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.
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