Can you find the boat amidst the mostly plastic debris? Such sights are no longer rare on some of the world’s waters. Ocean River Institute photo

PLASTICS, OCEANS, JOBS AND SECURITY

      While perusing the new non-fiction shelf in the Flint Public Library last week an old Closeteer found Plastic Ocean by Captain Charles Moore.  He borrowed it and has been fretting out loud about its revelations ever since.

For the past two decades, Moore, skipper of a catamaran, his own research vessel, has swept the surface waters of the eastern Pacific with nets designed to retrieve various sized pieces of plastic that have escaped from boats, ships, and land.  For now, let’s simply say he has found a lot.

Moore, with a background in chemistry, clearly tells the history of plastic most of which has occurred in the lifetimes of us older Stream Teamers.  Petrochemicals have spawned a huge industry, which, despite growing Earth inventories and fears, is still mushrooming.  The author tells of the late Steve Jobs urging that everyone update their iPods each year.  Such wonders are made of plastics and metals, some of the latter rare.  Multiply computers by a thousand other products plastic based.  We can’t begin to do justice to the chemical and commercial history of plastics here.  He outlines it well for us.  Moore kind of summarizes with a homely example we old timers can understand.  In the 1950s milk was delivered in reusable glass bottles.  In the 1960s wax coated cartons replaced milk bottles.  In the 1970s plastic containers surpassed paper.  These are the containers our children know for thousands of items.  Only some are recycled.  Much of the rest end up sequestered for awhile in landfills, along roads, and in the waters of the world.  Have you checked the roadside edge of your yard this morning?  You’ll probably find a few of the millions of pieces of plastic thoughtlessly chucked from passing cars last night.

The closeteer is still reading Moore’s passionate, rambling and revelatory book.  We fear he will share more of what he has learned with us.  Many of us have seen the shocking TV news reports and documentaries about plastic found in vast Pacific Ocean gyres.  Perhaps when he is done and we’ve discussed the subject, a proper book review will be forthcoming from the Water Closet.

The millions of tons of plastic suspended in our ocean currents, ranging in size from plastic boats to submicroscopic particles, is a concern you might think our leaders, present and potential, flanked by supposedly “shining seas”, would worry about.  Yet the candidates running for president loudly claim we shouldn’t apologize for our country.  Our major contributions to fossil fuel burning pollutants, which include plastics, and to global warming are not mentioned.  In a green world the color “green” is not uttered in their campaigns.  We take it back, in the case of global warming, Senator Santorum in debate the other night referred to the “the global warming hoax”.  Even President Obama, once quite green, in his long state of the union speech alluded to the environment in only a few fast sentences.  Are they afraid their fellow Americans don’t want to hear of environmental issues?  Yes.

Moore’s plastic on the loose comes from continents, ours long leading the way as a source.  The currents carry it everywhere.  Gravity takes some of the denser polymers down into the depths.  Some plastics degrade rather quickly in UV light.  Some are mechanically chewed and partially digested by a host of aquatic animals.  But how long do the smaller and then ever smaller particles last and how toxic are they?  As yet there are few definitive answers to these questions.  The variables are many.  Moore admits to being a lobbyist, a word much in political news of late.  We hear it a lot from our presidential campaigners who accept money from lobbyists and then tell each other not to do so.  Moore and his scientific and business friends are lobbying hard to stop the flow of plastic debris to the sea.

Another key word in the political campaigns of all, including our president’s, is “jobs”.  We ask, “Why not jobs cleaning up?”  Another word much heard is “security”.  By that the speakers mean a strong military.  Only representative Dr. Paul urges otherwise.  He, who wants friendship and negotiations between nations, is treated by the media as some kind of nut.  In a debate last week, Speaker Gingrich, a proclaimed Christian, when asked what he would do with America’s enemies, proudly quoting Andrew Jackson, said, “Kill them.”  The crowd, many also Christians, roared in approval.  What happened to “Thou shall not kill” or “Turn the other cheek”?  Is this a strange world or what?

Our point here as environmentalists is to look at the words “jobs” and “security” in the broadest and longest range senses.  What could be securer to all than having clean water and healthy habitats for all creatures?  What projects would provide more useful jobs for many than developing alternative sources of energy, cleaning up polluted places, and maintaining and expanding our national and state parks; tens of thousands more park rangers, fewer soldiers?  One old closeteer sadly learned last week on a guided walk of trails in Harold Parker State Forest that the swimming beaches there have been closed to the public these past few years due budget cuts.  Swimming areas were one of the main purposes of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which built dams to provide them in mid-last century.  The federal government did CCC projects during a real economic depression, not just a recession.  If then, why not now?  Let’s help Moore keep stuff that shouldn’t be there out of our oceans.  There might be many tens of thousands of jobs at all levels in this endeavor.

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WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION

FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

Ipswich River Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet per Second (CFS):

*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton

THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team:

www.middletonstreamteam.org; <StreamTeam@comcast.net> or (978) 777-4584

In the summer these multiflora rose brambles glow with hundreds of white blossoms. Pamela Hartman photo

WOODLAND WALK IN NEW SNOW

Friday, January 20, 2012, we awoke to a white world shining in the sun.  The TV weather folks said one to three inches of dry snow had come fast and furious in just a couple wee morning hours.  The frozen ground received and kept.  The storm was already well out to sea.  The last of it here must have been quiet; there was still frosting on the trees.

At a little past eight nine members of Middleton’s COA/CC Friday morning walking group¹ met at Mundy Bridge.  There at Prichard’s Pond the water could be seen in several pristine forms.  The liquid tumbling down the stretch of rapids in Boston Brook was at a distance black, contrasting sharply with white banks.  It sang.  Prichard’s Pond, frozen the week before, was a cold sandwich of water, 3 inches of hard ice, and 2 of fluffy snow.  The clear, hence dark water, on entering from Boston Brook allowed us to see all three layers.

All this of course was not novel to the lifelong Yankees, average age 70 plus. They’d risen to a thousand white scenes before, many far more spectacular.  Still, when now and then a breeze burst swept the trees and put us in glittering cold-white dust, some oohed and aaahed, others just smiled.

Happily chattering and kidding one another, we moved easterly from North Liberty Street on a cow path into the woods.  As yet we saw no tracks except those in our wake.  We were soon slowed by unfrozen Pond Meadow Brook bringing water down from Boxford and North Andover.  We had to help each other across a snow covered stone wall and narrow I beam bridge.  There were no casualties.  We proceeded up a path flanked by ledges into a mature oak wood that had been opened some by fire four years ago.  The morning sun, now higher, shone brightly down on us through the leafless canopy.  We passed several vernal pools sealed in ice.  Still no tracks but our own.

A half-mile southwest of Bald Hill we took a winding trail away from it off to the south among glacier carved knolls and two-hundred year old stone walls, the lichen etched gray stones were nicely decorated in white.  Protected Greenbelt land stretched on our left to the east.  Much of this land in northern Middleton, even the private, is naturally protected by wetlands and granite ledge that will not support septic systems.  Long ago it was pasture.  It joins that of Boxford State Forest to the north.  There are miles of trails in Middleton, Boxford and North Andover where we can hike without ever seeing pavement or houses, and rarely other people.

However, we were not alone.  The first tracks that we encountered were those of a fox looking for a morning snack of voles or other small creatures.  We soon came upon a characteristic vole trail, which looked like those made by a western train engine in the deep snow of the Rockies as seen from a plane.  The vole had simply pushed its V plow nose in the fluffy dry snow leaving a mini-canyon behind.  One of the human hikers had seen a vole’s even more striking enclosed tunnel across his lawn that morning.  The fox, tracks in places spread and close together instead of well spaced in a perfect line, had obviously been very interested in the rodent’s path.  Her trail crisscrossed it several times.

All this guessing by non-trackers was done as we entered upon a great swath of openness not seen by us before.  In December and early January a logger hired by the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) with great machines had pretty much clear-cut over a dozen acres of rocky knolls where the fire mentioned had taken its toll.  His state permit calls this “salvage” cutting.  A few individual healthy oaks were left as sources of acorns, the beginnings of new generations.  On higher portions of the large clearing are two undisturbed islands; fifty-foot wide bands of trees left around vernal pools as forest cutting rules require.

The logging areas of salvage and selective cutting over 80 acres appeared a mess of muddy skidder trails and slash before the snow.  Now all is somewhat cloaked in restoring solid water that will melt gradually to the living soil and roots below.  Much light will enter the woods and in just a couple years all will be green again.  We admired hundreds of waist-high white oaks, shoots from the bases of fire damaged trees, awaiting their turn in the now sunny wings.  Plants, many call “weeds” that we call flowers, will come forth this spring.  Wildlife in the area will increase.  These clearings will be where the food and action are.

Some of us had these hopeful thoughts as we climbed a wide skidder trail where mice and coyote tracks had joined those of fox and vole.  The breeze had picked up a bit and the freezing air on skin, in which blood now warmly flowed, felt good.  Despite the cold, some coats were unbuttoned.  The trail eventually took us southwest into the NEFF log yard where several enormous machines and a pile of whole trees for chipping were assembled.  We heard no sawing from the lone logger, his strength multiplied a million fold by engines and oil, was somewhere else.  His idle machines were waiting.

We left via Stream Teamer Joan and son Peter Cudhea’s driveway where the “harvested” logs and fuel chips also exited for the roads of North America.  The logger had told a couple of us that some of the best logs go all the way to Canada.

Back at Mundy Bridge we decided to hike up Boston Brook on a narrow pine shaded path beside the rapids to the ruins of an ancient logging operation powered by men, horses, oxen and water long, long, ago.  After crossing the “Boy Scout Bridge” over the brook on Greenbelt land we walked several rods² upstream, to the remains of a mill pond dam unused for three centuries.  There in the winter woods devoid of leaves the earthen dam and its sluice and overflow ways are clearly seen with an island between the ways.  There are new dams built by beavers on the upper entrances of both.  The beaver impoundment, once a mill pond with floating logs awaiting the farmer-sawyer, supported us on its ice as we walked upstream looking for the current dam builders’ lodge.  Sharp eyed hiker Sally Shaw spotted it upstream in bushes at half a hundred yards.  The beavers had taken advantage of a large fallen red maple’s upturned roots for the lodge’s northern wall.

We left as the last snow, down from white pines, swirled around us to songs sung by Boston Brook’s stones and fast flowing water.  Our blood sang in harmony.

1. The Middleton Council on Aging/Conservation Commission Friday morning walking group was started in 2005 by then Chairwoman of both boards Gertrude Dearborn.  If you would like to join us please meet at Angelica’s rear parking lot on Fridays before 8 AM.

2. One rod = 16.5 feet.  We use the ancient surveyors’ and farmers’ unit here because it seems appropriate for the ruins we were visiting.  ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION

FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

Ipswich River Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet per Second (CFS):

*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton

THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team:

www.middletonstreamteam.org; <StreamTeam@comcast.net> or (978) 777-4584

This beaver dam in northern Middleton is one of scores in the Tri-Town area. They range in length from a few to 400 feet, 1 to 7 feet high. Judy Schneider photo

BEAVERS YET AGAIN

     In 1996 cruel leg hold traps were outlawed in Massachusetts¹.  Trappers stopped trapping.  Beavers, enjoying a new lease on life, multiplied.  Just a couple years later we found signs of them along waterways around town and beyond.  By 1999 several dams were noticeably flooding red maple swamps, floodplains and even a few woodland paths skirting them.

In winter when their impoundments are sealed by ice hydrogen sulfide from bacterial anaerobic (without oxygen) respiration is released where open water trickles over dams.  This “sewer gas” from microbial decomposition of organic matter can sometimes be smelled several hundred yards away.  In 1999 it led a couple old closeteers to a major new dam in north Middleton.  We’ve watched the dam grow longer and higher each year ever since.  Now it is 6 feet high in places and 200 feet long.  The vast impoundment created above has broadened and deepened, and spread north into Boxford.  The red maples, white pines and thick stands of Atlantic white cedar were dead or dying within three years of flooding.  These species like lots of water but can’t take it standing above their roots and trunk bases year around.

In 1997 one closeteer started recording the location of beaver dams and lodges on a Middleton map.  In just a decade there were 40 dams noted.  Now the map hardly has room for more entries in the northern half of town and these are just the dams we know of.  The Ipswich River flowing easterly in the south and then northeasterly forming Middleton’s border with Peabody and Danvers has at least nine dams across its channel.  There were none in over eight miles of river before cheap steel leg hold traps were banned.

Please forgive us for repeating what we have reported about beavers in the Water Closet before.  Our fascination with these large rodents, who have so dramatically changed our landscape, increases each year as ever more of their works are admired.  An estimate from the map and an aerial photo of lowlands flooded by them has our tally up near 500-acres.  If we add the bordering uplands, where beavers venture out a hundred yards from their impoundments cutting trees and bushes, we might add several hundred more acres of land affected.  In a town of approximately 10,000 acres this has our rough tally approaching 10%.  We don’t know how to approximate the groundwater affected.  Their four-dozen or more dams here hold back the water in the watersheds of our streams year around.  This certainly boosts the water tables over large areas.  All this is done by 50 or so pound mammals working night shifts.  We rarely see them in our hiking and paddling rounds yet their signs are almost everywhere except on high ground.

This past week the map-keeping closeteer and friend went forth to check the ice on the 100-acre impoundment around Pond Meadow Pond mentioned above in the very northern tip of town where Boxford and North Andover, towns also with lots of beavers, join.  Pout Pond is the name on the 1980 USGS map.  There are too many pout pounds on our maps; folks simply used this name for ponds where they caught hornpout.  The late Chester Masse, game warden of note and much more, called it Pond Meadow Pond.  We could never figure where the second pond came in; there is only one four-acre pond in the once red maple swamp, now sunny impoundment, which in early agricultural days was drained wet meadow.  The brook flowing from it, we used to awkwardly call Pond Meadow Pond Brook, a name no one else we knew used.  An old closeteer, son of the game warden, when routing its name on a Stream Team sign post, shortened it to Pond Meadow Brook. This makes sense and was easier to rout.  Funny about names, we could go on and on going no where on this subject.  Our late historian Lura Woodside Watkins may be turning over in her grave at a couple of the Stream Team’s selections.  Rest easy Lura, if you could come back we think we could convince you that our names are better.  Oops!  Her turn following that last sentence could almost be heard.  Your names are in a fine history² we value; our names are on 24 vertical green sign posts. Your book may well outlive our wooden posts and those who remember what they said.

Forgive us for wandering from beavers, our subject. We wonder if they have names for the streams they’ve damned.  They haven’t gnawed down any of our sign posts yet.  Maybe chewing paint bothers more than our English names.

On skirting the southern end of the impoundment around Pond Meadow Pond we stopped after crossing its outlet, Pond Meadow Brook, on a wooded knoll overlooking the long well made dam there.  The wide downstream slope reminded us of a half fallen palisade fence.  The well placed sticks and small logs, hundreds of them, range in diameter from one to four inches, some are 10-ft. long.  These make up the latest layer of the dam’s downstream sheathing, beneath it are many older layers rotting and blending with smaller sticks and mud placed yearly on the upstream side by arms and dexterous hands.  An upstream-downstream triangular profile would show a base of about 15-feet and of height of 6.  Most days the ponds behind these marvelous dams throughout New England are chuck full of water; in this case the pond is a shallow 100-acre lake that spills though the leaky top and very audibly trickles to the brook five-feet below.

After five minutes of contemplation and wonder we old timers slowly resumed our counterclockwise circumnavigation of the ever changing impoundment, one we’ve circled several times each year since the beavers returned.  On the east edge of it there is another large dam (220-ft. long, 4-ft. high) where we found scores of black birch saplings freshly cut on a low beaver made island.  Naked twigs, without bark, from the felled one to four inch diameter trees littered the ground and ice in places.  Quarter-inch wide incisor marks at right angles along their lengths decorated them.  One large sapling cut twice at its base left what appears to be a carved bust, perhaps of a beaver notable.

After a leisurely two hours we were back on unpaved North Liberty Street whence we started.  The beavers, perhaps six or so (two adult parents, two born in late spring 2010, and two born in 2009) in each of several snug lodges passed, were behind us but still very much in our thoughts.  We hope they’ve stored enough food, branches stuck in bottom mud near their lodges.  As this is being written the Closet’s glass reads 5-degrees F, the first real cold day of this warm winter.  It probably doesn’t bother them.  They have thick waterproof coats; 32-degree F water in two entrances is just a plunge away.  Soon insulating snow may cover their lodges.  We’ll return when the ice will safely support us.  We won’t feel badly if they don’t come out from open places at their dams to greet us.  They may have been told stories of us and leg hold traps.

1. Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 131, Section 80A

2. Watkins, Lura Woodside, Middleton Massachusetts: A Cultural History   (Essex Institute Salem MA, 1970)

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WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION

FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

Ipswich River Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet per Second (CFS):

*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton

THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team:

www.middletonstreamteam.org; <StreamTeam@comcast.net> or (978) 777-4584

Here in just a small patch of a past winter are several forms of ice. Pamela Hartman photo

WINTER WATER

     The following is our fanciful attempt to explain freezing in a Water Closet published six years ago at the beginning of a real winter we then enjoyed.  There has been no winter to speak of here yet.

“Thanksgiving (2005) . . .  In the early morning water fell in novel form, at least quite different than that of the rain two days ago; still H-O-H, but fluffy, white and cold.

Imagine a great crowd (water molecules) intimately dancing in a city square.  Enter General Drillmaster Kold sweeping in on a northwest wind.  He doesn’t like the hugging, slide and cuddle, and orders, as soldiers will, the participants to rigidly extend their arms, the only contact (bonds) allowed with fellows, hand to shoulder.  The mass expands with arm-length gaps between the now freezing dancers.  The crowd becomes less dense and this is why ice floats.  Most substances upon cooling become ever more dense, water is an exception to a point.  Ice is crystalline; we have but to look at fresh flakes to see, the molecules unseen, arranged somewhat like in “Bucky Balls”.  Chemists have nick-named spherical hollow molecules of carbon atoms after Buckminster Fuller.  You know his geodesic domes, so light yet so strong.  But let us leave the world of molecules, we never really see, and return to this winter’s preview snow we started with.  We, who stay in the north, look forward to more and the new white world ice gives us.  The snow birds will leave; let them fly; they don’t know what they will be missing.  We’ll tell them upon return but they won’t listen.  For them water is only warm, blue and liquid.” (Water Closet 12/2/2005)

In the year just past we had a northeast storm in late October.  Heavy snow with strong winds took down countless trees and branches during the night.  By morning the snow was gone from trees and bushes and by early afternoon from the warm ground.  We haven’t seen any snow since except in the form of brief flurries.  Lingering, almost Indian summers have followed, largely without ice of any kind.  It is now mid-January and our water body surfaces are still largely liquid.  Last week we enjoyed two days when the temperature dropped to 10 degrees F by early morning.  It gave us a teasingly thin, at most one to two inches of ice on some quiet ponds and beaver impoundments, nothing we dared venture out on.

You are probably saying we’ve long had mild winters now and then, not to worry.   There is, however, a difference at least psychologically since we are now bombarded year ‘round with evidence of Global Warming.  Some scientists say when the “tipping point” is reached that significant, very noticeable warming, will come on fast.  Greenland and Antarctic ice will melt and great swaths of low land will be immersed.  The countries of the world worry greatly about this, but like our congress, dither at international meetings from which no strong widespread action is forthcoming.  Many climatologists, probably very reluctant to admit it, think that even if drastic actions to reduce greenhouse gases are taken soon they will be too late.  These morbid thoughts cloud our minds as we Closeteers awake each morning hoping to see snow or find access ice on our swamps and ponds.  We fervently wish for long cold spells and that the warm dark clouds in our minds will dissipate at least for this, so far, non-winter.  Freezing would temporarily cure our melancholy, but alas not the threat of Global Warming.  It is something measured planet-wide, not locally.

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WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION

FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

Ipswich River Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet per Second (CFS):

*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton

THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team:

www.middletonstreamteam.org; <StreamTeam@comcast.net> or (978) 777-4584