The Curtis Sawmill Dam is coming out. Judy and Rachel Schneider photo

GOOD BYE CURTIS DAM, WELCOME BACK ALEWIVES

     Mid last century water periodically flowed through a short penstock at the Curtis’ sawmill dam, Boston Brook, Middleton, and turned a horizontal turbine.  Its vertical shaft took the power to a pair of bevel gears above, which turned a long shaft with two belt pulleys.  Long leather belts spinning on these took the movement up into a fine mill building where they turned the axles of a circular saw and perhaps a log carriage.  In 1971 the mill, less than four decades old, was burned by vandals, so we can only guess at the mechanics above the rusting steel machinery left behind.  Anyway, we know this was the last water powered mill after three centuries of such in town.  It may have been the last in the Ipswich River Watershed; Stream Teamers and friends are checking now.

As this is being written the concrete dam built in the 1930s by the brothers Arthur and Ernest Curtis is coming down.  Since 1971, time, ice and floods have slowly been doing the job of demolition; now people and machines will remove all the concrete in the next couple weeks.  They’ll have Boston Brook flow to contend since almost two inches of rain fell here last night; the brook will be running higher.  The Ipswich River just a half mile downstream is up over normal May levels.

The contractor, in the hire of the Town of Danvers, which holds the water rights to the dam and mill pond, will carefully set aside the machinery assembled by the Curtis brothers.  Someone told a Closeteer that “mechanical genius” Arthur poured some of the gears.  Volunteers from the Middleton Historical Society and Middleton Stream Team, often in cahoots, will make a parklet on the brook near the saved tail race walls of natural stone, commemorating the saw mill.  Middletonites John Goodwin and Arthur “Breezy” Page can remember having logs sawn into boards there.  Stream Teamer Joan Cudhea’s father Charles Prichard just up stream took logs for conversion to lumber for a pond side summer home.  Others harken back to diving off the mill roof into the pond as boys. Many have skated on the mill pond.

Sometimes we forget what a beautiful object a well made gear can be.  We were reminded recently upon admiring stream team photographer Judy Schneider and daughter Rachel’s pictures of gears and connected power train remains at the Curtis mill ruins.  Rust and encrusting organisms have softened their once functioning hard surfaces.  The   now works-of-moldering-art lie amongst decaying concrete and the natural stones of the mill’s walls.  Judy and Rachel crawled over and around them last week for final photos of the parts in place.  The iron artifacts are to be saved this week as the seven decades old dam is razed by order of the State.  For the planned memorial at the site we envision an informational kiosk of the type at Stream Team landings on the river and an iron sculpture using the mill’s remains.  There is a nice path along the brook from nearby Peabody Street to the site.  In the spring we hope folks visiting will see anadromous fish on the way up to spawn.  Before the blocking dams in our river and tributaries there were tens of thousands.  Herring, shad, sturgeon, and salmon, not caught by Indians and later the Colonists, made the round trip.  Now you see the reason for this essay’s optimistic-hopeful title.  We old Closeteers won’t see it but we like to think the fish will return when the big dams at Bostik, Willowdale and downtown Ipswich are gone.  The Curtis dam removal is but a start.

Note:  A slideshow of the Curtis Pond Dam remnants and old sawmill waterpower machinery is available in the first three pages of the album at http://www.judithdschneider.com/History/Middleton-Mills/11029641_8xxndf   

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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):

For May 15, 2012:              Normal . . . 71 CFS                    Current Rate . . . 105 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

An American elm resistant to Dutch elm disease is transplanted at the 2012 Middleton Earth Day Festival. J. Schneider photo

FESTIVAL CRADLED IN A CROOK OF MIDDLETON BROOK

     The Middleton Stream Team invited folks to the town’s annual Earth Day Festival on the soccer field next to the bandstand in back of Memorial Town Hall.  On a perfect last Sunday in April, they came, the most in five years of such celebrations.  Revelers couldn’t see nearby Middleton Brook encircling to the northwest and northeast due to trees and knolls.  In Colonial times before the reservoir dam, the stream, now from Middleton Pond overflow, “was . . . a powerful one of great beauty”¹ bringing water down from Reading.  While we Stream Teamers couldn’t see the brook, we felt its presence.  The Town has long been planning a town common in the brook’s bend there that will take advantage of its presence along King Street, with a history of water powered mills and two early graveyards not far from its banks.

Midway through the afternoon landscaper Glenn Bambury and wife Donna crossed Middleton Brook where it flows under Mount Vernon Street and arrived to transplant an American elm resistant to Dutch elm disease that the town provided for the occasion.  Howe-Manning students Allison Rock and Rachel Kim read a fine tree poem² while the elm’s root ball was carefully unwrapped and nestled in Glenn’s special soil mix.  An old Closeteer helping was surprised by the interest six or so little nippers ages 4 to 7 took in the process.  They, unencumbered by parents near the excavation, watched as Glenn and assistant filled wheel barrows with soil from truck and then carefully went through the several steps in transplanting.  The children questioned and offered advice as the old Closeteer told about elms and how big they used to get before the disease struck mid-last century.  They sat very close to the hole and had to be shooed back a couple times as shovels of soil were placed.  Donna held the 15-foot tall tree vertically as Glenn worked.  There must be something very basic and satisfying to kids about tree planting; Sunday’s group stayed from beginning to end.  The lucky Princeton American elm with such care is off to a good start.  The Closeteer told the kids that when they were 65 the tree might be eight stories high.  He clearly remembers many elms flanking our Yankee town centers’ streets and commons when he was their age.  We who observed the planting scene provided the town by volunteers Glenn and Donna hoped the kids when old will look high to its graceful top of delicate branches and admire an oriole’s woven nest, the lightest and strongest of hammocks, swaying in the breeze.  While talking about elms at the festival two old timers separately mentioned oriole nests when remembering elms of yore.  We think orioles like the flexible branches.  And won’t it be nice if the small observers when grown old tell their grandchildren, “See this elm, I watched it being planted at an Earth Day Festival long ago.”

It rained the Tuesday and Wednesday after the Sunday planting.  Nearby Middleton Brook rose a couple inches, the Ipswich River to which if flows almost a foot.  The elm roots released from their burlap bag are growing into Glenn’s moist mix.

1. Watkins, Lura Woodside.  Middleton Massachusetts: A Cultural History

2. Oppenheimer, Joanne. Have You Seen Trees?  (Scholastic Inc., New York) 1967

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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):

For May 8, 2012:                 Normal . . . 78 CFS                    Current Rate . . . 45 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

Young Homo sapiens gently holds Rana sylvatica in Downeast Maine outdoor classroom. Linda Gralenski photo

COMMENTS ON EDUCATION

     A marvelous book of less than 200 pages just passed through the Closet, it was a gift given to an old Closeteer three years ago by friend of the Stream Team “Red” Caulfield.  In 2004 geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki, whom you’ve probably seen on TV nature shows, nature writer Wayne Grady, and illustrator Robert Bateman gave the world Tree: A Life Story.  The Closeteer sadly finished it this past weekend.  You know how it is when you have a book you happily look forward to reading in spare moments ends.  Suzuki and Grady who know their biology and have done their homework weave the subject’s many branches seamlessly through time.  They tell us through the life of a West Coast Douglas fir how much more there is to a tree than meets the untrained eye.  This 250 year old fir, like all trees and most organisms is part of a larger whole of communities and ecosystems intertwined and interdependent in air, soil and water.

This book led to thoughts about human education in the 16^th through 20^th centuries when reading was made possible for many by the Gutenberg Press.  The new scholars put the classics on pedestals and looked up to and elevated them even further.  Academia became a new aristocracy.  It had the would-be-fashionable straying from the land and nature in droves.  It became hickish to be a farmer, a person interested in and tied to the land.  The book of Genesis finally available to all didn’t help either.  It emphasized taking dominion over all plants and creatures for the good of God’s important creation man.  Yet a literal reading shows the writers thought he created all else too.  American Indian creation myths certainly recognized the latter and put all on a more equal footing.  Another book just reread in the Closet is Black Elk Speaks.¹ Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux medicine man whose rapidly diminishing people shifted along the branches of the upper Missouri River during the sad times of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and numerous others on the way out as survivors of America’s aggression were confined to “pens”; Black Elk’s word for reservations.  He as a child had lived closely with plants, animals and their habitats.

With the development of cheap paper books our would-be teachers went away to colleges, some called normal schools although not natural, to become literate.  They returned to teach generations the Three Rs inside classrooms.  The parents of their flocks thought that classy, it would get “students” away from the farms, fishing boats, and trades.  They will be successful and live in fancy houses artificially landscaped or with no landscape at all, just towers of bricks and concrete.  Many teachers so isolated in “ivy towers” knew little of ivy, trees, soil, or much else natural.  Some feared or distained “dirt”, bacteria, bugs, and snakes and passed their fears on.  Parents so educated followed suit.  It got so kids weren’t even taught about common insects and trees. And too many were perversely proud they hadn’t.  That was for peasants.  Suzuki and Grady say nothing of this; these are just some of our thoughts arising from their important book.

The authors, without ever mentioning education, tell us beautifully how intricate are the overlapping layers of life.  Upon reading their book and others by ecologists over the years we wonder why children aren’t taught at an early age more about the natural world.  Despite “good” educations we know that many adults today know little of such basics as compass directions, phases of the moon, tides, weather, geology, biology, and zoology.  Some don’t even know where they fit in nature relative to other creatures, i.e. evolution.  Farmers, fishermen and hunters do but there are few of them left.  Machines, agribusiness and specialists have taken over food production.  Now we study books, not nature directly, so have less feeling for the latter.  We must of course study both, but why separately and seemingly out of order?  Why not teach about soils, air, and water early on in school before, and as kids naturally do when they explore mud puddles and weedy-grassy patches?  They intuitively know education is from the ground up.  The answer is that nature is largely outdoors and that our teachers, parents and schools are indoor people and institutions.   A friend of the Closet, Fred Gralenski, way down Maine where the Sun first shines each day on our country takes youngsters out each spring to find amphibians and other creatures.  We got a report from him last week about this year’s finds and finders.  See the attached photo.  And just this last Sunday at Middleton’s Earth Day Festival Ipswich River Watershed naturalist Jim MacDougall taught children and adults about fish and more as they stopped by his fly tying table to tie and chat.  We wish there were thousands more Freds and Jims showing the kids what they had learned around the yard as children, and since in ever widening fields as adults.  Teaching shouldn’t be the sole domain of indoor classrooms, textbooks, and germ and bug fearing parents or the advertisers who take advantage of parents’ fears.

The education we advocate would be done by parents, other kin and outdoorsmen-nature lovers in vacant lots, backyards, greenbelts, parks and on small farms.  Locally we have large areas of undeveloped land near at hand and foot.  There should be pubic paths from every school and neighborhood to them.  Middleton now has a fine opportunity to gain more such land in the floodplain of Nichols Brook and by access for all to a five mile stretch of former railway passing through town from North Andover to Danvers, much in and along wetlands “where the wild things are”.  Middletonites, please attend town meeting Tuesday, May 8, and vote for Rails to Trails article 29 and for article 28 to purchase 19 acres between East Street and Nichols Brook.²   These will become more of Middleton’s outdoor classrooms.

1.  Neihardt, John G.  Black Elk Speaks. (Washington Square Press, New York) 1932, 1939

WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION

FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

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

For May 1, 2012:                 Normal . . . 95 CFS                    Current Rate . . . 66 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

Painted turtles warming up in Patriot Day’s sun. Most years this spot on the Ipswich River would be under two-feet of water in April. J. Schneider photo

PATRIOTS DAY ON THE IPSWICH RIVER

While thousands were running before a gentle tailwind north-easterly to Boston in dangerous heat, ten old timers in five canoes, also tending in that direction, were enjoying the day on the Ipswich River.  We, on the 67^th Huntoon-Masse Patriots’ Day paddle, unlike the Marathoners were in no hurry and under no stress except of waning years, which we didn’t give a thought to except when climbing in and out of canoes or over logs.  The strange 80 degree heat, while disturbing to minds daily reading of Global warming and used to crisp cool Aprils, stimulated the flow of blood.  The oldest of us is 89, the youngest about 60 with most falling, but not yet, in between.  Besides the heat another difference from past years was the elevation of the water after a long winter-early-spring drought.  There was no detectable flow at all except over dams.  If it wasn’t for the periodic beaver dams we’d have been unable to navigate in places.  We could see pollen lines on trees from past spring highs four-feet above the water level we paddled.  Without the half dozen beaver dams in the six-mile stretch we did it would have been down another foot or two.

Despite being a holiday with warm weather we saw only one other canoe and two kayaks.  However, the heat had kids swimming at Thunder Bridge.  The water temperature was about 10 degrees higher than it normally is in mid-April.  While people were scarce three of our favorite river animals were not.  We must have passed a hundred basking painted turtles, most relatively small.  Canada goose couples near or on their nests were seen every few hundred yards.  Muskrat holes pocked the banks and their fine grass lodges caught our eyes on rounding almost every turn.  Mother geese were setting on nests built on the summit of a couple.  In the past we’ve often seen them nesting but usually on beaver lodges.  The muskrats these past three years are definitely in the ascendant.  One pair of geese, perhaps domestic novices, has built a nest on a low bar with only a foot of free board.  A good rain, if one ever comes this spring, may carry it away.¹

The low flow river in spring is a strange place.  The wide muddy strips between mean-annual-highs and the present water level half the way up the channel’s bank are black, gray and drying.  Herbaceous plants are still some way off, although the now common reed-canary grass is up a few inches in sunny stretches.  The turtles have plenty of solid surfaces, fallen branches and exposed roots to charge their batteries in the sun on.

Our leisurely pace and ease of paddling without wind or schedule gave us time to ponder painted turtles, Canada geese, and muskrats.  Upon return to the Closet we read about them again.  Edward Howe Forbush is one our favorite sources, his tomes like us are old.  Birds of Massachusetts and New England fills the three volumes given the Closet by Francis Masse, long leader of our Patriots Day Paddle.  His late father, game warden Chester Massé, passed them on to him.  Fran’s mother started the annual family paddle in the late 1930s.  The following is some of what Forbush had to say about Canada geese.  We’ve included the following here before but can’t resist doing so again.  He describes their passing here as we knew them as children.  Late 20th and 21st century folks probably can’t believe they weren’t always with us here year-round.

“Wild geese are the forerunners of winter and the harbingers of spring.  While the ice still covers our lakes . . . and the spring floods first begin to break up the frozen rivers, the geese are on their way; and then as that “flying wedge” sweeps fast across the sky it brings to all who see or hear the promise of another spring.  The farmer stops his team to gaze; the blacksmith leaves his forge to listen as that far-carrying clamor falls upon the ear; children leave their play and eagerly point to the sky where the feathered denizens of the northern wilderness press steadily toward the pole, babbling of the coming spring, carrying their message over mountain and plain to village, city and farm as far as open water can be found.”

Believe it or not, you who fret about geese poop on golf courses and park lawns, just three human generations ago we only saw them coming and going in spring and fall.  They lingered a bit to fuel up in our fallow fields, marshes and tidal flats.  The passing of the great V’s, Forbush’s wedges, were the cause a great deal of excitement to us kids.  Now, as all know, many stay year-round.

Let’s think about the painted turtles passed and one hatchling reported crossing Butch Cameron’s yard last week from a nest 1000 baby turtle lengths from the river.  Its mother laid her eggs there last summer.  We’ll also return once again to our favorite turtle book by scientist, artist, naturalist, almost poet, and MacArthur genius grant recipient David M. Carroll.  We wish you could join us as we turn the luminous pages of The Year of the Turtle.  Carroll, New Hampshire Yankee, who knows the names and places of all our plants and animals, writes prose approaching poetry about them.  His Swampwalkers Journal is laden with information and while never sentimental is obviously written with deep love for his wild subjects.  In both books we must pause every few paragraphs to think about what we have so pleasantly learned.  A slow spring wade though a wetland with Carroll is a rich experience.  He stops to sketch, measure, and take notes about turtles found.  Many are old acquaintances.  He records place in space, companions, and air and water temperatures as well as observations about time and light.  Had he gone on our Patriots Day canoe trip it would have taken forever.  Back at home his sketches give rise to beautiful water colors.  These and fine sketches grace every few pages of his books.  This paragraph was to be about turtles not their champion.  On reflection we suppose that is what it should be.  Most humans have strayed too far from our fellow creatures.  If we knew them we might protect their habitats and ultimately ours.  We’ll revisit painted and others turtles in subsequent weeks.  Now let’s see if we have room in the Closet for third animal mentioned, muskrats.

Alas, we do not.  We’ll have to revisit them also.  This past Sunday-Monday’s almost three inches of rain have raised the river over two feet, which will make it much easier.¹ This time there will be fewer of us and we’ll be quieter.  The muskrats may come out and join us.  In the meantime we’ll leave you with a homework assignment.  Read Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife Magazine’s good article by Peter Mirick on muskrats in its March 2012 issue.  Or visit the Water Closet and ask long-ago boyhood trapper Fran Masse about them; or better still paddle, like we plan to do again, among them.

1. From Sunday morning through Monday evening (April 22 -23) we finally got rain.  Almost 2.6 inches was measured in central Middleton; the river at the south Middleton USGS gauge rose almost three feet.

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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):

For April 24, 2012:             Normal . . . 103 CFS                 Current Rate . . . 207 CFS*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton

THE WATER CLOSET  is provided by the Middleton Stream Team: