Connecticut River Journey — A Plan With a Past
I was born on the Connecticut river, so to speak.
I was born in Hartford CT, which was founded on the Connecticut River back in the 1600s. My first house was just up the hill from the Connecticut river, and I could see it if I went out on the sidewalk and looked down a long hill as far as I could see. Right in front of the river was a train track, and whenever I heard a train, I ran to watch. And then there was the river behind it.
I haven’t seen the Connecticut river from that spot for about 72 years, but I’m taking my son (himself a grandfather) and we’re going to have a look.
It will be October then, lovely I expect because of the lingering colors and because the snow will still be a month or two in the future.
Connecticut is about 2500 miles from where I live now, in Tucson. We’re flying in, converging in Chicago for the second half of the flight east. Connecticut is family turf, and I’m going to share my memories with my son. We probably won’t have time to go to Boston where he grew up so he can share his with me.
While we were talking about places in the east that we would like to visit together, I realized that a great number of events from my growing-up years were based on the Connecticut river: birth, first home, college, first date with the guy I married, and we think the home of a great great great great great grandfather.
Also, many cousins still live there.
So we thought we’d start at the very beginning of the river and follow it down to where it empties into Long Island Sound (another body of water important to me when I was growing up, the place where I swam and sailed).
But where does this river begin? The Connecticut that I know is not a trickle, it is a wide, well-developed body of a vast amount of water.
A little research showed that the mighty and personally important Connecticut, which divides New Hampshire from Vermont, which served as a conduit for Dutch explorers before the Pilgrims arrived a hundred miles to the east and stepped onto Plymouth Rock, starts as I guess most rivers do as a trickle in the woods.
You drive all the way to the Canadian border, to a crossing into Quebec, then just before the border join a footpath that rises in altitude several hundred feet on a rugged, rocky trail. Finally a sign says Fourth Connecticut Lake. (No, I haven’t been there myself. Not yet. And research shows us that we’re not going to be able to drive to it, only to the border crossing. So I suspect we won’t see it in person.)
It’s a tiny lake. I’ve heard it referred to as a pond. Small as it is, it’s the headwaters of the 410+/- mile long Connecticut River.
We hope to follow the entire length of the river during the 2–3 days we have.
One important spot is a dam at Wilder NH. This is where John and I had our first date, a lovely dinner at the Wilder Inn. Not your typical blind date! The fine dining on that first date was a real eye-opener.
Then we will duck into Hanover NH, where John and I had our first home. We lived there only briefly, for the six or so weeks we had between our wedding and his flight to San Diego to begin graduate school. I was to leave a few days later and drive back to Smith College, also on the Connecticut, for my senior year.
Then we will go to Hartford, where I was born; to Wethersfield, where I first lived; and then to Long Island Sound, not far from where I first learned to sail. The town where it enters Long Island Sound is Old Saybrook. I remember my mother telling me her mother used to like to go there in the summer.
So that’s our plan.
What I’d really like to do is to get out and walk along every tributary — there are 148 of them, of which 38 are major, according to Wikipedia’s article on the Connecticut River — but we’re not going to do that in 2–3 days.
I just wonder how many other parts of my life, parts I don’t remember, occurred along the Connecticut. Some important ones happened hundreds of years before I was born. What patriots from way back trod these same paths, haggled about these borders, farmed these lands, or moved west?
I don’t know what we’ll actually do. It will just be nice to be in New England with a beloved son, to take in the fall again. But if nothing else, I want to stand with him in front of the little house my mother built in Wethersfield and see it from there, with my old eyes. Maybe a train will go by, and that might even be enough.
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, a linguist, and a life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
Peg believes in Old Love, a rich genre not to be confused with young romance. Old Love is about relationships, deep, enduring, and complicated. She knows: she has been married to space scientist and author John S Lewis for 57 years, and if she is old, he is yet older.
