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Introduction: A Train Journey into the Past and Future Life must be lived amidst that which was made before. Every landscape is an accumulation. The past endures. —Donald W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, 1979 Six a.m. is an ungodly hour to begin a train journey (or a book). My ride to New York City one fine summer morning begins at Springfield, Massachusetts, the northern terminus of Amtrak’s Connecticut River valley line. Springfield in its heyday was a major rail hub with some two hundred trains daily and hundreds of passengers thronging the waiting hall and platforms.1 Today, Springfield’s station is a barebones trackside ticket counter and seating area, as welcoming as a jury waiting room. We file out to the two-car train whose diesel locomotive (the line is not yet electrified) belches exhaust into the morning mist. Untouched by the computer revolution, conductors punch paper tickets and off we go at a blistering crawl. A humdrum morning train ride might normally not be regarded as an opportunity to reflect on the imprint of humanity upon the world around us, and indeed most of my fellow passengers are soon sensibly asleep. But given a window seat and a sprinkling of imagination, the view from the train offers a panorama of the Connecticut Valley’s settlement history and a glimpse of its future. As the environmentalist Bill McKibben pungently described this very route: “Along the way, the river cuts through many strata of biology and history and economy—small farms, old mill towns dating back to the zenith of New England’s industrial revolution, small cities slowly rotting.”2 The trip just now beginning will offer glimpses of such earlier stages of the “enduring past” (in Meinig’s phrase) as well as hints of a new era for those post-rotting small cities, a further layer of accumulating landscapes which suggests that they may fare better in the century now in progress than during the final decades of its predecessor. After creeping past derelict freight facilities and beneath an interstate highway, the train, like the taxi in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, warps back in time. For ten minutes, we follow the eastern shore of New England’s master stream running free and frothy over rocks and around islets in sparkling sunshine—the combined flows of tributaries from Canada to the north, the White Mountains to the east, and the Green Mountains and Berkshires to the west. This river and its glacier-scoured valley have sustained humans since time immemorial. Native peoples left their imprint in the many settlement sites, trail routes, and patches 2 Introduction of forest clearance that greeted the first European settlers.3 Lured by the fertile lowlands, upland forests, furry and edible wildlife, and teeming fisheries, a chain of ­ seventeenth-century colonial outposts rapidly ascended the valley, reaching the site of Springfield in 1636.4 The transition from Native to European occupance of the valley constituted an epic demonstration of Meinig’s “landscape accumulation .” The historian William Cronon has described the clash of cultures: “When the ­ Europeans first came to New England, they found a world which had been home to Indian peoples for over 10,000 years. But the way Indians had chosen to inhabit that world posed a paradox almost from the start for Europeans accustomed to other ways of interacting with the environment. Many were struck by what seemed to them the poverty of Indians who lived in the midst of a landscape endowed so astonishingly with abundance.”5 Whereas Natives treated the land as a “commons” whose bounty (crops, wildlife , fish, firewood, berries, etc.) was shared as needed for survival, the Europeans imported their notions of “ownership” with the concomitants of legal title, marketability , fencing, and pursuit of private economic profit. The English also imported their political geography of counties and towns, thereby dividing the “wilderness” into discrete administrative and economic units that feistily endured to the present day. Vestiges of the valley’s agrarian past are glimpsed from the train: stone walls, weathered barns and silos, farmhouses of wood or stone, gleaming Congregational churches—the “enduring past” amid the cluttered present of fast food outlets, billboards, municipal buildings, and parking lots. The train crosses the river in view of the Enfield Dam, a crumbling relic of industrial New England, built in 1827 at the river’s first rapids above tidewater.­ Ingeniously, the dam was equipped with a dual canal system to power mills and pass...

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