Easton's Queset Brook

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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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:

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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.

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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

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

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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."

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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 !!!

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.