Passing over the Frank Wood Bridge connecting Topsham and Brunswick before Christmas this year I looked up the river over the construction of the new bridge and toward the hydroelectric dam just above Shad Island.
When I walk with my camera, but no human companion, my mind buzzes with connections, insights, and plans. With no archivist or stenographer the lucidity of the connections, the unadulterated sparkle of the insights fade once I end my ambling fugue. I am left grasping after them. I never regret it but I do miss it.
A new piece of gear slowed this day’s stroll as I rephotographed the scene around the river side. I was doing my bridge loop. From my house a purposeful walk of about a mile to the swinging bridge. On the bridge my pace slackens and I begin to inspect things more carefully. A half a dozen spots along the path on the Topsham side of the river walk bring you down to the river’s sandy side, or perhaps to a slightly raised stone outcropping with a broader view. I will meander down the Topsham side pausing ten or twelve times along the way before walking across the vibrating green bridge. It thrums with the harmonics of tires on the grid of its steel deck, the water may roar with froth in April or just burble below at other times. Now all is punctuated by construction noise and the building smells of poured concrete, welding, and diesel. Once over the Frank Wood Bridge I duck below it at 250th Anniversary park to look downriver toward Merrymeeting Bay or across the head of tide to the Great Bowdoin Mill. This never fails to stir memories of a elementary school field trip when it was still a paper mill, and a neighbor’s father there at work in a white tee shirt with a cigarette hanging from his mouth gave us a menacing look as he stood over an opening in the floor that exposed moving water below. Back upstream through the labyrinth of construction equipment squats the monolith of the Hydroelectric dam, hoarding the flow of the river like a mythological miser.
Once satisfied I close the loop by heading up Maine Street and home.
I have photographed the same spots dozens of times but always look for a different take on my visual thought.
On this day, in addition to a shiny new piece of gear, I had my new friend Rachel’s words impregnating my every thought. She’d been on my mind for six weeks or so by this time.
Meeting Rachel
Rachel told me a “lens aided view into a patch of moss reveals a dense tropical jungle in which insects large as tigers prowl amid strangely formed luxuriant trees…..the early buds of leaf or flower from any tree or small creature reveal unexpected beauty and complexity when, aided by a lens, we can escape the limitations of the human sized scale.”
She was right of course but she wasn’t talking about a camera lens but rather a magnifying glass in the hand of a child.
She told me a story about a walk with a child on a windy night near the ocean when great and elemental things prevailed. She felt “solitary and fragile against the brute force of the sea. . . .the full moon riding lower and lower toward the far shore of the bay setting the water aflame with silver.”
When I heard her I slipped back to a walk of my own at the edge off a familiar cove, another place I walk and stare. I was there seeing the reflection of an old boathouse on the far shore scattered like the fragments in a kaleidoscope by the guzzles and tide pools scattered by the receding tide over the scalloped facets of the flats. A breeze kept the surface twinkling. The form of the boathouse, the pitch of its roof, the old twelve paned windows of its doors were framed in white. The colors of the reflection were more vivid than the boathouse itself fired by the oblique light of the sun departing over my shoulder. Before the golden hour the sun and water and have a peculiar way of casting mud in a curious admixture of cobalt and purple. This saturated the reflection of the boathouse as if it were a younger version of the boathouse itself, but not quite yet formed.
Just a fragment of her sentence—the water aflame with silver—took me there.
I had not had a camera that day. I have been back half a dozen times after consulting charts and tables to try and replicate that day’s sun and the tide. One day both were right but the air was still. The reflected image too crisp and unfractured to satisfy my mind’s eye.
If only I could paint.
I reconsidered the book in my hands. I learned later that it had been published after Rachel’s death as a sort of hopeful how to book for parents and others charged with teaching the young about the natural world. Its premise: for the guide it is not as important to know as to feel…emotions are the soil if facts are the seeds.
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength…..
….An experience like (stargazing) when one’s thought are released to roam through the lovely spaces of the universe, can be shared with a child even if you don’t know the name of a single star. You can still drink in the beauty, and think and wonder at the meaning of what you see.
It is Rachel Carson writing in The Sense of Wonder a book she never got to see in print. Described as words and pictures to help you keep alive your child's inborn sense of wonder, and renew your own delight in the mysteries of earth, sea and sky. Rachel’s longtime agent and literary executor Marie Rodell arranged for the publication of the essay. Parts had appeared in various magazines in the years leading to Rachel’s death. Carson had intended to expand it into a book: The Sense of Wonder, exhorts parents to help their children experience the “lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life.”
As Frank might say, this is no mere postscript or addendum to the life she chose, but a final, fresh, illumination of it.
Maybe I should just read this one?
First out of the box was The Life of The Marsh, an encyclopedia of sorts from 1966, part of an educational series. The sort of book that depressingly reminds us that topics that seem new, habitat loss, climate change, and the necessity of conservation have been known, written about, and largely ignored for generations.
Next came, Lost Woods, The Discovered Writings of Rachel Carson. It is a paperback, an anthology of things Carson had written both before she was famous and while she was becoming famous, generally between the 1930s and 1950s.
Both books are compendiums, collections of scattered works reassembled in a new order so neither is rare, a “first,” or even early enough to be vintage. Not collectable, not remunerative. Both had marginalia, signs they’d been used, probably in some sort of an academic project so into the yard sale stack they went.
But then came The Sense of Wonder with its captivating photographs and lyrical transporting prose.
Like a lot of people I had attempted Rachel Carson’s most well known work, Silent Spring. Without troubling to revisit it now my opinion is that it was a trifle pedantic, strident even. After all, by then Rachel was known as a crusader. Moreover, the battle against DDT had been won.
Twice between succeeding dawns, as the waters abandon pursuit of the beckoning moon and fall back, foot by foot, periwinkle and starfish and crab are cast upon the mercy of the sands. Every heap of brine-drenched seaweed, every pool forgotten by the retreating sea in recess of sand or rock, offers sanctuary from sun and biting sand. In the tide pools, seas in miniature, sponges of the simpler kinds encrust the rocks, each hungrily drawing in through its myriad mouths the nutriment-laden water. Starfishes and sea anemones are common dwellers in such rock-girt pools. Shell-less cousins of the snail, the naked sea slugs are spots of brilliant rose and bronze, spreading arborescent gills to the waters, while the tube worms, architects of the tide pools, fashion their conical dwellings of sand grains, cemented one against another in glistening mosaic. (Undersea, Rachel Carson, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1937. This tide pool is in New Harbor at the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve. It is a Nature Conservancy property and accessible to the public)
Arrested by The Sense of Wonder I reached back on the pile for Lost Woods. It opens with Undersea, an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1937. Just four pages long, we are told that for Rachel from this work, ‘everything else flowed.” It formed the basis of Rachel’s first book, 1941’s Under the Sea-Wind, which remained Rachel’s favorite piece of her own writing.
I spent a month or more with Lost Woods, pausing frequently to pursue some angle or reference that stoked some smoking kindle. But I always return to Undersea. Two-thousand five hundred and four words and not one is misplaced.
Rachel Reminds Me About Frank
I had never heard of John Burroughs. Rachel had. In 1952 she was awarded the John Burroughs Medal, an award she coveted. Her third book, The Sea Around Us, published in 1951 was the prize winner, judged by the John Burroughs Association to be that year’s most distinguished piece of writing on natural history. In accepting the prize, Rachel spoke of the immortals with whom she had been linked.
Immortals.
This runnel led to John Burroughs and his earliest work, Expression, in the 1860 Atlantic Monthly, misattributed by some to Emerson. Further up and further in were the John Burroughs Association, the forty-five years of Burroughs’s journals kept at Vassar College, but more important, the list of John Burroughs Medal winners. There, along with immortals like Rachel, John McPhee, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Roger Tory Peterson was Frank.
Frank is Franklin Burroughs, a local, a scholar, a duck hunter, and an angler. Frank also won the John Burroughs Medal in 2009 for his 2006 book Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay.
I spoke with Frank, on and off, for a year or so around the time Confluence was published. At that point, I had read a fair amount of his work. Somewhere in the house still, I hoped, lay an inscribed copy of Confluence.
Frank had done my father the same posthumous kindness that Marie Rodell had done Rachel. He had shepherded my father's final work in between the covers of book and written about it “this is no mere postscript or addendum to the life he chose, but a final, fresh, illumination of it.”
Rachel’s use of the term immortals to describe her fellow recipients of the Burroughs medal recalled two pieces of Frank’s work that probe mortality. That of his dog and his own.
Frank wrote that his aged dog was possessed of “legendary flatulence, his breath an abomination.” I laughed out loud before I read on to realize that A Pastoral Occassion, written sometime in the 1980s, recounted Frank’s laden decision to release a family dog from its earthly misery.
It is a great piece. In spite of its solemnity the descriptive humor is striking. More than a few backyard graves for beloved pets dot my half-acre. But mine have all been cats, their graves relatively shallow, the distrurbance to the earth reclaimed by Iris or Daylillies within weeks.
Frank’s dog was big. The hole Frank dug roused an episode of the Sopranos, a pomaded Paulie Walnuts standing over a cursing Russian Mafioso digging his own grave. Work of a different sort but work nonetheless.
To that point when I first read A Pastoral Occassion Frank Burroughs had been just another personage over at the college who my parents might mention now and again. I assumed he was filled with the same willfully tenebrous thoughts they all seemed to contain. I had still never met him but began to consider the possibility that he was a regular human. and opened my mind to the thought that a few of them might have lives outside their tweed.
A piece written just a few years ago, Catch and Release, addressed his own frailty after a fall while fishing. With the same precise wit he described his aging angling coterie as “high-risk geezers, burdens upon the earth but in no hurry to leave it.”
I made a a note to track down my copy of Confluence and re-read it once I had finished my run through the Carson Anthology.
On the Bridge
Standing in the Frank Wood Bridge looking upstream I was vaguely thinking about Rachel and imagining the scene differently, with no dam there.
Looking through the view finder, I hoped to frame the shot to include a bit of what remains of the falls in the foreground, just about at the traditional head of the tide in the Androscoggin, the construction decking from which the new bridge is being built, and the current version of the dam. I also hoped to capture the fish ladder hard at the left of my view beneath the brick of the Cabot Mill in Brunswick, or Shad Island, a lump of rock whose very name has become an anachronism.
A friend recently mentioned the re-licensing of the dam—skeptical about the continuing utility of the dam in relation to its impact on aquatic life and the spiritual satisfaction, not to mention fruitful economic benefits of a rejuvenated fishery, he avoided polemic—we were at a Christmas party after-all.
It’s an oddity of passing time. Some dam, or other, has been there all my life, plus another six or seven of my lives before mine. The current version, built in 1980 or thereabouts, must, I have always assumed, have some inherent societal value, a utility, and therefore be necessary. Because it has always been there.
One of the selling points for the new bridge, to replace the one on which I was standing, is that it will be more pedestrian friendly. It will be higher and wider. Viewing platforms, concrete promontories, shielded from passing traffic will suspend idlers like me over the river. Upstream we would see a better view of the dam. Perhaps from the right angle and height will see the Swinging Bridge.
Concerning salmon and shad Rachel wrote:
A hundred years ago, salmon still ran in the rivers of New England wherever dams had not blocked their passage and mills poisoned their spawning beds. The spring run of the alewife, or river herring, was an important event of the year to villagers on New England rivers, and shad poured into the Susquehanna. . . .in such numbers that the shallow waters foamed with their passage.
Imagine the waters around Shad Island foaming with the passage of its namesake species.
Anadromous, shad head upstream to spawn, some of their clan would be devoured in Merrymeeting Bay by male eels patiently fattening themselves as they await the ten years or more it will take their female companions to return from the lakes and streams of the Western Mountains, now mature and ready to return to the mid-ocean Sargasso Sea to spawn. Catadromous, the eel’s trip to its breeding ground runs the opposite direction than the salmon or shad.
If the oceans and rivers of the earth were Rachel’s cast and crew, then the eel is Rachel’s prima donna.
I wanted my readers to feel that they were for a time, actually living the lives of sea creatures, There was one fish whose migrations included all that varied under sea terrain—the eel. I know many people shudder at the sight of an eel. To me (and I believe to anyone who knows its story) to see an eel is something like meeting a person who has traveled to the most remote and wonderful places on earth; in a flash I see a vivid picture of the strange places that eel has been—places which I, being merely human, can never visit (from a memo from Rachel Carson to the publicity department for the publisher of Under the Sea World).
But looking at the fishway, there is no darkened stage, no assembled musicians rifling their scores awaiting the conductor’s tap, tap, tapping of the music stand. Instead there is "A fishway that works poorly for alewives and not at all for salmon or shad." (From Crossing at the Lower Falls of the Androscoggin, by Doug Bennett found on the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust Web Page).
Beneath the Bridge
Under the bridge at the foot of Brunswick’s 250 Anniversary Park you can see down river a good bit over the head of the tide to where the river begins to widen as it enters the back stretch on its race to join its five river cousins, Muddy, Cathance, Abagadasset, Kennebec, and Eastern at Merrymeeting Bay.
I often stop under this bridge and wait by this river for something to happen. Truth is, I haven’t the patience. My idea of waiting is to spend thirty minutes or so focused on a pair shags drying their wings atop a rock in hopes that their hunger will coincide with luck—good for me, bad for some fish—and give me an image that will get lots of likes and shares.
The gold standard here, however, is a sturgeon leaping clear of the foam. I have never seen one. To get that you need the patience of a hunter in a deer stand and an intimate understanding of the creature’s habits and life.
This photo was made by John Lichter. You can see more of his great photography at johnlichterpotos.net There are plenty more concerning the Androscoggin River Watershed, other areas of ecological recovery and restoration as well as many other Maine photos.
Thinking about the sturgeon and gazing down river toward the Bay reminded me again about Frank’s book. And now, I knew it to be a winner, not just because he signed it for me, but because it was in the Pantheon with Rachel, John McPhee and Roger Tory Peterson (Roger Tory Peterson received an honorary degree from my college the year I graduated; from the way the biology faculty behaved when he stood to receive his sheepskin you’d have thought he was Tom Jones or Taylor Swift).
It took me some days to find my copy of Confluence. I was on the verge of ordering a new one when fortune finally smiled on me and brought me back to the first set of shelves I had looked on. Of the sturgeon Frank writes in a segment called Intimation of Immortality:
Sturgeon date from a past and a planet that we cannot conceive of by any analogy or extrapolation from our own experience. Ten thousand years are nothing to them. Fossil Sturgeon, very similar in all respects to Acipenser sturio, indicate that the species was thriving during the Cretaceous Period, seventy to a hundred million years ago. As you no doubt recall, the Cretaceous was eventful and stressful; such imposing creatures as dinosaurs flourished in it and ultimately succumbed to it. It is hard to see what design features allowed the sturgeon to swim unscathed through the massive biocide. It is a fish—unhurried, benthic, fond of big rivers—that is older than the Andes Mountains, and that, having changed a lot less than they have, swims past our backyards every spring. It has seen continents drift, lived and thrived and left its fossilized remains in sea basins that are now dry land. Observed the advance and retreat of the glaciers, the depression and rebounding of the earth’s surface, the first mammals, the first humanoids, the first jet-skis. The slow motion apocalypses of geology and evolution have passed over it, signifying less to it than the turnings of the tide and the cycle of the seasons. By our standards sturgeon have no conception of time—almost no experience of it. By their standards we are bubbles on the stream.
Of her beloved ocean Rachel wrote in her coda to Undersea (Atlantic Monthly September 1937):
In the red clay that carpets the great deeps at 3000 fathoms or more, such delicate skeletons are extremely rare. Among the few organic remains not dissolved before they reach these cold and silent depths are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks
Thus we see the parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them up until the gathering energy of the spring sun wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic activity, hungry swarms of planktonic animals growing and multiplying upon the abundant plants, and themselves falling prey to the shoals of fish; all, in the end, to be redissolved into their component substances when the inexorable law's of the sea demand it. Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality. Kindred forces to those which, in some period inconceivably remote, gave birth to that primeval bit of protoplasm tossing on the ancient seas continue their mighty and incomprehensible work. Against this cosmic back ground the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.
Under Sea, Rachel Carson, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1937. The Atlantic keeps an indexed website of all its older editions. The are free to read. You can find Undersea, and many other fabulous old bits there in PDFs of their original form. It was just 4 pages, 2500 words or so.
Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson, This 1965 work is still in print from Harper Collins. The current version can be found in plenty of places, Locally most of Carson’s books are in stock at Gulf of Maine. Used versions of the 1965 edition are available online. it is quite a nice edition. Mine, the book that sent me down his Rabbitt Hole, sold for $50 just five days after I listed it
A Pastoral Occassion, Franklin Burroughs, was published in the Kenyon Review in 1986. It recounts the circumstances that led to the decision to put down a family pet. I first stumbled across a photocopy of it kicking around my house back in the 1980’s It can be found on JSTOR which does have a free membership with limited reading, maybe 100 articles a month or so. Good enough if you are a dilettante rather than a scholar.
Catch and Release, Franklin Burroughs, Downeast Magazine 2022 recounts a fall on the rocks while fishing alone, the good luck that led to his rescue, and the challenges of his rehabilitation.
Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay, Franklin Burroughs. Heather Perry Photographer. The 2009 John Burroughs Medal Winner for books on natural history. This book was originally published by Tilbury House. Apparently Downeast Books will be issuing a new edition in the summer of 2025. The current version is readily available. It is a great book to have if you live anywhere near the watersheds of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Rivers. You can read it cover to cover but its format lends itslelf to piece meal reading, or continued reference. It is a series of nineteen essays with a common theme—Merrymeeting Bay—but each stands alone. Heavily illustrated with photographs by Heather Perry, no essay is longer than twenty pages, and many are bite sized.
Brunswick Dam Relicensing. A website collecting information related to the application to renew the license for the Brunswick Hydroelectric Dam.
More photos by John Lichter of the Androscoggin River Watershed, Ecological Recovery and Restoration.