Our River
By Andrea Lani
The water is dark coppery brown where it’s shaded by trees, silvery blue where it mirrors the sky, and golden green where it reflects the sunlit crowns of pines. It appears almost perfectly still, though now and then minute ripples radiate outward where a needle has dropped onto its surface, and there’s a faint shimmer in the light-struck stretches. But there’s no perceptible current, nothing to indicate which direction the water is flowing, or whether it’s flowing at all. Even the yellow birch leaves that rest on its skin are doing just that: resting, as immobile as anchored watercraft.
Yet I hear a faint gurgle, the sound of water running over rocks, barely a whisper, a hint of sound, nearly drowned out by the incessant yank-yank-yank of a red-breasted nuthatch. The gurgle is confirmation, if I needed it, that the water before me is not stagnant. It’s not pond or lake or puddle. It is, despite all appearances to the contrary, on the move. It is a river.
I sit on the high bank in mid-October after an unusually dry late summer and fall. The river below me is, in technical parlance, bony. Blocky rocks that are a deep bronze color when submerged are coated in the dusty gray of dried sediment. Clusters and chains of these rocks form bars, islands, and archipelagos that disrupt and funnel what flow the river retains. Tufts of grass have taken advantage of the low water and sprouted in what was once the riverbed.
My husband and I have lived beside this river for twenty-four years. We, and our three children who’ve grown up beside it, usually refer to it as “the river,” as if there were only one, or “our river,” a designation that implies not so much possession as close kinship, the way we refer to our sons. While technically we own roughly 2,500 feet of river frontage, we understand that we are at most short-term neighbors to this stretch of flowing water.
Our river has an English name, the unmelodious and utilitarian West Branch of the Eastern River. In the language of the Wabanaki, across whose territory the Eastern River flows, it is Mundoo-uscootook. According to the 1962 publication Indian Place Names of New England, this means “devil’s rush river,” referring, the book claims, to the “magical powers” ascribed by the indigenous people to cattails. An alternate translation—”river of spiritually powerful rushes”—is offered by Wabanaki Place Names of Western Maine, an interactive online map created from research done by Bates College students. The puritanical sensibilities of early settlers must have been so disquieted by the notion of plants having magical or spiritual powers that they felt the need to rechristen the waterbody with the purely directional handle of Eastern River. Presumably the name was chosen because it is the only one of the six rivers flowing into Merrymeeting Bay that enters from the east. Four of the others retain their Wabanaki names—Kennebec, Androscoggin, Cathance, and Abagadasset—and the fifth—the Muddy—is at least descriptive, as well as being an English translation of the river’s Wabanaki name, Psazeske, meaning “muddy branch.”
The main stem of the Eastern River comes into being fourteen miles north of its confluence with the Kennebec and about two miles south of our house, at the place where the West Branch joins the East Branch in East Pittston. Below this point the river passes its tidal crest and from there flows broad and deep, alternating long, straight stretches with meandering oxbows as it plows its way through the marine clay of the bottomlands of Pittston and Dresden on its way to Merrymeeting Bay. I’ve seen tall, grassy plants—perhaps the rushes that gave the river its Wabanaki name—lining the shallows at the mouth of the Eastern from onboard a motorboat hurtling down the Kennebec toward Swan Island. I’ve also canoed a small section in Pittston, launching from the Kennebec Land Trust’s Eastern River Preserve. Aside from these two close-ish encounters, my familiarity with the main river comes from viewing its expansive, silvery surface from the window of my car as I drive down Route 127, which follows the path of the river from Dresden Mills almost to its outlet.
But this wide and tidal ribbon of water is not our river. Our river is the West Branch of the Eastern River, a waterway of an entirely different character. The West Branch arises in a wooded gulley between two ranch houses on the side of the road in Windsor, around eight miles north of its meeting with the East Branch. You don’t even need to blink to miss the spot. I recently went on a zig-zagging road trip north from my house, seeking out this source, as well as each place the river makes contact with civilization. I had traced my finger along the thin blue line as it squiggles down Map 13 of the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found that upstream of our house there are five places where the river passes beneath a road via bridge or culvert. Though most of the crossings occur on roads I drive regularly, I’d never noticed, until I went in search of them, these glimpses of the river. Even then I had to concentrate to recognize the dip in the road or stretch of guard rail that indicated the presence of water flowing beneath the pavement. However, on a dead-end dirt road I’d never driven before, I crossed the river on a very obvious narrow bridge made of heavy wooden planks and drove alongside its channel for perhaps fifty yards, getting a rare unobstructed view of dark water tumbling over rocks.
At the fifth crossing below its source, the river passes beneath the road we live on via a very obvious massive domed metal culvert that stretches out on both sides of the tarmac like an airplane hangar. This new culvert, put in a couple of years ago, after the old one rusted out and the road surface dropped two feet, marks where the stretch of river I’m most familiar with—our river—begins. Our house is a short walk down the road from here, and from our front door a trail winds through a forest of mixed hardwoods to the edge of the river, where I now sit on the bank looking out over its scanty flow.
Having a river as a destination gives a sense of purpose to an otherwise aimless walk in the woods. The river also adds novelty to a landscape—and a life—that can feel static, evolving as both do in the slow increments of days within seasons. A river, as Heraclitus noted around 2,500 years ago, is always changing. It was also useful to have a river as enticement when coaxing small children along the trail. There’s nothing kids love more than throwing things—often including themselves—into water. During our sons’ first few years, we toted them in slings, backpacks, or sleds until they could tramp the trail on their own legs. In the wintertime we would trek over its surface by snowshoe, following the tracks of deer, coyote, hare, and otter. In the summertime, we’d don old sneakers and wade upstream, me chasing dragonflies with my camera while the kids tried to catch green frogs, pickerel frogs, and the thumb-sized fish that congregate in any pool deeper than a few inches. In the riverbed we’d find all kinds of treasures: crawfish with big, snappy claws, dragonfly nymphs the size of dimes, freshwater sponges like miniature emerald cities.
Now that my kids are grown, my interactions with the river have become more observational, less interactive. But there’s something to be gained by sitting quietly. I’ve recorded close to a hundred species of birds, witnessed a mink scamper along a side channel before slipping in and swimming off out of sight, and viewed bands of deer browsing among the tall grass of a broad meander. Last winter, I watched a young beaver plow through the deep snow that blanketed the iced-in river, his swimming motions exactly those of a kid scrambling through a ball pit.
My husband and I used to talk, mostly jokingly, about exploring the Eastern River from its source to its confluence with the Kennebec. Now that I’ve sought out the river’s uppermost reaches, I realize this would be less a paddling excursion than a journey through tax maps and phone books, seeking out permission from landowners to wade in the shallow stream. Our river is not big or important enough to rate a gauging station, so it’s hard to say how much water flows through its channel, or if there’s ever enough to be navigable. My own unscientific answers to these two questions are: usually not much and only during ice-out, in March or April. At that time of year the water is freezing cold, the air not much warmer, and the surging current carries hazards like big, polygonal slabs of ice, logs, and sometimes whole trees washed down from upstream. Not only would it be dangerous to try to navigate the river in those conditions, it wouldn’t be that much fun.
But the weather, as they say, is weirdening, and two years ago it rained nearly five inches on the first of May. The river rose higher than I had ever seen it, submerging whole sections of trail and washing away fallen logs we had crossed the river on for years. Each subsequent day, the water level dropped, but by the fifth day, a Saturday, it was still much higher than usual for that time of year—high enough, I thought, to float a couple of kayaks.
My husband and I launched our boats beside the new culvert, and once we paddled around a bend we put the road out of view and left civilization behind. Trees rose from the banks on either side of the stream, birds called in the overstory, and the sound of rippling water drowned out any hum from passing cars. Beyond the bend, the river carried us over a long stretch of striated bedrock. Though the water level was still high enough to float our boats, it was not high enough to create a comfortable cushion between our rear ends and the corrugated stone riverbed. As we floated downstream, bouncing over rocks, I gazed up into the cathedral arch formed by the trees from each bank meeting in the center. The midday sun illuminated the canopy like stained glass, the newly emerging leaves of the birch and aspen glowing chartreuse and the young red maple leaves flickering crimson-gold alongside the deep-green of hemlock and pine. In some areas the banks rose high above our heads; in others, they sloped gently to the river’s edge and were lined with royal ferns just unfurling, thickets of stinging nettle, and green-trunked striped maples. This perspective was entirely new to me (when we wade in the river I mostly look at my feet so I don’t trip or slip or step in a hole), and for the first time I felt more like a part of the river than an outside observer.
After a while the water slowed, becoming smooth and deep and winding in wide loops through a clayey floodplain. The sky expanded as we meandered between low banks cloaked in dried grass and dotted with enormous, splintered willow trees and conical balsam firs, a place I call The Wilderness because of its hummocky, subarctic appearance. Here we came to our only portage, a tangle of logs and branches that had been washed down by the flood and wedged across the channel where it narrows at the outermost bend of an oxbow. We beached our boats, scrambled through matted grasses with tiny green shoots of new growth poking through, and relaunched on the other side. Around a few more curves, we passed through a stretch of wide, calm water where ice forms early in the season creating a rink where, as teenagers, our sons played an invented game of three-sided hockey, using garage-sale sticks or long, stout branches, with chunks of wood for pucks and boots for goals. Below the rink, we glided over two nearly submerged beaver dams, and then the river resumed its straight, shallow flow, and we resumed bouncing over rocks.
Since we left the culvert behind, we had seen no sign of humanity, but soon after the beaver dams, we passed alongside a neighbor’s property, where the woods are strewn with old windows, piles of lumber, broken appliances, and rusty tools. After this there were further indicators—a bridge where another neighbor’s driveway crosses the river, a lawn chair on the bank, a frayed rope swing hanging from a tree—but for the most part, our route might have taken us through the remote backcountry rather than our backyard. This wildness is accidental, or perhaps a lesson in conservation through neglect. Because the West Branch (and the East Branch too) largely flows through the center of land that spans between roads, rather than alongside a road, it is buffered from both development and runoff pollution. The river is also not deep enough to attract swimmers, boaters, or anglers, and getting to it in most places entails a long slog through snowy, thorny, or mosquitoey woods. As a result, it’s largely left alone. The surrounding forest has been allowed to grow back since the days when it was cleared for pasture, and a complex and varied community of plants and wildlife now make the river and its environs their home. None of the land adjacent to West Branch is permanently protected, however, and, like all wild places, it faces untold hazards from climate change, including more droughts like the one we’re in now and floods like the one that enabled our float trip.
As we neared our takeout point, we left the trees and wildness behind, the river flowing between open fields over which we could see farm houses and the village of East Pittston. We had returned to civilization. But there was one more adventure in store for us. As we rounded a bend and headed toward the bridge where our road again crosses the river, my husband twisted around in his boat and called back to me, “Duck your head as you go under.” He went through first and I followed, bending as far forward as I could. Beneath the low bridge, the water dropped without warning over a series of rapids, and from my awkward position I paddled madly, bouncing over boulders and adding several more bruises to my collection, before the river leveled out again, winding around one last bend. Here we beached our boats, just shy of the confluence with the East Branch, and carried them across a friend’s back lawn to our truck, where we loaded them up and headed home.
It is, perhaps, delusional for a human to think they can know a river. We exist on such different scales: Our river is roughly 8 miles long; I’m less than six feet tall. Our river is ancient, dating back to the recession of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, around 20,000 years ago; I’m just over 50. I’m not even clear what I mean by river. Is the river the water or the channel the water flows through? Are the floodplains, oxbow lakes, and feeder streams part of the river? Is the whole watershed? Does the river include the community of fish and frogs, vegetation and algae, macroinvertebrates and microorganisms that make the water home? What about the riparian vegetation and the birds and animals that use the river corridor for travel, food, and shelter? Even a small river like ours is made up of so many parts, covering a vast landscape, as well as flowing through a vast expanse of time and changing from day to season to century. If I could navigate the Eastern River from source to confluence, that would still only give me a access to a a fragment of the river’s being. It is impossible to fully comprehend the whole of a river, or hold it all in one’s mind. But I can get to know, in my limited capacity as our river’s short-term neighbor, a small section of it. I can walk through the woods that surround it and sit on its bank. I can listen to the water flow over the rocks in the shallows and to the birds that flit among the trees that line the banks. I can breathe in its mossy, iron-tinged scent. I can feel its cold water and the hard, slippery rocks that line its bed. I can snowshoe over its frozen surface in winter, wade through its shallows in summer, and one spring in a lifetime, float with its current in my boat. I can look deep into its dark, glistening water, and try to understand what our river has to say.