Bi-Weekly Topic for April 15, 2004
3mt-5: The Merrimack River Before 1620
This is more history of place, but it does concern the Merrimack River. I will warn you that it is not pleasant reading, for it concerns Indian history, and that is never a happy topic in American History. It's called "The Merrimack River Before 1620".
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Before European Contact, the Merrimack River was part of a network of riverways and trails for a 'nation' of Indian villages, consisting of families interconnected with other villages through intermarriage and social commerce centering around agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Over thousands of years these communities developed in ways now lost to history. What we do know is that between the years 1617 and 1619, historians estimate that between 75% to 90% of the Indian population of New England died in an epidemic of viral hepatitis or chicken pox passed on by ailing European sailors. Thomas Morton described a village near Massachusetts Bay in his “New English Canaan”:For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive, to tell what became of the rest, the livinge being (as it seems) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to pray upon. And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that as I travailed in the Forrest, nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha.For the Pawtucket Indians on the Merrimack River, this “Algonquin apocalypse” left them vulnerable to attacks by their Eastern enemy, the Tarrantines. The Pawtucket chief Nanepashemet at that time held together the largest confederacy in New England. Their center was at Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack (now Lowell) but their territory extended south to the Mystic River, west to the Concord River, and east to the coast. David Stewart-Smith writes in his doctoral dissertation:
The Merrimack was deeply underpopulated with some villages abandoned. The Tarrantine came in raiding parties from their new location at Penobscot, to bring home corn, captives, and plunder.
And somewhere near Malden, Mass, in 1619, Nanepashemet made his last stand against the Tarrantine, and was killed. Such devastation was precursor to European settlement beginning with Plimoth Plantation 1620. Life on the Merrimack would never be the same.
posted by Greg @ 12:00 AM
Source: http://grapez.blogspot.com/2004_04_11_grapez_archive.html#108199380236870808
Downstream
By P
The metropolis where I live, Cleveland, is defined by its river. That's sort of rare among cities, as I see it. Many great cities have rivers -- London, the Thames; Paris, the Seine; New York, the Hudson. St. Louis has the Mississippi, or the Missippi has St. Louis, and they come close to Cleveland; but if New Orleans were at the mouth of the Rio Grande, or if London ornamented the Severn, they would still be great cities, losing little of their character.
When people hear about the Cuyahoga, they invariably ask, "That's the one that caught fire, isn't it?"
Well, yes, it did. Thirty-five years ago, and quite a few times before that, the river, and sometimes railroad trestles and other structures, burned when oily waste from metal factories caught fire. In 1969, the environmental movement was getting under way, hapless Cleveland got a really nasty moment in the spotlight and the whole United States got started on a cleanup that continues to this day.
"Cuyahoga" is said to mean "crooked" in an Indian language, maybe Erie. Crooked it is -- the river's lower end meanders madly across its deep valley, The Flats, on a path that looks like a sink drain with several traps installed by a demented plumber. One of the continuing delights for visitors and residents alike is watching 600-foot ore carriers navigate 300-foot turns without hitting the steel bulkheads on the sides. The process is like maneuvering a screwdriver through a sink trap, and it's something to see, if you have the patience.
The Flats, half industry and half entertain-ment, line the bulk-headed sides with vast piles of crushed limestone, dusty bulk-storage towers and refurbish brick buildings that boom with music at night. A decade ago, the Flats were busier; now some of the action has moved up the hill to an equally old district of refurbished warehouses, and some of it has moved out to the suburbs, most likely because of a spate of problems in the parking lots.
The Cuyahoga also defines Cleveland by being a divider, as so many other rivers do. To the west were the Irish and German immigrant workers who built the Ohio and Erie canal and stayed to work in the growing factories as Cleveland became a steel town. To the east was the money that owned the ships and the factories. Then the East Side became the black side, with the whites on the west.
Now, with the blacks in the majority, the west has gathered the Hispanics and many of the Arabs; the east has Chinese and Africans and, in the suburbs, Russians. The synagogues and temples are east; the colleges and museums -- the work of old money -- are east; the huntn' fishn' snowmobilin' crowd are to the west. Because of the limitations of the roads, it takes serious time to get from one side to the other, and often folks don't go.
Oddly for a town where people claim never to cross the river, the Cuyahoga's northern end is a fiesta of bridges. Layers of bridges, like a giant's jungle gym -- wonderfully, the low ones swing and rise to make way for the ships. Another of the continuing delights of the river is watching from a high point while the bridges ponderously rise and fall; the slow-moving scene is accented by traffic and rapid-transit trains pouring gliding back and forth.
The river doesn't go very far. It begins in marshes south and east of the city, wanders through Akron and finally plods up to its destination. Glaciers got it drunk on meltwater and left it confused, though not too confused to dig an impressive gorge through Akron.
Away out on the Cuyahoga's eastern end, I took my canoe and a friend for an experimental trip soon after I brought the boat to Cleveland. It had been my mother's, and had been stored for years under a cottage in New York state. Swatting mosquitos in a rural park, we lowered the boat into the murky water -- and watched in disappointment as it quickly filled and nearly sank before we got back to shore. That canoe is lovely, but it needs some refurbishing and a good soaking before anyone will paddle it with his knees dry.
As a definition, the river leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't catch fire anymore. Its sides don't define the people, the people define the sides. The murky waters don't splash or gurgle. The fish they harbor aren't very attractive. But it's still alive and busy, and it's fun to watch.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/River.html
Delta Dreaming
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on River and Estuary
It's one of those places that though nearby — fifteen miles to the south-southeast will put you in the middle of a slough — we never get to. The Delta, formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, consists of thousands of miles of sloughs, levees, submerged islands, channels, and river reaches, a maze of waterways and islands. We're not aquatic sorts however, and its possibilities for boating and fishing don't lure us. Levees, toe drains, and creeks block entry for those who travel by road.
If I cycle south from here as far as I can go, the road making jogs to the east occasionally, I reach Liberty Island, and can't cross the slough on my bike. It's a land of marshes, pastures, and always a stiff breeze. Beating upwind is never much fun on bicycle, and since the wind usually heads either north or south here, I am not wont to head that far.
I think we have made the east-to-west drive through the Delta once, starting off on Interstate 5, driving past the fields where the sandhill cranes spend the winter, and into the Delta proper. It's rich agricultural land (I've been working recently with the digital state soils map and the Delta shows up as the area with the highest organic matter content), much of it lower than sea level and hence dependent on levees to stay dry. A map of the Delta shows a watery hole in the land pattern at Franks Tract, where the levee failed in 1937 and again in 1938 to flood the area permanently. Our exit from that trek across the Delta was at Rio Vista in Solano County, practically due south from where we live but a circuitous route from our house.
There's a quirky book about the Delta which I recommend entitled Sturgeon Tales: Stories of the Delta by Charlie Soderquist, a great benefactor of UC Davis who unfortunately died recently. A talking sturgeon by the name of Sally features prominently in the stories, as well as a fleet of ghost ships. The book is beautifully illustrated with a set of watercolors that well capture the lazy verdure of the region.
Posted by Numenius at April 15, 2004 11:11 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/04/15/delta_dreaming.html
Ditches
By C. Little, no less
This is a letter I wrote to the Albuquerque journal last year, in response to a
plea from a North Valley resident for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
to cease scraping the acequias while the ducks were nesting. I have lived on the
ditch for many years, and I am sad to report that the destruction of wildlife and
especially wildflowers has been devastating. I don't know what else can be done,
beyond pleading and prayer.This is a post to the ecotone wiki, a collaborative
website for writing about place.
I anticipated the standard response from the MRGCD in reply to a recent letter to the editor,protesting the destructive, unconscious mowing of North Valley irrigation ditches, but I suppose this plea will likely be simply ignored.
I am sure the conservancy district employees are hard at work mowing here, mowing there, for months on end, removing the elms, grasses and other unwanted vegetation from the many miles of ditches, with no particular time-table or concern
for the nesting habits of ducks.
In fairness, constant mowing is required to keep pace with the outrageous weeds
that will be towering over the paths after a few summer rains. Russian thistle and
tumbleweeds, goatheads and pretty little ferns that turn to woody thornbushes
are growing quickly, since they have no competition from other plants.
My experience as a ditch-walker over the past twenty years in Corrales is
that the multitudes of native plant species and colorful wildflowers that once
were commonplace along the ditchbank are now gone forever, the result of commitment to a policy of systematic destruction by bulldozers and mowers.
I remember when, from August to October along the acequias, we enjoyed a brilliant display of fantastic, ten-foot multi-headed sunflowers, black-eyed susans, white asters, purple asters, Indian paintbrush and larkspur, gallardia and cosmos, penstemon and hollyhocks and Mexican primrose...until--along came the bulldozers, late in the summer, but too soon for the seeds to have ripened and fallen.
The next year there would be fewer flowers, and fewer the next, and they too were crushed at the height of their beauty, and the ditch was scraped, back and forth.
Eventually the softclay silt of the banks became unstable, and the gophers moved in, so that in many places the dump trucks came to shore up the banks with concrete chunks. The main canal I used to walk was completely cemented, so as to save the water that grasses and wildflowers might drink while doing their job of holding the banks together with their roots.
Now there is not much left out there on the ditches except weeds and thorns, thistles and goatheads. We still have the perfection of a clear blue sky, sometimes, and the mountain’s glory, but down here on the ground where I walk, I haven’t seen a single native sunflower, nor a purple aster yet this season– only the isolated goldenrod, gourd or globe mallow. On a Sunday morning early this spring, I observed two men dump garbage bags full of beer bottles into the water at a shady turn, then run away, jump into a SUV and drive off.
The very next day, I watched a pair of mallards with a family of baby ducklings paddling bravely up the flow, restoring hope and great wonder that they still can do it--in the face of such odds, such lack of respect. How much longer, till we look back through the eyes of memory, and wonder when it happened that all that beauty went away, leaving only a dry concrete channel full of trash, a dusty ditchbank and a wall of weeds?
Source: http://chickenlil.blogspot.com/2004/04/ditches-this-is-letter-i-wrote-to.html
The same river twice
By hoarded ordinaries
It seems to be impossible for me to talk about place without simultaneously talking about time. As I sit here typing these words on our back porch, the spring sun warming my bare feet, I naturally and inevitably think back to the first time I sat writing on this porch. It was September and the day was hot: one of summer’s last hurrahs. Then as now planes flew overhead; I remember feeling depressed and disconnected, a newcomer in a place where I was another anonymous face. Then in September I wrote by hand in a notebook, seeking solace in silent pages. Only later did I type and edit those words, sending them to other anonymous faces in the form of an essay that searched for the one thing we all secretly crave: connection and recognition, some indication that we indeed are not alone.
Sometimes, remarkably, the blank page talks back. A handful of readers–people I’d never met–told me they found solace and comfort in what I’d written: how could that be? When I’d written it my heart was breaking with that nondescript loneliness that marks the margins of our days, the unnamed ache that bubbles to consciousness only when we stop our hurry and look deeply into the limpid flow of time. If we’re all destined to die–and secretly we all know we are–then what is the purpose of this mundane march of time? If ultimately we face our individual fates alone, what is the purpose of human interaction? Feeling the abandonment of a motherless child, I wrote out of desperation and despair: somewhere, anywhere, is there anyone listening, be it God or man? Somewhere, anywhere, in this time or any other, is there meaning to be found in specificity, the insignificant crawl of a spider inching his forgotten way across a window screen?
Yesterday, feeling more restless than depressed, I took the dog walking along the river. The Ashuelot River runs through campus and through Keene; behind various local businesses runs a fringe of semi-abandoned riparian woods, Ashuelot River Park, that offers a quick getaway for town-worn souls. Yesterday was warm and sunny; I walked in short sleeves, shorts, and sandals. The Park was full of mothers with strollers, parents with bicycling children, kissing lovers and roaming herds of bored-eyed teenagers, all moving and congregating in a flowing swirl of human activity.
The dog and I walked alone through these anonymous faces: the dog and I nearly always walk alone. Dodging embracing lovers and wide-eyed toddlers who asked, awed, if they could pet the nice doggie, I took another photo of a lone maple tree I’d photographed last October. Then in October, this tree shimmered with neon hues of orange and yellow; yesterday, in April, it looked barren and dead, forgotten on an isolated shore.
They say you can’t step into the same river twice, but it seems that both writers and photographers continually try to use memory as a bridge between then and now. If I hold dear in my memory the image of an October maple, will it be granted a provisional immortality, burnt into nerve cell and synapse, a pattern that can be quickly and spontaneously recalled? And if I share this dearly held memory with another–with you or any other willing anonymous face–will a connection be cast across space, time, and souls, my memory becoming your memory, a bridge not only to span but to stem time’s flow?
The dog, not being burdened with the questions of human consciousness, has no thought for time. Instead, he lives in a perpetual now where the past does not exist, the future is as close as the next savored smell, and you can jump into, joyously, the same river twice, three times, four, and again. To humans aware of their own mortality, rivers are a symbol of time and its passage; to dogs attuned to their own noses and bellies, rivers are an excellent source of cold spring mud and the secretive smell of still-hibernating turtles. The dog has no memory of either September or October; the dog has no worry or care about time, no need for notebooks, photos, or scribbled pages. Neither alone nor apart, the dog has never been struck from the float; instead, he, like Whitman is forever held in solution. In springtime, while skirting rivers, my spirit watches the dog with envy and with shards of stolen, vicarious joy.
- This is my contribution to the Ecotone bi-weekly topic, River and Estuary.
Comments
http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/04/18/the-same-river-twice/
Apr 18, 2004 at 4:55 pm
Enjoyed this one tremendously, ma’am. My kind of musing. A cup of coffee, an early morning sunrise, and a picnic table somewhere by the creek and we could sit and discuss the day for a couple of hours……….
Apr 20, 2004 at 12:04 pm
Hi, Jim: so good (as always) to “see” you! Glad to hear you enjoyed more musings on time: it seems that’s all I ever write about! Although I’m not a coffee person, a cup of tea (and conversation) by any creek sounds great. I imagine your neck of the woods is beautiful these days, compared to our still-half-dormant landscape here in NH.
Thanks again for the kind words.