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HOST) Commentator Willem Lange reminds us that New England’s rivers in spring flood used to be filled bank-to-bank with floating logs.
(LANGE) On June 21, 1895, a big log drive of the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company was floating through a stretch of the river in North Hartland called Sumner’s Falls. One of the rivermen, a 19-year-old from Cherryfield, Maine, fell off a log and drowned. The other drivers pulled the body from the river and covered it with a blanket. The paymaster wired the boy’s father in Maine.
The father drove over with a pair of fast horses, picked up his son’s pay – about $300 – and left. The rivermen buried the boy beside the falls and scratched his information on a stone. As far as I know, it’s still there.
I think of that brute of a father whenever I turn my truck toward the headwaters of the Androscoggin River. He had to cross several river drainages to get to the Connecticut. His buggy took him two or three days to cover what I now travel in two hours: up the dwindling Winooski to Mollys Pond. Down Joes Brook to the Passumpsic at St. Johnsbury. Up and over to the Connecticut, and upstream to Groveton. Up the Upper Ammonoosuc, which, despite its tight bends, once carried logs down to the Connecticut. Up and over New Hampshire’s second-bumpiest road, and finally into the Androscoggin watershed.
I strike the river at Thirteen-Mile Woods. To people of a certain turn of mind, it’s a historic site. The river, which runs beside the road, once bore millions of feet of logs and pulp down to the mills at Berlin. The winter woods rang with the sound of axes and crosscut saws. Teams of horses hauled sleds of logs out of the woods to the riverbank, where they were stacked up parallel to the shore in piles called rollways. In the spring, after the ice had gone out, the logs were chivvied with pikes and peavies until they rolled into the river, the most dangerous job of all.
After that, it was pure pleasure for the men – up to their rear ends in ice water all day, prying logs off rocks, breaking jams, dancing like Nijinsky across the heaving, deadly sea of logs all the way to Berlin, Gorham, or even Rumford. If they didn’t die by payday, and didn’t blow it on the way home, they had almost enough to last until the next November.
I wonder, as I stop to look at the river, how many passersby have any idea of all that. There’s little left to show for it. No more bunkhouses, forges, or horse hovels. The cook tents that followed the men down the river have moldered into dust. The log-and-stone islands that held the middle of the booms are now just piles of stones. My friend Jack Noon tells me there’s an abandoned bateau, rotted almost to invisibility, at the head of the gorge on the Diamond River. I’d like to see that someday, before I become a memory myself.
This is Willem Lange in Thirteen-Mile Woods, and I gotta get back to work.