more lake water. It was important to me that the tadpoles had a spacious, well decorated interior, and also some wriggling company in the form of tiny worms, snails, shrimp, and other denizens of the goop.

Stocking up

Old containers filled with lake water and other cool gunk, ready to be added to the new tank.

I wasn’t expecting any of these new companions to present me with a moral dilemma or recall certain ecologically unfortunate shenanigans of my childhood. But an empty aquarium demands to be filled; and the tadpoles, small as they were, didn’t fill the space with as much life as it was equipped to hold. I wanted something more, and the next week I set off in my newly fixed Prius to do some gathering. That’s when, stooping at the bank of the flooding Minnehaha Creek, I found something even cooler than a tadpole.

Hand Fed

Tadpoles can’t be hand-fed, but they can be fed-hand. They love the taste of dead skin!