Our river is one of the pair of kingly streams which traverse almost our
entire State from north to south. The first twenty-five miles of its
course, after leaving the great lake which it drains, is a tearing rapid
between rocky walls: then follows perhaps a hundred miles of alternating
falls and "dead water," the falls being now fast taken up as water
powers. It has eleven hundred feet to fall to reach the sea, and it does
most of this in its first thirty miles.
The river's course through part of our county is marked by a noticeable
geological formation. For a space of fifteen miles, the greater and
lesser tributary streams have broken their way down through the western
ridge of the river valley in a succession of small chasms that are so
many true mountain defiles in little. They have the sharp descents and
extreme variety of slopes and counter-slopes, though with walls never
more than a hundred and fifty feet high.
There are forty or fifty of these ravines, some nourishing strong
brooks, some a mere trickle, or a stream of green marsh and ferns where
water once ran. Acushticook, which threads the largest, is really a
river, and Rollingdam, Bombahook, and Worromontogus are all powerful
streams. Rollingdam follows a very private course, hidden in deep mossy
woods for several miles. The ravine presently deepens and becomes more
marked, descending in abrupt slopes, then narrows to a gorge, the rocky
sides of which are covered with moss and ferns, nourished by spray. The
brook runs through it in two or three short cascades, and falls sheer
and white to a pool, twelve feet below.
Below our Town, the river sweeps on, steadily wider and nobler in
expanse, till it reaches the place where five other rivers pour their
streams into its waters, and it broadens into the sheet of Merrymeeting
Bay, three miles from shore to shore.
Below the bay the channel narrows almost to a gorge. The sides are steep
and rocky, crowned with black growth of fir and spruce, and through this
space the swollen waters pour in great force. There are strong tide
races, in which the river steamers reel and tremble, and below this
there begins a perfect labyrinth of channels, some mere backwaters, some
leading through intricate passages among a hundred fairy islands. There
are cliffs, moss and fern-grown, and countless dark headlands. The
islands are heavily wooded with characteristic evergreen growth, dense,
fragrant, of a rich color, and they are ringed with cream-white granite
above the sea-weed, where the blue water circles them.--And so down, till
the first break of blue sea shows between the spruces.
We never feel cut off, or too far inland, having our river. The actual
sea fog reaches us on a south wind, salt to the lips. Gulls come up all
the way from the sea, and save for the winter months, there is hardly a
day when you do not see four or five of them wheeling and circling;
while twice or thrice in a lifetime a gale brings us Mother Carey's
chickens, scudding low, or else worn out and resting after the storm.
The river sleeps all winter under its white covering, but great cracks
go ringing and resounding up stream as the tide makes or ebbs, leaping
half a mile to a note, to tell of the life that is pulsing beneath; and
before the snow comes, you can watch, through the black ice, the drift
stuff move quietly beneath your feet with the tide as you skate. I have
read fine print through two feet of ice, from a bit of newspaper carried
along below by the current. One winter a dovekie lived for three weeks
by a small open space made by the eddy near some ledges; then a hard
freeze came, and the poor thing broke its neck, diving at the round
black space of ice which looked scarcely different from the same space
of open water.
The river lies frozen for at least four months. The ice weakens with the
March thaws and rains. Then comes a night in April when the forces which
move the mountains are at work, and in the morning, lo, the chains are
broken. The great stream runs swift and brown and the ice cakes crowd
and jostle each other as they spin past.
The river traffic goes steadily on through our three open seasons, and
with it a little of the longer perspective of all sea-faring life comes
to us, and off-sets the day-in-day-out of the town's shop and factory
routine.
Our southern lumber is brought us by handsome three and four-masted
schooners, which take northern lumber and ice on the return voyage. The
other day two schooners, on their maiden voyage, white and trim as
yachts, were at the lumber wharf, the _Break of Day_ and the _Herald of
the Morning_.
Our coal comes in the usual long ugly barges. One or two small excursion
steamers connect us with the nearer coast towns, forty miles distant,
and every day all summer, the one large passenger steamer which connects
us with the big coast cities, comes to or from our town. She takes her
tranquil way between the river hills, not without majesty, while the
water draws back from the shores as she passes and the high banks
reverberate to the peaceful thunder of her paddles. Like other river
towns, we have now a fleet of motor boats, in use for pleasure and small
fishing.
Traffic on the river shrank immensely with the forming of the Ice Trust,
which holds our ice-fields now only as a reserve. We see three or four
tall schooners at a time now, where we used to count the riding lights
of a dozen at anchor in the channel.
The greater part of our fleet of tugs is scattered. The _Resolute_ and
_Adelia_,--dear me, even their names are like old friends--the _Clara
Clarita_, the _City of Lynn_, the _Knickerbocker_, and the trim smart
twin tugs, _Charlie Lawrence_ and _Stella_, have gone to other waters.
The _Ice-King_ plies now in the coast-wise trade. Our lessened river
work is done by the _Seguin_, a large and handsome boat, the _Ariel_, a
T-wharf tug from Boston, and the _Sarah J. Green_, an ugly boat with a
smokestack too tall for her.
The Government boat comes up in late April, while the river is still
very rapid, brown and swirling after the spring freshet, and sets the
channel buoys. We always thrill a little at her unwonted, sea-sounding
whistle. She comes again in November, takes up the buoys, and carries
them to some strange buoy paddock in one of the winter harbors, where
hundreds and hundreds of them are stacked and repainted. The names of
the revenue cutters in this service are prettily chosen, the _Lilac_,
_Geranium_, etc.
Before the days of tugs, schooners and larger vessels sailed up and down
the thirty-odd navigable miles of our river under their own canvas, and
the traffic to and from Atlantic ports was carried on by packets: brigs,
schooners, and topsail schooners. One of the captains has told me that,
seventy-five years ago, on his first voyage, it took his brig seven days
to beat to the mouth of the river, a passage now made in six hours. It
must have been extremely difficult piloting. The channel is narrow in
many places, though the river itself is so wide. There are sand-bars,
mud-flats, and ledges.
In my Father's childhood a curious, indeed a unique type of vessel,
known as a Waterville Sloop, plied between what was then (before the
building of the dams), the head of navigation, twenty-six miles above
us, and Boston, taking lumber and hay. They carried one square-rigged
mast, and sailed with lee-boards, like the Dutch galliots, and were in
fact a survival of the square-rigged sloops of old time, immortal in the
memories of the glorious Sloops of War, and in Turner's pictures.
Once in a while you still see "pinkies," which were once so common:
small schooner-rigged vessels with a "pink" (probably originally a
_pinked_) stern, _i.e._, a stern rising to a point, with a crotch to
rest the boom in.
Scows are rarer than they used to be, but they still carry on their
humble, casual lumber and hay business, sailing up with the flood-tide,
and tying up for the ebb. They are sloop-rigged, quite smart-looking
under sail, and sail with lee-boards, like the Waterville Sloops.
The Lobster Smack, a tiny two-masted schooner, not more than thirty feet
long, comes once a week in the season, and we buy our lobsters on the
wharf and carry them home all sprawling, and are delighted when we get a
little sea-weed with them.
The laborers of the river are the dredges, pile-drivers, and their kind.
They must see to the journeyman's work that keeps the river's traffic
unhampered. They drive piers and jetties and dredge out sand-bars. They
go and come, unnoticed by smarter vessels, laden heavily with broken
stone, sand, or gravel. They are dingy powerful boats, fitted with a
derrick and hoist or other machinery. They carry big rope buffers at bow
and sides, and in spite of this their bulwarks are splintered and
scarred where they have been jammed against wharves and knocked about.
There is no fresh paint or bright brass about them, they are grimy
citizens, but are all strong and seaworthy. Sometimes the Captain is
also owner; sometimes one man owns a whole little fleet, of two dredges,
say, and a small tug, named perhaps after wife and daughters, as in one
case I know, the _Nellie_, _Sophia_, and _Doris_. This is the family
venture, followed with as much anxious pride in "our Vessels" as if the
fleet were Cunarders.
One day what should come up the river but a white schooner, tapering and
tall, and glistening with new masts and cordage, bearing a fairy cargo
of shells and corals. The rare shells, some of them costly museum
pieces, were to be sold to collectors, if any were to be found along our
northern harbors, while others, as beautiful as flowers or sunset
clouds, the children might have for a few pennies.
The Captain was a young Spaniard, very dark, and as handsome, grave, and
simple in bearing, as a Spanish Captain should be. His men seemed to
adore him, and to obey the turn of his eyelashes. They all gave us a
charming welcome, especially to the children. It was a leisurely and
pleasant little venture. I do not know whether it brought in profit, but
all the town flocked to the schooner, day after day, for the week that
she stayed with us.
The rafts come down the river when they please. They look about as easy
to manoeuvre as an ice-house, but the flannel-shirted lumbermen who
operate them, two to a raft, seem unconcerned, and scull away at their
long "sweeps," in the apparently hopeless task of keeping their clumsy
craft off the shallows. With the breaking up of the ice, stray logs,
escaped from the holding booms, come down stream. The moment the
ice-cakes are out of the river, even before, you begin to notice shabby
old row-boats tied up and waiting at the mouth of every stream and
"guzzle"; and as soon as a log whirls down amongst the confusion of ice,
you will see boats put out, perhaps with a couple of boys, or else some
old humped-up fellow, in a coat green with age, rowing cross-handed,
nosing out like an old pickerel watching for minnows. The logs that are
missed drift about till they are water-logged, when they sink little by
little, and at last become what are known as "tide-waiters," or
"tide-rollers," _i.e._ snags drifting above, or resting partly on, the
bottom, a menace to vessels.
There are holding booms at different turns of the river, with odd shabby
little house-boats for the rafts-men moored beside them; and what are
these called but _gundalows_, an old, old "Down-east" corruption of
_gondola_; whether in derision, or in ignorance, is not now known.
Sometimes they are fitted up with some coziness, perhaps with white
curtains and a little fresh paint, and I have even seen geraniums at
their windows.
Another brand-new schooner, the _William D'Arcy_, tied up at our lumber
wharf this last spring, and lay there for nearly a week. We all went on
board her. She lay at the sheltered side of the wharf, out of the cold
wind, and the sun poured down on her. The smell of salt and cordage was
so strong that you could almost feel the lift of her bows to the swell,
but there she lay, as quiet as if she had never lifted to a wave at all.
The men were at work at various jobs; no one was in a hurry; it plainly
made no difference whether they were two days at the wharf or ten.
The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, hawsers, and hawse-holes,
seemed wonderfully large to our landsman eyes, and the inside fittings,
lockers, etc., as wonderfully small and compact. The enormous masts were
of new yellow Oregon pine.
The Captain welcomed us hospitably, and took us down into his cabin,
which was fitted with shelves, lockers, and cupboards, neat and compact,
all brand-new and shining with varnish. There was a shelf of books, the
table had a red cover and reading lamp, and the wife's work-basket stood
on it, with some mending. She had gone "upstreet" for her marketing.
"Oh," said one of us, "it looks so homelike and cozy!"
The Captain looked round it complacently, but with remembering eyes that
spoke of many things. He had been cruising all winter.
"It looks so to you," he said, "but often it ain't."