As a kid and while returning back home to Centralville after time spent in the Acre or “Little Canada” where some of my aunts, uncles and cousins lived, I would always enjoy watching the silent, long-streaming ripples of the Merrimack River as they gently flowed over the many granite rocks that made up the river’s rough, craggy bottom.
Often, I wondered if Jack Kerouac in his reveries had also made “ripple watching” of the lower Merrimack a memorable event of his early days in the city. Where did our Lowell poet and author ever learn his precious insights about Doctor Sax and that big, scary, multi-story mystery house on Hildreth Street across the street from Lowell’s famous Hildreth Street Cemetery where our beloved and, sometimes, misunderstood Civil War General Benjamin Butler is ceremoniously buried?
But, back to my story about keeping the environment clean.
The factory-river scene, which I must have passed hundreds of times during my first twenty-one years of walking on this planet is one that seems forever engraved on the membranes of my young noggin. Looking over the green, metallic railing to my right, I noticed that a steady flow of dark, yellowish-brown-green fluid (gunk) was being constantly added to the river’s quiet surface through a short, metal pipe that protruded through the huge foundation of the three – or was it four story – textile mill building behind me and to my right.
The gunk material was allowed to drop directly below through gravity where it then accumulated in an unattractive pool located near the footing of the Aiken Street Bridge, which I was crossing. Here, I was learning elements of practical “fluid dynamics” years before even considering a career in science and technology at Lowell Tech, just up the street!
But the story does not stop there!
The yellowish-brown-green fluid eventually streaked across the entire width of the river and then continued downstream toward Lawrence, Massachusetts where a fellow-French-Canadian lad, David Coilie, would, later, bathe in the Merrimack’s waters. However, this Lawrence boy was not amused to find that his entire body was completely covered with an ugly, multi-colored sheen of glistening spendour. And it was difficult to scrap off. Many, many years later, he shared with me the “fluid dynamics” lessons of his youth. We, both, agreed that Nixon’s EPA efforts had started just a bit too late from the viewpoint of two, intrepid, Merrimack River boys, way back when boys would be boys.
Finally, more to the story – dead fish in the waters
Another river observation had caught my eye even before the gunk discoveries described above. There still was some fishing to be done on the upper Merrimack River above the Pawtucket Falls even as I entered puberty. As a kid, I eagerly rummaged through the alluring, river’s edge neighborhoods of Lakeview Avenue near Bridge Street, but also near the West 6th Street/Lakeview Avenue crossover where any lad could easily find treasures such as: old automobile rubber tires, bicycle parts and pieces of box springs and, of course, dead fish. There were several places in town called a dump and this was one of them.
Finally, dead fish floating, belly-up and going downriver were surefire, visual signs of Lowell’s possible needs for cleaning up its environment. Curiously though, no adult within my auditory range (maybe, the Lowell Sun newspaper raised a fuss?) seemed to be even slightly concerned that obvious, visual pollution was negatively affecting property values. Even land developers in the area made no mention of our changing, not-so-beautiful neighborhoods.
Fortunately, we had Jack Kerouac to, somehow, make it all beautiful!
A la prochaine, Paul from 179 Ludlam Street in Centralville
