Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack

Art of the Voyage

{ 1 1 3 } On a sun-drenched morning, Pamela and I shoved our canoe into the Merrimack River at Lambert Park, a small slice of riverside situated barely upstream of Hooksett, New Hampshire. Its manicured lawn and careful paving lay just below a low dam, beside which was perched a brick powerhouse. Apparently, it was a popular launch site for fishers in small outboard-powered boats. A few were readying their gear in a gauzy mist arising from the frothy whitewater pouring over the dam onto a jumble of rocks. I began exploring the Merrimack near where Thoreau concluded his outbound voyage, going southerly with the flow as he did on his return trip. It was nearly forty miles and numerous bridge crossings, several rapids, and the huge Amoskeag Dam to where the river once met the Middlesex Canal at Lowell. Perhaps I could spot remains of their confluence from the water since Alan and I had been stymied by railroad tracks and thick brush when searching along the shore. As we shoved off, cool air arose from the water, but the bright, cloudless sky held all the promise of summer’s heat when the sun reached its zenith. Though the dark reflection-painted river looked smooth and placid, we felt the current’s power at once. John Perry, a minor, retracted his plea of not guilty, and pleaded guilty to an indictment charging him with breaking and entering the store of Messrs. Harris & Jones and stealing 58 pounds of copper therefrom in the night time. Boston Courier, September 6, 1839 THE NATION TODAY IS OVERRUN BY AN ATTITUDE OF “I SHOULD HAVE IT JUST BECAUSE I WANT IT AND I SHOULD HAVE IT NOW BECAUSE I WANT IT.” Manchester Union Leader, September 6, 1969 High court will tackle campaign finance rules Lowell Sun, September 7, 2003 Art of the Voyage 1 1 4 m a i n s t e m Almost immediately we came upon two rusting truss bridges, one an abandoned highway span and the other a railroad crossing with trees growing atop it. Looking simultaneously through the metal fretwork of both created a series of fractured kaleidoscopic images, dividing a coherent landscape of sky and green hillsides into a series of discrete pieces framed by the superstructures’ geometry. The moment quickly passed as we found ourselves swept beneath them and then under the modern highway bridge, high and sleek, arching over the river on tall, concrete piers. Still, the notion that even the sky could be compartmentalized in a glance stuck with me, warning this deep traveler to scrutinize details of even the grandest phenomena. The Merrimack forms at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers in Franklin, New Hampshire, and flows 116 miles to the sea at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Though its gradient is a modest 2.6 feet per mile, most of the drop occurs in six short spurts, at three of which arose the textile cities of Manchester, New Hampshire, and Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Encompassing 5,000 square miles, the watershed extends 134 miles north to south and 68 miles east to west, with tributaries reaching into the steep, forested heart of the White Mountains. The area receives about fortythree inches of precipitation a year, and the river boasts an average daily flow in excess of six thousand cubic feet per second at Lawrence. The name Merrimack is a corruption of the Indian word merruasquamack , meaning “strong water place.” Native peoples gave the river several monikers, this one commonly applying to the reach between Manchester and Lowell. True to its etymology, the river’s falls and rapids were prime locations for waterpower development; scholar Theodore Steinberg called the Merrimack the “most celebrated river valley in America’s early industrial history.” Where the sedate Concord River was the seedbed of original thought and intellectual prowess from the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and others, the Merrimack was a roiling industrial dynamo, a crucible of practical ingenuity. The Merrimack, wrote J. W. Meader in 1869, “surpasses all others in the harmonious blending of the useful and the beautiful,” a juxtaposition Pam and I had just witnessed at Lambert Park where the a r t o f t h e v o y a g e 1 1 5 dam created a roaring falls of foaming whitewater even as it spun a turbine producing as much as sixteen hundred kilowatts of...