Frigid Blue

On days like today, with the temperature near zero and the wind coming from the north, it means the chill hits me in the face as I take the picture.  My dog Jack has no view of the river, waits patiently for a bit, then sometimes gives a little whimper.  Hurry up, Dad, it's cold.  At this time of year, bright blue equals frigid.

Crow and Deer

Tim Palmer from America by Rivers, "Because of the glaciers' effectiveness in bulldozing soil, bedrock in New England rarely lies more than twenty feet underground and often juts up to the surface.  Where rivers intersect these ledges and veins of resistant rock, sharp rapids occur."  The far turn downstream from the bridge constitutes a mass of resistant rock, acting as a dam, slowing the water upstream, creating the shallow rapids further down.

Crows haunt the the river.

Deer leave tracks in the center, 

then go to the edge.

Glacial Ottauquechee

The thermometer tonight reads twenty-nine degrees, nearly shirtsleeve weather, except that we expect two to six inches of snow in the next twenty-four hours.

This glacial-like weather spurs contemplation of the real glaciers.  These shaped Northeastern rivers in ways unique on our continent, according to Tim Palmer, author of America by Rivers.  Palmer writes, "The ice left its signature all over the northeastern riverbeds, which in higher country are paved with rounded, gray cobbles and boulders pushed south."  This describes the Ottauquechee.

Running Cold

Nine degrees in the morning as I stood on the bridge. Minus one predicted tonight. 

Ice thickens, water runs 

Beneath the solidity,

Still alive and cold.

Snow Falls

Snowflakes appear like dust motes in this picture, taken at 10 a.m. at the height of Woodstock's storm today.

A river of high moisture had streamed across the continent to meet a lake of very cold air in the northeast, creating a snow fall:  further south epic, here ordinary.

Snow inside and outside the Middle Bridge.

Rock-Eating Ice

A few days ago as the bridge workers wrapped up their job, they threw a rock on the ice just downstream of the bridge to check if it would bear a person's weight.  The term rock-solid could be used for the ice itself that day.  Footprints crossing the center of the river proved it.

Since then, the rock sank day by day, despite the below freezing temperatures.  As of today, it was gone.

The frozen river 

took the stone in slow motion, 

gravity winning.  

Light and Shadow

At two today after light snow fell in the morning, skies had cleared.  Deep blue above, deeper blue shadow below.

The shadow bridge.

Frozen Time

A symphony of

grey and white patterns flowing

north in frozen time

Century

Glacier-like, the ice on the river shifts slowly.  The frozen circle, formed first by the figure-eight whirlpool of days ago, maintained its shape for a while, but now has nearly disappeared.  The rock resting on the surface, thrown there by workers to test the safety of the ice, has settled, slowly being swallowed.  Underneath it all, the river runs, fed by all those streams bred in the South Woodstock hills or running down Killington mountain.

Watersheds intrigue me these days.  You hear the term in ordinary usage to note how nothing will be the same again, as in "Pearl Harbor was a watershed moment for America."  This derives, I guess, from the experience of moving from one watershed to another.  On one side of a ridge the water goes east.  Cross over and it flows west.  Having more awareness of this fundamental Earth entity, I try to be more alert to actual watershed moments, when you really do go over a ridge into a different river system.  Driving north on Rt. 12, climbing, following Gulf Stream to near its source, the road reaches a high point, the enters a different zone.  I'm not sure I can describe exactly how, but Barnard seems different on the Silver Lake side, compared to the Gulf Stream and Ottauquechee watershed.  Pond Brook flows out of that lake and joins Locust Creek, a tributary of White River.  The streams of that watershed create their own patterns, a different system, an individual of sorts, yet always connected to the Connecticut River family.

This is post number 100 for this river journal.  A watershed?

Our Watersheds

Another morning with the temperature in the teens or lower brings a blue light to the river landscape. 

I have been pondering the relationship of river to watershed, as the water still continues to flow beneath the ice, which opens up here and there.  The far bend here makes the stream visible with its swifter, shallow current.

Watershed and river meld from one to another.  The riverine landscape gives us its moisture at first in drops and spurts, carried downhill, then merging with other little flows until a rill, then a brook, then a wider deeper stream emerge, and somewhere along the way, someone gives it a name: Barnard Brook, Gulf Stream, Kedron Brook.  The point being that one emerges from the other seamlessly.   Dripping rocks begin the Ottauquechee and Connecticut Rivers.

Our human being, the physical, psychological and spiritual selves that define who we are have their own "watersheds," that is, the sources which create and feed each part of us, and from which we can never fully separate, because at our essence, we are one with them.

Grey over Ice

This morning I looked closely at the footprints crossing the river and confirmed what I thought had been the case yesterday.  An animal - a deer, I am guessing - had laid down tracks almost at a right angle to the boot marks.

What is it like for you, Ottauquechee River?  It is older than human time and will last longer.  While godlike in its transcendence, it is also exquisitely vulnerable. The Ottauquechee takes in whatever sky and earth send its way, eternally open. When the rain came two days ago, a drain pipe overhanging the right bank, just downstream from the bridge, poured liquid into the river.  I don't use the word "water," because salt and grime darkened the stuff enough so that the narrow flow moving over the ice that day by the right bank appeared grey until it reached the far bend.

Around a few more river bends, the Woodstock sewage treatment plant sends its products into the river.  Fertilizer leached from fields adds another ingredient.  Whatever rises from the earth in the watershed will get to the river. 

Most everything that falls 

 will reach the river some day.

She has to take it.

Who Needs a Bridge?

When I went to the river this morning, I discovered the crew still there, dismantling more scaffolding.  Looking over the edge I saw two things which grabbed my attention:  a rock about 18" by 12" sat on top of the ice, and human footprints marking a route across the middle of the river.

I asked Brad, the crew chief, if he had walked across the ice.  He had not, but one of his crew had.  "There's a big rock on top of ice," I said.  Smiling, he said, "That was our test."

 Late afternoon shadows
Highlight a frozen river.
Deer tracks cross footprints.

Frozen Circle, Bridge Renewed

Yesterday's flowing Moebius strip morphed overnight to a fossil.  The downstream circle, visible above, remains, now frozen.  Water now moves over the ice along both banks, while the center has become a temporary island.

I met Brad again, the senior worker on the project to strengthen the bridge by replacing the stabilizing steel cable system below the wooden roadbed.  He told me they were done, except for removal of the scaffolding.  He asked me if I was the one doing the blog, and showed me on his phone images of the bridge underbelly, laced with new steel lines.

With justifiable pride, he displayed shots of the heavy duty brackets, cable connectors and individual cables themselves which now crisscross the base of the bridge.  Brad and Alex, his assistant, did this work while negotiating narrow aluminum scaffolds suspended above the river, sometimes in single digit temperatures.  Nearby they placed an aluminum dinghy in case someone needed rescuing, not much use when the river iced up.

Circle to Circle

The rain started around midday, with the temperature rising all morning, starting from the teens in town, single digits in the hollows.  By the time I got to the bridge at 1:30, a large section of ice above the main channel had collapsed, with water flowing above it.  A long thin crack suggests the surface ice cleanly broke in two, then sank.

The upper end of the crack signals the point where the water hit surface ice again.  When the blue-grey flow reached that boundary, the visible stream began to move in a tight circle, seen in the photo. Floating pieces of ice moved round and round the near perfect loop, going nowhere.  Even more startling, some of the water spun back upstream to create a clockwise flow in a less well-defined circle.  The centrifugal flow from the second then rejoined the first to create a fluid figure-eight.

The blue-grey water

Made a Moebius strip above

The transfigured ice.

God's Bar Code

Today we followed another tributary of the Ottauquechee from near its headwaters near Plymouth all the way to the larger stream.  Broad Brook and Rt. 100A weave together, both flowing down into the river valley.  Driving north on Rt. 100, we turned right on to 100A and climbed out of the Black River watershed up a steep hill and, crossing the divide, re-entered the Ottauquechee region.

Following Rt. 4 back to Woodstock, with the river on the right, the manic nature of the ice artist was on full display.  Narrow serpentine patches of moving water appeared and disappeared among and underneath infinite variations of edging, striations, shades of grey, glints of sun, slashes of white, shadows of trees, windrows of snow.

At about mid-morning today, from the bridge, all that wildness upstream had slowed to stillness, with a single set of delicate tracks crossing from one bank to the other.  The other wild note being the staccato and parallel range of long tree shadows.  A wild thought: God's bar code?

Vanishing Flow

The river looks like this for much of its length, although the dark slashes around the bend show swifter, shallower water unfrozen along the left bank.  Yesterday I drove the 4 miles from the Taftsville Bridge into town along River Road, a dirt track hugging the left bank, with no guard rails.  It offers an up close view of the Ottauquechee.  No open water flowed the entire way.

Taken yesterday, this is the hydroelectric dam just upstream of the Taftsville covered bridge, complete with overhead power lines.  You can make out the grade of River Road on the far bank, emerging from the woods to parallel the river. 

Back at the Middle Bridge in the late afternoon today, I saw a photographer pointing her lens upriver. So did I.

Just above the bridge

River ribbons shone and flowed

With the waning sun.

  

                        

Crosses and Bends

At around 2 p.m., the bridge workers, Brad and Alex, seriously bundled up, took time to explain to me their mysterious project, underway out of sight, evidenced only by the shadows of narrow scaffolds suspended over the icy river.

The wooden bridge structure on its own will eventually bend in the direction of the river flow, Brad told me, or the other way, because of the sunlight coming from the upstream and southern side.  He was not sure which way it would bend, but it would, "like a banana."

The original design addressed that possibility by a single steel cable being woven crossways back and forth underneath the wooden roadbed.  Over the 40-plus years of the bridge's life, and perhaps exacerbated by the floods of 1973 and 2011, this cat's cradle construction failed.  A picture showed the cables no longer stretching tight from point to point, some parts hanging loose.  The sole cable, messed up in one place, necessarily got messed up in others; all was connected.

Brad and Alex have been spending these frigid days removing the old cable and installing separate steel lines for each diagonal traverse of a bridge section, with new fittings and metal plates.  The pattern is a series of crosses, succeeding one another across the bottom of the span.  Each connection from upstream to downstream and vice versa is a separate line of steel.  A problem with one will not automatically be replicated along the bridge.

The Ottauquechee bends in response to the stone it meets.  The bridge, it turns out, would like to bend too.  Left alone, some day, it will.

River as Path

With another night of double digit below lows, open water patches from the Rt. 4 to the Middle Bridge shrank.  Walking the dog along River Street, I counted four or five narrowing leads where the stream flowed in sight.

The snow cover revealed something new:  critter tracks.  With the hardening of the river it becomes a clear path for creatures getting from points A to B.  The sight this morning of one small set of tracks reminded me of last winter.  Then, I saw deer tracks along the right bank.

The River Neva in St. Petersburg carries truck traffic each winter.

Hidden Work, Hidden River

The 1:30 p.m. sun already cast a long shadow upriver.  Standing on the bridge, with the north breeze chilling my face, I noticed the shadow of the workers' scaffolding below.  With the single digit cold, they had gone away already today.  The picture below hints at where they do their hidden task. 

Bananas in Winter

A light and persistent snow last night and today covered the ice.  The hard surface's elaborate witness to freezes and thaws disappeared just as the flowing water beneath sank from sight during the past weeks. 

Even in the cold, the work on the Middle Bridge continues, if fitfully.

The figure above peers toward a co-worker suspended on a scaffold between the span and the river.  Some time back, a worker told me cables under the Middle Bridge keep the covered roadway straight.  Tropical Storm Irene may have messed them up, and FEMA has funded work to fix them.  Otherwise, the bridge could bend "like a banana," I was told. 

In the department of silly conjunctions, it struck me that in this stark white world of the Ottauquechee in winter, we hear talk of bananas, the workers wear banana-colored coats, and the OSHA-required rescue dinghy seen upside-down and snow-covered on the opposite bank below, is yet another banana shade.  And, by the way, when the river had its ice-lined central channel, the bend curved banana-fashion.

Out of Sight

The ice thickened further overnight.  Walking along the river from the Rt. 4 bridge upstream to the Middle Bridge this morning, the visible water played peekaboo:  now you see me, now you don't.  With no discernible pattern, running sinuous leads split the ice for tens or hundreds of yards on the stretch between the two bridges.  Ice covered most of the Ottauquechee from bank to bank.  The freeze provided a skin, the living water flowed on beneath, released from time to time.

The view above could be turbulent weather from space.  The shapes, the patterns, the chaos bear witness to the moments when the stream made the transformation to solidity. 

The stream continues 

While an expressionist mass

Waits in place, for now.

Voice from Another River

 Late morning downriver.

Late afternoon upriver.

The near disappearance of the river under the ice underlines the nature of the Ottauquechee as a presence not easily defined.

Yesterday I opened a book I received for Christmas, The Best Spiritual Writing 2002. Leafing through, I found these words from Barry Lopez, written about his long observation of western Oregon's McKenzie River.

"Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch.  I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide.  If I have learned anything here, it's that each time I come down, something I don't know yet will reveal itself."

From Gulf to Valley

In the distance, you can make out where the water emerges from the ice at the turn toward a a more rapid and shallow reach. 

Upriver from the bridge an open lead (seen above) along the left bank continued underneath, then disappeared.  A balmy 16 degrees this morning, and snowing again.

This afternoon, I followed another tributary along most of its length.  Gulf Stream flows into Barnard Brook not far from where the latter joins the Ottauquechee.  Gulf Stream twins Barnard Brook until they join up.  Both originate in that town's highlands. The Brook carved out the valley home to Stage Road, running right by the Suicide Six ski lodge.  The Stream originates in the aptly named Barnard Gulf.  I followed this narrow defile, along a side road off Rt. 12 called Gulf Road, crossing from the White River watershed into Ottauquechee territory.  Having crested a hill, I drove down alongside a stream a few feet wide, with the hills steeply rising on both sides.  Gulf Stream created the path taken by Rt. 12 all the way down to Woodstock.  The bridges crossing it grow longer and longer as it makes its way to join the Brook.

Different Worlds

The view from the Middle Bridge at 9 a.m., Wednesday, January 7.

The view twenty-four hours later.

The blogger today at 13 below.

Double Digits Below

The river narrowed further as the ice inched toward the center, not solid yet.  I noticed the stream undercutting the frozen ridge along the right bank.  It appears that since the ice began forming, the Ottauquechee's level has dropped a few inches.  With the rain gone and and the world hardening with cold, this makes sense.  The watershed sheds less when frozen. 

With the Fahrenheit reading expected to hit 12 below tonight, maybe the right and left bank ice will merge tonight.  We'll see.

Single Digits

What were islands of floating ice yesterday became continents this morning.  In the knife-shaped slash of ice at the lower right of the picture, I could see where floating bits had gotten locked in to the solid surface.  They kept their shape within the larger frame, but are going nowhere for a few days anyway.  As I write this in the evening, it is eight degrees outside.  I expect the Ottauquechee by the bridge to be ice from bank to bank by the morning.

Ice and Continents

The forming and break-up of ice plains, ledges and islands as temperatures rise and fall, occurring over hours and days, form a contrast and a parallel to the deep history of the river's bedrock, formed and broken up over millions of years.

Multiple episodes of continental shifts, mountain building and volcanic activity added to, then ripped up the constellation of rock types which lie beneath our Vermont feet.  The "drift" of continental plates, like the movement of ice islands seen on the Qttauquechee, caused a demolition derby, the latter swiftly, the former in motion so slow even the imagination can't picture it, though science can describe it with some precision.

As the volume Where the Great River Rises explains, "Through the action of plate tectonics, continents crash together and break apart forming mountains and opening oceans.  The force of collisions create great faults many miles inland, areas of weakness in the rocks that are the paths of least resistance for water."

The course of rivers keeps alive the stories of continents.

Icy Narrowing

The ice spreads like a sclerosis on the river, tightening its grip. A blood vessel with the look of the picture above might lead to trouble.  Again and again, I am struck by the forms frozen water takes.  The hard edges have grown thick enough that the stream has room to undercut them, while flowing beneath the ice as well.  The different stages of hardening leave a record, with striations and varying shades telling the story of water meeting cold in a myriad of subtle moves.  The remaining smooth and open curve, like a snake rounding a corner, reveals the main current, too fast, so far, to freeze.  With a week of cold temperatures ahead, the channel will shrink.  In 36 hours or less, the flow will be invisible, with ice from bank to bank, not subtle at all, but solid.  We have seen it before.

Haiku on Ice

As lands seen from space,

While flowing, touching, merging,

Ice forms the river.

Black and White

Snow coating the expanding ice edges of the river create stark boundaries between two states of the same element, liquid and frozen. 

On the radio today, I heard a discussion of haiku.  I could not resist a river effort.

Black on white, crows scratched

the new scoured, snow-swept shore.

One found something, ate.

Three and Counting

With both water and temperature dropping while I was away for three days, the river changed again,  at least the third freezing cycle since wintry weather began a month or so ago. 

With the lower stream level came clear water and a revelation.  The floodlike intensity over Christmas had swept away the bank of stones thrown up mid-channel a few weeks ago when a thawing ice jam roiled the river.  I could see redistributed stones spread out to the left, to the right and further downstream. The current as it comes from under the bridge had returned to its old route, running to the left of the middle of the river.  The wedge-shaped stony bank was gone and the river  returned entirely to its old flow.

An armada of slushy ice fragments teemed in that current.  They cascaded toward the right bank, amalgamating into larger pieces and slowing down.  With the cold expected in the teens tonight, the now familiar graceful curve at the Ottauquechee's center will narrow tonight, most likely, with more and more ice locking on to the expanding frozen edges.