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

Crosscurrents

{ 1 6 4 } Not long after Pam and I had pulled our canoe out of the river and passed through the short masonry tunnel penetrating the railroad embankment at Reeds Ferry, I returned with Alan. Shouldering the boat from a rough dirt parking area at the edge of an old residential neighborhood, we entered the arched portal and found ourselves in the well-tended park. Isolated from the workaday world by the berm on which the tracks were laid, and sandwiched between the river and railroad with impenetrable woods on either side, the space felt like a small outdoor room. Pam had been taken by the quiet, Zenlike beauty; Alan admired the engineering—the broad, druidical stone steps leading to the water, and the culvert providing passage not just for people, but for a small stream that flowed beneath grates fitted into the concrete tunnel floor. Before the railroad’s coming, this hidden spot had not only been a focal point of the settlement here, but its very reason for being. Today, the ferry landing was merely a reminder that before the day of reliable bridges, the river was not just a north-south highway, but an obstacle to people heading east or west. Now only a cluster of tired houses and small businesses strung along the Daniel Webster Highway, Reeds Ferry had once been a bustling transportation link. Withourdeeptravelinginterestpiqued,AlanandIspeculatedabout the enigmatic launch site while we paddled. Our curiosity wouldn’t be Crosscurrents Brown University. Commencement at this institution was held yesterday. Boston Courier, September 6, 1839 Getty Makes Record High Bid for Alaskan Oil Manchester Union Leader, September 11, 1969 Municipal officials: Cuts hurting homeland security Lowell Sun, September 9, 2003 c r o s s c u r r e n t s 1 6 5 satisfied until we got off the water and returned, stepping into a barn just up the street from the forgotten landing. Here we found Charles H. Mower, the unofficial “mayor,” who crafts Windsor chairs just as they did when Reeds Ferry was a busy freight and passenger terminal two hundred years ago. Mower is a bearded, burly man with a genial manner and an impassioned voice. Born in the old brick house with granite lintels standing next to the barn, he doesn’t just know local history, he feels and breathes it. Alan and I spent two hours in his small workshop littered with wood shavings and filled with the rich, pungent odor of red oak as he spun tales about the life of Reeds Ferry. With a deep breath he began by telling us about ancient Narragansett land grants, the split of New Hampshire from Massachusetts, and the town of Merrimack’s original charters, one of which complained of land that was “mean and ordinary.” Though he had traveled widely, including a tour of duty in Vietnam, he was the deepest of travelers on his home turf. Engaged in making a spindle for the back of a chair, Mower axed a kindling-sized piece from an oak log. In the 1700s, he said as he worked, Reeds Ferry was an important crossing enabling people to attend church in Londonderry on the far side of the river. It also allowed those living east of the Merrimack to shop at the store established in McGaw’s Tavern, which once stood next to Mower’s barn. Today, a Getty Station occupies the spot, pumping gas for motorists on the Daniel Webster Highway, called “The Great River Road” in McGaw ’s heyday. Reed, he noted, as he shaped the angular stick of wood with a draw knife, lived on the opposite shore and operated the ferry from there. “Fine silica and alumina filtered out of glacial Lake Merrimack, and the town was built on this ancient lakebed of clay,” he related. “Adam was made of clay, the most humble and pedestrian of materials, and the basic stuff of the earth. In this town they made the bricks that built the factories of Lowell. In one day one hundred thousand bricks were shipped from that little landing on the river. Like plain clay, it’s ordinary people working in concert that build cities, entire civilizations even.” 1 6 6 m a i n s t e m Planing the slender piece of wood with a spokeshave, Mower needed less than ten minutes to transform the rough stick into a delicate spindle . “It doesn...