Lost in Easton

How not to solder a padlock in the woods at midnight

2011-03-11T22:36:00.001-08:00

Since my one attempt at teenage vandalism did not come close to succeeding, I can tell the story.

When I was in eighth grade, the big chunk of woods behind our house was purchased and subdivided for development into what are now called McMansions. Because the land is quite ledgy and rocky with Dedham granodiorite, the first two operations consisted of cutting down most of the trees and then dynamiting the ledges and hauling the boulders off the shattered land.

This did not sit well with me, but as a 15-year-old with $10 in my savings account I was quite helpless to stop it. The developers had all their legal permits.

The dirt road to the development was quite a ways in the woods and blocked by large metal posts driven into the ground and secured with ametal chain and a padlock the size of a softball.

One day after school I decided to solder the keyhole of the padlock that held the chain in place across the dirt road. That way the trucks couldn't get in and cut and dynamite any more trees and ledges down.

This plan would take cunning and stealth and certain pieces of equipment: a Bernzomatic blow torch and a roll of solder from the cellar. It would also require sneaking out of the house at night after my mother went to bed. It would also require a Hogan's Heroes type of disguise, which in this case was all the dark stuff I had in my bureau and a navy blue ski mask, even though it was summer.

Fully equipped at about 11 p.m. I snuck out of the house with ski mask, matches, torch and solder and hiked through the woods to the construction site and tried to find my way down the little, circuitous deer paths I chose so as not to be seen beneath a street light. Once I got to the chain and lock I discovered I knew nothing about how to solder, particularly the part about heating the lock as well as the solder, and I didn't bring any flux. So the solder kept beading up and rolling off the padlock didn't plug up the keyhole, which my plan required.

After a couple minutes I heard voices and leaves rustling in the woods and froze in a cold sweat with visions of the fluorescent lights of the Easton Police Station and the inevitable call home to mom that I had been arrested, was in the pokey and needed bail money to get out. As the voices got closer, I panicked and bolted as fast as I could in the opposite direction: deeper into the woods toward Stoughton. I fell a few times, banged my knees and head on rocks and trees, scraped my face on saplings but just got up and tried to run even faster. I was scared but also astonished. How could I so easily get discovered and caught?

There were yells and screams of "Someone's up there in the woods," and it sounded like half a dozen people were following me. By their footfalls and voices I could tell were spreading out to cut off my routes of escape and trying to flank me from the sides to cut off any alternate routes. So I ran faster, zigzagged like a tailback and tried to throw them off my intended path, which I didn't know.

They were gaining on me. Who were they? Did the developer hire Green Beret squads to camp out and watch over their stuff at night just to catch people like me who didn't know how to solder?

Finally, like a deer in a deer drive, or a rabbit chased by a wolf pack, I zagged when I should have zigged and got cornered and tackled in the leaves and rocks. The man who knocked me down pinned me on the shoulders. He was much bigger than me. I couldn't wriggle away or see him. "I've got him," he yelled and the rest of the group converged. "What's this," one said grabbing my hand, "It's a blowtorch."

I still had the ski mask on. The group converged over me with clenched fists and wild screams about 'let's kill him.' At this point I thought my face would probably not have recognizable features within a few minutes and waited to hear what your own bones sound like when they crack on a warm mosquitoey night. I thought I was going to die.

"Pull his mask off," they yelled. The lead guy ripped the ski mask off my head. Then they all said in a puzzled voice: "Drugless?" It was my schoolmates. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

I told them my story and they told me theirs. I was trying to solder a padlock in the middle of the night. They had all taken LSD and had been running around in the woods high as kites since it got dark.

"We came this close to killing you, you idiot." They said.

So the soldering the padlock idea didn't work out.

Easton's Queset Brook

2011-02-16T10:57:00.001-08:00

This is a video me and my brother Tim made of us tracing the Queset Brook in Easton to one of its sources, Lincoln Spring next to the Easton Lutheran Church on Lincoln Street. The spring and the seeps nearby all flow into the little pond behind the Town Pool and then into Mr. Parker's little pond on Main Street. The back part of the video is at the wet meadow that used to be Flyaway Pond until the dam broke in 1968. Flyaway has now reverted to its natural state: a wild cranberry meadow.

We did this at Thanksgiving 2003 and as you can tell I was fascinated at the clarity and purity of the water in these little rills and brooklets that all come together a quarter mile downstream and go into the Queset Brook. Timmy's discovery of a big giant hellgrammite in one little rill helped to confirm my suspicion that this set of brooklets do not dry up in the summer. Hellgrammites are the larval phase of dobson flies and live in the water for years before emerging into flying insects. We also found some big crane fly larvae too, another sign of stream permanence. [Clue: because hellgrammites and large crane fly larvae tend to need to grow for 2 or more years underwater, we could tell these rills did not dry up every summer.]

This little network of spring and seep-fed rills are what supported the native brook trout of Queset Brook and what led 1700s settlers in Easton to name Queset Brook, "Trout Hole Brook."

Native brook trout could be restored to this part of Queset Brook tomorrow if the several intervening dams below were breached. These dams were first built for the Ames Shovel Works in the early 1800s and now have taken on 'ornamental' status. But in reality these tiny dams and the tiny ponds they have made serve only today to prevent native fish, particularly native brook trout, from living in Queset Brook as they did for millennia.

We made this video to illustrate a point. Just because a native species, like brook trout, was extirpated from its home 200 years ago does not mean we cannot today bring them back. At Queset Brook in North Easton, all of the fundamental elements are now present to bring the species back. The one missing element is restoring the connectivity of the brook by breaching the tiny 'ornamental' and/or forgotten dams that still lie in its headwaters. Restoring connectivity is critical to brook trout because during the summer they need to be able to get to where the water is coolest and they are incredibly well adapted to doing this provided there is not a 5 foot stone and concrete dam getting in their way; or by corollary a tiny pond behind the dam which artificially raises the water temperature of the brook to a point that the trout cannot tolerate.

Back in 1975 Easton had a 'dual bicentennial' which meant that Easton's 250th birthday since its incorporation in 1725 coincided by one year with the nation's bicentennial. Easton had much fanfare and parades and observances at this time. My dad was on the organizing committee. It just so happened that a few years prior, William and Elise Ames Parker and the Ames' family had donated to the town as conservation land all of the area seen in this video and the town built a set of stone-dust walking and bike paths through it, which are still there.

So in 1975 David Ames and the town somehow convinced the State of Mass. to do a one-time stocking of brook trout into Queset Brook and Picker Pond as part of the bicentennial celebration. My brother Tim and his friend John Brown caught lots of these brook trout and also noticed that many of them held over for several years in Queset Brook if you were hardcore enough to find them.

What the Town of Easton didn't do in 1975 was to ask how a native, self-sustaining population of brook trout could be restored to Queset Brook and what this would require. Instead, the Town and the State of Mass. elected the much easier route of dumping a 100 or so hatchery brookies into Queset for 'the kids to catch' and assuming they would disappear within a year by being caught or dying from lack of access to necessary habitat, which is basically what happened.

From the comfortable perspective of sitting here 40 years since, the error made by the Town Fathers of Easton in 1975, including my own Dad, seems head smackingly obvious. But at that time it wasn't obvious due to lots of cultural, psychological and sociological factors.

Or to put it another way. In 1978 when I was 13, I got up one Saturday morning on a lark and rode my 3-speed Schwinn bike all the way down Route 138 for 30 miles from Easton to the Segregansett River near Dighton to just try and see and catch a native brook trout and then turned around and biked home (which is uphill all the way) in time for supper, knowing I would get in trouble for doing it without telling my mother (she thought I was just riding down the street).

Of course, I pedalled past the Frates Dairy Milk Bottle in Raynham.

But why did I do this? Because at age 13 I was obsessed with seeing an actual native brook trout in its native habitat. Not a trout in a hatchery where you put a nickel into a machine and get a handful of pellets to feed them.. Not a stocked, finless rainbow trout dumped into a Cape Cod pond or Lake Massapoag in Sharon. But the real thing: a real, wild, native Massachusetts brook trout living in its native, aboriginal environment. And from buying Francis Smith's guide to the remnant trout of southeastern Massachusetts at Tight Lines in West Bridgewater, I knew the closest place to see a native Massachusetts trout was either in the Segregansett or the Palmer Rivers in Rehoboth and Dighton. So off I went on my bicycle with a little spinning rod tied to my back.

The experience was worth it, since it encouraged me to drag my Dad down to the Palmer River for a number of fishing trips in the swampy, mosquito infested jungle that the Palmer is. And I think he liked it. We even dragged my stepmother, Maureen, down to the Palmer one day when the mosquitos were incredibly thick. Then we stopped at the A&W root beer stand in Taunton afterwards and I got so sick from covering myself with Old Woodsmans bug dope that I puked all over the parking lot.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if we restored a native, functioning population of brook trout back to Queset Brook in North Easton in 1975 I would not have blown chunks all over the A&W root beer stand on Route 138 in Taunton where the car hop girls had to walk around.

But on the other hand, because I went to the Palmer River alot in high school, I did get to meet a box turtle who was slowly and methodically tromping along the brook bank and sniffing the air now and then. He (or she) was probably the coolest box turtle I ever saw because the woods were completely still and quiet and then there's this box turtle just box turtling around the moss next to the Palmer River and I was lying down on the ground a few inches from the box turtle making goofy faces at him. That was when all worlds coalesced and collided. It was just me, the Palmer River, the mosquitos, the moss, native brook trout and a very old box turtle ambling about in the woods wondering who the hell I was.

Redfin Pickerel in Easton's Brooks

2011-02-02T04:09:00.001-08:00

The redfin pickerel (Esox americanus) is the smallest and least known member of the pickerel and pike family, which contains the more well known and much bigger chain pickerel, northern pike and muskellunge. Chain pickerel (Esox niger) and redfin pickerel are the two species of the family native to Massachusetts.

Redfin pickerel are very small, usually less than 5-6 inches, and only rarely up to 10 inches. Since they are quite similar in appearance to chain pickerel, most people who have seen a redfin pickerel assume it is a very small chain pickerel.

Redfin pickerel occupy a fairly unique niche along the Atlantic seaboard: very small first and second order brooks. In some areas, such as northern New England, this niche would be occupied by the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). Unlike redfin pickerel, native brook trout are extremely intolerant to water temperatures much above 65 F.

Easton is unusually situated at the very top of the divide between the Neponset and Taunton River watersheds. For this reason, especially in North Easton, most of the brooks are truly first order streams, meaning they rise directly from isolated marshes, bogs, seeps and springs. In contrast, a second order brook is one formed by the joining of two first order brooks. Nearly all of the brooks in Easton are first or second order, meaning they are very small and have a very limited watershed. Brooks of this type have some very unusual attributes, including, unfortunately, that they can periodically dry up during prolonged droughts.

Prior to 1978-1979, an enormous tract of woods existed from Holmes Street and Linden Street in North Easton all the way to Stoughton and the Stoughton Fish and Game club. It was bordered by North Main Street on the west and Washington Street on the east. Around 1979 a large chunk of this land was turned into subdivisions.

Before 1979, however, I used to walk these woods quite a bit. They had all been cleared for pasture in the 1800s as evidenced by stone walls running through the woods this way and that. Just to the west of where Whitman Brook crosses the railroad tracks near the Stoughton line I discovered a tiny brook, barely a foot or two across, that stayed wet all year round, and flowed into Whitman Brook. So one day after school I followed its trace.

At some point a century earlier a farmer had a little cart path that crossed the brook and made a tiny bridge over the brook using some flat pieces of glacial rock nearby. It was quite odd seeing such an old, but obviously handmade little piece of construction way out in the middle of the woods. Leaning on my belly on the piece of granite I looked into the water and was surprised to see a tiny pickerel, no more than 3-4 inches long, hovering in the current like a brook trout, head pointed upstream, waiting for a little insect or other bit of food to float by. I watched him for about a half hour.

Now, in hindsight, I'm quite certain I was watching a redfin pickerel, whose ancestors had probably been living in that little tiny brook for the past 8,000 or so years.

Unfortunately, the little brook was destroyed the next year to build Phase IV of a bunch of McMansions.

Too bad.

The Logperch in the brooks of Easton, Mass.

2011-02-02T01:49:00.001-08:00

The Logperch is a member of the darter family of fish (Percina). This family also includes the yellow perch, so common to Easton's ponds and deeper, slower streams.

The darters are an incredibly varied and diverse group of freshwater fish, even though most are just a few inches long. The logperch is the largest of the darters, reaching a length of up to about six inches. Darters are unusual in that most lack swim bladders, have wildly outsized pectoral fins and the males display extraordinarily bright colors during mating season.

On the Atlantic coast, Massachusetts is just about the northern limit of darters, although there exist historic reports of the swamp darter in several brooks in York County in southernmost Maine. Interestingly, darters are quite common in the mountain brooks of central Vermont. Those I used to observe as a kid in East Corinth, VT were probably the Johnny Darter, one of the most common and best known of the family.

My experience with the logperch in Easton is limited to a single observation back in the late 1970s when I was in junior high school. We lived just up the street from Whitman Brook where it crosses Elm Street and goes into Langwater Pond and we used to muck about in the brook all the way to the Stoughton/Easton line.

One summer, most likely in 1977 or 1978, we had a particularly nasty and prolonged drought in and around Easton. Every thunderstorm missed us and you could almost hear the ground groan and sigh for lack of moisture. As my uncle Gilbert Heino would say, it was tough.

One day I walked down Elm Street to Whitman Brook and was shocked to find it was completely dried up just before it enters Langwater. Walking in the brook bed I found dozens and dozens of dead fish, lightly covered with mud. Most were about 4-5 inches long, very slender and kind of odd-looking. Coming back home I figured out, to the best of the descriptions in our various fish books, that they were logperch. Apparently what happened is that the drought was so severe that the logperch got stranded in isolated pools in the brook and when those pools finally dried up, the fish died in them.

What struck me then, and still today, is that we never knew these logperch lived in Whitman Brook. Even with all the fishing and wading and exploring we did in the brook during our growing up years, we never saw them. Apparently, they are quite reclusive little fish. Part of this might be due to our familiarity with the centrarchid family, ie. bluegills, pumpkinseeds and largemouth bass in the local ponds, as well as the chain pickerel. The bass and sunfish family are curiously non-shy, to the point that it almost seems they are as curious about you as you are to them, especially if you are swimming, where the sunfish will come up and nibble at your leg hairs. And underwater, with a diving mask, largemouth and smallmouth bass will swim right up to your face to check you out.

So absent further sightings since 1978, I can only surmise that for all those years of wandering about in Whitman Brook, there were logperch aplenty but they kept themselves extremely well concealed. This is the only logical way to explain how during that one very bad summer drought when Whitman Brook dried up there were dozens of logperch lying dead in the brookbed.

As a side note about our native Percina in Easton, many people are not aware that yellow perch engage in a very interesting spawning migration during April. I first encountered this at the back end of Picker Pond off Canton Street in North Easton. Picker Pond is fed by two brooks, one coming from Flyaway Pond and the other from Long Pond which both meet in a marsh before the pond actually starts.

Walking the little brook from Long Pond one April I was surprised to see fish in it everywhere -- far more than you would ever expect to see in such a small brook. Upon closer inspection I discovered they were all the yellow perch in Picker Pond. They had swam from the pond into the fast water of the brook to mate and lay their eggs. It was quite a sight.

The Brooks of Easton, Mass.

2011-02-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

This is a short medley of some underwater video I took in 2009 and 2010 in a few of the little headwater brooks in Easton, Massachusetts. Rather than wait for the 'full blown' coverage I'd like to do, this will suffice for now.

The first brook has no formal name. We've always called it, unimaginatively, 'the brook.' It's behind the house where I grew up on Linden Street in North Easton. It actually starts not far from Long Pond and flows east behind Canton Street, then between Linden and Holmes Streets, under the railroad tracks then into the Ames estate where it joins Whitman Brook on Elm Street. All of the video looking up at the trees is actually through the water -- that's how clear the water is.

This brook often dries up in the summer during dry spells, except for isolated pools, so its aquatic population is mostly insects, particularly water striders (Jesus bugs) and the occasional crayfish. This is from July 31, 2010, one of the hottest days of the summer. We had just gotten a big thunderstorm so the brook came up a bit from being almost dry. Since it was so hot I went out back of my mother's house and found this one tiny pool that was about a foot deep and took a dip. The water felt unbelievably good -- it was about 65 degrees probly. And clean !!!

The second brook is actually in East Mansfield. It is a little tributary of the Canoe River that comes into Canoe River campground at the 'tenting site' there. It's really pretty. This is about 200 yards up a red maple kind of swampy thing from the border of the campground. We had gotten a big thunderstorm the night before so the water is a bit turbid. This little brook has native bog iron in its bed.

The third brook is Black Brook at the old railroad grade in the Hockomock Swamp in South Easton. Black Brook is aptly named since unless the water is less than six inches deep it is so colored by tannic acid you can't see the bottom. It's not that the water is muddy or murky -- it's crystal clear -- but it is clear like reddish root beer is clear. The last clip is not underwater, but just looking down at the little pool just above the railroad grade with the reflection of the trees overhead.

The still photo at the end is my brother Tim standing above Queset Brook along Sullivan Ave. where it goes underneath the railroad tracks. This is what William Chaffin called "Trout Hole Brook" in his History of Easton from 1888. It is the one brook in Easton which has good, documented evidence of formerly supporting native brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). It lost its native brook trout population in the late 1700s when it was dammed up for the Ames Shovel Works, which caused the water to become too warm and polluted to support native brook trout. This section of Queset Brook could support native brook trout again if several of the old dams on it were removed, which they should since they serve no useful purpose except to louse up the brook.

What's interesting is how each brook has a completely different water color. The Linden Street brook is crystal clear; the little Canoe River tributary is cream soda colored and Black Brook is almost ruby red. This is from the varying amounts of tannic acid leaching into the water from decaying leaves.

The music is an excerpt of a little improv song I made up around 1994 on a cheap Casio keyboard. A few months ago I put an electric bass guitar on it which thickens it up a bit. The melody line is a transparent rip-off of the melody line of "Third Stone from the Sun" by Jimi Hendrix with various fake embellishments.

[Note: The compression used by youtube doesn't like underwater video that much; on my computer it looks best at the '360p' setting.]

Status and Future of Atlantic White Cedar in Hockomock Swamp, southeastern Massachusetts.

2010-12-08T00:02:00.001-08:00

"Of these swamps, the most notable is the Great Cedar-Swamp so prized for its timber in the early days of our history. These swampy lands have very little value now; but they contain abundant promise of making the best farming portions of the section. They only need thorough draining in order to utilize their deep, rich, vegetable deposits, and turn them into fertile fields. The day is coming when this will be done." -- W. Chaffin, History of Easton, 1886.

By Chaffin's description of the Hockomock Swamp in 1886, he established that the Hockomock Swamp was originally an Atlantic white cedar swamp and by the time of his generation, the Hockomock had been almost completely logged of its cedar and 'had little value now.'

In this recent overview, I presented aerial photographs from 2001-2008 showing the contemporary extent of Atlantic white cedar stands in the Hockomock Swamp.

The scientific literature on Atlantic white cedar swamps suggests a combination of several forces -- clear cutting of cedar, changes in drainage patterns due to road and rail bed construction, and an asymmetrical dominance relation with swamp red maple -- have conspired to create permanent changes in the balance of cedar and red maple in the Hockomock to the great detriment of cedar.

Based upon these factors, it is unclear if the extant coverage of white cedar in the Hockomock can or will increase in the future on its own; if the remnant cedar stands in the swamp today are in decline and will continue to decline; and if active remedial efforts are necessary to increase the size of the stands or, perhaps are necessary to prevent further loss over time.

Laderman (1989) offers some sobering thoughts with relevance to the Hockomock:

"Hardwood and shrub leaf litter inhibit cedar germination to less than one percent."

"The floor of a wetland previously supporting Atlantic white cedar is the most favorable substrate."

"Cedar swamps have generally higher water levels than nearby red maple swamps and are flooded for longer periods."

"It would be expected that definitive guidelines for management of a tree that has been harvested since the first Europeans settled on the continent would have been developed long ago, yet this is not so. As with many other plentiful resources in the early days of development, the supply of cedar seemed endless. When all the cedar that was easy to remove was gone, the operators moved on. If less desirable cedars remained, they were commonly taken for fence posts, shingles or even firewood. Fast growing hardwoods often replaced cedar, and the nature of the forest changed."

If Laderman's conclusions are true, this offers little hope for natural regeneration and expansion of Atlantic white cedar in vast portions of the Hockomock where it is now completely absent; and little hope for the expansion or even continued maintenance of small, isolated stands.

Atlantic white cedar are now completely absent from the Hockomock in a zone extending east from the old railroad bed, to Route 138 and to the abandoned Maple Street/Hall Street road grade from Raynham to West Bridgewater, except for one small, isolated stand just west of Maple Street. This area comprises a large portion of the Hockomock.

This aerial shows a complete absence of cedar east of the railroad grade (yellow line) to Route 138 (red line) and beyond. The dark green areas are cedar. The question is: are these green zones of cedar shrinking or growing? If they are shrinking, then we are watching the demise of the last large remnant of the Great Hockomock Cedar Swamp.

If we assume this entire area was heavily logged for cedar in the 18th and 19th centuries (which general information suggests was the case), the aerials suggest that the area west of the railroad grade successfully regenerated in cedar while the swamp east of the railroad grade did not. What is striking is the high density and large expanses of cedar all the way up to the railroad bed and its complete replacement by swamp red maple on the other side of the rail bed. Having walked through this area extensively and field checked the aerials, I can confirm that cedars are completely absent east of the rail bed to Route 138 and the swamp in this area is virtually pure red maple.

The pattern exhibited at the 1880 railroad grade suggests it dammed the swamp enough to 'dry out' the swamp east of the grade, thus making conditions more suitable for colonization by red maple which now totally dominate the Swamp to Route 138 and almost to Route 24. This fits a pattern seen across the swamp, wherein extant cedar stands are invariably found 'above' (ie. upstream) of these roadbed dams (where the water is impounded) and are absent directly below them (where the roadbed has made the swamp slightly drier). This presence/absence pattern is seen at the north/south crossings of the Old Colony railroad bed, at the abandoned roadbed at Maple Street and at Route 24.

It is difficult to look at the aerial image above and not see that the white cedar swamp originally extended well to the east of the railroad grade and was somehow, in the past, truncated by it. But if our model assumption is true that all of this area was logged for cedar in the 19th century, something other than logging alone caused cedar to fail to regenerate east of the railroad grade. The most likely answer is a change in seasonal water table due to the grade itself that favored red maple on the 'dry' side. If we assume the area on both sides of the railroad grade was logged equally, we have to assume conditions were sufficient for cedars to regenerate from seedlings and small trees on the left side of the grade but conditions had changed enough on the right side of the grade to allow red maple to get the upper hand. And according to Alderman, once red maple gains a strong foothold in a logged-out cedar swamp its dominance becomes permanent. This appears to be the case from the railroad grade to Route 138.

The Uniqueness of the Hockomock

As noted by Laderman, most Atlantic white cedar swamps in southeastern Mass. were formed in kettle hole depressions after the Wisconsinan glaciation, wherein large blocks of glacial ice were buried by outwash debris and created isolated, deep depressions in the landscape after deglaciation. The Hockomock is 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than these small cedar swamps and is much more hydrologically complex (it's a lake bottom, not a kettle hole). The large expanse of the Hockomock and its numerous lobes has made it much more susceptible to man-made water level changes (due to large-scale road building, primarily) than much smaller and hydrologically simple kettle-hole shaped cedar swamps. Despite its larger size, I believe this has made it much harder for the Hockomock to regenerate its cedar stands after severe or total cutting because drainage changes have tended to fragment the swamp and cause large scale water table changes that tend to favor regeneration by red maple over cedar at a magnitude not seen in smaller, much more confined cedar swamps.

The area surrounding Nunkets Pond in the Swamp supports this hypothesis since (assuming a 1800s heavy cutting) its cedar have regenerated and its overall drainage pattern has not been altered:

While I have not extensively investigated this hypothesis, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of a cedar swamp and the degree its drainage patterns have been altered and its ability to regenerate and maintain its original Atlantic white cedar stands after severe cutting. Smaller, more hydrologically simple and isolated cedar swamps tend to be better able to regenerate and not succumb to takeover by more aggressive and generalist swamp red maple.

As a simple matter of area, you could fit a lot of small cedar swamps into the Hockomock. It's just that big. But regeneration of cedar after cutting during the past 150-200 years seems to be much more depauperate in the Hockomock than in smaller cedar swamps. Moreover, wide swaths of the Swamp today have the appearance of a monoculture -- red maple -- and what is known of cedar swamp dynamics suggest a 'tipping point' where a swamp dominated by red maple tends to stay that way permanently due to the highly specific germination and growth needs of cedar.

This suggests a disturbing hypothesis; either the extant wide swaths of pure red maple in the Hockomock were always pure and always there (which means most historical accounts were completely wrong), or the Hock has been radically and permanently altered by severe cutting of its cedar and drainage changes due to road building that favor red maple over cedar.

Why Should We Care?

As much as I like tromping about in the vast, pure red maple stands of the Hockomock, I can't help feeling I'm walking (slogging) through a man-made monoculture. Aerial views of the Hock show actual tree species distribution patterns that are explained better by human intervention than natural distribution of tree species and suggest human intervention in the last 200 years as radically and negatively affected the habitat value of the Hockomock, which after all, was preserved in the 1960s solely for its value has habitat, particularly for rare and endangered species requiring large amounts of undisturbed natural habitat.

Laderman (1989) reports unique and high habitat values for large intact Atlantic white cedar swamps, all the more important in Massachusetts because most of its cedar swamps no longer exist:

"In the Northeast, a preferred winter browse for white tailed deer is white cedar foliage and twigs. Cottontail rabbit and meadow mouse and feed of cedar seedlings ....

"Cedar stands in the Great Dismal National Wildlife Refuge supported the great bird density of coniferous forests censused in the United States in 1981. These stands held nearly twice as many birds per unit area as a surrounding maple-gum forest. Parulid warblers are the most dominant birds in Great Dismal cedar stands; prairie, prothonotory, hooded and worm-eating warblers, oven birds and yellowthroats comprised about 3/4ths of the breeding birds found. Prairie and worm-eating warblers appear to be particularly dependent on the Great Dismal cedars. An "over mature" stand, one with most trees over 100 years old, was particularly well populated."

So as a general rule, the extent to which the Hockomock today has veered away from its natural condition detracts from the very values for which it has been recently preserved. What's missing is an analysis of to what extent and in what fashion the Hockomock no longer resembles itself, as defined by its character prior to being mauled by loggers in the 19th century and road builders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

References:
Laderman, A.E. 1989. The Ecology of Atlantic White Cedar Wetlands: A Community Profile. U.S. Dept. of Interior. Biological Report 85 (7.21). Washington, D.C.

Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland

2010-12-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

If you walk very deep into the Hockomock Swamp on a fall day and lie down on your back, this is what you see.

The Wildlands Trust of Southeastern Massachusetts has reproduced and put on-line (mirrored here), the full text and illustrations of the landmark 1968 book: "Hockomock: Wonder Wetland." It is in PDF file format and can be read and downloaded here.

For many years, in a cardboard box up in our attic in Easton, our dad, Allan Watts, kept about 100 copies of this seminal book, and around 2001 my brother Tim Watts grabbed a copy and hunted and pecked on the keyboard of his computer to write much of the book's text onto his website, GlooskapandTheFrog, to preserve it. As Timmy wrote:

"We have shamelessly copied the book here on our website. The only contact we could make about using it was with Ted Williams. Ted wrote the history chapter. He was pleased that we wanted to use his writing on our website and was surprised that copies of the book were still around after thirty years. We were unable to contact the others who contributed, but we used their writing anyway. It's just too good and too important to be out of circulation. This booklet came into my hands only because my dad was part of the small group that recognized the value of the Hock thirty years ago. Although I was quite young thirty years ago, I can still recall seeing bumper stickers around the Town of Easton where I grew up. They said, "Don't Knock The Hock."

This site, "Tispaquin's Revenge," and its mirror site, "Lost in Easton," and Tim's site, "Glooskap and the Frog," are no more or less our attempts to build upon the power that "Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland" held within our small, pliable heads when we were 12 and wanted Dad to bring us down the Snake River or the Hockomock River after work in the canoe to fish for perch and pickerel and look for giant snapping turtles in the depths of the Hockomock.

Now that my dad has been gone since 1996, and it is more than 40 years since Betty Anderson, Ted Williams and Henry Moore wrote "Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland", something in me feels a need to take stock of what has been gained and what has been lost in the Hockomock since that pivotal time; and as important what has changed, or has not changed, in peoples' psyches about the Hockomock since that time. In other words, my key concern is where is the Hockomock headed? Who is taking care of it? Who is looking out for it? Who is keeping their finger on its pulse and vital signs? Do we even know if it is healthy or not? And how do we know? What are its vital signs?

Those who wrote and distributed "Hockomock" in 1968 had a more daunting task than we have today. During their time, as the bulk of the text shows, it was a huge task just to explain and defend a wetland's very right to exist. At this time, swamps were considered vile, useless things that needed to be quickly filled or drained and converted to 'useful' land. "Hockomock" was a brave and unrelenting scientific assault on this false paradigm, and shows a young Ted Williams exercising the type of muscle and sinew he has since parlayed into becoming one of America's finest conservation writers. It is not coincidental Ted cut the first notches in his belt defending right of the Hockomock to exist.

But as Ted knows well, the places championed by rising writers need to be continually protected long after the fanfare and hubbub and grant funding has passed them by to newer frontiers. The Hockomock is one of them. Where in the past, engineers with drafting pencils could obliterate the Swamp with one stroke (as they tried in the 1960s), the Hockomock and many places like it now face death by one thousand tiny paper cuts. None of these paper cuts in isolation enough to singly raise the ire or attention of alert citizens groups, but collectively enough to make the place not function or exist anymore, except as a shell, a spot on a faded map, a forgotten sign nailed to a dying tree.

This is what I fear for the Hockomock. Today the Hockomock is not healthy. It is not in good condition. It is being pelted by blunderbusses of insult from all directions. These insults are not abating. What is abating are the existence and interest of those who profess a goal of protecting the Hockomock. Which brings us to the key questions:

What is the Hockomock?

What is the baseline to gage its health?

As the Hockomock existed in 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 or 2010?

Who gets to choose?

The folks who wrote "The Hockomock" in 1967-68 knew they had started a battle, not finished it. They expected us to finish it.

Do we care enough to finish it?

Are we aware enough to finish it?

It's up to us now, in 2010, to frame the debate in the same way Kathleen Anderson, Henry Moore and Ted Williams did in 1968.

In the fall of 1990, me and my friend Bob LeSieur took a rental plane from Mansfield Airport at night to Buzzards Bay and back. Bob flew, I looked. It was night by the time we got into the air. Once we got up to about 1,000 feet we could clearly see the entire landscape in which we grew up below us, defined by light and lack of light. What I noticed was that from Mansfield south to Cuttyhunk was an almost relentless onslaught of artificial light. Except in the ocean itself, not a single small space, from Plymouth to Providence, was not dotted by a Christmas Tree necklace of bright sodium lights.

Except the Hockomock Swamp. The Swamp stood out as a giant black spot of no light surrounded by endless light. I could discern the Swamp's bounds in the night, at 1,000 feet of altitude, just by seeing where the light stopped and the darkness began, from Taunton to Easton and Norton to West Bridgewater. Bob and I touched down in Mansfield after about an hour.

That same night, John DeVillars, then the Mass. Commissioner of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, had convened a meeting in Bridgewater Town Hall to hear public comments on the state's proposal to declare the Hockomock Swamp and its surrounding environs an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), a new and untested state designation that would subject any new and large development (like a huge shopping mall) to a higher level of regulatory scrutiny than would otherwise be provided. At this time, a developer had just proposed such a shopping mall near Route 104 just south of Nippinicket Pond and the state felt the need to oppose it because of the damage it would do to the Hockomock Swamp.

At that meeting in the very old Bridgewater Town Hall, I had just come off a small plane flying over the Hockomock at night. And I told the 50 or so folks there what I had just seen. What I told them I saw was an island of darkness in a sea of lights, traffic lights and street lights from Boston to Martha's Vineyard. The only dark spot was the Hockomock. And I asked the folks in Bridgewater what could possibly be gained by our kids if that one place, the Hockomock, was slowly, year by year, criss-crossed so much by streets and roads and trains and highways and malls so that it looked exactly like everything else does at night: a giant parking lot.

That was 20 years ago. In 2002, the Massachusetts Legislature illegally pushed through a number of bills which forbade the state's own environmental department to examine the effect of putting a high speed passenger rail line through the last and most remote section of the Hockomock Swamp: in Easton. This was despite the ACEC designation given to the Swamp just 12 years earlier. Every effort by local Easton citizens over the past 30 years and John DeVillars himself in 1990, flew out the window because the MBTA decided to ram-rod a train line through the Hockomock because it was the path of least resistance, ie. who cares about a swamp anyways? Some battles are never truly won.

So here we stand today. Like the Dickey-Lincoln Dam Project proposed from 1955-1970 in northern Maine's Allagash and St. John Rivers, the MBTA's plan to wreck the Hockomock will never be truly dead so long as they cling with their cold dead fingers to the 1880 right of way through the Swamp and pray over chicken heads and feathers for a U.S. Congress dimwitted enough to fork over $5 billion to put it up 6,400 feet of tracks on stilts to satisfy George Carney.

This is not the debate we should be having in 2010. My father fought and won this battle in 1966. We, as a State, decided the Hockomock should be protected and preserved. An entire generation of kids, like myself, have grown up with the safe knowledge that the Hockomock will not be screwed with again and the battles our parents fought to save it will not need to be fought over and over and over again.

My friend Bill Townsend said to me, "we are the water that wears away the stone." But the corollary is, "these bastards have endless supplies of sand to wear the gears smooth." Choose your quaint aphorism and follow the dollar.

But I do know the Hockomock Swamp today is losing. Losing ground. Losing vitality. Losing support. Losing its life.

As any map from 1968 shows, the Hock's trajectory since has been toward retreat, not advance, and like Pometacom and Tispaquin in 1676, it has nowhere to go. Is anyone building new swamps lately?

Looking down at the Hockomock from Bob LeSieur's rented Piper Cub in 1990 and seeing the sea of darkness in the Swamp was like in 2003 when I wandered deep into the swamp and noticed how unbelievably quiet it is. Henry Moore wrote in 1966:

"Why do we value a swamp that cannot be drained, filled, flooded or even "used" or "improved" in the modern sense of those overworked words? Stop reading here if you know the answer. Keep going if you don’t.

The Hockomock Swamp is a 10-square-mile living example of why the best "use" or "improvement" of most wetlands in this or any other state is often to simply leave it alone. Twenty-five thousand years ago the Hockomock was buried under glacial ice. Twelve thousand years ago it was a lake.

Today it is a self-perpetuating 7 1/2 billion-gallon water storage and flood control project that didn’t cost a dime to build or operate – and never will if it is preserved. It is also a treasure house of bird, animal, fish, reptile, insect, plant and forest life that didn’t cost a penny to assemble and house – and never will if it is preserved.

Possibly most important, it is a 6,000 acre oasis of peace and quiet in a world gone mad with speed, noise and strife. It can always remain that way if it isn’t destroyed in the name of "progress."

If you lie your head on the trunk of a swamp red maple in the heart of the Hockomock Swamp, look up, and then turn your head gently, this is what you see.

Big Foot Paw Print Discovered in Bridgewater Triangle !!!

2010-12-05T20:22:00.000-08:00

Well, it does look amazingly like a human-type footprint. But it's actually Nunkets Pond, just west of the Nip in the Hockomock.

They don't grow small Big Foot in the Hock, you know.

Reconstructing the Hockomock Swamp: What Used to be There and How Do We Restore It?

2010-12-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
November, 2010

Commonwealth of Massachusetts aerial photos from 2001-2008 provide a good overall picture of the landscape and vegetation types which exist today in the Hockomock Swamp. These photographs show that today, only 15-20 percent of the Swamp is dominated by Atlantic white cedar and most of the Swamp is completely bereft of the species. These photographs suggest that road and railroad grades built through the swamp have drastically changed drainage patterns in the Swamp in favor of regeneration of pure stands of swamp red maple and against regeneration of existing and former stands of Atlantic white cedar. This essay proposes that unless active efforts are made to eliminate the negative effects of these man-made drainage changes and to actively re-seed Atlantic white cedar where it once grew and has been eliminated, Atlantic white cedar will eventually disappear from the Hockomock and be replaced by pure stands of swamp red maple. Such an event will eliminate much of the biodiversity of the Swamp and allow it to become a man-made monoculture, rather than a natural place.

In the map above, I have arbitrarily broken the swamp into four sections or "lobes." Section 1 is that portion from Howard Street in Easton east to Route 138, south of Route 106 and north from the Snake River at the outlet of Winneconnet Pond and Route 495.

Section 2, the "Central Section" is south of Route 106, north of Route 495, and east to Route 24, including the Nip and Nunkets Ponds.

Section 3 is the long vertical lobe east of Route 24 where the waters of the Nunketetest (Town River) join with West Meadows Brook south of Prospect Street and Route 106 in West Bridgewater.

Section 4 is Dead Swamp in Raynham, and just to the east, Titicut Swamp, both cut on their northerly sides by Route 495 and its cloverleaves. While I could add Little Cedar Swamp in Easton, just above Route 106 and Pine Swamp in Raynham, this map gives the lay-out of what most people consider the Swamp proper.

Looking at the large scale map, it is easy to see the Hockomock's ultimate origin as a glacial lake bottom, with the swamp now forming the 'shoreline' of the lake. This glacial lake is variously called "Glacial Lake Taunton" or the "Leverett Sea" depending on which geological text and author you look at. The higher grounds, easily seen because they are now the sites of roads and houses, are peninsulas in the original glacial lake where the land was higher. The smaller 'dots' of swamp and lowland on the peninsulas and around the main mass of the Hockomock correspond to 'deep' holes in the glacial lake.

Once you view the Hockomock as a glacial lake you can see how it formed: the lowest spots in the lake bottom, not having an outlet (due to various restrictive bottom conditions), slowly infilled over the past 8-9,000 years with vegetation which kept decaying into peat, creating a flat, level surface of rotted vegetation spanning 6,000 acres and five towns.

Mass GIS imagery from 2001-2008, taken in late fall and/or early spring, gives us a unique tool to gauge the existing vegetation types of the Hockomock because during these times of year, the deciduous trees in the swamp (mostly swamp red maple) have lost their leaves and look greyish purple at high altitude. White pine and Atlantic white cedar retain their evergreen color.

White pine only grow on islands and high ground in and along the swamp. Atlantic white cedar prefer much wetter areas that pine cannot grow in. By comparison to USGS topographic maps, comparative foliage color, and field checking, it is easy to distinguish stands of pine and cedar in the swamp. Through this process we can generate an accurate map of contiguous Atlantic white cedar stands in the swamp. By looking at such a map we can see there are surprisingly few stands of Atlantic white cedar in the Hockomock today.

The largest Atlantic white cedar stand is in Section 1, between Howard Street in Easton and the Raynham Dog Track on Route 138 in Raynham (click on image to see full size). I've drawn yellow lines to delineate the Swamp boundary from the 'high ground' around it. This helps to see the Swamp as the level remnant of a glacial lake bottom, with 'islands' as well as 'tributaries.' Route 495 and the Snake River, the outlet of Winneconnet Pond are at the bottom of the photo. The red line is the old railroad grade east of Route 138. The Atlantic white cedar stands can be easily seen as the green foliaged area in the middle of the photo. You can tell at least part of this aerial montage was taken in late fall, due to the cranberry bog in the left center being bright red. The Easton Rod and Gun Club and dug trout pond off Howard Street is just above and to the right of the bog.

In the above photo, I've narrowed down on the Atlantic white cedar stand in Section 1 to show it in greater detail. Here, the coloration difference between cedar and white pine is obvious (the white pine has foliage that is a 'yellower' green than the cedar); and I have been able to field check these differences in the photos by walking this section of the Swamp. The color differences are real. What is immediately obvious is the sharp line between the cedar stands on the left (west) side of the old railroad grade (the yellow line) and their complete absence east (right) of the railroad grade; and how dense cedar stands tend to hug the edge of the Swamp on its west side to the right of the cranberry bogs.

The yellow line is not an arbitrary marker: it is the railroad bed of the Old Colony Rail Line, built through the Swamp c. 1875-1880. It is raised above the Swamp by about 10 feet and is made of imported earthen fill. When it was built, a number of narrow 'box culverts' of roughly cut granite were placed at its base at scattered intervals to allow the water from the Swamp to continue moving from West to East (left to right). As these aerial photos show, the railroad grade has prevented the growth and regeneration of Atlantic white cedar on its east or 'downstream' side. As the photo shows, there are no white cedar stands east of the railroad grade, yet they are are very expansive on its west side right up to the grade. This is because the grade acts as a dam in the Swamp and makes the right side (the downstream side) drier than it used to be and dry enough to keep cedars from effectively competing with swamp red maple, which can tolerate drier conditions than cedar. From the railroad grade east to Route 138 and then to Maple Street/Hall Street, Atlantic white cedar are completely absent.

In these closer photos of the Swamp next to the old rail grade, you see darker 'lobes' moving left to right. These correspond to slightly wetter areas, which correspond to the location of box culverts on the railroad grade that let water through. In these aerial photos, denser stands of smaller swamp red maple are slightly darker in coloration and correspond to a wetter area.

In the second photo, I've drawn with yellow the 'plumes' of water flowing from the box culverts as they exit the railroad grade and travel due east. Three plumes are clearly seen in the photos. Note how they match well with dense stands of cedar on the left side of the railroad bed, but the cedar does not continue on the opposite side of the bed, which is pure swamp red maple.

To me these photos suggest that prior to construction of the railroad bed, the cedar stands continued to the east of the grade but were logged out and, for some reason, have not regenerated. This is odd if only because if we assume that the cedar stands were logged equally on both sides of the bed, both sides should have equally regenerated during the time it is presumed they were cut (150 years ago). Why the disparity?

Honestly, I don't know. But I think it has something to do with a complicated interaction with the fact that Atlantic white cedar trees propagate by dropping their cones on the floor of the swamp and the water levels of the swamp being changed by the erection of a 'dam' (the railroad grade) that made the east side of the grade not conducive to regeneration by cedar and also, by it being kept physically separate from extant stands of cedar on the west side of the grade.

Section II -- The Hockomock Central Portion

In Section 2, cedar are in a small cluster (I) just west of the now-abandoned Maple Street at the extreme southeast corner of Easton; around the shore of Nunkets Pond just west of Nippinicket Pond (II) and in a wide vertical swath just west of Route 24 (III) (click on image to see full size). The red line is Route 138 in South Easton and Raynham. The very high resolution photo below, of Nunkets Pond next to the Nip, shows how easy it is to discern white pine from cedar and high ground from low ground.

Hockomock Section III -- the Eastern Portion

Despite its size, Section 3 contains no contiguous stands of cedar, although scattered, isolated clumps appear to be present (click on image to see full size). Route 24 is on the left. The Nunketetest (Town River) is in the upper part of the photo, flowing left to right.

What Do the Images Tell Us?

Just as a ball park estimate, the Hockomock today appears to be comprised of less than 20 percent Atlantic white cedar; and those trees are in widely separated stands with vast, nearly pure swaths of red maple between them. Was it always this way?

Most likely not. Due to the durability of the wood and their straight trunks, Atlantic white cedar swamps were aggressively logged for their trees in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Hockomock. Logging was most likely done in the dead of winter when the swamp was frozen and paths the width of oxen or horse team could be made to cut and remove the trees. In all likelihood most of what remains standing in the Hockomock today are the chest-high seedlings Atlantic white cedar left over from those cutting operations, now grown up over the past 100-200 years into mature trees. What is puzzling, and the real point, is why most of the swamp's Atlantic white cedars have never regenerated. I believe this is due to a complex folding of the cutting with the construction of roads and railroad beds; and when these factors conspired to prevent the logged out stands of Atlantic white cedar from regenerating, even after 150 years, and has allowed swamp red maple to become the apex and sole canopy tree species in the 'new' Hockomock Swamp.

Evidence for this is shown in that the wide and broad monotypes of swamp red maple east of the railroad bed and Route 138 show no sign of re-emergence of cedar (ie. no seedlings) and total dominance by swamp red maple. This represents a paradigm change in the forest pattern of the swamp; and one that appears to be permanent. By our understanding of the cedar/red maple interaction, the remaining Atlantic white cedar stands of the Hockomock are most likely headed toward extinction and eventual piecemeal replacement by swamp red maple. Should we care?

You Can't Prove A Negative

Was every pre-colonial Atlantic white cedar in the Hockomock chopped down? To show that you'd have to physically inspect every cedar tree in the Hockomock: a daunting task. Was it possible? Yes, given Yankee 'greed and ingenuity' from the 1800s and 1700s to cut down every tree in sight. Did it actually happen? Nobody knows because nobody today has done the type of exhaustive checking such a conclusion requires to be valid.

But from a landscape restoration and preservation perspective for the Hockomock, this question is secondary. The primary question is what are we going to do today? Because most of the Hockomock is protected as state wildlife management land, any further cutting is basically illegal. That's good.

But that 'steady state' of preservation alone does not provide insight into what used to be, what it could be, what is stopping it, and what can be done now to bring the Hockomock in a direction toward -- rather than exorably away from -- what it was.

The Dams of the Hockomock

This photo shows perhaps the best evidence of how the dams across the Hockomock Swamp have altered its natural character. Note how the large Atlantic White cedar swamp west of the old railroad bed abruptly ends at the bed and disappears on its 'downstream' side and does not re-emerge. It is hard to envision a scenario where 18th and 19th century loggers would selectively clear-cut only the cedars on the right hand side of the railroad grade and leave the left hand side uncut. This suggests that a change in hydrology due to the railroad bed must be the cause of the complete absence of cedars on the right hand side of the railbed and their continued abundance on the left hand side.

A cursory glimpse at aerial views of the Hockomock shows four long dams crossing its mid-section, three formed by roads and one formed by a railroad grade. These are from west to east, the N-S railroad grade east of Route 138, Route 138 itself, Maple Street from Raynham to West Bridgewater and Route 24 itself. The first three lie 'straight through' the Hockomock, while most of Route 24 follows a peninsula of naturally higher ground except where the Town River itself crosses beneath it. The first three function as low, but potent earthen dams that greatly alter the depth and movement of water in the swamp; and in doing so the habitat for trees and wetland vegetation.

Should we care? I think so. Waterflow in the Hockomock travels from west to east. All three of the first barriers constrain this water movement, forcing it to flow through small culverts, now mostly clogged with debris. Walking on these barriers, their west side is obvious the "wet side" and the opposite side is noticeably drier. Water flowing through the swamp from west to east is forced to pool up against these dams and flow parallel to it until it finds a small box culvert that is still not totally clogged with debris.

A cursory examination of the railroad grade east of Route 138 shows a high density of cedar swamp on the west side of the grade and a total absence of cedars on the east side remarkably coincident with the railroad grade itself. This railroad grade was built c. 1875-1880. The MBTA prizes this overgrown railroad grade because it wants to use it to build a high speed railroad line from Stoughton to New Bedford. But now, because of the enormous, and admitted, negative effects of raising and rebuilding the grade to accommodate 80 mph passenger rail, MBTA has proposed putting the rail line through the Hockomock on stilts, or as they say, a 6,400 foot long 'trestle.'

Well, fine. This means that whether the train ever passes through or not, the existing railbed can be dug up and removed, restoring the swamp's natural flowage pattern. I am not concerned at how this might affect existing ATC and dirt bike use, since this use is being conducted illegally anyways.

The old Maple Street/Hall Street 'grade' from Raynham to West Bridgewater is another story. Except as a conduit for illegal ATV traffic, it serves no purpose except to radically and negatively alter the drainage pattern of the Swamp. As you can tell by walking along it from the Raynham end, it forces Black Brook to flow parallel to it for more than 1,000 feet, making the west side of the berm unnaturally wet and the east side unnaturally dry. In a place like the Hockomock, where just a few inches of difference in standing water and water table changes the entire tree species assemblage, the berm has a decidedly negative effect, heaped upon the fact the grade/berm never should have been built in the first place and will never carry any traffic ever again.

Simple Solutions?

It would take one summer season with a couple excavators and a few dump trucks to remove both of these post 1880 'dams' that cross the width and breadth of the Hockomock, just by digging them down to swamp level and removing and trucking out the artificial fill used to create them. The cost would be less than repaving a similarly long section of Route 24 which is done almost every year. And unlike repaving Route 24, once done it would be done in perpetuity. The natural drainage pattern of the Hockomock would be permanently restored and rescued from a time when people wanted to destroy it but only lacked the capital to do so. Then put in boardwalks so people can walk through.

Time to End the Trope of the Abused Child

Efforts to save what is left of the Hockomock date back to the 1960s. For obvious reasons, which I do not knock, the emphasis was placed on not allowing the rest of the Swamp to be filled and destroyed, as was certainly the tenor of those times. But that was nearly 50 years ago. The available land was bought and a fairly good-sized chunk of the Swamp was placed under state ownership. The path toward the destruction of those purchased lands was averted. The folks involved rightly breathed a sigh of relief. They deserve immense credit for what they did.

But this is 50 years later. During this time the uplands and swamp directly adjacent to the state-owned part of the Swamp have been chewed and ravaged by umpteen subsequent encroachments. All of which trend negatively on those values for which the Hockomock was first preserved: as a wild, clean and unspoiled place amidst a helter-skelter of urban-suburban pavement of ugliness.

I use the "Abused Child" analogy here in the sense that it is good for the police to come and stop your husband or boyfriend from beating your kid to death with a tire iron; but that interdictment alone does little to help the kid figure out how to save her sense of self and make it in the world. There is a difference between a tourniquet and triage and a stable existence. The preservation efforts on the Hockomock in the 1960s were the tourniquet and Medivac triage. But it is foolish to confuse these efforts as commensurate with a stable, normal and healthy post-traumatic existence.

Exploring the Bridgewater Triangle: Was Bigfoot a Bull Moose?

2010-12-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
November, 2010

Since around 1970 a number of authors, bored newspaper reporters, amateur attention seekers, the easily befuddled, the benignly mentally unstable and the slightly or highly inebriated have combined efforts to weave a rich tapestry which persists today under the name, "The Bridgewater Triangle."[1]

Why a Triangle and not a Trapezoid?

As the character Eb in Neil Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon points out, any three points form a triangle. If you add one more point, you get a trapezoid, or a rhombus, or a rectangle or a square.

Author Loren Coleman takes credit for naming the Bridgewater Triangle around 1970. His choice of polygons was not coincidental, since at the time much hay was made about the presence of the "Bermuda Triangle" aka "The Devil's Triangle" in the mid-Atlantic.

Whether fuelled by sincere belief, hope of fame or a bit of both, Coleman was astute enough at marketing to realize that glomming onto a then-in-vogue phrase associated with the supernatural would give "The Bridgewater Triangle" media traction not available if he had named it "The Taunton Trapezoid" or the "Hockomock Hexagon" or the "Raynham Rhombus."

Once Coleman had selected this admittedly catchy name, he had to explain why he selected the specific vertices of his triangle; why he did not choose others; and why he ignored 'supernatural' events that were reported near but outside the strict perimeter of the triangle he drew in pencil on a AAA road map of Massachusetts.

Coleman's choice of a highly specific shape, the triangle, and a highly defined bounds for that triangle, should have been derived from a scatter plot of reports and sightings that were constrained to within that triangle at a rate greater than would be expected by chance.

But once Coleman published his chosen shape (a triangle) and selected its vertices and bounds, any subsequent reports and memories of weird phenomena would tend to be those occuring within the bounds of the arbitrary lines that Coleman first drew.

This creates a self-reinforcing dynamic, called bootstrapping, wherein people who had 'weird' experiences within the Triangle feel encouraged to report them, while those who had 'weird' experiences outside the bounds of the triangle feel proportionately less encouraged to report them, lest their reports disturb the pre-set bounds of the Triangle. And then, voila, subsequent reportings tend to support the validity of the original, arbitrary bounds and shape of the 'triangle.'

Medical researchers have long been aware of this psychological effect on both subject/informant and researcher, which is why drug evaluations are done "double blind" wherein neither the test subject or the researcher knows who got the drug and who got a placebo. This all derives from the placebo effect, wherein patients given a pill they are told might cure their ailment sometimes respond positively even though they were given a sugar pill. And doctors, with lots of time and effort on the line working to devise a new cure, will often subconsciously interpret study results to show the drug has a productive effect, simply because they know which patients received the 'real' drug and which received a sugar pill. Hence the need for double blind studies.

The research collected by 'paranormal' researchers about the Bridgewater Triangle is a textbook example of all the key flaws of non-double-blind research. The researcher is clearly biased: he wants to find positive evidence to support his pre-determined conclusion.[2] The 'subjects' are entirely self-selected in the sense that they will only make 'reports' if they fit and support the conclusions the researcher has already told them. Not surprisingly, folks like Loren Coleman only get emails and letters from people who basically want to tell Coleman something that supports, rather than detracts from, what he has already said. Nobody takes the time to write to Coleman to say they have never seen UFOs or Bigfoot in the Hockomock. Self-selection bias is deadly and is well known to pollsters, psychologists and medical researchers.

As Kevin Spacey said to Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross about Helen and Bruce Nyborg: "They're insane, Shelley. They just happen to like talking to salesmen."

A Long Tradition of Scary Spooky Stories -- Now Updated !!!

The legend of the Bridgewater Triangle has all the characteristics of a meme: a story or belief that propagates itself regardless of its truth. "Urban myths" form an entire class of this psychological phenomena. We all know this phenomena from parties and jobs, where we tend to agree with somebody we wish to impress even if they say something we don't actually agree with. It's all a risk/benefit calculation.

If you're in a job interview or talking to your boss and they say something kooky, and you want to get the job or keep your job or get promoted, the risk of agreeing with them is minimal and the benefits are tangible. But the risk of disagreeing with them are real, ie. not getting the job, not keeping the job, or not getting promoted. So in a calculation that often occurs at the subconscious level, the risk/benefits are strongly weighted on telling your boss you agree with them, and if you want extra brownie points, providing them with an anecdote or argument that strengthens their position. Thus the origin of the "Yes Man."

This is the departure point between science and pseudoscience. Pseudoscientists seek information that confirms or supports their initial hypothesis. Scientists seek information that disproves their hypothesis; not because they want their hypothesis disproven, but because they know the only way for a scientific hypothesis to have an integrity is if it has been subjected to the most strenuous falsification tests possible. This is why car makers run their cars headlong into cement walls rather than into giant soft pillows to test the durability of their chassis when striking cement walls.

The Good Done by Bridgewater Triangle Enthusiasts

Once you take into account all of the psychological effects described above, the many and various 'reports' supplied by ordinary folk to 'paranormal' researchers about the Hockomock Swamp and the surrounding environs provide a great deal of value. Why do people take time to supply this information?

The first reason is simple: people like to be listened to.

The second is deeper: for many people who grew up around the Hockomock, the place does exert a sense of awe and mystery. I believe this emotional response is a good thing that should be encouraged. It's a child-like awe that, when removed, results in strip-malls, apathy, and obsessive television viewing.

Ultimately, the Bridgewater Triangle boils down to two questions that young kids always ask, "Why?" and "What if?" Our society seems determined to stamp out those questions. It is not a good thing, especially for the advancement of science.

The Hockomock has always been a cipher. This is a good thing. It would be a terrible loss if every square inch of it could be studied and analyzed to squeeze out, capture and contain for analysis every unknown which it holds. It would be a very wet, but very dry husk. Sort of like if a neuroscientist could exactly explain why Pablo Picasso or Louis Armstrong made every brush stroke and every trumpet note they ever made just by putting their preserved brains under a super high power scanning electron microscope.

From this perspective the reports of 'odd' phenomena around the Hockomock are of great value. Many appear to be honest and vivid sightings of wildlife. I do not doubt these folks saw 'something,' I only differ in my assumption of what they saw or thought they saw.

A classic observation, during the last 30 years, is of very large animals crossing small roads near and through the Hockomock. These are all very brief sightings (usually in cars) and in difficult lighting conditions (dusk, dawn).

Assuming these sightings of large animals are not hallucinatory, not highly exaggerated, and not just plain falsified, it is not too hard to come up with a short list of animals that would fit the provided descriptions. The animals are moose, black bear and large (200+) white tailed deer.

The problem with both the eyewitness reporters of these animals and their interpreters ('paranormal' researchers) is they have no clue as to the native historic animal life of the Hockomock and southeastern Mass. in general. This is not their fault. They just haven't done the historical research.

It shocks many people that moose and black bear were very common in southeastern Massachusetts prior to the late 1700s. Moose were common all the way down to the Elizabeth Islands and Cuttyhunk on the southernmost extremity of Cape Cod. There is a "Moose Hill" in Sharon, Mass. a few miles from the "Bridgewater Triangle" that is now a wildlife refuge and education center.

Due to the relentless (I would say insane) obsession of our 18th and 19th century forbears with exterminating every bit of wildlife from New England larger than a chickadee from their sight, virtually every large mammal native to eastern Massachusetts was extirpated by about 1900, except for tiny remnant fragments. Beaver, bobcat, mountain lion, moose, wolves, wild turkey, passenger pigeon and (nearly) white tailed deer were all made extinct in eastern Massachusetts by 1900 and many well before that day. This deliberate extirpation (by directed hunting) was abetted by the relentless, insane obsession of 18th and 19th century settlers to cut down every tree in Massachusetts.

Unlike the claims of 'paranormal' researchers, the above is all thoroughly and exhaustively documented in various laws passed by the Massachusetts Legislature from 1650 to present and is available for the looking in the Massachusetts Archives. But that takes work. And 'paranormal' researchers are not wont to spend much time examining historical archives which might produce 1700s or 1800s documents that provide a more mundane and prosaic explanation for alleged "Bigfoot" sightings near the Hockomock.

And, you can't sell a book or free-lance newspaper story based on evidence which shows a "Bigfoot" or "pterodactyl" sighting in the Hockomock was most likely a great blue heron or a big white-tailed deer. Once the fable has been established, the only money trail is to feed the fable to feed the table. As a freelancer myself, I understand this financial impulse, but the product sold is still fraudulent.

Moose and Bear in the Hockomock?

Moose have been gradually filtering back into Massachusetts for the past 40 years. However because they entered northern and western Massachusetts first, coming down the spine of the Berkshires, southeastern Massachusetts is sort of the station at the very end of the train line.

It is at least possible that a few adventurous moose from time to time have passed into and through the environs of the Hockomock in the past several decades. The Brockton Enterprise carried a story in the late fall several years ago of a deer hunter in Taunton claiming to have seen a moose, albeit briefly, in a dense wooded area near the swamp. To my knowledge there have not been any confirmed or repeated sightings.

Despite their size, moose can be extremely difficult to observe even in places where they are fairly common. Where I live in Augusta, Maine moose tracks are not uncommon along the banks of the Kennebec River. However in 20 years of living in Augusta and roaming the Kennebec River and adjacent woods I have never seen one, even though they are there.

In a woodland as thick and expansive and as lightly travelled as the Hockomock, a small group of moose, or an itinerant migrant passing through, could easily go completely unobserved and undetected.

The same can be said for black bear, although indications are the rate of black bear in-migration to Massachusetts is occurring much more slowly than with moose. However, black bear are notoriously reclusive animals and take great care to stay as far from people as possible. An itinerant bear in the Hockomock would be exceedingly hard to document except by sheer luck on the scale of winning Powerball.

As with moose, the most likely way that one would make 'first contact' with a moose or bear in the Hockomock would be to observe tracks or scat and this requires someone who knows exactly what to look for and to actually be looking for it. Complicating this is that today, most of the people who actually go into the Swamp do so with ATVs and dirtbikes along the powerlines and the old railroad bed behind the Raynham Dog Track. The noise created by these machines practically guarantees that if there were any large mammals around they would be long out of sight before you would have a chance to seem them.

A fairly typical 'sighting' was told to Easton writer Ross Muscato in 2005:

"Joe DeAndrade thinks the swamp may be the habitat of a creature yet to be identified. In 1978, DeAndrade, then 24, was standing on the shore of Clay Banks, a pond in Bridgewater near the swamp. His back was to the water.
''I was standing there, and for some reason I had to turn around," DeAndrade says. ''It was a chill or something inside me. And I turned around, and there, off to the right, maybe 200 yards away, there was this -- well, I don't know what it was. It was a creature that was all brown and hairy, like a big apish-and-man thing. It was making its way for the woods, but I didn't stick around to watch where it was going. I ran for the street."

Mr. DeAndrade's recreation of his 1978 encounter, at the site where it occurred, can be seen here.

This 'sighting' -- if it actually occurred -- has all the hallmarks of a moose sighting. Like most quoted by paranormalists, the anecdote ends just as it gets interesting. Two hundred yards is a long way away -- it's the length of two football fields -- and it's impossible to know how well Mr. DeAndrade is at calculating distances in just a few seconds. Even a bull moose at 200 yards would not be easy to identify to species especially if it was already moving into the woods. That Mr. DeAndrade says he immediately "ran for the street" instead of staying and trying to get a better glimpse of the animal says something.

This anecdote, from an unnamed informant, was given to paranormalist Chris Pittman of Franklin, Mass. in 2008:

"When I went to the building across the street from the Raynham Dog Track it was about 8 and just starting to get dark, we went to the back of the building. There are some trailers there that weren't there about a month ago, and some old cars. We went towards the woods to park our dirtbikes and there was a nasty smell so we looked around and in a trailer that was open there was a tarp down and there were 3 or 4 dead deer- I think that's what they were, couldn't really tell. They were all ripped open, with all the guts all over the place. It was nasty. There was evidence that someone was there, we saw footprints and some soda that wasn't open and we noticed that the building is more closed up that it was before. We also heard some noise coming from the tower part, it sounded like someone was slamming metal around. I have been in the building and walked around but didn't go in some of the back rooms because it was really dark and I didn't have a light... I have also seen dead animals like that before out on the powerlines, there was at least six stacked up, all ripped apart, and I have come across some hanging in trees."

While cited as a 'paranormal' observation, this anecdote has a mundane and grisly explanation. The informant happened upon a deer poaching operation. Deer hunting is common in the Hockomock and deer stands are found all over the swamp, usually on small islands of high ground or along its edges. Deer poaching is unfortunately commonplace in part because the chances of getting caught doing it in the swamp are slim to none. Poaching also helps explain the lack of any recorded kills of moose or bear in the swamp. It is illegal to hunt moose or bear in southeastern Massachusetts so even if someone did see one and take a potshot at one they would have to keep it a secret.

The next anecdote, again from 2008, is also easily explainable:

"My daughter and I were driving down Administration Road in the Bridgewater Correctional Complex... We saw a pine tree bent (not snapped but curved) in half with something standing on the tip of the tree, holding it down to the ground in the middle of the street. This was about 2:15 in the afternoon, on a Saturday. I was fixated on the fact that a tree could bend like that without breaking, but my daughter saw the "thing" right away and she was fixated on that. We had to stop because it was in the middle of the street. We looked at it and we just didn't know what to say. It looked like a tall man, hunched down a bit, in a skin tight black suit with large, almost bat type wings. He was a matte, not shiny black color, head to foot. He was standing, but hunched down, on the pine tree, his weight was holding down the top. he saw us and we looked at each other for just a few minutes then he straightened, leaped and flew over the top of the trees on the other side of the road. The pine tree he had been standing on, bounced back up slowly, and rocked back and forth a few times before stopping in it's normal standing position. That was all we saw. We were both awake, fully rested, lucid, drug and alcohol free and it was during daylight hours: 2:15 in the afternoon."

The description given is very close to a large wild turkey or more likely, a turkey vulture. The problem with a story like this is that we don't know whether the informants have any familiarity with local wildlife. Turkey vultures are enormous, strange-looking birds that are rarely observed up close and near the ground (usually you only see them flying in the air a considerable distance overhead). After a long absence from southeastern Mass., they are now making a comeback.

This anecdote, from 1975 but reported in 2007, is another that, if not completely fabricated, suggests a moose sighting.

"In 1975 I was driving my girlfriend home to Brockton. I don't remeber the name of the street, but traveling there from E.B. you start on Pleasant, take the fork to the left, it goes down a slight slope a few houses on either side, then there's (or was) a clearing where the power lines went through.

Anyhow, it's some time between 11 and midnight, and I'm driving along while my girlfriend was sound asleep. Up ahead I noticed a very large black mass in the middle of the road (just before the power lines). I can't tell what it is and while I'm still 30 -50 feet away I slow way down and put on my brights. I still can't see what it is but it's really large and it's absorbing the light from my headlights so I really have to stare at it. I'm thinking it's some huge trash bag or something and I'll need to pull it out of the road. I'm getting really close, 10 - 20 feet and I'm just rolling the car along, and I can't see what it is. But it's big, I had a 67 Plymouth Fury III 4 door, and this mass was well above my hood line.

So I'm going so slow I'm almost at a stop and I can't be more than 5 - 10 feet away, and it's taking in all of the light, I still can't see what it is. Then really slowly this thing lifts it's head and stares right at me!! It's face was bone white, no hair, mostly apelike, thick brow, wide jaw, no eyebrows. And still no body, but because of the size of the black mass it had to be at least 7 feet tall, maybe even 8.

It actually gave me a heart attack. I felt my heart stop for three full beats. Then I recovered, pulled around it and stepped on the gas. I shook from head to toe for hours, and for years after when I thought about it."

Again, the pattern is the same. Except for people who have travelled to northern Maine and are savvy about wildlife, the chance observation of an adult moose at night would be a truly bizarre occurrence in southeastern Massachusetts. Moose are extremely odd-looking creatures in part because their bodies rest on very long legs and they have, in some ways, very 'human-like' faces. The described height (7-8 feet) is identical to an adult moose.

Like all of these anecdotes, this one ends just as it gets interesting. The informant describes the "animal" as standing 5-10 feet in front of his car and towering over it. At such a close distance, even with high beams on the car headlights would not illuminate much of a 7 foot tall animal. But most telling is the informant fails to note how many legs it has. This would be fairly easy to discern by counting. Does it have arms? Is it standing on two legs? Given the length of time of the observation and the proximity to the animal, it would seem the informant could have at least counted and recollected how many legs it had and if it had arms or not. Lastly, the informant never tells us whether the animal walked past them to the other side of the road. It would seem the animal would have to get out of the middle of the road in order for the driver to continue down the road. But no, the 'story' ends abruptly with the animal in the middle of the road blocking the driver's car.

I like this anecdote because it neatly illustrates a consistent pattern in the type of observations submitted to and collected by 'paranormal' researchers regarding the Hockomock and the Bridgewater Triangle. On one hand you have vivid, up-close sensory descriptions of certain elements; but a complete absence of other sensory descriptions that should have, and could have, been made.

Then there's one of my favorites: "we didn't have a flashcube during the day" anecdote:

“My cousin lives in Raynham along the old Conrail tracks that run behind the Raynham Dog Track. He moved there in about 1988 and we were recently recalling a strange incident that happened about that time. I was around 12 or 13 and it had snowed an inch or two that night before. We were out in his back yard when we noticed some strange footprints in the snow. The footprints were not of an animal, but of a human being or so we believed. The prints were spread out showing very large strides and the prints were not extremely large and could easily pass for an adult size 13 or so. Here is what we found to be very weird at the time: the footprints ran straight through some very thick briars, shrubs and small trees. We attempted to take photos of the prints but were unsuccessful because we did not have a flashcube. Of course our parents all thought we were just kids being stupid and naive… As I remember his next-door neighbor had a chicken coop in his back yard, the direction from which the tracks originated. His neighbor had quite a problem with losing his chickens, as he thought to coyotes, which there are a number of out in that area, but I am becoming more convinced that coyotes were not his problem.”

Aside from all the other problems with this tale, the "tell" is that the photos didn't come out because they didn't have a flashcube. It is hard to understand why you would need a flashcube to take a picture of a large animal track in bright white snow during the day. That said, the usable portion of the description fits well with a moose track.

This anecdote, from 2004, again near the Hockomock, is suggestive of a moose:

"Another odd happening if you are interested, I was on Scotland Street in West Bridgwater which turns into a Bridgewater Street about halfway through and has fields on either side with dirt paths going into them for a large portion of the street. For fun a friend and I drove down one and parked to try and lose another car full of friends. He looked out the window and called my attention to a very large person who stood up in the middle of the field and then moved towards us. Needless to say we drove away very fast. I still have yet to meet anyone that large."

And some anecdotes, when examined textually, just make no sense. This is from 2005.

"I have a alien story that is all true and happened to me and my son. My son won't comment on it, but I was eye to eye with one of these beings. Here goes....One night, or I should say one morning, early in the morning around one or two I guess, my son and I were riding around after work trying to unwind before going home. Now this was in the late 90s that this happened. We were somewhere on Route 24 going toward Brockton, I was near the swamp area near Bridgewater. I'm driving down the road and I see this thing come out of the woods on the other side running right across the road. Thank God, there wasn't any traffic. I yelled to my son and asked what the hell was that, he said he didn't know. By my rate of speed and his rate of speed he was in a route for a collison with my drivers door, if he kept running across the highway. He kept running across, now I was almost up to him, I yelled to my son to hold on this was something big and it was going to crash into the car. I grabbed the wheel tightly, turned and looked out the drivers window and I was eye to eye with this being. He stood like a man, with big big black eyes, no pupils, just solid black, his body looked like it was all one piece. Nothing with joints. Then I closed my eyes for a second to wait for the impact, none came. I opened my eyes and pulled over immediately, hoping someone behind me saw what I saw, and there were no other cars near me, they were too far behind me to see. I was shaking like a leaf. I can't believe it didn't cause an impact. I couldn't believe what I saw. My son was shaking too, I asked him what he saw and he said he saw something but didn't know what it was. I could see he was shaken just like me. To this day he wont admit he saw what I did. I am telling the absolute truth about everything, and I would face God right now and swear in front of him that this actually happened. I never knew what the poor thing was running from. I do consider myself quite lucky though to be priviliged to have seen this being... I also have walked through the swamp area, and it has one of the most awful feelings to it. I just wanted out of there."

The "tell" here is that the driver did not even apply the brakes to avoid hitting the 'man-thing' running across Route 24 right in front of him; and that according to the man's own story he 'hoped' the man-thing would get out of his path before he struck it. Why not apply the brakes, especially if it might be a person? Another 'tell' is that cars on Route 24 travel at a speed of 60-70 mph which would make it impossible to get a 'good look' at a 'man-thing' right next to your driver's side window, unless you actually stopped the vehicle, which according to the driver's own story, he did not. Instead he says did not pull over until after the 'man-thing' apparently passed right through the body of his vehicle. None of this makes any sense.

I put this anecdote in a separate category called "Total Bullshit."

Analyzing the Anecdotes

I do not doubt the honesty of these personal anecdotes. Well, a little bit. Viewing them in succession allows you to discern repeating patterns. The most obvious is that a lot of people are scared stiff of the Hockomock Swamp; and that the mental stability of at least some of these folks is questionable, at least at the time of their observations.

An axiom of science is that you can't prove a negative. So, keeping to this rule, we can never completely dismiss everything these folks reported seeing and hearing since we didn't see and hear it at the same time and place as they. So we have to rely upon a preponderance of evidence approach, ie. why is it only people who are totally befuddled and scared the ones who saw strange things in the Hockomock? And why do these strange creatures hide from people who might approach an anomalous sighting more rationally?

I like these anecdotes because, unlike dry scientific reports and maps, they encapsulate a much broader and richer emotional depth of what it is like to live alongside the Hockomock. They don't tell us much about the swamp itself; but they tell us much about peoples' relation to the Swamp.

And the most common note is fear. Nearly every anecdote ends with the informant running or driving away from the Swamp in total fear and not coming back. The Hock is prickly in this sense; it does not suffer fools gladly but at the right time of year and place it rolls out the welcome mat and lets you in and become part of it, even if just for a few hours. The Hockomock is truly a scary place, in the sense that if you go into it you can die. But you can also just as easily die painting the side of your house, but still people paint the sides of their houses.

I like the mystery and intrigue the Hockomock evokes in people. It is good. We should be challenged by places so near and so full of questions that nobody can answer. It keeps us wondering and not so falsely self-assured.

UPDATE: To offer a partial concurrence with the commenter below, there is no question the Hockomock has long evoked a wide variety of emotional responses in people, especially in those like myself who grew up around it. My break with 'triangle enthusiasts' is whether these emotional responses, which are undoubtedly real, have any causal connection to phenomena outside the realm of science.

1. As an unwitting confirmation of this essay's theme, the Wikipedia entry for the Bridgewater Triangle is a stale rehash/plagiarism of all of the unattributed and undocumented crazy tales repeated over and over again in newspaper articles dating back to the early 1970s, none of which provide any factual substantiation.

2. To his credit, Chris Pittman of Franklin admits in his website that a piece of scat (ie. poop) he had initially attributed to a "Bigfoot" from the Hockomock is actually coyote poop from the coyote eating a deer carcass, including the skin and fur.

Poquanticut Cedar Swamp at Borderland State Park, North Easton, Mass.

2009-07-28T23:44:00.001-07:00

The former Poquanticut Cedar Swamp, where Leach's Pond ends and Poquanticut Brook begins. The two humps of trees in the center of the photo, now islands in Leach's Pond, were once islands in a dense white cedar swamp, where a modest upward elevation change allowed white pines and oaks and maples to grow. "Islands in the swamp" such as these are common in the Hockomock Swamp, several miles to the south, and were marked and mapped and named by the 1700s.

After the Hockomock Swamp, the largest Atlantic white cedar swamp in Easton was Poquanticut Cedar Swamp, which is now underneath Leach's Pond in Borderland State Park at the Easton-Sharon line.

In his 1886 History of Easton, William L. Chaffin (who referred to Leach's Pond as Wilbur's Pond) writes:

"These two streams both flowed into the Poquanticut Cedar-Swamp, where Wilbur's Pond now is. They united in the swamp, the main outlet for the swamp being the same as the outlet for the pond, namely, Poquanticut Brook. The larger of the two branches that unite to form it is Poquanticut Brook, or River, the branch at the west."

In the 1820s, after the Poquanticut Cedar Swamp was clear-cut of all its trees, General Sheperd Leach mined the swamp for bog iron ore. After the bog iron was removed, a natural earthen berm on the south side of the swamp was raised to make a pond to provide water for mills in Furnace Village at New Pond on Foundry Street (Route 106).

According to Chaffin, the Poquanticut Cedar Swamp had two outlets, with Poquanticut Brook being the larger and more westerly. He describes a second brook that drained the swamp from the east:

"This small stream had its source in the swamp spoken of, before Wilbur's Pond was made. It was considerably larger once than now, because it helped drain the swamp ; but the dam checked the flow of water into it, and cut off its main supply. It still contrives to live, however, drawing from the swampy land through which it wends its sluggish way enough water to make a stream. It flows southerly, crossing Rockland Street between the Tarteus Buck and the Mrs. Horace Buck places."

This information tells us that Leach's Pond was most likely created by closing off the east outlet of the Poquanticut Cedar Swamp and building a small dam at its westerly outlet, Poquanticut Brook. The dam at the head of Poquanticut Brook no longer exists. Leach's Pond now spills naturally into the brook at a depth of just a few inches.

Poquanticut Brook as it begins at Leach's Pond.

Leach's Pond

Because it raised the water level of the Poquanticut Cedar Swamp by only a few feet, Leach's Pond has always been shallow, never more than 5-6 feet deep in most places. Today, the pond is rapidly reverting to an expansive wetland.

In just the past 40 years, from when I first went canoeing at the pond with my father and brother in the early 1970s, Leach's Pond has changed dramatically. At that time much of the pond was sufficiently free of water lilies to allow for easy fishing without constantly getting your lure or bait tangled, and thick weed growth was confined to the shallow coves and shoreline. Today, nearly the entire surface of the pond is carpeted with water lilies, pickerel weed and floating bog islands. This can be seen in contemporary aerial photos in which it is difficult to even recognize a pond.

A long, low east-west gravel berm which forms the south side of Leach's Pond and the walking trail along the pond suggests the berm is natural, glacially made feature, most likely a small moraine. Moraines are formed when the front of a glacier remains stationary for a period of time, causing the rocks and gravel locked in the ice to be all deposited in one position. This occurs when the melting rate of the glacier is equal to the forward speed of the glacier, meaning the glacier is still moving (in this case, to the south), but its front remains in one spot. By this piling of gravel, a long, low natural dam is created, often with a large, shallow pond behind it. As the pond slowly fills with rotted vegetation, it becomes a wetland and finally a wooded swamp. The Poquanticut Cedar Swamp was likely formed in this way. Once the cedar was clear-cut and the bog iron removed from around the cut stumps, Gen. Sheperd Leach needed only to block the eastern outlet brook of the swamp and increase the height of the natural berm by a small amount to create a 200 acre pond that exists at Borderland today.

Upper Leach's Pond

Upper Leach's Pond (or what my father called the "back pond") is a vastly different place than Leach's Pond and is unique in Easton. It is much smaller than Leach's Pond and follows a north-south axis with steep shorelines. There is a small wooden dam at the outlet of the pond, which is only 2 feet high, and its outlet stream flows for just a few yards into a cove at the northern end of Leach's Pond. The stones in the outlet stream are stained bright orange with bog iron and in the summer tiny hornpout can be seen in its pools.

Most notable about Upper Leach's Pond are the numerous floating islands that dot its surface; its depth -- which ranges from 5 to 15 feet; and its crystal clear water. These floating islands, which are natural gardens of pitcher plants, sundew, swamp azalea and other bog plants, reveal the pond's original character -- a quaking bog.

A northern pitcher plant on a floating peat island in Upper Leach's Pond.

A quaking bog is created when over thousands of years, layers sphagnum moss fill the entire bowl of a pond. Deep layers of sphagnum moss form what we call peat moss. Peat behaves like a kitchen sponge when it is saturated with water. If you press down on it, it easily gives, and water squirts out the sides, top and bottom. Imagine carving an enormous kitchen sponge so that it perfectly fits the bottom contours of a pond. Now try to walk across it. Like a sponge, the surface of the bog bends under your weight, water squirts out from the pressure of your feet, but you still can walk across it. Imagine a small tree growing on the top of the sponge, just above the water level. If you jump up and down on the "sponge," you can make a miniature earthquake and make the tree bounce up and down. If you can do this, you are standing in a quaking bog.

A pitcher plant growing in a floating garden of sphagnum moss in the middle of Upper Leach's Pond, Borderland State Park, North Easton, Mass.

Quaking bogs are not common because they require a very special set conditions to be created. Most quaking bogs in New England begin as glacial features called kettle holes. A kettle hole is made when a glacier is in its final stage of melting and retreating. During this melting process, enormous amounts of water and gravel flow out from the bottom of the remaining ice. As the melt water flows in various directions it often cuts off small blocks of glacial ice from the main body of the glacier. These blocks of ice (which can be hundreds of acres in size and 100 feet thick) become buried under many feet of gravel and stone. When these buried blocks of ice melt, they leave a water-filled depression in the ground. If this depression (the "kettle") intersects with the local water table it becomes a permanent pond. If the kettle only intersects with the local water table during the spring, it becomes a vernal pool, the birthplace of toads and salamanders. If the kettle is deep with steep sides, it will remain a pond for millennia. Henry Thoreau's Walden Pond in Concord is a classic kettle hole pond, as are most of the deep, spring fed trout ponds on Cape Cod, like Hamblin's Pond, Schubael's Pond, Deep Pond, Spectacle Pond, Peters Pond, Mare's Pond and Big and Little Cliff Pond way down in Nickerson State Park in Brewster.

Upper Leach's Pond does not have the classic form of a kettle hole pond: which are roughly circular and have no inlets or outlets. However, its features suggest that like a kettle hole, it began as a glacially scoured depression filled with ice, which then melted, leaving a pond of medium depth that has been slowing filling in more many many centuries. So exactly how do we describe a very unique place like Upper Leach's Pond? This requires detective work.

A swamp azalea (Rhododendron viscosum) growing on an island of floating peat in Upper Leach's Pond, Borderland State Park, North Easton, Mass.

First, we note that Upper Leach's Pond is quite deep for a small pond. In most places, aside from the floating islands of peat and surface plants, the pond is 10 to 15 feet deep. Next we note that the dam at its outlet, a stack of three 8 x 8 boards, is only 24 inches high. If these three boards were removed, the pond would only drop in elevation by two feet, still leaving a fairly deep pond.

I have no idea what this flower is, except that it is growing out of the water at a floating peat island at Upper Leach's Pond. Note the white insect egg cases on its stem.

Third, we note the abundance of pitcher plants and sundews on the floating mats of peat that dot Upper Leach's Pond. Pitcher plants and sundews are quite unique in that they trap and eat insects. Pitcher plants do this by folding their leaves into a tall cylinder with a trumpet shaped bonnet that allows rainwater to collect inside. Thousands of fine hairs coat the inside of the trumpet, all pointing downward. Insects, especially ants, that explore the interior of the trumpet fall down into the tube and into the pool of rainwater at the bottom. The downward pointing hairs make it difficult for insects to crawl back out. Once trapped at the pool in the bottom, the insects drown and are dissolved and digested by the pitcher plant.

A pitcher plant at Upper Leach's Pond, showing the fine hairs pointing downwards that keep bugs from crawling out of its maw.

Sundews are much smaller than pitcher plants and capture insects by a very different method. The stems of a sundew end in a fleshy pad that looks like a canoe paddle. Each paddle is studded with tiny stems so that it looks like a pin cushion. The end of each pin is covered with a drop of sticky, glistening liquid. When an insect lands on the pin cushion, they become stuck in the drops of sticky liquid and many cannot escape. Once an insect is trapped, the sundew slowly wraps these pins around the insect and eats it.

A sundew on the edge of a floating peat island in Upper Leach's Pond, Borderland State Park, North Easton, Mass.

Pitcher plants and sundews evolved the ability to attract and eat insects because they live in wetlands that lack key minerals they need to live. While most plants obtain these minerals from the soil, pitcher plants and sundews basically live in water, and more particularly, water that lacks these minerals. To make up for this deficit, pitcher plants and sundews obtain these minerals by catching and eating insects. Ponds and swamps that are fed by perennial brooks contain enough minerals in their water to give plants all they need. Only in special cases, like a kettle hole bog fed only by rain and snow and groundwater, do pitcher plants and sundew have the advantage over other aquatic plants due to their ability to catch insects and extract their food directly from them.

A sundew next to a water lily about to bloom on a floating peat island in Upper Leach's Pond, Borderland State Park, North Easton, Mass.

An important feature of Upper Leach's Pond is its inaccessibility. When I first went there, in the early 1970s, the entire area was still owned by the Ames family. One Saturday morning, my father put our canoe in the truck and we drove up Lincoln Street to Bay Road and down the unmarked dirt road to the white farm house next to Leach's Pond, in what is now Borderland State Park.

We put the canoe in at the east end of Leachs' Pond and as the morning went on and the sun rose higher we made our way to the northwestern end of Leach's Pond. Upon entering a small weedy cove, we pulled the canoe out and dragged it over a gravel berm and entered the "back pond," Upper Leach's Pond. Once in the back pond, from my seven year old eyes, we entered a different world.

The pond was much deeper than Leach's Pond, where your canoe paddle would often touch the bottom. And it was full of strange, floating islands and mats of vegetation that suddenly dropped off to the bottom, which we could not see. The water was crystal clear, and when the sun was at the right angle (it was noon by this time), you could see "caves" beneath the floating mats of peat and, sometimes, if you cast your Jitterbug just right and didn't hook the island, a 2 pound bass would come out from a cave and suck in your Jitterbug with a resounding thwop.

Because we were in a canoe, we could paddle right up to the mats in the middle of the pond and look at the scarlet and green pitcher plants growing at their edges, and my father explained what they were and how they caught bugs. When we went home that afternoon, as the sun went down, I felt as if I had been briefly dropped by spaceship into a weird world where some things were familiar, like bass and pickerel and lily pads and water, but much of it, like floating islands covered with odd looking plants that ate bugs, were nothing like I had ever seen before.

To get the photos of seen here, I brought my underwater digital camera and swam out to one of the larger floating islands and precariously pulled myself on top of it and then walked around as if I was its proud, albeit, temporary, owner. This is something I have wanted to do since I was 7.

Puds Pond

Puds Pond is due east of Upper Leach's Pond, and the two lie almost parallel to each other like tiny finger lakes, separated by a small neck of high ground extending south from Mountain Road. Puds Pond is created by a 12-15 foot high poured concrete dam, which due it its design and materials, appears to have been erected in the early 20th century by the Ames family. Chaffin makes no mention of Puds Pond in his 1886 History of Easton, which suggests the pond and dam did not exist when he wrote his book.

Unlike Leach's Pond, Puds Pond is deep, at 12-15 feet at the concrete dam. Unlike Upper Leach's Pond, it has no floating islands of peat, and based upon the height of the dam at its outlet, it was never a natural pond. What is now Puds Pond was until the early 20th century a small, clear, fast-flowing brook that shrank to a near trickle during the summer. This can be deduced by measuring the height of the dam and the length of the pond. The height of the Puds Pond dam is about 12-15 feet and the length of the pond created by the dam is about one half mile. This can be seen at the pond's inlet at Mountain Road, where it is a small wetland with a surface just a few feet below the road bed. This tells us that in the half mile distance from Mountain Road to the 12-15 foot high dam at the outlet of Puds Pond, the brook dropped 12-15 feet in one half mile. That is a gradient of 24-30 feet per mile, which is a very fast moving stream, perhaps one of the fastest in Easton. The road at the top of Puds Pond was not called Mountain Road for nothing.

Puds Pond is the best swimming spot in all of Easton. The water is amazingly clear (you can see bottom down to 20 feet) and there is a perfect area of sand and gravel for wading at the small beach just to the right of the dam. Before Puds Pond was made part of Borderland State Park, this little beach was very popular with Easton residents, especially teenagers, because you could drive to the pond from the dirt road at the intersection of Bay Road and Allen Road, or by walking in from Mountain Road. Unfortunately, these same teenagers and young adults had a habit of trashing the area with beer cans, McDonald's wrappers, broken bottles and breaking off every nearby living tree to make bonfires. This turned an incredibly scenic and enjoyable spot into an unsightly and dangerous dump. Today, you have to walk into Puds Pond from Bay Road or by a very long walk from Massapoag Ave. and the swimming area has a goofy "no swimming except for pets" sign posted on a tree. Feel free to ignore the sign and go swimming anyways. It's your pond.

UPDATE: Since writing the above I have examined aerial Ektrachrome slides taken by my father, Allan E. Watts, of Borderland State Park during the fall of 1970. From these photos it is fairly obvious that Upper Leach's Pond was naturally a part of the lower pond, and presumably during the early 20th century the Ames family had constructed a low berm and trail to connect the west side of Borderland to Puds Pond and in doing so made a dividing barrier which created what we now see as Upper and Lower Leach's Pond. As best as I can surmise, what we now call Upper Leach's Pond was "scooped out" much more by glacial action than Lower Leach's Pond which would explain its much greater depth.

The Beaver's Imprint in Easton

2009-07-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

A young beaver in Seven Mile Stream, Vassalboro, Maine. Photo by Tim Watts.

Few have ever considered the profound effect the beaver had on shaping the early development patterns of Easton. Due to intense trapping for its fur in the 1600s, beaver have been extinct in Easton for 200 years and have yet to recolonize the town.

Chaffin, in his History of Easton, confirms this:

"There were several places known in early descriptions as Beaver Dam. One was just west of Stone-House Hill ; another was in the extreme northwest part of the town. Numerous small streams and swampy places made the town a congenial home for the beaver. Remains of a beaver dam were seen by Alonzo Marshall near the stream northeast of his former home, and beavers were known to have made their dams at Cranberry Meadow, and west of the old Nathaniel Perry place near the Mansfield line. The dam the remains of which were found by Mr. Marshall is referred to in the North Purchase records as early as 1709. There was also a Beaver Pond, so-called, as late as 1752, on Whitman's Brook, near the old Joseph Drake place."

Chaffin further states of Cranberry Meadow, the area which is now occupied by the Morse Bros. cranberry bogs on the north side of Foundry Street near the Southeastern Regional School:

"Cranberry Meadow extends quite a distance westward from the railroad crossing at the old Dean saw-mill on Prospect Street. Lots from it were in great demand when the land was first divided. Much of it was overflowed in the winter. It was originally a beaver pond. In the action of Dean vs. Brett, elsewhere noticed, the following statements were offered in the evidence : 'It appears that said Meadow was formerly flowed by the beavers, or natives, or antediluvians, and in that condition was found by [Timothy] Cooper.' Reference is made to " the time the natives had it for a fishing pond, after they had destroyed the beavers which made the dams below. ... It was a natural pond or bog when Cooper found it in 1706."

Further evidence of the beaver's imprint on Easton is found in the use of the word "meadow" in the name of many of Easton's brooks, from Dorchester Meadow Brook near the Stoughton line to Mulberry Meadow Brook in Furnace Village. Most of the freshwater meadows for which these brooks are named resulted from the long-term damming activities of beaver. These dams would have kept trees from growing along the banks of the brooks and maintained a field-like meadow with a single sharp drop at the dam outlet. This meadow effect would have been further maintained by the beaver continually cropping and removing young trees growing at the water's edge. The effect would be a stair-step of shallow, sinuous ponds dominated by annual aquatic vegetation with a shoreline of mature trees many yards away.
A typical meadow created and maintained by beavers. This one is on Worromontogus Stream, Randolph, Maine.

It is not a coincidence that many of the oldest ponds in Easton were created by dams located just upstream of some of the oldest roads in town. Monte's Pond and Knapp's Pond are created by dams just upstream of West Elm Street and Union Street, respectively. New Pond and Old Pond in Furnace Village are created by dams just above Foundry Street. Morse's Pond is created by a dam just upstream of Central Street. Langwater Pond is created by a dam just upstream of Main Street. Historic documents show these dam sites are some of the oldest in town, dating back to the early or mid 1700s. These roads most likely take their present routes because they were aligned to cross shallow wading places in the streams directly below very old beaver dam sites. These road crossings, in turn, became convenient places for colonial mill builders to construct rough stone dams on top of the dam foundations built by countless generations of beaver. The earliest development pattern in much of Easton was most likely: ancient beaver dam > wading place > Indian foot path > fur trapping site > colonial foot path > mill dam at wading place > improved road with mill dam just upstream.

Because southeastern Massachusetts has lost its native beaver for so long, most Easton residents are only vaguely aware of how beaver build their dams. Having lived in Maine since 1982, where beaver are common, I have examined countless beaver dams in various stages of construction and destruction. One of the things that most surprised me was that beaver incorporate large numbers of fist to melon-sized stones in their dams, especially at the early stages of construction. Basically, the beaver build a lattice of cut saplings and brush as a first layer and then use their front paws to lift and place stones from the stream on top of the branches. This has the effect of solidifying the dam structure by keeping the first layer of saplings from floating away in the current. As the dam grows in height and width, the beaver use fewer stones and more saplings and branches.

But like any dam, even the best-built beaver dam will wash out eventually in a flood. When this happens, the saplings and branches are swept downstream but the stones layered into the dam tend to fall straight back into the river channel, creating a natural berm and riffle that the beaver use as the foundation for their new dam. In this way, over decades and centuries, the beaver create a shallow, stony wading place just below a flat, winding and open meadow. If there is no beaver dam present, these wading places look completely natural. But they aren't. They were made by beaver.
A beaver dam under construction on Worromontogus Stream, Randolph, Maine. Note the softball sized stones placed by the beavers on the first layer of sticks. It is likely the stones help to keep the first course of sticks from floating away in the current and create a more flood-resistant base to the dam. Beaver can erect a foot high dam in a single evening.

Hockomock Swamp, Old Growth Cedars

2009-07-25T20:04:00.001-07:00

Back in the late summer of 2003, I walked through the old Old Colony Railroad bed through the heart of the Hockomock Swamp near the Easton/Raynham town line and found a number of stands of very large, very old Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides). Only on my birthday in July 2009 was I able to return to this spot with a camera, and only for a short time. Luckily, the sun had come out after a torrential thunderstorm the night before.

Despite the conventional wisdom, the Hockomock Swamp is not muddy nor filled with mud. It is certainly wet, during the wet season, but the water is as clear and clean as spring water. In the place where I found these old growth cedars, the water in the Hockomock is perhaps more clean and pure than any water in the world, because it is filtered by miles of undisturbed swamp. It is probably the safest, cleanest water to drink that can be found.

And contrary to conventional wisdom, the Hockomock is not hard to walk in. Yes, you need to let your feet get wet, but in the summer, on a sunny day, the feeling is like walking along a beach with the waves lapping over your shoe tops. Apparently, what I found in this deepest part of the Hockomock is a mature Atlantic white cedar swamp that has not been cut or logged or disturbed for at least 150 years -- and possibly ever. The trees are large and tall with branches beginning 20-30 feet above their trunks and an understory of smaller trees and shrubs scattered among beds of sphagnum moss. And contrary to most wisdom, plenty of light reaches the swamp floor, because the canopies of the mature trees do not completely meet and intermingle, but instead leave gaps often as wide as their crowns.

Make no mistake. In the photos above you are seeing a place that almost nobody has seen or walked in for centuries. Yet it is just a 15 minute walk from the Raynham Dog Track. Judging by the size of the Atlantic white cedars here and the lack of any cut cedar stumps (which are easily visible right alongside the railroad bed), these stands have never been cut and have rarely, if ever, been visited by humans.

The first photo in this sequence shows a forest of sphagnum moss. Sphagnum moss is the little engine that could of the Hockomock. It is what makes all of the life possible in the swamp, because it prefers to grow with its feet constantly wet. Beneath this bed of electric green sphagnum is a bed of old, dead sphagnum 40 feet deep -- peat moss. You would have to dig down the length of a telephone pole to find a single bit of soil, or rock, or dirt, or sand. It is all vegetation. That's why the Hockomock is not muddy. To be muddy, there must be mud. And mud is made mostly of mineral soil. There is no mineral soil in the Hockomock, except so deep that it is where early humans followed caribou on a tundra 10,000 years ago and built tiny fires from twigs of trees only shoulder high. Somewhere, down very deep in this peat, many feet below the living layer of sphagnum moss are the footprints and fluted points and graves of those who watched as the mountainous glaciers receded to the north.¹

How old are these cedars?

The biggest white cedar I found is 25 inches in diameter. Not having a tape measure, I estimated the tree's diameter by putting my arms around it, and my hands could not touch each other. Back home, I measured the distance of my outstretched arms and got a figure of 72 inches. Adding six inches to this (since it seemed that my hands were a few inches shy of touching when wrapped around the trunk) gives a circumference of 78 inches, which divided by pi, gives a diameter of 24.8 inches.

A "honker" Hockomock cedar with Queequeg T. Dog, Ph.D providing a size comparison. This Atlantic white cedar is approx. 25 inches in diameter at breast height.

The next question is whether this stand of white cedar regenerated from a stand that was cut when the Old Colony Railroad railbed was cut through the swamp in 1866.² A stand that regenerated from a cut in 1866 would now be 140-150 years old. Given the documented growth rates and age vs. diameter of white cedar studied in southern New England, it would be very possible that the seedlings and small trees that were left from an 1866 cut would be in the average size range seen in this stand, ie. 14-16 inches in diameter.

However, a 25 inch diameter cedar in southern New England is of sufficient size to be as much as 200 years old. This cedar may predate the 1866 construction of the Old Colony Railroad bed by 50 years. This tree suggests that some parts of this cedar stand were logged lightly or not at all when the railbed was built; and strongly suggests the stand has not been logged in the 143 years since the railbed was built.

Atlantic white cedar is noted for being extremely resistant to rot and decay. For this reason, past logging should be shown by cedar stumps. The white cedar in this part of the Hockomock grow on massive humps or hummocks elevated three or more feet above the wetted part of the swamp. The humps created by the trunks and roots of these cedars are the highest ground in the stand. You have to literally climb up these hummocks in order to stand alongside the trees and examine them. In order for 19th century loggers to cut these trees with two-man saws, the cuts would have been made about three feet above ground level, leaving behind a considerably large stump well above the swamp floor. At least some of these stumps, particularly those from large cedars, should still be visible today.

Interestingly, there are cedar stumps of this type just outside the railbed, where the carted-in gravel and fill was used to raise the railbed above the swamp. But once you walk more than 100-150 feet away from the railbed and into the swamp , there are no cedar stumps. Because on this most recent visit I was focussed on documenting the character of the cedar stand with video and still cameras, I was not specifically searching out evidence of stumps in the part of the stand farthest from the railbed. As such, it is possible that a focussed effort to search for stumps deeper in the stand might reveal them.

The lack of any obvious stumps in the cedar stand away from the railbed suggests, pending a more detailed survey, that the builders of the Old Colony Railroad bed confined their logging operations to the immediate vicinity of the railbed and did not venture deeper into the adjoining swamp to cut trees purely for their value as sawlogs. If this was the case, it is possible that the stand of Atlantic white cedar documented here may not have been cut at all during the construction of the railbed in 1866. And because this part of the swamp was completely inaccessible and pathless prior to construction of the railbed in 1866, it is doubtful this stand of cedars was ever cut prior to 1866. This history presents the possibility that some or all of this cedar stand was never cut at all.

Another clue to the age of the stand is found in the ratio of cedars (C. thyoides) to red maple (Acer rubrum). The cedar stand documented here is atypical for the Hockomock. It is not a thick, pure, even-aged stand of white cedar with trees just a short distance apart from each other in an impenetrable and nearly lightless tangle of live, dead and fallen trees. This type of thick, dense cedar swamp forest is characteristic of the species throughout its range. The density of trees in Atlantic white cedar swamps is a key reason why they were so commercially valuable and so aggressively clearcut. It is estimated that more than 98 percent of the Atlantic white cedar swamps in the United States have been destroyed by logging.

Atlantic white cedar tend to grow in pure, dense, even-aged stands. Prior to the onset of logging in the 1700s, forest fires, windstorms and hurricane periodically created large openings in cedar swamps which destroyed enough of the standing trees to allow a new generation of trees to seed and replace them. A key clue which supports this theory is that young cedar require a sunny, well-lit, open forest floor to germinate and grow.

Unlike many New England trees, young cedar cannot survive for more than a few years in the deep shade created by their parents towering over them. For this reason it is believed that cedar swamps require periodic disturbances which remove large sections of the mature cedars in order to regenerate. Absent such disturbances, a mature Atlantic white cedar swamp would, after several centuries, become dominated by red maple (Acer rubrum). This is noted by Stoltzfus and Good:

"The pattern suggested in these earlier studies is that A. rubrum eventually replaces C. thyoides over time. As large canopy individuals die within even-aged stands, Acer rubrum individuals invade the gaps and eventually dominate. The mature-state or old-growth stand thus becomes dominated by A. rubrum rather than C. thyoides. Wetland forests dominated by C. thyoides can be maintained only by continued disturbance whereby the canopy and shrub layers are removed, providing open conditions in which C. thyoides can regenerate."³

Modern silvicultural research shows that the germination of Atlantic white cedar is almost completely halted if the cones fall into a leaf litter of hardwood and shrub leaves, ie. the typical floor of a red maple swamp.⁴ In other words, what we know about Atlantic white cedar suggests that mature cedar swamps eventually "go out of business" due to their own success and become red maple swamps when they remain undisturbed for a period of time longer than the natural life expectancy of the existing cedar stand (ie. 2-3 centuries).

If this successional model is true, we should expect that a very old cedar swamp that has not been disturbed by fire or hurricane-induced blowdown would be comprised of a fair number of large, old even-aged cedars in a swamp dominated by red maple and other deciduous trees and shrubs.

This perhaps describes the origin of the mature Atlantic white cedar stand in the Hockomock west of the railroad bed at the Easton/Raynham town line.

Tree Companions of the Hockomock White Cedars

This is a black gum or tupelo (Nyssa silvatica), growing beneath an old growth Atlantic white cedar.

This is a yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis), growing beneath an old growth Atlantic white cedar.

Canopy view of the Hockomock old growth cedar stand with mature Atlantic white cedar at the top and mature red maple (Acer rubrum) at the bottom. All trees shown are approx. 50-60 feet in height. Note the significant gaps in the canopy.

Notes:
¹Stone tools from the Early Archaic period (9,000-8,000 years ago) have been found along the shore of Lake Nippinicket, at the southern end of the Hockomock. See Kathleen Anderson and Ted Williams et al. 1968. "The Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland." Privately published. See also,"Taunton River Wild & Scenic Study, Notes from Archaeology Experts Meeting, 5/14/2003."
²Easton Historical Commission. 2008. "Town of Easton Historic Preservation Plan." Town of Easton, Mass. Available as 3.5 mb pdf file.
³Dwight L. Stoltzfus & Ralph E. Good. 1998. "Plant Community Structure in Chamaecyparis thyoides Swamps in the New Jersey Pinelands Biosphere Reserve, USA." in Coastally Restricted Forests, Aimlee D. Laderman, editor. Oxford University Press.
⁴ Aimlee D. Laderman. 1989. "The Ecology of Atlantic White Cedar Wetlands: A Community Profile." U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Biological Report 85 (7.21). Washington, D.C.

The Trout Brooks of Easton, Mass.

2009-07-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

Easton, Massachusetts is at the watershed divide of two rivers: the Taunton (Cohtuhticut) to the south and the Neponset to the northeast.

All of Easton's brooks have their headwaters in the northern end of town and all flow to the south and southeast, eventually arriving in the Taunton, which empties into Narragansett Bay.

Correspondingly, the two towns directly north of Easton, Sharon and Stoughton, are the southernmost end of the Neponset River watershed and their brooks flow to the north and east toward the mouth of the Neponset at Milton and Boston. This drainage divide is also documented in the county lines of southeastern Massachusetts. Easton is the northernmost town in Bristol County, while Sharon and Stoughton are the southernmost towns in Norfolk County.

The boundaries of Easton were first laid out in 1662 as the northeastern corner of the Taunton North Purchase. The imprint of the Taunton/Neponset watershed boundaries on the boundaries of Easton and Bristol and Norfolk Counties are not coincidental. They are the direct imprint of the tribal boundary between the Pokanocket Wampanoag Indian tribe to the south and the Massachusett tribe to the north and east. At the time of English colonization, the center of the Pokanocket tribe was at the mouth of the Taunton River, near Bristol, Rhode Island. The center of the Massachusett tribe was at Massachusetts Bay in Boston, at the mouths of the Neponset and Charles Rivers. The northern boundary of Easton follows the watershed boundary of the Taunton and Neponset because the sagamores of the Pokanocket tribe possessed ancient title to the lands south of this watershed divide. The lands north of this divide were recognized as under the ownership of the Massachusett. What is now called Easton was most likely a lightly populated "buffer zone" between the formally recognized territories of the Pokanocket Wampanoag to the south and the Massachusett directly to the north.

Easton is also the drainage divide between the uppermost and lowermost Taunton River watersheds. The brooks in the eastern side of Easton, the Queset Brook, Whitman's Brook, Dorchester Brook, Black Brook and Dailey's Brook, all flow into the Hockomock Swamp which forms the headwaters of the Nunketetest, the Town River, which flows east out of the Hockomock Swamp in West Bridgewater to form the headwaters of the Taunton River.

The brooks on the western side of Easton, Poquanticut Brook, Beaver Brook, Mulberry Meadow Brook, Gowards Brook and the Canoe River, flow into Winneconnet Pond, which is the natural headwater pond of the Cohannet (Mill River), which enters the Taunton at its head of tide. Because the Taunton River takes a nearly circular course to the southeast and southwest before it enters saltwater, the brooks on the western side of Easton would have made a much shorter and faster canoeing route from Easton to the Pokanocket tribal center at Mount Hope (Montaup) Bay. This canoe route would have started at the junction of Poquanticut and Beaver Brooks at Route 106, down Mulberry Meadow Brook to Winneconnet, down the Snake River to Sabbatia Pond and down the Cohannet to the head of tide near Weir Village in Taunton. By this route, saltwater is only about 15 miles from South Easton.

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This aerial map of Easton shows Bay Road at its center. Bay Road, which is an ancient Indian path from Narragansett Bay to Boston, forms the east-west drainage divide in Easton. Every drop of water which falls west of Bay Road flows into the Cohannet at the head of tide in Taunton. Every drop of water which falls east of Bay Road ends up in the Hockomock Swamp and to the headwaters of the Taunton.

Lincoln Street is the only north-south drainage divide in Easton. All of the water which falls on the north side of Lincoln Street ends up in Queset Brook, which flows southeasterly into the Coweeset and enters the northwesterly end of the Hockomock Swamp via the Hockomock River. All of the water which falls on the southerly side of Lincoln Street goes into the Black Brook, which flows south and enters the northwesterly end of the Hockomock near Foundry Street (Route 106). That Lincoln Street is a principal drainage divide in Easton and intersects with Bay Road on its western end suggests it was an ancient east-west Indian path.

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Lincoln Street almost perfectly follows the drainage divide between Queset Brook to the north and Black Brook to the south.

Most, if not all, of Easton's brooks probably supported native brook trout prior to damming in the mid 1700s. However, Queset Brook is the only brook in Easton where there is historic evidence for the presence of Eastern brook trout, the only trout species native to Massachusetts. This evidence is found in Chaffin's History of Easton, which includes a very old map showing Queset Brook with the name "Trout Hole Brook." Many North Easton residents from the 1950s through 1970s remember well when Mr. William Parker annually stocked his small pond along Main Street with brown trout each spring. Many of these trout survived for many years and grew to nearly two feet long in the short, free-flowing sections of Queset Brook between Hoeshop Pond, Parker's Pond and Shovelshop Pond.

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Queset Brook rises from Ames Long Pond (top left of image) and the now drained Flyaway Pond (lower left of image) and flows east through Picker Pond, Hoeshop Pond, Shovelshop Pond and Langwater, or Fred's Pond. In this short distance, the brook falls 50 feet.

The Great Bend of the Queset

Unlike all of the other brooks in Easton, the Queset flows from west to east from its headwaters until its junction with the south-flowing Whitman Brook at Langwater Pond. The reason for this unusual direction is that the only large outcrops of bedrock in North Easton village keep the brook from flowing south. These bedrock outcrops have their most prominent exposures at Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, which is built on them, and in a north-south line from Pond Street and the Langwater Estate to Sheep Pasture. These bedrock outcrops force the Queset to flow east from the Ames Free Library, across Main Street, across Sullivan Ave. and Pond Street, to Shovelshop Pond, and to Langwater Pond, where the Queset does a right angle bend southward through Sheep Pasture. Just below the mouth of Queset Brook into Langwater there is a tall, slightly rounded bedrock exposure called Big Pout, which forms the corner of the Great Bend of the Queset. Just across the pond is a smaller bedrock knob called "Suicide Hill" by local sledders because it is one of the few hills in North Easton that made for good winter sledding. This east-west course around the bedrock outcrops of North Easton Village creates a significant fall in the brook, which made it ideal for colonial dam builders seeking convenient sites for mechanical water power.

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Center Street in Easton follows a north-south ridge of high ground that neatly separates the southerly course of Black Brook on the west from the southerly course of Queset Brook on the east.

Washington Street (Rt. 138) is a high north-south ridge which divides the watersheds of Queset Brook and Dorchester Meadow Brook. Dorchester Meadow Brook, which rises in a wetland just north of Union Street at the Easton/Stoughton line, flows through Knapp's or French's Pond (now almost a wetland) and Monte's Pond (drained in the 1970s) and Bigney's Pond (now almost a wetland) to Torrey Street just over the Easton/Brockton line. From the 1950s and 1970s, the defunct Brockton Fish & Game Club stocked trout in Bigney's Pond. These trout survived many seasons in the free-flowing sections of Dorchester Brook north of Torrey Street to Monte's Pond and also south, to where Dorchester Brook enters the Coweeset Brook near the Brockton/West Bridgewater line.

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Dorchester Meadow Brook flows south along the Easton-Brockton line from Knapp's Pond to Monte's Pond to Bigney's Pond, all of which have now reverted to wetlands since being first created by small stone dams in the mid 1700s.

A young beaver in Seven Mile Stream, Vassalboro, Maine. Photo by Tim Watts.

The Beaver's Imprint on Easton

Few have ever considered the profound effect the beaver had on shaping the early development patterns of Easton. Due to intense trapping for its fur in the 1600s, beaver have been extinct in Easton for 200 years and have yet to recolonize the town. Yet, we know that beaver were once common in Easton due to the name of one of its brooks, Beaver Brook, and the road in South Easton that crosses it, Beaver Dam Road.

Further evidence of the beaver's imprint on Easton is found in the use of the word "meadow" in the name of many of Easton's brooks, from Dorchester Meadow Brook near the Stoughton line to Mulberry Meadow Brook in Furnace Village. It is probable that the freshwater meadows for which these brooks are named resulted from the long-term damming activities of beaver. These dams would have kept trees from growing along the banks of the brooks and maintained a field-like meadow with a single sharp drop at the dam outlet. This meadow effect would have been further maintained by the beaver continually cropping and removing young trees growing at the water's edge. The effect would be a stair-step of shallow, sinuous ponds dominated by annual aquatic vegetation with a shoreline of mature trees many yards away.

A typical meadow created and maintained by beavers. This one is on Worromontogus Stream, Randolph, Maine.

It is not a coincidence that many of the oldest ponds in Easton were created by dams located just upstream of some of the oldest roads in town. Monte's Pond and Knapp's Pond are created by dams just upstream of West Elm Street and Union Street, respectively. New Pond and Old Pond in Furnace Village are created by dams just above Foundry Street. Morse's Pond is created by a dam just upstream of Central Street. Langwater Pond is created by a dam just upstream of Main Street. Historic documents show these dam sites are some of the oldest in town, dating back to the early or mid 1700s. These roads most likely take their present routes because they were aligned to cross shallow wading places in the streams directly below very old beaver dam sites. These road crossings, in turn, became convenient places for colonial mill builders to construct rough stone dams on top of the dam foundations built by countless generations of beaver. The earliest development pattern in much of Easton was most likely: ancient beaver dam > wading place > Indian foot path > fur trapping site > colonial foot path > mill dam at wading place > improved road with mill dam just upstream.

Because southeastern Massachusetts has lost its native beaver for so long, most Easton residents are only vaguely aware of how beaver build their dams. Having lived in Maine since 1982, where beaver are common, I have examined countless beaver dams in various stages of construction and destruction. One of the things that most surprised me was that beaver incorporate large numbers of fist to melon-sized stones in their dams, especially at the early stages of construction. Basically, the beaver build a lattice of cut saplings and brush as a first layer and then use their front paws to lift and place stones from the stream on top of the branches. This has the effect of solidifying the dam structure by keeping the first layer of saplings from floating away in the current. As the dam grows in height and width, the beaver use fewer stones and more saplings and branches.

A beaver dam under construction on Worromontogus Stream, Randolph, Maine. Note the softball sized stones placed by the beavers on the first layer of sticks. It is likely the stones help to keep the first course of sticks from floating away in the current and create a more flood-resistant base to the dam. Beaver can erect a foot high dam in a single evening.

But like any dam, even the best-built beaver dam will wash out eventually in a flood. When this happens, the saplings and branches are swept downstream but the stones layered into the dam tend to fall straight back into the river channel, creating a natural berm and riffle that the beaver use as the foundation for their new dam. In this way, over decades and centuries, the beaver create a shallow, stony wading place just below a flat, winding and open meadow. If there is no beaver dam present, these wading places look completely natural. But they aren't. They were made by beaver.

It is likely that most of the early dam sites on Easton's brooks were built on top of these ancient beaver dams and their park-like meadows just upstream.

Flyaway Pond and Native Easton Cranberries

Like many things we see and buy in supermarkets, we rarely stop to think where cranberries or cranberry sauce or cranberry juice comes from. Sure, they come from cranberry bogs, but those we see look like neat, rectangular golf courses of red and green, split by perfectly straight, mathematically arranged ditches of bright yellow sand with a little white shed in the far corner.

Actually, cranberries are native to Easton's freshwater meadows and still grow in them in abundance. They can be seen, picked and eaten in their full splendor at the freshwater meadow which used to be called Flyaway Pond, just north of Lincoln Street.

Flyaway Pond is a large, natural, rock-filled meadow fed by groundwater that flows from west to north to form Queset Brook. In the 1800s a dam was built at its outlet to create a pond to provide storage water for the various mills in North Easton village, since the Queset Brook ran so low in the summer that it provided little water to move waterwheels and machines. By the late 1800s, an enormous gravel berm was built at its outlet which made the pond nearly 20 feet deep, extending from just south of Canton Street all the way to Lincoln Street.

My father, who was born in North Easton in 1936, recalled fishing and canoeing on Flyaway Pond as a youth and young adult. He said the water was so clear and unstained that you could see every stone on the bottom even in its deepest spots. By the 1960s, the various mills that Flyaway Pond had been built to power were long gone and forgotten. The pond remained, but the old earthen dam at its outlet was inspected by various officials and deemed unsafe. Using an influx of public monies, professional engineers were called in to design and supervise construction of a new, safe "modern" dam of poured concrete. This was promptly done to great fanfare. Unfortunately, the new concrete dam was not secured to any solid surface at its base, and instead sat on loose glacial sand and gravel. In 1968, a very rainy spring caused Flyaway Pond to get very high, which caused the pressurized water at its bottom to want to make tunnels through the loose sand and gravel beneath the massive concrete outlet. Which it did. And on one rainy night in April 1968, the tunnels became so deep that the concrete dam turned over like a dog on its side and all of the massive concrete stopped holding back water. And in a few hours, all of the 100 or so acres of Flyaway Pond poured downstream and destroyed much of North Easton village. Flyaway had flown away.

In an age where dams were considered as sacred as the flag, the dam at Flyaway Pond was never rebuilt in 1968 and the pond was allowed to revert toward its natural condition for the next 40 years. In 1996, the pond's owner, Robert Mailiff, Sr., sold the land upon which the pond had once resided to the Town of Easton as conservation land. As I was only 3 years old when the Flyaway dam collapsed in 1968, I never saw the pond. My brother has vague memories of it.

In 1986, on a lark at Thanksgiving, I was home from Maine and took a walk to and through the remains of the pond, getting my feet and pants soaking wet and freezing cold. And in the old remains of the pond, where it used to be 15 feet deep but was now only a foot, I discovered gigantic patches of ripe, wild, native cranberries. It was the first time I had ever seen or eaten actual wild cranberries growing in a wild cranberry bog. They tasted good. I then realized that prior to its damming 200 years earlier, what we called Flyaway Pond had been for thousands of years an immense and lush natural cranberry bog.

A decade later, in July of 1996, returned to Easton from my home in Maine to see my father, whom I never saw because he died of a massive coronary as we were going down the dirt road to our beach cottage in Mattapoisett where he was helping a neighbor pull out their boat before the onset of a hurricane. A few days later, at his wake at George Copeland's funeral home on Center Street in North Easton, John Grant moved up to my spot in the receiving line. Like my father, John was one of the founding members of the Easton Conservation Commission in the late 1960s. I had not seen him for many years. John clasped my hand and said, "We just bought Flyaway."

Four years later, in 2000, there was a short-lived movement in town to attempt to rebuild a dam at Flyaway. The effort was well-meant, led by people my age and younger, so as to recreate the pond that had been there 40 years earlier. I knew that under modern wetland protection laws, the chances were nil that a permit could be issued to destroy and flood the freshwater meadow even if the money to build the dam could be raised. So I said nothing. The money was not raised, the permits were not issued, and the dam was never built.

There is no doubt in my mind that Flyaway, the vast, tangled, natural freshwater meadow, was created in part by beaver that lived there for millennia, periodically damming and flooding the small brooks that flow into and through it. Prior to European settlement, Flyaway was most likely a prime habitat for moose, which colonial records show occupied Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands as late as the 1750s. And with the moose and beaver were their chief predator, the wolf. The Flyaway that I am now seeing, 40 years after the dam broke on a dank spring night in 1968, was reassembling itself into that same place.

The Chestnut Woods of Black Brook

In the 1960s the Town of Easton's school department bought many hundreds of acres of thickly wooded land south of Lincoln Street for future school construction. The Oliver Ames High School and junior high school now occupy part of this land, which adjoins the Easton Town Forest and runs west all the way to Bay Road and Randall Street. If not for this fortuitous purchase, and the Town taking ownership of the land for open space, this immense tract of woods would now be an endless daisy chain of McMansions, cul de sacs and subdivisions.

As junior high school and high school students, these woods were known as "the woods," which meant the place right across the bus parking area where you could sneak in and smoke pot and sneak out without getting caught. So while smoking pot before and after school was probably not the smartest thing to do, at least we did it in a highly natural setting. And in doing so, you couldn't help but sit there on a log and look around at the woods you were sitting in.

Because I was an extremely shy person in high school, and also had the affliction of becoming very paranoid after smoking pot (like, from afraid of getting caught), I tended to only smoke pot deep in the woods, where nobody could find me. And because I was so shy that I often went into the woods anyways, just for something to do after school, buying a pinnah for a buck and walking deep into the woods sort of fit in with the plans I had.

Only a decade after I graduated Oliver Ames High School, and even more so now, 27 years later, did I realize that the infamous "woods" next to Oliver Ames High School are American chestnut woods. Except that all of the American chestnuts in these woods died when my father as born in the 1930s. And only last year, after walking through these woods for the first time in 20 years, did I understand how devastating the chestnut blight was, and continues to be.

My father, who was a forester, could not tell me of the great chestnut forests of Easton because they were all nearly dead and gone by the time he was born. Even he had no memories of them. And it would be odd for someone to be compiling detailed memories of tree species distribution patterns when they are six.

As my brother Timothy said the other night, "The only reason there are any chestnuts left is that they can keeping putting out suckers from the old roots. If they were like oaks, which don't put out suckers, they would be extinct."

One of the places where the stumps of old American chestnuts, bludgeoned to non-existence by the chestnut blight pandemic of the 1930s, still bravely put out suckers is along the long ridge of sloping high ground between Randall Street and Lincoln Street in Easton, just east of Black Brook.

The American chestnut blight occurred because a closely related species of chestnut, from China, was imported as lumber to the United States in the early 20th century. These Chinese chestnut logs carried a fungus, the chestnut blight, for which American chestnut trees had no resistance or immunity. Once this fungus spread from eastern U.S. ports to the surrounding forests it was unstoppable. The native American chestnut from Maine to the Carolinas had no resistance to the fungus and they all died. Imagine every white pine tree or every maple tree in the United States dying in a few years. Imagine every cardinal or robin or crow or squirrel or daisy dying.

The American chestnut blight is a compelling window into how Darwinian evolution works. Evolution occurs because every time an organism reproduces there is the chance of a copying error (a mutation) in the DNA as the parent gives its own DNA to its children. These mutations pop up in the same random way as the chute of water pouring over a stone in a tiny brook will produce a big bubble sometimes, a small bubble sometimes, and sometimes no bubbles at all, but in no predictable way, hence the term "babbling brook." While it is 100 percent predictable that mutations will occur in the DNA of a species, it is impossible to tell where and when these mutations will occur and what affect they might have on the baby animal or plant which inherits these mutations from their parents.

It is likely that the chance mutations that would have given resistance and immunity for American chestnut to chestnut blight arose countless times in chestnut trees from Massachusetts to the Carolinas over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. But because there was no chestnut blight in North America for these mutations to be useful against, these mutations blinked on and then off again from the chestnut genome without a trace, much like a melody that comes into your head while you are working, and then disappears when you get in the truck and go home. A key aspect of evolution is that it has no foresight. It cannot predict or prepare for the future. Species are the future as viewed through the rear view mirror.

For this reason, the American chestnuts of Easton in 1200 A.D. could not "save" genetic mutations in their DNA that would save it from chestnut blight that would only come onshore from China 700 years later and reduce its towering forests to rubble. Which is what happened.

What do Poquanticut and Queset mean?

Despite that people have lived in Easton for nearly 10,000 years, only a handful of Indian place names are recorded within the town. Two of the most prominent are the names of brooks.

Poquanticut is the name given for the brook that rises in the natural ponds and bogs at the Sharon line, in Borderland State Park, and flows due south across all of Easton to Furnace Village, where it joins Beaver Brook to form the Mulberry Meadow Brook. Poquanticut is also the name of Poquanticut Ave., which runs north and south from Foundry Street to Rockland Street.

Queset is the name of the brook that rises from Flyaway Pond and Ames Long Pond and flows through North Easton Village and then southeasterly until it meets Dorchester Meadow Brook east of Turnpike Street to form the Coweeset River.

So what do these names mean?

New England Indian historian Kerry Hardy offers the following suggestions:

Poquanticut, according to Huden, is "at the clear, shallow stream" (if its spelling accurately reflects how the Narragansetts said this name). However, if they said Pokan-, pogon-, pogun-, or something like that, it would mean "at the river of nut trees" (or specifically, butternuts).

And ...

Coweeset, Queset, Cohasset -- all the same word: Kuwes, white pine; -et, the place of. Coos County, NH; "Cowasessick" on the ancient Sheepscot River; and today's Cowasuck people (who have a cool website) all share this root, along with a million other places in New England.

These two Wampanoag Indian words introduce us to the wondrous complexities of the Wabanaki language. If the ancient Greek writer Heraclitus said "you cannot step into the same river twice," then a Wabanaki speaking person might have said, "you cannot give a river the same name once."

In the most simple terms, Wabanaki people did not name rivers the way Europeans do. Europeans give the mainstem of a river the same name from its mouth to its headwaters. Like the Amazon, or the Congo, or the Mississippi or the Connecticut.

In most, but not all cases, Wabanaki assigned "place names" to very specific places on rivers, based on an easily discernible physical feature. This name might refer to a falls, a gravel bar, a grove of white pine, or the location of a fishing weir. But in most, but not all cases, this name referred to the place on the river, not the entire river from its mouth to its headwaters. This difference in how things are named -- and what is actually being named -- caused endless confusion with English and French visitors to Wabanaki country.

A perfect example of this confusion is seen in a 1686 court deposition by a Wabanaki man named Perepole who lived in central Maine. In this deposition, which involved a land dispute between two Englishmen, Perepole describes how his people had at three different names for what we now call the Androscoggin River. The lowermost reach of the river, Perepole said, was called Quabacook, the middle reach was called Pejepscook and the upper reach was called Ammoscongon:

I Perepole of Lawful age testify and say that the Inden name of the river was Pejepscook from Quabacook what is now called Meremeeting bay up as far as Amitgonpontook what the English call Harrises falls and all the river from Harrises falls up was called Ammoscongon and the largest falls on the river was above Rockamecook about twelve miles, and them falls have got three pitches, and there is no other falls on the river like them and the Indens yousd to catch the most Salmon at the foot of them falls, and the Indens yousd to say when they went down the river from Rockamecook and when they gat Down over the falls by Harrises they say now come Pejepscook."

The Wabanaki of Massachusetts, as far as is known, did not have standardized units of distance such as inches, feet, yards and miles or centimeters, meters and kilometers. But they did have a very unique and useful measure of distance: the "look." To understand what a look means gives a great deal of insight into the Wabanaki mindset. It is a unit of measurement completely derived from canoe travel on a river, especially a large river. A look is the farthest distance up or down a river that you can see from your vantage point.

No matter how straight a river looks on an aerial map, it still has subtle bends and corners in it. These corners prevent you from seeing all the way down the river. Even on a fairly straight river channel, there is a point in the distance where the channel curves just enough to the left or right that all you see is the opposite river bank. The distance from where you are to where you can no longer see the channel continue is one look.

On the Kennebec River in central Maine, where I live, the looks on the Kennebec are 1-3 miles long. When my nephew and niece first canoed down the Kennebec as young children, they were very perplexed because as they looked ahead in the distance, the river channel seemed to stop in the distance at a solid wall of trees and hills. To them, it looked as if the river had become a long, narrow lake with its end in the faraway, but viewable distance. One day my niece Hallie, who was in the front of the canoe, said, "Uncle Doug, the river stops down there. What are we going to do?" Without consciously knowing it, Hallie was correctly discerning a look.

In canoe travel, units like feet or yards or miles have no useful meaning. Canoes do not have odometers and rivers do not have mile markers and exit signs. Even if a map tells you that a dangerous falls is three miles below where you put in, it is nearly impossible to gauge three miles while paddling a canoe. But if someone tells you that a dangerous falls or an excellent camping spot is five looks below where you started, you can keep perfect track of your movement towards it and know exactly when it is coming just by counting looks.

This is one look at Negwamkeag on the Kennebec River in Sidney, Maine. This look is about two miles long.

Lost in Easton

2009-07-20T10:41:00.001-07:00