When the grandkids would come to stay with us in the summer, I took them down to the river every afternoon. The west branch of the Ompompanoosuc, rich with tumbling boulders and sandy shallows, flows right through the yard. While the 11-year-old hosted tea parties on a big rock, the two little ones helped me stack stones into arches, towers and houses for gnomes, always exploring where the center of gravity lay. At night we cured up on the couch with British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy, or at least a heavy, glossy picture book about him, picking which sculptures to try tomorrow.
When the kids became swimmers, we kayaked up and down the river from May to October. On a gravel bar along a wide, lazy meander, Bella ran a make-believe restaurant called Café Peru, and Kristov paddled me around on the front of his kayak-taxi, taking me to imaginary meetings on the Ganges. After every high-water event we rushed out to see what had become of our little settlement.
The kids are off having their own teenage lives now and haven’t been in the river with me for years. I don’t spend as much time in it either, but I do spend a lot of time hiking along it, watching and studying it.
Spring begins at the first sight of the male merganser, his pure white breast glistening against the gray-brown river. Then the bedroom window comes up and I sleep with one ear awake to the gurgles and tumbles of my favorite lullaby.
Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus is quoted as saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Sometimes the river invites me in, wading and even plunging, and other times she rages violent and muddy over big rocks, throwing whitecaps in the air.
Rivers are driven by their need to adjust. The laws of physics are behind this constant meandering. The river comes crashing into a bank, grabbing gobs of dirt and cobble. Then, deflected away, she slows and drops her load — first the heaviest rocks, then the gravel, then silt. The deposits form a point bar, like the home of Café Peru.
The bank that erodes, the cut-away bank, will sometimes be undercut enough to slough off slices of soil. Sometimes a river will cut away so much that it cuts clean through to make a short cut, finding the downstream curve. An oxbow lake is sometimes left by the abandoned meander, so named because it resembles the wooden frame and bow pins used with teams of oxen.
Landowners can become very nervous at meandering rivers, especially when the property line is the riverbank. Planting a healthy riparian border can be the best insurance policy. Not one little row of willows planted by the PTA, but 40 feet of willows, boxelders and shrubs on both sides.
Haying or grazing animals near the bank is the best way to lose real estate. Rivers need to meander to slow themselves down. They also need to have access to floodplains, swamps and escape hatches for when the water rises. During Tropical Storm Irene, the fields behind Strafford’s Upper Village looked like the Mississippi, as the Ompompanoosuc reclaimed her floodplain, which saved many houses and bridges downstream.
We get into a real quandary when a human structure is near a cut-away bank. The first line of defense is dumping riprap — slabs of stone — to stop erosion. Unfortunately, riprap channels the river and speeds it up, sending one person’s troubles downstream to the neighbor’s property.
Beavers love rivers as much as I do. They chew off trees, trees that evolved to grow on riverbanks and to be chewed by beavers. Boxelders and willows are experts at stump sprouting and these hairy sprouted stumps are experts at catching leaves and sticks and dirt during floods, allowing new soil to form, which builds up the bank.
Here, well upstream from Long Island Sound, our river is clean and mostly runs free. She does however suffer from riprap and invasive plants that did not evolve along with her. I find large piles of garden waste along the river, leaf rakings, grass cuttings, cat litter, mysterious bottles of unknown chemicals. The Edvard Munch scream of angst comes out for all the lost bloodroots, spring beauties, native ferns, goldenrods and asters that have been forced out by Japanese knotweed, goutweed and garden escapees from Eurasia that arrived in wheelbarrows.
My wish is that the west branch of the Ompompanoosuc, along with all the upstream brooks everywhere, remain free to meander, provide homes for beavers and wildflowers, and spark the imaginations of kids, and adults being kids.
Micki Colbeck, of Strafford, is an artist, a conservation biologist and a member of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.