by Hal Borland
If the insistent reclamation men had their way, the time might come when there would be no more swamps or bogs. If that time comes I hope I am not here to see it.
Chapter 6
Flowing Waters
If you would know any land, know its streams, its living waters. A brook or a river is a valley articulate and in ever-changing motion; its story is the story of the earth and one of the major forces that shaped it and clothed and populated and made it good.
I WAS ONCE ASKED by a morose man from the city: “What makes anyone think a brook or a river is something special? What are they but water, muddy water, running downhill?”
I wanted to ask if he had never seen the Potomac or the Ohio or the Mississippi; if he had never sat for an hour and watched the Hudson, fouled as it is, moving majestically through New York City’s own dooryard. I wanted to ask if he had never stood beside a brook and listened to it at dawn or walked beside it on a June afternoon. I wanted to tell him about brooks and rivers, but it would have taken me an hour to say the things that a brook or river can tell a willing listener in five minutes. I said: “Perhaps one must live with running water to understand.”
Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. The trees that grow on its banks and all the greenness there may be common elsewhere but they still are special to that river. So are the birds, the insects, the animals that live along that river’s banks. And the river has its own swarming life, its fish, its amphibians, its reptiles. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.
If I would trace the story of mankind I must start at the ocean, mother of all life, and travel up a river. I will come to a place eventually where the river forks, and by following either fork I will come to a brook. Walking beside that brook I will finally climb a hillside and find a source spring. There, beside that spring on a wooded hillside, I can look out over the land and see how man, though warm-blooded and terrestrial, followed the flowing waters of this earth to his own present destiny.
Man is far removed from his aquatic and amphibian beginnings, but he can no more do without water than can a fish or a frog. Air is his element, but his own body, his corporeal being, is more than 70-per-cent water, which must be constantly replenished. In the beginning, man lived beside the sweet water simply to slake his daily thirst. Then he learned that he could travel from place to place on a floating log. His ingenuity made a raft of two logs and he became a traveler. When he had refined the raft into a boat he became an explorer, with means of transportation well beyond the length of his own stride. Water became not only his daily drink but his highway. And eventually, when he had combined four paddles into a waterwheel, water became his power, his industry.
The first tribal village was beside a stream. When villages became cities, they too were beside the rivers. When the first men ventured across the vast, salty seas they departed from river-mouth docks and sought river-mouth landings on alien shores. When their harbor cities became crowded they moved upstream. And when the farmer chose new land he looked for springs and brooks, the sustaining sweet water, and for a river that would power his gristmill and float his produce to market.
Then man discovered coal and harnessed steam and laid iron rails and dug deep wells for water. And he dumped his trash, his garbage, and his sewage into the rivers, which he thought he no longer needed as sweet, flowing water. The polluted rivers poisoned him and beleaguered him with flood and challenged his wisdom and his skills. And man, who could send a rocket around the moon and dissect the atom, who could diagram the universe and weigh the sun, still couldn’t live a week without a drink of fresh water.
I was thinking of these things this morning as I sat for an hour on the bank of the Housatonic River which flows past my own house. And I was thinking of the springs on the mountainside and the brooks that flow from them to join the river. I was remembering the high plains of my boyhood, which were so long unsettled and little used because live water is so scarce there, where the only rivers I knew were the shallow, meandering Platte fifty miles to the north and the marshy, oxbowed Arkansas 150 miles to the south. I was remembering my first trip across eastern Utah, a barren land with scattered sage and bunch grass its only vegetation. Then I saw what I was sure must be a mirage, for it looked like a line of tall, green trees. It was no mirage. It was the towering cottonwoods that flank the Colorado River as it winds across the desert toward its spectacular canyons to the south. I stopped for an hour in the cottonwood shade, listening to the clamor of red-wing and yellow-headed blackbirds and marveling that a river could bring such cool, sweet change in the midst of the desert.
The Housatonic, like so many New England streams, is relatively short and uncomplicated as a river. It rises near Pittsfield, Massachusetts and flows generally southward about 150 miles across western Massachusetts and Connecticut to Long Island Sound. It has only three tributaries that are even called rivers, and two of those are no more than good-sized brooks. It is heavily polluted with sewage and industrial waste in its upper reaches, relatively clean through its middle course, and a sluggish, polluted stream once more in its lower forty or fifty miles.
Here where I know it best it is nominally clean, largely because the upstream pollution has been ameliorated by miles of intricate and sunlit wandering in the broad valley just to the north. It has a slow current here, in part because there once was a low power dam half a mile below my house. That dam maintained several feet of water in what was then a big marsh just up the valley from here. Men who were boys at that time tell me, with glowing eyes, about the number and size of black bass they caught in that backwater. But the hurricane of 1938 brought a flood that washed out one end of the dam. The hydroelectric plant was removed and the dam never repaired. The river dropped four or five feet, the big marsh soon drained, and now that legendary fishpond is a thicket of swamp maple and alder brush with a brook winding through it. And my section of the river, though still ten or twelve feet deep in places, is almost as placid as a millpond most of the time, though just below the old dam it surges into rapids and soon becomes a hurrying, white-water mountain stream. A heavy rain upstream or a quick snow-melt in March can raise the river level several feet overnight and set the current boiling. It is a river of uncertain moods.
Even where the farm fields come down to it, the river is lined with trees. That is the natural state of a riverbank. The trees here are typical eastern trees. There are a few willows, but not as many as seem to line the rivers of the Midwest. Most of them are the typical black willows of the East. And there is willow brush, much of it wild pussy willow and undistinguished except in early Spring when the silvery catkins appear. Just down the river is a grove of popples; they are American aspens, with tall, tapering central trunks and slim and scattered branches. Their leaves, like those of the quaking aspens of the western mountains, whisper in every breeze. There are a good many elms, mostly white elms, the traditional trees of the New England “common” and characteristic of riverbanks throughout the Northeast. Here and there is a slippery elm, with somewhat larger leaves, deeper-furrowed bark, and broader-winged seeds. There are a few white birches, though those big birches usually grow on higher, drier ground. And there are many basswood trees.
The basswood is known in Europe, and often in America, as the linden. The American species grows taller, has a broader crown, and its leaves are larger than those of the European linden. Basswood blossoms are unique. They are small, creamy white, and come in small clusters on long, drooping stems. Those stems spring from long, narrow, leaflike green wings quite unlike the tree’s large heart-shaped leaves. The blossoms are so fragrant they make the whole riverbank sweet in June, and they are so rich in nectar that it drips like sticky mist. You can hear when the basswoods are in bloom, for all the bees of the countryside are busy in the trees. Basswood flowers make excellent honey.
There are a few oaks along the river, m
ostly the familiar white oaks of the East but now and then a northern red oak, which really belongs on higher ground. There may be swamp white oak somewhere along my river, but I have never found it. I live on the northern edge of the normal range of this big, beech-leafed oak, but the chinquapin oak grows here, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, though we are out of its usual range. I may have mistaken a small swamp white oak for a chinquapin.
There are ash trees along the river, thickets of them here and there growing so close they are tall and spindly, as well as an occasional big, spreading tree. I can understand why anyone confuses the three species we have here, white ash, black ash, and red or river ash. All three grow to the same shape, all have bark much alike, and all have the same pattern of compound leaves. Black ash leaves usually occur in a nine-leaflet pattern, four pairs and a terminal leaflet on each stem. But both white ash and red ash have, usually, only seven leaflets, three pairs and a terminal one. Until I got it through my head that red ash prefers the wet soil of a riverbank or swamp margin and white ash prefers higher, drier ground, I often mistook one for the other. Black ash, incidentally, is also a wet-soil tree. So now when I see a seven-leaf ash on the riverbank I know it probably is a red ash, and a seven-leafer on high ground usually is a white ash. All ash wood, by the way, makes good fuel for the fireplace, especially while it is still green. There is an old saying in my area: “Ash green is wood fit for a queen.”
Just to add to this ash-tree confusion, there is also the tree commonly known as mountain ash, which grows wild in the Northeast but which is also used in ornamental planting because of its showy bunches of bright orange berries in the Autumn. This tree really isn’t an ash at all; it belongs to the same family as the apple, even though its compound leaves look much like those of the real ash. In England it is known as the rowan tree. The seeds of the real ash trees look something like half of a maple key, though the vane is longer, narrower, and not curved.
Also along my river, and most rivers of eastern America, is the sycamore, sometimes called plane tree or buttonwood. You can easily spot a sycamore by its smooth brown bark which peels off in large sheets and reveals cream-colored or soft greenish-tan fresh bark beneath. A big old sycamore sometimes looks as though someone had daubed it with splashes of dirty whitewash. The leaves look a good deal like the familiar maple leaf, but its fruit comes in the form of rough-surfaced balls an inch or more in diameter which turn light brown in the Fall and cling to the branches all Winter. I think of them as buttons for some Paul Bunyan’s mackinaw, and possibly those who first called the tree “buttonwood” had the same notion.
The shrubs and bushes along my riverbank include bush dogwood, viburnum, alder, shadbush, and sumac. There are three kinds of bush dogwood—red-osier, round-leafed, and silky cornel, which is also known as kinnikinnik. And that name, kinnikinnik, calls for a moment’s explanation.
Kinnikinnik is an Algonquian word meaning “mixture” and was used for the blend of dried bark and leaves, with or without tobacco added, which was smoked by both Indians and whites in the early days. Because the mixture was rolled between the palms to reduce it to a proper texture for a pipe bowl, French voyageurs called it bois roulé, rolled wood, indicating that the kinnikinnik the Frenchmen knew was mostly made of bark. One simple blend consisted of dried sumac leaves and dried inner bark of one of the bush dogwoods, probably the silky cornel. Hence the name kinnikinnik for this shrub. Sometimes the blend also included willow leaves, arrowwood leaves, and bearberry leaves. The red bearberry is also sometimes called kinnikinnik. I have smoked several blends of kinnikinnik and must report that I prefer tobacco in my pipe.
None of the bush dogwoods grows more than six or eight feet high, and all have typical dogwood leaves, toothless, with parallel veins, and growing opposite each other on the stem. Red-osier and silky cornel stems are maroon, but round-leaf dogwood stems are green. If it seems important to be sure whether a red-stemmed bush dogwood is red-osier or silky cornel, slit the stem and look at the pith. If the pith is reddish-brown, the twig is from silky cornel. If the pith is white, it is red-osier. All three of these dogwoods come to flower in June with flattened clusters of small, white, four-petaled flowers that mature into loose clusters of whitish or bluish-gray berries about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Those berries are not poisonous, but they are not really palatable either, though most birds eat them.
The viburnums range from straight-stemmed arrow-wood to the pimbina—often called high-bush cranberry though it is unrelated to the true cranberry—and the pithy-stemmed elderberry. Various of the straight-stemmed viburnums are called arrowwood. They all have roughly heart-shaped leaves, and tradition says the Indians used their stems as arrow shafts. That I doubt. But small boys cut them now and then and use them for homemade arrows.
In the Fall I watch for several of the viburnums, and for various reasons. The maple-shaped leaves of dockmackie turn a rare purple and add a surprising grace note to the October color. The pimbina’s leaves, also maple-shaped, turn maple-red and orange. And the nannyberry has grape-colored berries that shrivel and look and taste like raisins; for this reason, the bush is sometimes called wild raisin. But the birds like those berries, so I seldom find many.
Every countryman and most country visitors know the elderberry, which to me is as beautiful as most cultivated shrubs with its big, flat-topped clusters of tiny white flowers in June and its heavy heads of little purple berries in August. The oversweet fruit makes good wine or jelly—and stains fingers and clothing like ink. Birds like elderberries so much that they flock to the bushes when the fruit is ripe and sometimes break the brittle branches with their weight. Elderberry stems are full of soft white pith which can easily be pushed out to make tubes. Old-timers used them as spiles when gathering sap from maple trees. And country boys made popguns from them and used them as stems for corncob pipes in which they smoked dried sumac leaves out behind the barn.
The names “elder” and “alder” are confusing, but the elderberry belongs to the viburnum family and the alders are kin of the birches. Both like damp soil, which is why they grow along my river. Alders make thickets along most riverbanks and in the edges of swamps, sometimes growing fifteen feet high. In late Fall or Winter they can baffle the beginner because they have seed cases that look like miniature spruce cones. But in the Spring they bear flowers in the form of dangling catkins sometimes three inches long and eye-catching with their purple and yellow coloring.
Come mid-April and the shadblow blooms in the riverside woods like tall spurts of shimmering white mist among the leafless trees. I first knew shadblow in the high mountains of southwestern Colorado, which simply proves how broad is the range of this cousin of the apple. But I knew it there as serviceberry. In the Northeast it gets the name shadblow or shadbush because it comes to blossom when the shad come up the streams to spawn—or did come when the streams were habitable for shad, not heavily polluted. It blossoms in tufts of small, white, long-petaled flowers before the leaves appear. In June those blossoms mature into bluish-purple fruits that look like fat rose haws and have a pleasantly sweet taste. Many birds and all kinds of animals, from bears to chipmunks, relish those berries. Here on my riverbank the shadbush grows as a tall, straggly shrub or slim tree fifteen feet tall, with leaves much like apple leaves.
Sumac grows everywhere, in damp soil and dry, high and low. In the Northeast we have three common species, staghorn, smooth, and dwarf, but even the dwarf sumac often grows as big as the other two except when the stag-horn becomes a twenty-foot tree, as it does halfway up my mountainside. All three varieties grow here along the river, sometimes mingling in the same patch. If it is important to know them by name, remember that staghorn sumac has very fuzzy branches and stems, smooth sumac lacks the fuzz, and dwarf sumac has narrow green “wings” along the leaf stems. All of them bear fruit in fat, cone-shaped clusters, and the fruit of all three is deep red when ripe. This clustered fruit and its red color are points to remember if you live
or prowl where poison sumac may be growing—poison sumac fruit comes in loose bunches and ripens greenish-white or lead-gray. Poison sumac, which acts like poison ivy on contact with the skin and is to be avoided, is rather rare in the Northeast and usually is found only in swampland near the coast. I shall have more to say about poison sumac and other poisonous plants in another chapter.
There are vines along all rivers. In my area the most common ones are wild grape and Virginia creeper. The grapes here are mostly the tiny river grapes, the fruit about the diameter of a lead pencil and borne in clusters like Concord grapes. The vines run everywhere, along the ground, over the bushes, and up the trees, snares for unwary feet. Old vines are sometimes two inches through and tough as ropes, and I have seen them dangling from branches forty feet above the ground. Many northeastern river valleys have fox grapes, which bear bigger fruit. The fox grape was the wild ancestor of the Concord and other American varieties of tame grape.
Virginia creeper is a cousin of the grape and climbs by means of tendrils like those of the grape. Its fruit is much like that of the river grape but even smaller, ripens in loose clusters, and is edible but not worth tasting. Virginia creeper climbs even more vigorously than wild grape and for some reason seems to thrive on standing dead trees. I have seen a sixty-foot dead poplar festooned with Virginia creeper all the way to the top. Such a tree is a spectacular tower of flame in late September, for the Virginia creeper’s five-part compound leaves turn an especially brilliant scarlet.
There is little poison ivy along my part of the river, for which I am grateful. Most riverbanks abound with this obnoxious plant, which I shall discuss later with the other poisonous plants. We do have bittersweet, with its bright orange berries in tan husks, and we have deadly nightshade with its bright green leaves, small purple and gold blossoms, and poisonous, waxy-looking red berries. And we have patches of wild raspberry, the red-stemmed black-cap, whose small black berries are tedious to pick but wonderfully sweet and tasty. The long, slender canes of the blackcap are not as viciously thorned as the heavier canes of wild blackberries, which also grow along my riverbank, but they can be painful to bare arms or legs. Many places have the wild red raspberries, but there are few along my riverbanks.