In Monterey we all live in a catchment area called a watershed.    The common destination of most 
runoff ( runoff: a catchall term for fluid laden with the salts from our driveway de-icing, those chemicals
we sprayed around the  house, and the elements of  every fluid we flushed down our plumbing system) 
from our properties is the Konkapot river, and then the Housatonic.  Water is a fine solvent and is a 
carrier for all those elements, phosphorus, nitrogen and more sinister chemicals used around our homes.
For many of us in Monterey, the first stop for our runoff  is Lake Garfield.  Being in the Lake Garfield
watershed  means that everything  goes to the lake, and some of it stays there.

If you live on or  anywhere  along  the lake shore within sight of the lake,  you are reminded daily where
all your liquid effluent goes.  However, out of sight really is out of mind.  So if you live on Hupi road,
Art School Rd, Mt Hunger Rd, and  any of the cross streets of that group,  or Route 23  from  Mt.
Hunger to town center, and Tyringham Rd. up to the to  of the hill--you  may not think about being in the 
LakeGarfield watershed, or what that really means.  Know it or not, the runoff finds its way in to the lake
as its first stop on the way to the Housatonic.  It arrives not only from the three brooks that feed Lake
Garfield, but it runs through the ground, along  buried rock ledges, by groundwater seepage, as well as 
from numerous springs and through storm drains.  And that water carries those dissolved chemicals with  
it.  There they act as extra nutrients which stimulate the plant overgrowth in the lake.  Do they stay a little  
while and then go onover the dam and into the Konkapot?    No.

Lake Garfield has a  dark secret.  Down in the deepest part of the lake  is an abyss, about 30 feet deep,
which parallels the steep side of the hill, parallel to Elephant Rock Road.   It is a place where  the water
is always cold, and where phosphorus and other persistent chemicals of  many years past live on 
without being passed along out of the lake.  Because of the  interactions with these chemicals, oxygen
is used up, and fish who normally like cold water cannot live in this part of the lake mainly because they
can’t breathe.  Normal reactions do not occur here.  When we  take  lake measurements,  these low 
oxygen readings begin to show up at about 7 meters depth - approx 23 feet.  Each year the current year's
nutrients add to the  nutrients of years past and remain to feed water plant growth.  In 1994 the 
Commonwealth  began a comprehensive watershed initiative, setting plans in motion, then in the year 2000,
with characteristic frugality, restructured its watershed planning, (read cut back) but properly kept the 
focus on holistic planning and management.  This common sense approach tells us it is useless to throw
herbicides into the waters to kill weeds while at the same time we’re loading up the groundwater with
phosphorus and nitrates from runoff of homes and farms.   It says that the ecosystem we need to be 
concerned about isn’t just the lake, it is the whole watershed.