Old River, New Trees

In an early post, I wrote of the river I knew when I was a small child, the Quinnipiac as it passed through the village of Plantsville, Connecticut.  I recalled it seemed very small and messy, even ugly.

Yesterday, we passed through the Quinnipiac watershed on our way to the Hudson Valley.  I got out of the car in Plantsville.  I found the very modest bridge from where I used to look down on the oily, tire-strewn stream in the 1950s.

No larger than it used to be, still hemmed by narrow and human-made banks, the river seemed clear.  A plastic cup trapped in a little sand bar and a mop handle stuck along the bottom lent an accent of debris within a renewed, clean flow.

We passed the house I lived in from birth to age 11.  Two forty-foot maples grow in front of the small white house next to a Carpenter Gothic church, uphill from the river.  They were not planted yet when our family moved this very week 56 years ago.  Over those decades, some of the water that descended on that stretch of the Quinnipiac valley never made it to the river.  Those maples' roots drew the water up and up to create, in their leafless winter state, a representation in branches of the shape of a river's place in the landscape, that dendritic look shared by trees and watersheds.

From the Ottauquechee to the Hudson

Sunset fell around 4 p.m. today on the Hudson River, north of West Point.  I took this picture, with Storm King Mountain looming over the darkening river from a point in Cold Spring, N.Y.  Elizabeth and I traveled down the Connecticut River Valley today, turning southwest through the watersheds of the Quinnipiac and Housatonic Rivers, and then into that of the Hudson.

Rumor has it that propane tanks swept into the Ottauquechee by Tropical Storm Irene were found up the Hudson River, whose tidal zone reaches past Storm King Mountain and still can be measured in Albany.

Twin Rivers

 

 

Yesterday's pulse of high water has come and gone.  After morning flurries, the mid-afternoon brought clearing skies.  A new freezing cycle will begin this week, with temperatures predicted in the single digits at night. 

 

We drove today down the Connecticut River valley, crossing a bridge over the Black River along the way.  Where the Great River Rises, the atlas of the upper Connecticut River system, twins the Black and Ottauquechee as one watershed unit.  Almost the same length, about 40 miles, they roughly parallel each other in their respective courses from Plymouth and Killington to the greater river. 

 

As the Ottauquechee made Woodstock, so the Black made Springfield.

 

 

 

The Black River and Springfield, Vermont around 1910

 

 

Higher Water

The river rose this morning between 7 a.m. when I walked the dog and about noon when I took this picture, the result of nighttime rain and more snow melt.  Leaf fragments, sticks, branches and logs rushed under the bridge in the turgid brown. Around eight, Elizabeth had driven by Gulf Stream, which feeds Barnard Brook and then the Ottauquechee, and witnessed unusual force and volume.  Gulf Stream carved some of the valley Rt. 12 follows north from Woodstock.  Gulf Stream funnels waters from brooks coming out of the Prosper Valley, an area "defined by the ridgelines running through Barnard, Bridgewater, Pomfret and Woodstock." A University of Vermont website names this valley a watershed all its own.  The top of Mt. Peg offers a great view of the Prosper Valley. Tropical Storm Irene wiped out a bridge on Gulf Stream not far from its connection to Barnard Brook.

Today's higher waters hint at what the river has done before, and will do again.

Rivers Everlasting

On the third day of Christmas, I recall a recent conversation with a priest colleague about the way rivers connect high places with low.  She exclaimed, "That's Christological! They mediate between heaven and earth."

In my reflections, the divinity imputed to rivers keeps emerging.  My daughter in London gave me a Peter Ackroyd book titled Thames:  Sacred River.  The volume I have been reading about the differing roots of cultural growth between the New and Old Worlds makes much of the sacredness of the Ganges of India.  Author Peter Watson noted some believe it to be a daughter of the king of the mountains.

What about a river gives rise to thoughts of the divine?  Rivers, for the most part, outlive us.  They flow before we are born and keep flowing after we die.  They transcend our lifespans and the lifespans of every generation of identifiable humanity.  Although not as eternal seeming as the seas, they have lives of such unimaginable antiquity that they might as well be immortal.

The Vermont State Park's website on Quechee Gorge Geology (http://www.vtstateparks.com/pdfs/quecheegeo.pdf) shows a tantalizing sketch of the path of the pre-glacial parent of our Ottauquechee, flowing not far from the current stream, going strong 130,000 years ago. 

You cannot step in to the same river twice, and yet the same river can flow for nearly forever.

Light on the River

The high Christmas waters crested before this morning, leaving behind a sharp line where the river swept through the snow along the banks.  As I stood on the bridge this morning, it took only a few minutes to see the level drop further, shown by inches more of wet rock standing out of the water.

The sun shown in fits and starts as I took pictures.  After three grey days, I longed for stronger light.  Finally, on the fourth try, after twice starting home and returning when the sun spread wider, this shot emerged. 

My dear family presented me with three river books yesterday.  More light on the Ottauquechee!

Christmas Rising

Throughout the watershed this Christmas day, the rain and above average temperatures melted snow cover, sending innumerable freshets down gullies and divides, into creeks and brooks, carrying earth, leaf debris and matter unrecognizable, if no less real, into the Ottauquechee.  Swirling under the bridge these additions to the stream raise and color the waters, opaque today.  We expect more rain tonight, Yuletide abundance of another sort.

The Darkness Did Not Overcome It

Clouds Descending

We are in a wet time.  The Eye on the Sky Vermont Public Radio forecast declared a flood warning for Christmas Eve.

Frosty Wind Made Moan

On the first full day of winter, a confection of snow covered the verge of ice reaching toward the river center. 

I love the carol, In the Bleak Midwinter, with its bittersweet tune and words, catching the mystery, the sweetness and the gravity of the birth of Christ, as Christians understand it, or, at least, as I understand it.

As the story is told in the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph travel south from Nazareth to Bethlehem. That journey probably followed the Jordan River much of their way.  The Jordan, though five times longer than the Ottauquechee, is not much wider, as the old postcard image below shows.

 

The carol creates a picture requiring higher latitudes than Joseph and Mary would ever have traversed, but, of course, "the bleak midwinter" is not really about the weather.  Cold winds blow in many forms, and still do.

Latest Fall

Clear skies brought ice and sun today.  For at least the third time in the past weeks the ice has spread from the banks toward the center, with the left bank supporting a wider graceful arc.

Yesterday's duck - a variety of merganser perhaps, if the tufted head is a guide - would not have found today's river so placid.  Sibley's Guide to Birds says at least one kind of merganser winters in the north, preferring small ponds.  When he swam upriver he might have thought he was in a pond, the surface was so quiet, although he was surely paddling hard against the current.

Winter comes tomorrow, officially.  The river knows.

Solitary Duck

Each of the last three days, as we approach the solstice, the river has seemed darker. Cloud thickness, not the Earth's tilt led to this. Otherwise, I think these have been the most uniform pictures since I began this blog two months ago. 

As I left the bridge, breaking the monotony, a loan duck appeared, swimming upstream.  With a crested head, white breast and pointy beak, it paddled toward the bridge.  It kept shaking its head and pecking at parts of its body.  A personal cleanliness routine?

It seemed striking to see the duck all alone on the river.

Orange 2

This morning's shot reruns yesterday's view: an ice-free river flowing well.  My post then declared my confusion at the sight of what appeared to be an orange swimming upstream.  Was it a round fish with tropical colors invading a Vermont waterway?

Today, I stared at the spot where the creature from the black river shook my confidence in the law of gravity.  In the picture above you can make out on the surface the inverted V-shape signature of the rock and gravel bank beneath it.  It forms almost a perfect triangle, with the bottom frame of the photo as the base.  The apex of the triangle is formed by the joining of the two stronger currents on either side of the central shallow. 

In watching that confluence this morning, I began to believe that the eddy created there had more power than I had thought.  The orange object had been lingering by what seemed like a patch of weed.  The more I looked, the more I decided that it was a patch of dead leaves, black like all the leaves now heading by under the surface.  The eddy at the junction of currents had captured enough of those leaves to lay down a dark mat.  I decided that it was, in fact, an orange, which would, being sort of liquid inside, be subject to the force of the vortex created by the currents coming together.  The orange's circling of the mat of leaves followed the path the leaves themselves might have taken before settling to the bottom.  The orange, submerged and yet floating still, never settled.  It just went around in circles, looking just like a fish nibbling at the edges of a succulent river weed.

By today, it had moved on.

Orange

Standing on the bridge today, I spent my usual few moments just watching the water go by, observing what it carried.  Near the point of the inverted V of the new underwater rock and gravel patch lay a clump of some kind of weed.  Next to it I saw an orange, floating near the bottom.  In the gentler current caused by this stretch of shallows, the orange seemed caught in an eddy.  I watched it move a few inches one way, then another, and then it seemed to break free, pulled downstream.

Then, after a few feet, the orange turned around and headed back to the weed clump.  I had been wrong.  Whatever it was, it was not an orange.  From the height of the bridge it looked round and orange.  Oranges do not swim upstream, however.  Over the next several minutes, I watched the "orange" circle the weed patch, stopping here and there.  Was it eating something?  Was it some kind of very compact fish, i.e., lacking both head and tail?

Can anybody help me with this?

A Name

In his book, The Great Divide, Peter Watson speculates about the first forays humans made into what became known as the New World.  These forebears of North American native peoples found there way into our continent as the Laurentide ice sheet neared its end about 11,000 years ago.  The birth of the Ottauquechee in something like its current form dates from the retreat of the ice that covered Vermont.  As I understand the geology, it was a rebirth, in fact, of an earlier incarnation of a river which flowed 130,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age, and probably long before that as well. 

That old river had disappeared for thousands of years under a mile or so of ice.  It seems fair to give our Ottauquechee a new birth date, roughly coinciding with the arrival of people on the scene. 

Watson reviews the findings of linguists, archeologists and anthropologists to paint a picture of these first peoples.  After reading his survey, I see in my mind's eye a group of women, men and children facing walls of ice and roaring streams. 

The name for the Ottauquechee, derives, I understand, from a New England aboriginal language, but which one is not clear. It means "swift mountain stream,"  or something close to that.

Those long ago wanderers among the ice and flood plains may have seen our river flow again for the first time, and maybe even gave the name we call it now its beginning.

What the River Carries

A few weeks ago I had a chat with a man who has observed the river for about 90 years.  "There are some organizations who think they know a lot about the Ottauquechee River," he said.  He told me about the days when the Bridgewater Mill poured dye into the river.  Folks knew by the color of the rocks which sort of dye spewed out that day. The mill went out of business because the owners could not afford the technology to keep the river clear, an effective way to improve the Ottauquechee, and tough for those who lost their jobs.

In the late 60s, I worked for a hiking camp on the Cold River, along the Maine/New Hampshire border north of Fryeburg.  My job included regular trips through Gorham to pick up food orders and do laundry.  I would drive along the Androscoggin River, whose stink betrayed its presence before I saw its milky brown, sinister-looking stream.  Things are better on that river now, although from what I read, not great either.  Some mills still work, for better and worse.

The title of Tim O'Brien's collection of stories of the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, makes me wonder what the river carries still, and how what kind of story those burdens tell.

The freeze and thaw cycle came and went gently in the past day. 

What Kind of River?

In other posts, I wrote about the being of the river, that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, that it responds to the world around it.  The Ottauquechee responds?  Can you say a river responds to water from the sky or runoff from a hill?  There is no river without them, there is no separation really between hill and sky and stream.  They belong to one process.

Asking the question, "What is it like for you, Ottauquechee?" tempts me to see the river as a person.  And since answering a question with a question is an old human trick, tonight I imagine the river asking me, "What is it like for you, Norman?" 

I imagine the Ottauquechee waiting to hear what sort of river I am.

The cycle of freeze and thaw may be starting again.  The left bank ice field bulged out, a different arc from the last time. 

Prologue to Winter

Shortly after noon, the sun came out for a while after days of what the professionals call "mixed precipitation."  Mixed or not, much of it made its way to the Ottauquecheee, now ice free along here.  The episodes of freezing and thawing are, I expect, rehearsals for the winter, which officially has not even arrived.

I stood on the bridge today with a resident of River Street, which parallels the left bank.  We recalled last year's early deep freeze.  It had locked up the river tight, until the force of a midwinter thaw plastered both banks with six-foot high ramparts, walls of ice pushed to the side by meltwater.  These remained until spring.

He told me where to look for fish (in the right bank shallows) and described seeing muskrats and otters on this stretch of river.  My wildlife sightings so far have been restricted to ducks, crows and robins. 

The water ran very clear today.  Leaves still flowed along, entirely underwater now, and appearing nearly black, a far cry from their look of a few weeks ago.  Some snagged themselves on the new bank of small rocks thrown up by the ice mess of the last days.  With the bright midday sun, the photo below reveals the inverted V-shape of the stony shallow which now splits the main channel.

Ice and Stone

Scraps of ice dislodged from center, left and right sectors of the river scraped in the shallows, flew by in swifter currents and dawdled along quieter edges.  In just a day, the ice jams which dominated this stretch of river disappeared, with shredded edges left along the banks.  This fleeting reign of ice held enough power, though, to change the river's dynamics coming out from under the covered bridge.

In the bottom part of the photo, you can make out a dim, slightly brown inverted V-shape.  The ice-altered currents brought to the center of the stream a bank of stones and gravel, raising the central river bed sufficiently to cause a split in the main current.  What had been a unified swift flow only days ago, shooting right out from the center of the river as it emerged from beneath the bridge, now appeared as two faster currents on the left and right of the rocky shallow the ice had thrown up.  The chaotic freezing and thawing of the past week left its mark in shifting stone.

Whirlpool

While still frozen beneath the bridge, the water swept away yesterday's immediate barrier beyond it, clearing a short open path for the main channel.  By 1 p.m. today, some of this central current met another barrier.  After rushing through a narrow gap in the middle of the river, the water found itself caught in a what appears to be a cul-de-sac.  On the left side of the mushroom shaped pool, a whirlpool pulls the water around and down.

The twin factors of more ice and more water, a function of the temperatures swinging between freezing and thawing, both bloat and crowd the river.  Every barrier, though, however stubborn or strange, will yield to the weight of the river seeking the sea.  In the meantime, wonders appear.

Not the Same River

Wet snow fell by the inches yesterday, then turned to rain.  The picture above shows the afternoon river through the scrim of clumpy snowflakes.  Landing on the lacy ice floes midriver, they turned the multitude of shifting forms white.

The ice borders with their incremental creep toward the center and the playful flow of ice islands through the main channel came to an end some time in the night.

Around one this afternoon, I saw an ugly Ottauquechee for the first time.  Crushed ice and snow created patternless masses jutting every direction.  Fresher snow could not cover brown stains from earthy runoff.  The entirely frozen surface under the bridge covered the river's flow for yards downstream until it burst out from below like a violent spring or a spout of lava at the center of the main current.  It instantly split into three channels as a chunk of ice blocked its immediate path.

The weight of water dumped by the nor'easter smashed the symmetries of the past days.

One of the inspirations for doing this blog arose last winter as I would watch the relationship of ice, snow, water and light shift from day to day.  To paraphrase Heraclitus, "You cannot take a picture of the same river twice."

Striations of the Freeze

 

Watching the Ottauquechee's twist to the north at mid-day, the traffic jam of floating ice behaved like flat and shape-shifting bumper cars.  Or to shift similes, each rough-edged blob, at any one moment, took the form of a land mass seen from high above, with harbors, isthmuses, peninsulas and hinterlands.  Yet they moved and spun, collided and merged, a kind of watery plate tectonics gone berserk.  While all this helter skelter streamed by, the accreting border ice crept toward the center, too slowly to observe, but evidenced by the striations of the freeze.  

Bounded Rivers

 

The snow yesterday came with warmer temperatures, mixed with rain and sleet, sending water higher and faster, melting or sending downriver much of the border ice.  I just checked the local level of cold on my iPhone, and the number dropped from 12 to 10 before my eyes.  We will be near zero out there tonight, and colder further up the watershed.  Someone I know up Barnard Brook, an Ottauquechee tributary, often measures the air 10 degrees colder than in the village.

A friend responded to my invitation to comment on these posts with two references.  She told me of the Japanese animated film, Spirited Away, which I have not seen, but will find, as river spirits have a part, and she reminded me about Henry David Thoreau.  The latter wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which I have already begun to revisit.  Early in the book, Thoreau quotes the Roman poet Ovid with a verse form of the passage below, here in prose.

It is no less than the poet's description of a god creating rivers, once he had made the Earth-surrounding seas.

"… [He] added also springs, and numerous pools and lakes, and he bounded the rivers as they flowed downwards, with slanting banks. These, different in different places, are some of them swallowed up by the Earth itself; some of them reach the ocean, and, received in the expanse of waters that take a freer range, beat against shores instead of banks."  Metamorphoses, Book I, Fable II.

A succinct description, 2000 years old.

A Romance of the Bridge

 

Watching the river in the early afternoon, one leaf fragment sped by mid-channel as the snow flew down, disappearing as it hit the water.  Clearer water than the past few days flowed under the bridge, while little bits of ice moved at different paces: faster in the central current, slower on the fringes.  I wonder if the expanding reefs of ice coming out from the banks grow in part from capturing pieces passing near.

Right at the edge of the right bank ice - what looks like a an extra frozen slash on the lower right of the photo - appeared a floating pumpkin.  The shape, the basketball-like size, and the characteristic ridges identified it right away.  It seemed to be upside down, with its above water bottom either partially rotten or covered with snow.  It grazed the ice boundary for awhile then was taken up by the main current, heading for Long Island Sound, never capsizing, a well-keeled pumpkin.

As I came off the bridge, I found four 20-something folks, two men, two women.  They were in the road, in the snow, laughing and taking pictures.  I asked them if they wanted me to take a picture of all four of them.  They liked the idea.  I asked if this were a special moment.  Yes, one of the men had just proposed to his girlfriend on the bridge, and she had said, yes.

Streaming

 

What is like for you?  This question posed by Mark Kutulosky at a retreat last summer during the Pilgrimage for Earth has stayed with me.  I have been asking this of the Ottauquechee River.  Asking that question has resulted in the commitment to most days take a photo of the river from one spot on the Middle Bridge, a covered span in Woodstock, VT.  I hope to do this blog project for a year.  I have been observing the river every day.  Having decided to engage, I need to write about what I see, and what I learn.

Asking that question has opened a cornucopia of other questions.  What is it like for the river?  Well, what is it like for a person?  If you want to know deep down "what it is like" to be another person, for instance, you would want to know the life story and the web of relationships which define him or her in terms of family, work, friends and other vital issues.  You would want to know how the person responds to ongoing events, and what she or her thinks about the past.  You would want to know how that one relates to you personally.  You might explore the cultural implications of being born in a certain place and a certain time among others shaped by similar  backgrounds.  You might seek to learn what other people have to say about the subject of your attention.

All these questions, inspired by the first, can be adapted to any thing in Nature.  I am asking them of the river.  I have immersed myself in a flow of opinions, insights, facts, stories and images.  I invite you to join me.  If you have thoughts or experiences of rivers you would like to share, please post a comment. Think of it as "streaming."

The temperature went below 20 degrees Fahrenheit last night  Where the ducks fed yesterday is again ice.

Feeling Rivers

 

Do rivers run with emotions?  We wonder.  Novelist Alan Furst places a protagonist, Carlo Weisz, by the Seine, "All his life he'd gazed at rivers, from London's Thames to Budapest's Danube, with the Arno, the Tiber, and the Grand Canal of Venice in between, but the Seine was queen of the poetic rivers, to Weisz it was.  Restless and melancholy, or soft and slow, depending on the mood of the river, or his.  That night it was black, dappled with rain, and running high on its banks, just beneath the lower quay. What shall I do? he wondered, leaning on a parapet made for leaning, staring at the river as though it would answer.  Why not try running down to the sea?  Suits me."

The last post spoke to the river as divine, this one to the river as human. 

On the plane of what can be seen, twenty-four mallards clustered by the Ottauquechee's left bank this morning, away from the main current, dipping their beaks and heads in the water, having breakfast.  They seemed happy.

A Spirit of a River

 

I am asking the Ottauquechee River, "What is it like for you?"  As the river does not speak a human language, I need to, at least, listen, look, research and imagine.  The ancients, and plenty of contemporary folks as well, have had no problem imagining and, no doubt, in their own ways, experiencing rivers as spirits, or as governed by spirits.  Unashamedly, I turn to Wikipedia for help in many matters, including this one.  The encyclopedia lists 28 cultures - surely an incomplete list - with water spirits of one kind or another.  Nyami Nyami of the Zanbezi River grabbed my attention.

 

This representation of an African river god captures a moment of surface swirl and eddy in wood.

Shaped by Watersheds

 

Two posts ago, I traced my trip from NYC to Woodstock through the watersheds along the way.  Until I began this online journal, I had not given much thought to these natural features.  

Without knowing a watershed, one cannot understand the river, and it turns out you can't understand a lot of other things as well.  John Wesley Powell defined a watershed this way, "that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Powell claims watersheds form human communities.  Just as the river carves the path for the road, so the watershed shapes the way we live together.  Nations, states, provinces and municipalities owe their patterns to the watersheds they occupy.  Not a one-to-one dependence to be sure, yet a fundamental relationship.  The EPA will tell you (http://water.epa.gov/type/watersheds/whatis.cfm) there are 2110 watersheds in the continental United States.  Some in Vermont ignore state and international borders.  Social relations in those places often defer to the "simple logic" of the river world over the political divides.

The Associated Press disseminated the following article in January, 1988.

CALAIS, Me. — Gunpowder was at a premium during the War of 1812, and none was available when residents of this small border city wanted to add a traditional bang to their Fourth of July celebration.

No problem. They simply borrowed some from their neighbors across the St. Croix River in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. (Emphasis mine.)

So what if Canada and its mother country, Great Britain, were at war with the United States at the time? That was hardly sufficient cause for St. Stephen to refuse its neighbor.

"It's always been that way," says Bill Francis, who lives in his native St. Stephen but operates a gift and wood-products shop on the U.S. side. "There's a strong national identity, but people try to make it a community."

"I facetiously comment that we get along better than we would if we were in the same country," says Calais City Manager Nancy Orr.

 (http://articles.latimes.com/1988-01-24/news/mn-37929_1_new-brunswick-border-new-pool)

The River in the River

By noon today, the rising temperatures and rising flow of snow melt had swept away the ice borders, leaving shards here and there by the banks.  As high as I've seen it since I began these posts, the Ottauquechee illustrated the ancient Greek cry, "You can't cross the same river once!"  The contrast between the swift main channel, going as always from left to right, and the quiet margins created a vision of a river within a river.  The center flow seemed a different being than the gentler margin.  A few leaves rushed with the current and out of sight.

Yesterday's post showed "the river in the river" as open water scoring a graceful curve through the ice.  Today it could be seen in the movement of the water itself, a spinning, ridging fluid mass, appearing at the same time as both track and runner.