Downstream

My grandfather was a cranberry farmer. He owned a bog in Carver, Massachusetts (near Plymouth) and another in Mashpee, out on the Cape. Both bogs had rivers running through them. In Carver there was a pump house, with a mysterious and somewhat frightening belt-driven pump that would pull up water from the stream and cascade it out onto the bogs which, when appropriately gated, would be flooded, either as protection against frost, or for irrigation. Later this became useful when the technique of harvesting the berries in water become popular. Down on the Cape the water was put out by means of a vast sprinkler system. I have vivid memories of both rivers (though I don’t recall their names). When I was a young boy I would go with my grandfather to the bogs in the early evening. Sometimes we would fish, catching hornpout and eels, or sometimes we were tending the large garden he kept a the Carver bog.  The more exotic adventures were when I got to go with him in the middle of the night, after the frost alarm had gone off. I’d fall into the car half asleep, but by the time we arrived at the bog I’d be buzzing with the thrill of the mission; adjusting the flood gates, waiting anxiously while my grandfather would sometimes descend into the well of the pump house to make some adjustment, and feeling just a twinge of fear when that 10 foot, 12-inch wide belt would begin to whirr from the big gasoline engine to the top of the pump shaft.

In my high school years I spent summers working for my grandfather. Often the work involved trucking or laboring with the materials that he sold in his agricultural supply business, but I favored the days when we’d go out to the bogs. Out on the Mashpee bog the river was shallow, and one of our tasks was to wade up the river with a scythe, cutting the weeds that were impeding its flow. My most frequent companion was Jim, a large, dark Portuguese man from New Bedford. Jim would be driven over early in the morning by one of his brothers (he could not drive himself), often arriving at 5:30 or so. On cold or rainy days he’d find shelter in one of the trucks, otherwise he’d just stand, without much movement, until the crew gathered at 7:30.  Jim had a mouthful of rotting teeth, and though he was strong as an ox, he was not overall in good health. He signed his paycheck each week with an X, and my grandmother would cash it for him on the spot – I’m  not sure that he ever set foot in a bank  his entire life. His vocabulary was simple, but he had a gift for using it, and would often come up with profound observations about life that seemed as savvy as any book-learned wisdom that I had absorbed. Jim and I did a lot of different kinds of work together, but I can still see him standing in river swaying methodically with the scythe.

Rachel Carson had just written Silent Spring, and my first awareness of that book was that it had just about ruined the cranberry business, as it resulted in the banning of DDT, a pesticide that the farmers had become quite dependent on. But other toxic chemicals were found to replace it. One of our jobs was to supply the helicopter crews that did aerial spraying . We’d fill up tanker trucks with parathion, malathion, and other scary-sounding chemicals. Every year there were stories of folks who had accidentally spilled these chemicals on their skin. I don’t know if the rumors of fatalities were true, but people did get sick – it was bad stuff. After the trucks were filled there were piles of empty five-gallon pails around, which we would store and periodically drive up to a warehouse in the woods around the bog. When that would get crowded, we’d dig a big hole, throw them in and bury them. Our consciousness at the time was not privy to the fact that this might be a bad thing.

My grandfather loved the earth. Over the years he built up a successful business that supplied fertilizers, pesticides, and equipment to cranberry farmers all over the Cape and potato farmers in Rhode Island, but he always preferred the days when he could go out onto the bogs, weeding, cleaning ditches, and eventually each year, harvesting. We would often break for lunch just sitting on the ground leaning up against tree trunks. He would often doze off, and it seemed like he was just one with the tree and the ground. In the evening he would tend to his vegetable and flower gardens.  He would speak passionately about anything that grew, and he was thrilled whenever he witnessed even the most common wildlife. It never occurred to me until long after he died at only 66 years, that his routine practices might have been responsible for some serious environmental damage; thousands of pesticide cans just buried in sandy soil not far from the river. He was just a little late to be able to absorb Rachel Carson’s wake-up call, but his intentions were not malicious. Indeed, he was one of the most moral men I knew – he ran his business with integrity, and he really thought of himself as a servant to his employees. When big Jim’s brothers would forget to pick him up (which happened with some regularity), he would drive him the half-hour trip himself, but not before he had set him down at the dinner table and given him a much more decent meal than he would have gotten at home. If Jim needed to visit the dentist to tend to his decaying teeth, my grandfather would find time to get him there, and to take care of the bill while he was at it.

There are bad people in the world, and some of them knowingly make decisions that will result in damage. The harm may be to the environment, or to poor people, or perhaps even to forces at the spiritual level. But I believe that most people are good; we move forward out of habit, and it takes a while to change our thinking about things even when we become aware that our actions might  be damaging. I am now the age that my grandfather was when I was just a boy of 10. I had already come to love those two small rivers, and perhaps that influenced my current passion. I’m not a fisherman, nor have I spent much time boating up or down stream. But I could walk along a river bank for hours, or sit in one place, contemplating the journey that is taking place. One of my favorite spots is where the Nubanusit flows into the Contoocook. The former begins its short journey in my town of Nelson. Between there and its terminus (or perhaps it’s “transition”) in Peterborough, it once provided a livelihood for over 1,600 people. These days rivers are of less economic importance, but they have enormous capacity to enrich the soul. As I sit at the confluence, I think about how everything that I do in my life ultimately flows downstream, from one river into another. My time and place gives me the benefit of more information than my grandfather had, and I’ve cultivated different habits. But I am no wiser than he was, and I can only hope that those things which I do in innocent ignorance will not take too strong a toll on future generations.