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

Flow

{ 1 8 7 } Its seventy-two pounds conspiring with gravity, the canoe sluiced quickly down the steep, overgrown path to the water and landed with a splash. Seemingly as eager as a puppy for a swim, it almost took us with it. Where the day before Alan and I had worked tediously to haul the boat up the bank, it now yanked us down on a white-knuckled rollercoaster ride ending in laughter. The morning was cool and misty, the sky low with a modulating brightness that shifted in shades of gray swirling slowly around us. Not quite thick enough to be fog, it was a gauzy, translucent atmosphere softening the overhanging trees, hills, and nearby buildings. Within fifteen minutes though, the sun had melted through, and almost instantly the world was bright with hard surfaces, the mist disappearing as suddenly as if we had awakened from a dream. Without a breath of wind, the water was at first a flat calm. Dark, but reflective, it had the quality of an old, faded mirror. As the mist evaporated , a slight and fickle tailwind arose, rippling the surface, which erupted in sparkles of fractured sunshine. The banks were not quite as steep as they had been upstream, but still we paddled below the level of the surrounding countryside. The east shore was thickly wooded with large trees, evoking storybook images of English royal forests. Many of the bigger trunks were prominently posted with “No Trespassing” signs. BAE Systems of Nashua, Flow An omnibus containing inside and out thirty-five persons, fell through a bridge into the Washington Canal on Thursday last. Boston Courier, September 9, 1839 Thousands Pay Sen. Dirksen Final Tribute Manchester Union Leader, September 12, 1969 Archdiocese agrees to pay $85M to settle priest sex abuse cases Lowell Sun, September 10, 2003 1 8 8 m a i n s t e m an international maker of avionics, navigation, combat, and electronic warfare products, sternly threatened prosecution for violations. “Imagine walking around up there,” I suggested. “Like Lilliputians among huge trees.” “Who cares about trees? All those No Trespassing signs are a dare,” I said, suddenly flush with a bit of adolescent defiance. Maybe tooling around in a boat after a long winter and spring confined behind a desk brought out a quixotic juvenile streak in me. Had we been younger, we might have taken up the challenge laid down by the signs. But we were two meek, middle-aged guys, and to us the placards might as well have been pit bulls or armed guards. Kids walking or camping on the land might have been seen as a lark. But two grown men violating the perimeter of a high-tech defense contractor gave me cold war shivers of prosecution for industrial espionage. In this area Thoreau found a fifteen-acre sandy desert several feet deep “which was interesting even refreshing to our eyes in the midst of the almost universal greenness.” Stopping to chat with an old man working in a field on the opposite shore, he learned that the “impressive and beautiful” patch of sand had been a cultivated field of grain and corn. But fishermen had pulled up riparian bushes so as to more easily haul their seines. With the bank exposed, windblown sand created a miniature Sahara. Along the riverbank where the grit was blown off, Thoreau found fire rings of burnt stones in which charcoal and small animal bones were mixed. He also spied ancient wigwam foundations, flakes of stone, and one perfect arrowhead. In a glance, Thoreau saw a landscape changing as its relationship with humans evolved. A forest and Indian encampment had become a cultivated field and commercial fishery. With careless treatment, the property had succumbed to desertification. A century and a half later, our observations picked up where his left off. Fishing was now almost solely from boats and for sport, and the land had healed and reverted back to forest, though it was forbidden ground with ominous signs threatening severe penalties. Paradoxically , the need for twenty-first-century militarylike secrecy now kept loggers and developers at bay, leaving the land as close to its primeval state as it had been in four hundred years. f l o w 1 8 9 The opposite bank presented a contrasting environment, with large buildings and vast stretches of macadam parking visible beyond the thinnest veneer of trees. Sandwiched between the Merrimack...