[Illustration]
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
by Henry David Thoreau
Contents
CONCORD RIVER
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
Where’er thou sail’st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother—.
I am bound, I am bound, for a distant shore,
By a lonely isle, by a far Azore,
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek.
I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
THOU seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.
Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quæ, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquæ, pro ripis litora pulsant.
OVID, Met. I. 39
He confined the rivers within their sloping banks,
Which in different places are part absorbed by the earth,
Part reach the sea, and being received within the plain
Of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks.
“Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.”
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the
Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history,
until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers
out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of
CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have
been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be
Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will
be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To
an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and
it is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the
Great Meadows, and get the hay from year to year. “One branch of it,”
according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good
authority, “rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another from a
pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough,” and flowing between
Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham, and between Sudbury and
Wayland, where it is sometimes called Sudbury River, it enters Concord
at the south part of the town, and after receiving the North or
Assabeth River, which has its source a little farther to the north and
west, goes out at the northeast angle, and flowing between Bedford and
Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell.
In Concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and from
one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets,
when it overflows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile wide.
Between Sudbury and Wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth,
and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow
vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. Just above
Sherman’s Bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when
the wind blows freshly in a raw March day, heaving up the surface into
dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the
distance with alder-swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a
smaller Lake Huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to
row or sail over. The farm-houses along the Sudbury shore, which rises
gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this
season. The shore is more flat on the Wayland side, and this town is
the greatest loser by the flood. Its farmers tell me that thousands of
acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they
remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and
they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but
blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the
year round. For a long time, they made the most of the driest season to
get their hay, working sometimes till nine o’clock at night, sedulously
paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by
the ice; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it,
and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last
resource.