Lyme
“This kind of thing kind of keeps your brain sharp,” he said. “There are a million different shapes out here, and you have to be able to signal out which ones don’t belong. It’s kind of like the nature equivalent of Where’s Waldo?”
Donegan and his 10-year-old daughter, Maeve, were accompanying her fifth-grade classmate, Adam Crockett, and fourth-grade teacher Adam Dayno for an outing that was part of the 22nd annual Source to Sea Cleanup.
Managed by the regional nonprofit Connecticut River Conservancy, the project sends thousands of volunteers for cleanup initiatives throughout the four-state Connecticut River watershed, including events this year in Lyme, Hartland, Claremont, Lebanon and Norwich.
While the goal is to pick up trash, for aged-glass and pottery collectors like the Donegans, Saturday’s scouring presented its share of treasure.
Smoothed-over blue, red and green glass fragments were among the retrievals, which the Donegans will add to mason jars and illuminate with LED lighting for homemade decor.
“A lot of this stuff, like the red glass, is really rare,” said Donegan, who also has a collection of sea glass found along saltwater beaches. “There’s some stuff here we just can’t throw out.”
In 2017, Source to Sea Cleanup drew more than 2,500 volunteers who gathered more than 46 tons of trash from around 250 miles of river banks and waterways, according to a Connecticut River Conservancy news release. Dayno, a Lyme School teacher of 30 years who has taught each grade from second to fifth, has led annual outings as part Source to Sea Cleanup for about 15 years.
“It gives me the opportunity to talk to the kids about it (at school), and it’s as much about awareness as anything else,” said Dayno, who calls himself a conservationist in spirit. “Pollution travels a long way. What starts in a little village in Lyme can end up in Long Island Sound. That’s why we’re here.”
That and the treasure hunt.
For the Donegans, varying chunks of pottery also went home with the family, which they planned to try to match up with other fragments discovered while wandering the brook over time. The ceramic particles retrieved were extensive: flowery designs on pottery; a chunk of a teacup where the handle once met the base; an aged opaque bottle Niles Donegan believes was used for cosmetics; and a beige label fragment reading, “Royal Premium T&R Boot,” before being cut off.
“Boots in a bottle,” Maeve said quizzically.
Meanwhile, Dayno was examining a short wooden post that had been cut smoothly on both ends, down nearly to the height of a hockey puck — one of which, incidentally, was also found in the brook on Saturday. (Adam ended up earning the rights the puck after getting the better of Maeve in a game of rock/paper/scissors).
By this point, the group was more than a mile into the woods and appeared to be finding each new item more interesting than the last.
“That’s what this turns into,” Dayno said. “It’s a search for artifacts at the same time as a cleanup.”
Dayno made sure the cleanup wasn’t just a collection of keepsakes but a teachable moment, with plenty of talking points to cover as the group rummaged through sometimes-cryptic items.
What, exactly, was that rusted, cylindrical container that Dayno discovered? An oil drum and component to a boiler?
What about the “U” shaped metal bracket lined with hinges?
And what could the long rubber tubing dug out of the dirt by Donegan have been used for?
“We always ask questions about what stuff is as we move along,” Dayno said. “Sometimes, we can identify it, sometimes we can’t. But it’s always good food for thought.”
Lyme’s outing yielded two full 15-gallon bags of garbage and debris of widely varying vintage, from recent bottles and candy wrappers to rusted scraps of metal presumably left over from a de facto town dump that used to sit along the brook’s bank, according to Dayno.
Rusted auto axles and paint cans, decaying fence posts and barbed wire were all part of the findings, which the group recorded after the outing onto a data sheet to be sent to the river conservancy.
The outing is also good exercise — the out-and-back route to River Road amounts to a roughly 3-mile hike. Maeve and Adam were already used to hiking it, since curricula at Lyme School often incorporate the trail network surrounding the stream for outdoor education.
Sorting their findings back at the school, the group estimated it was about 50 pounds of material, a bit lighter than last year’s bounty.
“Maybe it’s because there were fewer heavy storms this year and less runoff,” Niles Donegan mused.
Or maybe it’s simply because Dayno’s group has been doing a fine job cleaning up the brook over the years.
“It’s a beautiful brook,” the teacher said. “It’s a little more beautiful now.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.