(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been sitting beside a waterfall and thinking long thoughts.
(LANGE) I’m sitting on a rock ledge beside Sumner Falls in Hartland – sometimes called Hartland Rapids. It’s kind of a sharp rock, so I probably won’t be sitting too long. It’s hard for me to see these rapids without thinking of the millennia of drama this valley has seen.
Even its formation was dramatic. It’s a geologic fault formed when two tectonic plates collided about 400 million years ago. Magma bubbled up along the fault; little of it erupted. Mount Ascutney is the plug of a nascent volcano that never blew its top. The river flows past its base as gently as if nothing violent had ever happened here.
More recently, the valley was buried in moving ice that scoured the bedrock over which it flowed. You can still see the scratches and chatter marks of its passing, and boulders brought from farther north, dropped where they were when the ice retreated.
Native Americans moved in 11,000 years ago, about the time a glacial dam burst, draining a lake that filled the valley from New Britain, Connecticut, to Littleton, New Hampshire. Slowly the barren rock and gravel gave way to tundra, and then to boreal forests. Native tribes populated the entire valley, from the Nehantics at the mouth to the Abenakis around the headwaters. The valley was for them a fertile breadbasket. They competed, but in hard times they cooperated. To ensure their hunting, they left some fields unharvested; they called them deer fields.
That 10,000-year period of stability and social development ended abruptly in 1614, when Adrian Block, a Dutch captain in a 45-foot vessel called Restless, sailed upriver as far as the first falls to trade for furs. Less than twenty years later the great migration of English settlers began to move up the river, with the usual inevitable result for the native people.
Sitting here on the ledges at Sumner Falls, it’s easy to see the ghosts: natives spearing Atlantic salmon; settlers portaging goods around the rapids; French and Indian raiding parties trying vainly to stem the English tide; the survivors of the 1704 Deerfield Massacre herded north through the snow to Montreal; Robert Rogers rafting downriver in October 1759 to get help for his Rangers stranded and starving at the mouth of the Passumpsic; the dam, mills, and canal that were obsolete almost as soon as they were built; river drivers of the 19th century, soaked in icy water, muscling logs over the falls in spring flood; the foaming pollution of the 20th century from the mills and tanneries upstream; and in recent years, racing shells, canoes, and bass boats.
Down below me, Dartmouth students in kayaks dart in and out of the current at the foot of the falls like bright-colored fish, unaware of their brief role in a drama of thousands of years. I can’t help but wonder what this lovely falls will look like in a hundred years.
This is Willem Lange up in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.