Waterways
They found a body in my river. Until I read the newspaper article my mother sent me from Massachusetts, I didn’t know that the river has a real name, but it does: Fort Pond Brook, a title I will use here and then never again, except to complain, because it is a terrible name: a man’s name, stodgy and staccato, and at odds with the water that floods my street when it rains too hard and withers down into a trickle during the droughts that come in the summer, those dry spells when the town distributes schedules dictating when we are permitted to water our gardens and when we must stand still and watch our vegetables die. I know the neighbors cheat, but our tomatoes are always better.
You can’t swim in my river, because it’s polluted and full of glass and detritus from the railroad tracks that run alongside it. It used to be an ecologically-sound superhighway, part of the annual New England Native American migration pattern thousands of years ago, but then came the railroad and then came the automobiles and then came the mill that dammed the river and broke its path. It’s strange to look out the window and see, parallel to one another: street, river, railroad; arranged anachronistically, but nevertheless, it is history laid out. When I was young and trying to fall asleep, I would isolate each travel-sound and hold them apart, but I think they put new engines in the trains since I moved away to Minnesota. They used to rumble and hum but now, when I visit, they roar, the aural equivalent of a stroboscopic lamp instead of the familiar roam of headlights on dark bedroom walls. Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one: things used to be better.
The first river I ever swam in was in Quebec, with my little sister and a young boy who appeared at our campsite out of nowhere and to whom my father spoke in halting French. Where are your parents? my father asked, and then timed how long we could hold our breath underwater. This was right after we had moved out of the city and into the suburbs of Boston, and I still had the vague notion that every river was an extension of the grey, clouded Charles, always smelling of city boats and something left to rot. But the river in Quebec had a taste like healthy stones and I stayed under for the longest, open-eyed through the clear water at my body distorted and pale-green like I’d begun to turn fish.
The man found in the river did not turn into a fish. He was there for a long while before anyone found him, and the water had time to erase his history from the face and body. No one knows who he is. No one has reported him missing. It could have been me: not the body, but the kids who found him. The papers say that they were teenagers walking on the railroad tracks that stretch along the bank, and I walked those railroad tracks almost every day, before my friends got cars and our lives grew bigger. I’ve found a lot of non-native species in that river—soccer balls, sleds, sealed bottles of Grey Goose vodka—but I never considered finding a corpse. Now I can’t help it, imagining how it might have been. What is that thing, that down there, what is that, caught up by a tree branch, tattered red cloth straining against the current?
Though the newspapers didn’t say, I imagine he was discovered where the neck of the river chokes tight and things get trapped, down by the old mill. If you’ve ever used a pencil, you may thank my river and this mill for bringing it to your hand. Acton resident Ebenezer Wood automated the pencil-making process in 1812 and ensured the quick and cheap production of hexagonal or octagonal pencils, which are the yellow kind you probably used to learn how to write. We owe a lot to both of them: to Ebenezer, and to my hometown of Acton, Massachusetts.
