Lessons on a River Well Traveled

We set out for quite a different trip this morning. Our intended destination was North Hartland Lake, a place we've been before but never during foliage. But when we got there, the gate to the access road was shut and locked.

"Wilder," my husband said.

We turned north on Route 5 and ended up in Kilowatt Park in the village of Wilder on the Connecticut River.

The park is nice, the put-in convenient and we were off in no time at all.

I have to admit the joy of the journey got squelched at the start by this totally wacko duck hunter. Imagine if you will either Monty Python or Jerry Lewis taking off in a boat to hunt ducks. We know there was a boat there somewhere because you could hear its engine's chainsaw whine (and so could the ducks) but you couldn't tell what kind of a boat it was. The hunter—and I'm going to assume it was a male—had covered the whole thing in dried weeds to make a moving duck blind.

He headed downstream toward Wilder Dam while we turned north toward the Montshire Museum, shaking our heads in bewilderment when "Blam! Blam!" Every bird for miles had already taken to the skies at the sound of the engine but there he was, tearing up the skies.

Things settled down as he moved out of earshot.

The mighty Connecticut is lake-like at this point in its travels from near the Canadian border to the place were it empties into the Atlantic. It's wide enough that a head wind made paddling a bit tougher (upper body strengthening, right?) as we wandered up to the Montshire Museum in Norwich and Blood Brook lagoon.

This part of the town of Norwich used to be a thriving village known as Lewiston before Interstate 91 flattened it back in the early 1970s. The lagoon is a nice spot reached by paddling under a railroad underpass. Jay remarked that the underpass was better constructed than the not-very-old Ledyard Bridge that connects Norwich to Hanover, New Hampshire and Dartmouth College. The stones are hewn to fit perfectly with one another, a sculptural testament to a time when architecture was built to last.

Milfoil—a foul weed from Asia that is choking waterways all over New England—is an evident concern here, and there were floating islands of algae. You'd better believe our boats will be washed down with bleach before we put them in anywhere else.

I kept imagining what it looked like when the log drives came down the Connecticut from 1875 to 1915, and the people who built and worked in the mills that used the water to turn stone wheels to power saws or grind grain.

The Connecticut was once considered the best landscaped sewer in the Northeast and the fact that we could paddle it today is a testament to the importance of legislation such as the clean water act. There are always lessons to be learned on the water.