The Codfresh: An Eerie Lake unlike any you Have Ever Seen

by Bill Russo

Here's a snippet from "Swamp Tales: Horrors from the Hockomock Swamp and the Cape Cod Marshes": This section describes an unearthly Cape Cod Lake and is a prelude to the sad tale of Jimmy Catfish.

"Codfresh Lake is like no other body of water that I have ever seen. Some say it was created by the great hurricane of 1937. Others avow that it never was created at all, but is simply some sort of a cosmic joke. It is only called a lake because there is no word in English for what it really is.

In the middle of Cape Cod sometime in the early 1900s; from Nantucket Sound Northwards, a salt river snaked its tidal way from Dennis Port towards Brewster, then veered sharply West in the direction of Provincetown - but it never got there.

A rogue stream from Harwich, began a trip East at Long Pond and took on girth when it married a rivulet from Hinckley's Pond. The conjoined rivers had a baby when they ran through Seymour Pond, about three miles from Route six. The newly expanded raging fresh-water river set a course for Dennis Port - but it never got there.

The Salt River rushed on to meet the Fresh River combination. The mingle of these entities did not bring forth a marriage of the headwaters; only an uneasy truce that created an odd body of water six miles long and a half mile wide. Divided into three sections; it consisted of a tiny sea of salt water two miles long on the East end; a small fresh-water lake of two miles in length on the West end; and in the middle, was a two mile area of unearthly water that the locals called 'The Brack'.

The three sections of the Codfresh were as different in color as in composition. The salty part was a bright, inviting blue, while at the opposite end of the lake, the freshwater section had a brownish/black hue. In the middle; the brack took on the gray pall of a World War Two battleship.

Airplanes generally avoided Codfresh Lake. Some pilots reported feeling queasy as they flew over the motley waters. Other fliers said their engines sputtered as they crossed the Brack.

Codfish were known to swim in the East and Trout basked near the Western shore; but in the middle it was said that strange fish existed. Fish that were neither salt nor fresh; but simply 'Brackfish'.

The six miles of land that was filled by the uneasy entrenchment of the salt and fresh rivers, had contained high points and low. It was both forested and bare, as well as rocky and sandy.

As it was being formed during the wrestling match of the rivers, the Codfresh waters took down trees, hills and hollows. The result was the largest lake on the island of Cape Cod, lying mostly in Harwich but partly in Dennis. Oddly enough, the shape of the lake mirrored the shape of Cape Cod! It looked like a flexed human arm."

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