My plan was to start out at the Connecticut River’s source, but that plan was ridiculous. A river has no source; it has only a hundred thousand sources: rivulets following improvised channels to streams that feed its major or minor tributaries. So, despite what’s written on the map, the Connecticut River that flows out of what’s called Fourth Connecticut Lake at the Quebec border is no river. It’s a runnel, a rill, a mere pipsqueak of a waterway. It’s a dude with an idea and a GoFundMe page. If this streamlet bore a sign, it’d say, seeking contributions.
I set out just before Memorial Day. I had a hammock, my camera, a microphone clamped to the handlebars of my bicycle. I wanted to look closely at people’s faces, to give them my full attention at a moment when so much in our society seems to be coming unraveled.
I rode south from the border, taking whichever road ran closest to the Connecticut River. Sometimes it was gravel, scenic and slow. Other times it was a narrow-shouldered highway with tractor trailers blitzing past. I met people on their porches and in their yards, or walking the streets of their cities and towns. “Pardon me,” I’d say. “I’m sorry to bother you.” And then I’d try to ask a question worthy of their time.
Here's what some of them said.
Did he miss it? He misses the people, he told me, but not what he called the “production people,” those big shots who thought – because they’d gone to school – they knew how to fell a tree. “Wrong, Bubba,” he said, looking right at me. “You ain't doing it right.”
Lilac season
Kim King was clipping flowers in her yard. I introduced myself, complimenting her lilacs. We chatted about her grandfather, who’d planted the lilac bush 14 years ago; she had a portrait of him tattooed on her calf.
I’m not sure why exactly I felt comfortable asking her what she was struggling with these days — it certainly wasn’t a question I dropped on every stranger I met. But when I did, she took a long breath and said, “I just lost my daughter four months ago.”
Macayla King would have turned 27 in March. She died of an overdose, after she, her boyfriend and another friend took cocaine laced with fentanyl. Kim had been the one to find all three of them.
“I just putter,” Kim said. “I try to keep busy.”
Macayla was Queen Beauty Vermont three years running, Kim told me. She was a hockey goalie. “She had five concussions on paper. I'm sure more than that.”
And she had a horse. A jet black, ultra-large workhorse named Fiona. Macayla had rehabbed her, starting 10 years ago. Now Fiona lives in Kim’s backyard.
“This is definitely all I have left of Macayla,” Kim said, slapping her behind affectionately. “We call her Big Butt.” She laughed and slapped her again. “Big Butt. Jiggle Butt.”
As I rode away from Kim and the horse, I passed yard after yard with lilacs in full bloom, tended and untended, their fumes wafting across the road. I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “A Widow’s Lament in Springtime.” It starts like this: Sorrow is my own yard.
That poem, too, is aching with flowers.
A couple hours later, 10 miles down the road, I met two teenagers, 18 years old, sitting under the bridge to Waterford, Vermont, in their souped-up purple VW sedan. Their names were Gavin and Dylan (or maybe Dillon, I failed to ask). Gavin drank a beer, took hits off his vape, and looked out across the Connecticut River.
As it happens, I have my own 18-year-old son. He’s sat many times in cars next to the Connecticut River near our home in western Massachusetts, drinking and smoking. I was interested in these kids.
Dylan’s dad, Ryan, was nearby, drinking his own beer. Moments before, he’d told me about his challenges with alcohol addiction. “At the end of the day, if you don't feel those head spins when you go to bed, you ain't doing something right,” he said, and then he hollered across the pavement to the boys. “Does it get out of control sometimes? Does the alcohol get out of control sometimes?” He turned back to me and said, “Yeah, especially when you put away 40 beers.”
I found this exchange startling, beautiful and messed up – all at the same time. To the boys, I said it was interesting how open Dylan’s dad was about his drinking problem.
“Um, yeah, that's a big thing around here,” Gavin replied. “Like, a lot of drugs, and if you don't drink, you do drugs here. That's the bottom line of the story. Like, everybody that you'll meet, they either drink or they do drugs. So that's like a huge thing around here.”
“This sticker right here, two of our really good friends passed away to a drug overdose,” Dylan said. “They bought cocaine and they got laced with horse tranquilizer and fentanyl.”
“Was one of their names Macayla?”
“Yeah. Macayla King, right here.” He pointed to a sticker, a portrait of her and her boyfriend, on the dash.
I don’t know if it was remarkable that I’d come across friends of Macayla so soon after meeting her mom. Such things happen in small towns.
These guys were younger than Macayla had been, but through siblings and friends they’d all traveled in the same small-town orbit. Dylan used to go out on the river with Macayla and her boyfriend. I asked what she was like, and he said she had a great sense of humor, so sarcastic he often couldn't tell if she was serious or not.
Gavin took a hit off his vape. “It's hard living here, man. Like, even during the summer, we have nothing really here.” He flicked his gaze in an arc across the water. “This is what we're doing. Just chill at the river. And what do you do when you go to the river? Drink a couple beers, that's just how it is. Everything's a mindset, and it's really hard to have a good mindset around here.”
I told the boys they were kind to talk to me, and then I rode further down the river, out of Littleton, out of Macayla King’s orbit, but still immersed in a splendor of lilacs.
Because it was the height of the season. Because sorrow is our own yard.
Raccoons, trees, grass
In Turners Falls, Massachusetts, I sat on a concrete wall above the spillway beside the town’s immense dam, watching several dozen sea lampreys swim in a clear pool. This was an animal I hadn’t even heard of until a week earlier. Splotched, multicolored, phallic, as long as a scarf or a donkey’s tail, they moved with supple undulations and then, for no reason I could discern, writhed their way out of the water onto bare rock, then back into the water again. They were old. Like, prehistoric old. Occasionally a grackle swooped down and nabbed a juvenile lamprey, the size of a big worm, and flew away with the lamprey writhing in its beak.
My intro to sea lampreys came courtesy of fisheries biologist Boyd Kynard — by far the most vocally expressive scientist I’ve ever met — who describes the lampreys as a keystone species for the entire Connecticut River Watershed.
“What they do, they go out to the Atlantic Ocean,” Kynard said. “They're six inches long, they stay out there for a year-and-a-half, and they come back and they're three feet long.” He paused for a heavy second, then dropped his voice like a jazz saxophonist hitting a deep and satisfying groove. “Feeding,” he said, “is really good out there.”
Here’s what I learned: The species emerged 220 million years ago, way before most other fish, way before humans, back when sharks first came onto the scene. They’re parasitic, latching onto larger fish with round mouths and spools of teeth. They employ a pointed tongue (it too has teeth) to drill a hole through the body of their host, and they feed on that host until its swimming slows from weakness, then let go and latch onto another fish in the same school. This spring and summer, over 50,000 mature sea lamprey passed through the fish ladder in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on their way upriver from the Atlantic Ocean. That’s a fraction of their historic numbers, but still — at two to three feet long each — it’s a staggering quantity of biomass.
“So these guys swim up the Connecticut,” Kynard said, “but not just up the main stem, they go to the head of little tiny tributaries.” And then, perhaps most importantly — at least for the watershed — they kick the bucket. “They die after spawning, so then their nutrients are just sucked right up by everything.”
Trace elements from the deep ocean, delivered courtesy of phallic swimmers to shallow pools far up the farthest tributaries of the Connecticut.
Now Kynard made a sound — a slurpy, sucking sound — scchhloop — attempting to re-enact with his own mortal body the process by which one bit of matter becomes enmeshed in another. “They've done studies on this,” he continued, stretching his arms the length of a sea lamprey. “Within two weeks, it's in everything. It’s in raccoons; it’s in trees; it's in grass.”
Wooh-sah
Ed and Peter were fishing when I came upon them at the Connecticut River Oxbow in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Seen from above, we could have been tiny, pinprick subjects in Thomas Cole’s famous 1836 painting of the Oxbow — ravaging wilderness to our west, pastoral awakening to our east — a world in the throes of transformation.
Ed, now in his 60s, grew up swimming in the Connecticut. I asked him what the river was like when he was a kid.
“Aw, it stunk,” he said. “You'd see turds, toilet paper, literally floating down the river.”
I heard similar stories upriver and down. A woman who grew up visiting the milltown of Groveton, New Hampshire, described the water’s color (orange) and its odor (bad). A man in White River Junction, Vermont, told me about his dad’s sawmill, right on the “floating sewer” that was the Connecticut.
And here’s what I saw on my ride down the Connecticut: dozens of bald eagles’ nests; ospreys diving for shad; eels migrating through clear water; and not a single floating turd. I’d heard for years there’d been a major cleanup of the river, but I didn’t know much about it, so I went to talk to hydrologist John Morrison of the U.S. Geological Survey.
“This dates back to the early 1970s,” Morrison said, “just about the advent of the Clean Water Act.” He told a story of wastewater treatment plants, enforced regulations for industry, and countless volunteer hours hauling mattresses and tires out of the river. He pointed at a chart showing nitrogen trends in the major tributaries to the Connecticut, including rivers classified as open sewers in the 1970s. “You can see a massive decrease in the amount of nitrogen loading from the system, so all those billions of dollars upgrading have been working. We see the results here.”
It’s not a done deal, Morrison told me. Runoff from lawn fertilizers; pet waste; sewage overflows during major rain storms – these are serious problems. But taken as a whole, life on the Connecticut is a different story than it was a few decades ago.
“When I first started in this job,” Morrison said, “we didn't have eagles all over the place. And now I don't think there's a day on the Connecticut River where we don't see an eagle. Like National Geographic kind of stuff — two eagles locking talons and twirling down to the river and picking fish off the surface.”
Due to residual pollutants, however, many of those fish aren’t safe for people to eat. Signs along the river warn of mercury contamination. Fishing in many locations is strictly catch-and-release.
At the Oxbow, under the watchful eye of Thomas Cole, I asked my new acquaintances, Ed and Peter, what satisfaction they got from catching a fish and throwing it back in the river.
Peter grinned. “I’m gonna go with wooh-sah,” he said. “That’s a little joke we have about being totally relaxed. You catch a fish, you look at the beauty of the fish, and then you go, ‘Alright, go back and get bigger for the next time.’”
He looked knowingly at his old friend Ed. “It’s your sound,” he said. “You give it to him.”
“Wooh-sahhhh.” Ed said, elongating the second syllable like a man who’s seen enough satisfaction to know, too, just how fleeting that satisfaction can be. Peter cracked up.
I got back on my bike. Paint that if you can, Thomas Cole. Those deep belly laughs skittering across the water.
In Holyoke, Massachusetts, I pulled up on a curb to talk to Felix Rivera. He was selling hot dogs with his wife. The economy, drugs, young people’s attitudes: according to him, it’s all going downhill. People used to work, help each other. Not anymore.
“You think it’s that different?” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he said. But isn’t that always how we look at the past, I said, like it was so much better? He looked at me somewhat perplexed, somewhat aghast. He said, “No, it really is different. It really is different.”
“If I didn't love it as much,” she said of the restaurant, “I would be able to sleep and not wake up and be like, ‘I need to add sliced Swiss to my list.’ I dream about it. I think about it all the time. It's very much a lifestyle.”
But the ospreys, cormorants, egrets and dozens of other species of seabird are living it up in Fenwick, Old Saybrook and Old Lyme. Unlike the other major rivers that flow into Long Island Sound, shallow sandbars made it impossible to establish an industrial shipping port here. Instead, it’s a marine estuary of global significance.
Life on the Connecticut
Perry Stream. Indian Stream. Halls Stream. The Upper Ammonoosuc River. The Ompompanoosuc River. Blow-me-down Brook. Sugar River. Saxtons River. Whetstone Brook. The Deerfield River. The Fort River. The Mattabesset River. Eightmile River. Falls River.
For 12 days I rode, talking to people on their porches, in their yards, while they stepped away from their jobs for a smoke. They were gracious, sometimes ornery, often hilarious, more frank and more vulnerable than I had any right to expect.
Pittsburg. Beecher Falls. Canaan. Colebrook. Littleton. East Ryegate. White River Junction. Plainfield. Bellows Falls. Turners Falls. Northampton. Holyoke. Springfield. Windsor. Hartford. Middletown. East Haddam. Deep River. Essex. Old Saybrook.
Outside a gas station in Centerbrook, Connecticut, a guy in a blue flannel shirt sat on a bench drinking coffee. His name is Russ. He isn’t from here, he wanted to make clear, he’s from the Bronx, but then he told me he’s lived here for 50 years (he worked at the engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney for 30 of them). For more than a decade, he’s been coming to this gas station to get his morning coffee. Why this spot? “I don’t know. It just happened that way, I guess.” Only a mile up the road is the town of Essex, with its gorgeous harbor and at least a half-dozen coffee shops.
“Yeah,” Russ said, “I don’t go down there that often.”
“You like this coffee?”
He laughed. “Yeah, it's all right. I get by with it.”
The odometer on my bike said 536 miles. I’d ridden all the way from the Quebec border to this Connecticut gas station to hear Russ from the Bronx tell me about his passable coffee. And for a while, as I rode away from him toward the mouth of the river, I couldn’t imagine any greater satisfaction than that.
“Life on the Connecticut" was made possible through a partnership between NEPM, NHPR, Vermont Public and the New England News Collaborative.
