A Journey Through River Regions

 

Driving home from Manhattan, we quickly passed through a slice of the Lower Hudson watershed, sliding through an EZPass point while heading northeast through the Bronx watershed, before crossing into the Connecticut Coastal river system, the boundary being the line between the states of New York and Connecticut.  This federally-designated local coastal watershed consists of smaller streams all heading to Long Island Sound, with names like Mianus, Rippowan and Poquonock, echoes of the Quinnipiac peoples whose name graces a watershed just a bit further along on our route back to Vermont. We crossed the Housatonic River at Bridgeport, with its own eponymous watershed, and reached the Quinnipiac at New Haven, following its course north to Meriden, where we crossed a slight rise and descended into the Lower Connecticut River watershed region.  This section of river territory stretches from the Sound up to Springfield, Massachusetts, where I woke from my nap as we entered the Middle Connecticut watershed around Hadley.  

Crossing into Vermont, the designation changed to Upper Connecticut. We followed the great stream's western side, until at Windsor we drove northwest alongside Lull's Brook up through Hartland, then crossed into our home system, where the Ottauquechee River had prepared a path nearly to our door.

Being away for a week meant we missed the snow storm that covered the banks of the river, whose remaining ice traced a graceful arc this morning under the grey skies, whose reflection in the river coordinates with the bordering ice.

Reversing the Freeze

 

The focus of this journal is to seek answers to the question, "What is it like for you?"  The "you," the subject in the exercise, being the Ottauquechee River, with a particular focus on the stretch to be seen downstream from the Middle Bridge in Woodstock, Vermont.  

One thing I've learned, at least.  The river possesses a deep sensitivity.  It responds to the world around it, and quickly, too.

The last few cold days brought ice from shore to shore, then overnight with the air coming from the south, it changed.  This morning when I took the picture above, it became clear that a reversal of the freezing pattern was unfolding in front of me.  I watched as chunks of ice poured down the clear central channel to either self-destruct on the surviving shelf, or be sucked down below it, out of sight for good.

By three in the afternoon, the thawing had cleared the central channel, leaving the older ice to last some few hours more.

In the first picture, you can just make out two orange dots near the center.  A basketball and a soccer ball sat there on the ice, as if someone had thrown them there.  I suppose if they had been carried downstream, they might have bounced up on the ice shelf when they hit it.

When I drove down River Street to take the second picture at 3 p.m., I saw the basketball stuck in the shallows a few hundred yards further downstream.

I will be away for a week on vacation.  I look forward to resuming these posts on November 30.

Morning Ice

 

I was out earlier than usual today, at about 7:30. Another night of cold temperatures crystalized the river further.  A visitor to Woodstock stopped on the bridge and asked me how long the river had been frozen.  I don't think he was prepared for the description of how you could trace each day's cold by the various curves and shades of white and grey that now stretch from bank to bank. It has been as if each cold night has laid down a brush stroke, each distinct from, yet connected to the next.  Looking at recent posts, you will see the lines, shapes and intensities on view today as they have grown.  A brief, intense history to be altered again, and maybe even erased by next week's forecasted warmth.

Movement Frozen

The Song of Ice

Today, on and in the river, I saw variations on the theme of freezing, an improvisation by ice.  Yesterday's clear central passage bottle-necked in the night, backing up the flow of slushy stuff into a scalloped stretch of icy ridge.

The clearer, older, ice nearer the right bank revealed a scattering of oak leaves trapped within.  Under other ice could be seen leaves moving in the spectral medium created by the dimming hard surface.  Small masses of ice fragments moved beneath the surface too, so that the river, shallow as it was, displayed different planes of activity.  First, the fixed icy surface.  Below, a level filled with frozen moving shapes. Further down the rocks at the bottom.  Near the right bank, free water flowed atop the ice:  another plane, above the surface.

The sight of flowing water contained by ice brings to mind the human bloodstream. Unless torn, it is  visible only through the presence of a few near surface veins and capillaries, yet constantly pulsing throughout our lives.  Like blood in the body, the river bears the stuff of life for the Earth.  Even in winter, on it flows, part of the near cosmic cycle of water poured onto the land, then pulled back to the sky.  The ice shapes a caesura in the process, a rest in the singing round of vapor, cloud, rain, river and sea.

Cold Flow

 

Yesterday's mixed up geometry resolved overnight. Temperatures in the low teens, and light snow, morphed a graceful curve out of jagged structures. If a special sensor could measure the swiftness of the currents, it could print out no better image than this of the faster-moving main channel.  When water lingers in this cold, it freezes.

Beneath the surface, it may be that nothing has changed, despite the surface drama.  Gravity pulls the water along this weaving course day and night.  I have been struck anew by this obvious fact.  The Ottauquechee just keeps on.  As long as there is topography, gravity and water, the river will flow.  The retreating glacier birthed this incarnation thousands of years ago, and thousands of years from now, barring earthquakes, volcanoes, permanent drought or nuclear destruction, this river will still be flowing between Mt. Tom and Mt. Peg.

River Geometry

 

This morning, the new cold created a wild geometry on the face of the river, a cross between Euclid and chaos.  The white lines inscribed the progress of last night's plunging temperatures. The cold set an edge of ice in place, then new ice would form further out.  The free flowing surface water reveals the deeper, faster channel moving from left to right, between the lines.

Masses of loosely gathered ice particles flowed, swept from quieter, colder shallows, or frozen in motion to a kind of slush.

The ice painted an abstract expressionist sheen on the Ottauquechee, reflective enough to take on sky blue, tree shapes, and long morning shadows from shore to shore.

This is only a presage of winter.  Next week, we expect temperatures in the fifties.

Stream Meets Stream

 

After yesterday's light snow, followed by a day of light rain, the river rose.  By mid-morning, the level had dropped a few inches, evidenced by a stroke of dampness on the rocks just above the waterline.

The November snow came our way from a twist to the south of the jet stream, bringing "Canadian" air to Vermont.  Today feels like January, sub-freezing temperatures and numbing wind chills.  

When I watched the Manchester, New Hampshire, television weather last night, the forecaster showed a graphic of the descent of cold from the north, showing how for the next few days, the northeastern United States would feel very Canadian.

With my attention going so closely to the Ottauquechee, and my realization that the view from the Middle Bridge faces north, I thought it a lovely synchronicity that Nature decided to direct her attention right our way.  This north-flowing reach of the river met this south-flowing air stream, and it snowed. 

Worth a Thousand Words

Flowing North

 

Today brought a revelation, only striking if you have become committed to developing a close relationship to a river, and an even closer one with a small reach of that stream.  From the source of the Ottauquechee in Killington to its Connecticut River outflow, we see a movement from west to east.  So, I have been talking about the downstream view from the Middle Bridge as looking eastward.  I was wrong.

Taking this picture today at half past noon, I was struck by how the sun threw a shadow of the bridge directly downstream.  At that time of day, the sun shines from the south, of course.  I checked a map, and sure enough, not far upstream the Ottauquechee takes a turn almost directly north, the beginning of a double S-curve through the rest of the village.  We see the north when we look downstream from the Middle Bridge.

The north was in the air and on the water today, with the temperature in the twenties and the first ice of the season appearing along the verges of the river.  In the photo, the thin frozen skin appears like a rash on the surface by the left bank.  More to come.

The River's Valley

 

This quiet and chilly morning found the still river reflecting the trees on the near right and those up a hill beyond the far left bank, past the northward bend downstream.  The upside down evergreens at the far turn seem especially disconnected from their source, dropped on the river by a trick of the light.

Driving this morning up the Ottauquechee valley toward Killington and Mission Farm, I found the road and the river framed by the hills, tree-filled, if mostly bare. At one point, I saw oak leaves fly toward the river.  While their branches hold on to a constellation of leaves, the oaks release as many as they keep, it looks to me.

Heading higher, I watched the road cross the river again and again, a kind of braiding as the flow of water and route of asphalt twist and turn.  While this seems today an easy sharing, Tropical Storm Irene proved the river owns the valley.  In a few hours of unholy spate, the Ottauquechee stormed and smashed her way through entire swathes of rights of way, whose presence evidenced finely tuned engineering acumen and hard-won construction skills, and gone just like that.  Of course, we put it all back, mostly.  The seams and marks of that August day three years ago form signposts though, reminding us, who are alert, that this is the river's valley.

Cloud Visions

 

The river mirrors the clouds.  The clouds feed the river.  The wind corrugates the blue and white surface shapes.  That east wind moves the clouds above the Ottauquechee toward Killington Mountain.  Snow has fallen out there already, into our watershed.  

Two phases of the hydrologic cycle, the great wheeling of water from air to ground to air again, meet on the surface today.  Here is an almost sacramental vision:  shimmering cloud shapes celebrating the surrounding grace of sustaining water.

Let There Be Light

 

As I have taken these pictures over the last weeks, I have come to realize that they are as much about the sky as the river.  Yesterday's two shots, one from Tuesday and one from Wednesday, are vivid examples.  I often find myself tempted to go back and take another picture if the sun has come out. I like the look of sunny scenes.

The experience of viewing the Ottauquechee is markedly different when the river reflects blue sky. I have also discovered that when the scene is brighter the photograph takes up more digital space.  The camera takes it all in more fully, just as I do.

It takes more effort to spend time at the river when things seem grey.  Today, looking straight down from the bridge, the water remained clear, if not washed by rays of light.  The occasional oak leaf swam by, and for the first time in awhile, the variously shaped flat river suds flowed alongside the leaves.  With the river lower, the rocky shallow reach just upstream churns the water to create bubbles. These gather into a whitish mass by the right bank.   The gentler water flow by the shore gradually picks off chunks of this effluvium and sends the shapes downstream.  From above, their high beige hue casts them in sharp relief with the darker stream.

Tonight, we expect our first dusting of snow.

Different Waters

 

 The view yesterday.

About two weeks ago, excavators tore into the hill behind the Episcopal church about  100 yards south of the river.  In the process of making space for a retaining wall, a cross section of the subsoil briefly was revealed.  We saw a horizontal swath of grey earth sandwiched by brown soil above and below.  One observer said this was clay laid down by the glacier 10,000 years ago.  I wonder if it was a remnant of post-glacial Lake Hitchcock, which for centuries filled the Connecticut Valley and had an arm extending up what is now the Ottauquechee Valley.  Mounts Tom and Peg once looked down upon the still waters of a lake.

The view today.

Rivers in Leaves

 

I took this picture yesterday in the early afternoon.  Both then and today, the river remains clear as crystal.  Looking down from the bridge, I see leaves moving, although for these two days, no maple among them.  As if someone was dropping oak leaves upstream, one lonely specimen after another flowed along.  Most rode the current a foot or so below the surface, some parallel to the bottom, other at right angles, and still others describing a slow spiral which, from time to time, brought them to the surface and then pulled them down again before disappearing.  Although a few maples in the village retain their leaves, it is mostly the oaks which persist in keeping them.  

Michael Snyder, a Vermont forester, tells us that oaks may keep their leaves longer because they discourage moose and deer from eating shoots in the spring.  Last year's leaves, not very tasty, I suppose, get in the way of succulent new growth.  Another theory is that oaks and their cousins, the beeches, are simply a little lower on the evolutionary ladder, a link between the more ancient evergreens and the radically deciduous.  In a few million years, they may get to be as grown up as a maple, cheerfully dropping their foliage just in time for whatever generation of leaf peepers may still be on this Earth.

Today in the late morning, before the sun broke through to create a mild and welcoming November afternoon, I took the picture above.  I noticed a different leaf shape on the Ottauquechee, something like a spearhead, very yellow.  They mostly rode the surface.  I don't know leaves as well as I would like.  They could have been from elms, which I would like to believe are making a comeback in Vermont.

In the flow of the river, each leaf carries, as its veins, that riverine, dendritic pattern, echoing, as it flows, the watershed which gave it life.

Arborescent Rivers, Within and Without

 

Today's blue sky belies the gloomy opening to yesterday's post.  

My trip up Barnard Brook, and the description of the Ottauquechee-Black Watershed in the book cited earlier, got me thinking about river patterns.  They are sometimes described as dendritic, meaning "of a branching form; arborescent." The latter word means "treelike in size and form." The tributaries of a river flow into the "main stem" of the watershed like branches attached to a tree.  The main stem of the Ottauquechee grows for about 31 miles, the Connecticut for 407.

This dendritic form seems woven into creation, as it can be found in crystals and in leaves.  It also describes much of what makes the human body live and breathe.  Blood vessels and nerves follow these arborescent paths. We are each a kind of self-contained watershed, with living rivers of fluid and branching electrical impulses.  

Ralph Brown, a British sculptor, created a bust suggesting this identity of human with river.  It is called The River.

Up the Brook

 

We have arrived at the typical November dreariness.  Grey skies, chilly temps, early sunsets, with only a promise of more to come.  Driving up to Barnard today, I followed a tributary to the Ottauquechee for its entire length, Barnard Brook, I saw my first falling snow.  The rain switched over to the white stuff as I climbed into the hills.

Experts divide up the NH-VT track of the Connecticut into bite-sized chunks, north to south. The Barnard Brook is part of the local swath of watershed called by the United States Geological Survey the Black-Ottauquechee watershed. The USGS preferences Vermont's streams over New Hampshire's in this shorthand for a section of both states which together contribute five major tributaries. In Vermont, starting south of White River Junction, are the Ottauquechee, Mill Brook, the Black, and the Williams, while from New Hampshire flows the Mascoma.  On that eastern side, the Sugar River and Lakes Sunapee and Mascoma are also part of the mix.

They all are a little higher today, if the view from the bridge here holds true for all the watery Black-Ottauquechee territory.

Water and Geese Above and Below

I took this picture yesterday around 2 p.m.  With Daylight Savings over, the mid-afternoon shadow of the bridge lengthens downstream. 

Less than a mile eastward, the ground floor windows of the Ottauquechee Health Center look out at a stretch of the river so straight it could be a canal.  Scores of Canada Geese dominated the scene yesterday morning. One or two would start to fly, leaving wakes as their feet trailed in the water just before taking off, and scoring the water again as they quickly landed.  Others dove under like cormorants, coming up in unexpected places. Still others, facing upstream, seemed to simply float, but as they appeared stationary, so they must have been paddling just to stay where they were.  Geese in every mode of action and inaction.  Were they just having fun?

We think of these geese as migratory, and they mostly are, but some stay around all year in our north country.  These birds may be right at home, or just taking a break on a southern trip from the Arctic.

Back on the bridge later on, I peered over and saw the river bottom lit up by the sun, as the bridge's shadow began some yards downstream.  The shadow obscured the depths, while the slanting afternoon light cut right through, revealing the bed of stones and sand, as I described in my post two days ago.  Gripping my iPhone over the edge, I took the picture below: the depths revealed, distorted by the lens of the surface ripples.

The under bridge scaffolding for repairing cables threw the H-shaped shadow.

The Bottom

 

Fewer leaves moved over the water today.  Maple predominated again.

I have spent a month posting about the Ottauquechee.  I realized today that I have not described riverbed below the bridge.  I took a closer look at what today's clear water passes over.  At the deepest and swiftest point, off center, toward the left, there lies a tongue of sand stretching into darkness downstream.  Here and there on both sides, double-fisted-sized stones flank that strip of bottom sand.  For a stretch on the left, a narrow slice of smooth ledge lies alongside.   On both sides toward the shores lie washing machine- and refrigerator-sized boulders.  Some of these larger rocks break the surface.  Others cause the very slow boiling effect closer to the right bank just downstream.  Out of the water, at least today, the rocky right bank rises steeply, with retaining walls escalating the height.  The left bank shelves gently away from the river.

I discovered a book yesterday whose riches I will share along with sights and thoughts about the river, Where the Great River Rises: An Atlas of the Connecticut River Watershed in Vermont and New Hampshire.  It lists the Ottauquechee as one of four larger tributaries to the Connecticut in the north country, which "from the air...sparkle in the sun."

A Murder of Crows

 

With the Ottauquechee down a bit, four crows, cawing loudly, strolled along the river's edge.  One or two stood in the shallows and leaned over to drink, a new sight for me for a crow.  A few weeks ago when again the water was quiet and lower, robins did the same thing, although they also bathed.  The crows moved up and along the left bank, as if patrolling, and one then flew to a nearby maple, his sharp black form contrasting with the faded red, yellow and blue Tibetan prayer flags fluttering in the morning's fresh breeze. 

Last year, robins had made a nest under the rear eave of the Rectory shed.  We enjoyed watching the nestlings grow larger, poking their open beaks upward.  One morning we heard robins squawking and saw crows flying out of the yard, and the nest was empty.

Wind Against Water

  

Gusts of cold east wind pushed against the river flow at mid-day.  Leaves of all types, in great numbers, moved on or through the water below the bridge, just blown from trees or swirled up from the earth.  Many found eddies near the shore, briefly shoaling before joining the seaward cavalcade of oak, maple and more.  The river is down some, but full enough right here to make room for the gusted swells.

Today's wind and cold signal a move toward winter.  A snow-covered pickup truck drove by this morning, though I have yet to see flakes in the air here in the village.