5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #5 "Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the fifth and concluding post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003; included in McPhee’s 2006 collection Uncommon Carriers). 

In this superb piece, McPhee retraces the waterways of Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). It artfully blends two trips in one: Thoreau’s 1839 trip and McPhee’s 2003 trip on the same rivers. Hence the title of the piece when it appeared in The New Yorker: “1839/2003.” It’s also posted on newyorker.com as “Paddling After Henry David Thoreau.” But I prefer the title that McPhee gave it when he collected it in Uncommon Carriers – “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”

The piece unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment one covers the first day of McPhee’s trip. It starts on August 31, 2003, in Concord, Massachusetts. McPhee and his long-time friend Dick Kazmaier launch their canoe (an Old Town Penobscot 16) on the Sudbury River, from the same location, according to Thoreau scholars’ best guess, that Thoreau and his brother John launched their boat (a fifteen-foot-long skiff they’d built themselves). McPhee and Kazmaier paddle down the Sudbury to Egg Rock, where it joins the Concord River, then down the Concord to where it enters the Merrimack River, then up the Merrimack as far as Tyngsborough, where Kazmaier bids McPhee farewell and yields his place to McPhee’s son-in-law, Mark Svenhold, for the rest of the trip. McPhee and Svenhold overnight in Tyngsborough at a resort hotel called Stonehedge. 

Segment two describes in greater detail what McPhee and Kazmaier saw, did, and thought as they paddled the Concord that first day. McPhee writes,

Sunday morning and “the air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture. . . . We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water.” In 2003, the Concord was similar for us that Sunday afternoon. Blue herons lined it like gargoyles. Who knows what pious thoughts they were thinking. Thoreau says that on this day “the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church,” and “the frogs sat meditating, all Sabbath thoughts, summing up their week.” Like the Thoreaus’ dory, our canoe moved through flat-calm water that reflected the surrounding world. Thoreau says, “It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water . . . for only Nature may exaggerate herself.” The water we rudely broke with our paddles was as clear as the air and the reflection. Moreover, in eleven miles on the Concord we saw one beer can (afloat), one orange-and-white plastic barrel (in the alders), and no other flotsam or jetsam. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was among the highest legislative accomplishments of the twentieth century. It owed more than a little to thought set in motion by Henry David Thoreau.

Note the artful way McPhee interweaves Thoreau’s observations with his own. The whole piece is like that – the two trips blending, almost as if McPhee and Thoreau are traveling together, which, in a sense, they are. 

Segment three chronicles the second day of McPhee’s journey, as he and Svenvold continue up the Merrimack. They go under the Tyngsborough Bridge. An hour later, they cross into New Hampshire. McPhee describes the river:

The river was peaceful, mostly silent, secluded. From time to time, we heard the surf of highways we could not see. We saw kingfishers along the Merrimack, and blue herons, the fisher kings. Eight Canada geese came in, splat, for belly-flopping crash landings—the only kind of landing they can manage. We saw a shopping cart, a truck muffler, a dolly, dead sweepers full of Styrofoam debris. 

They encounter a wastewater treatment sprayer:

Far ahead and near the west bank, a small geyser was shooting white water straight upward in the otherwise flat river. The eruption was only a couple of feet high but in that apparently motionless riverscape it had the focal effect of a natural phenomenon. It drew us toward it—the ultimate orifice of the Nashua Wastewater Treatment Facility, spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino. This hideous sight was enough to frighten a shipful of Vikings, as Mark Svenvold was prepared to affirm. The discharge smelled like laundry detergent and chlorine, nothing worse, but in this place more than anywhere else—including all the rocks and rapids to come—I preferred that the canoe remain upright. 

That “spinning great concentric swirls of white foam on the river, like half an acre of cappuccino” is wonderfully vivid.

In segment four, day two of the journey continues. McPhee writes,

Passing under a pair of high bridges, we came to the mouth of the Nashua River not long after noon. Turning into it, we pulled up the canoe on a sandy beach among boulders, and, under red maples, ate Stonehedge-prepared club sandwiches laced with avocado. The Nashua was clear, smooth, and fast—not white water but a firm current coming down through a railroad bridge whose bowstring trusses enhanced a lovely scene. The Nashua River, near its mouth, bisects the city, flourishing three oxbow bends before debouching into the Merrimack. The Thoreaus, after passing under a covered bridge and arriving at the Nashua, were not much interested. Henry praises the tributary for its “elm-shaded meadows” at Groton, but says that “near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it.” It tempted Mark and me, and we took off for the public library, digging hard against deceptive currents. A week earlier, for training purposes, we had gone a mile and a half against the upper Delaware at a stage near flood. But this was more difficult, possibly because the Nashua was shallow and we were not poling. Working off the avocado, we got around a meander bend and under the 101 bridge, almost a mile up. Then we came to a small island, beyond which were another railroad bridge and a dam. On our left was the spire of St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, dark-red brick, 1857. St. Casimir’s is on Temple Street near Scripture. Scripture is one-way. On our right was a brick mill, fourteen years old when the Thoreaus went by, with three large arches standing in the river, framing a pitch-black watery cavern. We fought up past the arches to the top of the island, where we decided to let the Nashua return us to the Merrimack.

That “working off the avocado” made me smile. McPhee’s humor abounds in this piece.

This segment is also notable for its structural analysis of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. McPhee quotes scholar Linck Johnson, who calls it a “complex weave.” McPhee comments, “The first image that came to my mind was a string of lights—or any linear structure with things hanging on it, like a heavily loaded clothesline.” McPhee himself has used this type of structure: see, for example, “A Forager” (The New Yorker, April 6, 1968; included in his 1968 collection A Roomful of Hovings). 

Segment five covers day three of the trip, from Nashua to Reeds Ferry. On this stretch of the Merrimack, McPhee and Svenhold see vestiges of the lock and canal that the Thoreaus and the floating freight carriers of the time used to circumvent a ledge. McPhee writes,

The lock doors, of course, were wooden and perishable, but some of the remains include hinges. The guide wall stood on the easterly side. Opposite was a large part of the long wall that led boats to the lock, just as the long walls of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Tennessee, the upper Mississippi lead thousand-foot tows past the bullnoses of guide walls and into locks today. In boulders along the Merrimack we saw iron rings, where canal boats, in the heavy traffic, were tied up to wait for their turns in the lock. 

And when they stop for lunch on an island, McPhee, connoisseur of golf balls, finds and identifies two of them (“In the sand at our feet were two golf balls—each a Strata zero”).

In segment six (day 3 of the trip), McPhee and Svenvold pick their way through a daunting set of six distinct falls. Here’s McPhee’s description of their passage through one of them – Coos Falls:

As we approached Coos, we were again confronted by the chimeric stone wall, making the river look impassable. At each big rapid, a wing dam had been a component of the engineering—an oblique arm sticking far up into but not all the way across the river, its purpose to divert water through the canals and locks. The wing dam at Moore’s Falls had been thirty-two hundred feet long, at Coos twenty-five hundred. That’s a lot of rock to pile up. Now scattered through the rapids, it appears from a distance to be as integral as it once was, and from nearby to be the rocks of a riverbed on Mars. The Coos canal had been framed by the east bank and an island, and now consisted of two small pools separated by isthmuses of high dry rock. It was certainly no thoroughfare, but it seemed preferable to the souse holes, standing waves, and growing water that reached across the river from the west side of the island. We carried the canoe up and over the first isthmus, paddled the second pool, and carried the canoe across the boulders to the north end of the island. There was still a lot of white water in front of us and no way to paddle it, so I walked upcurrent with the fifty-foot rope and, when it was straight, turned and pulled the canoe up to me. Three good pulls and it came on its own, or so it seemed—just picked its way around the boulders, up ledges, and through the little rips until I had to stop it with my hand. Mark came up and held the canoe while I made my way upstream another fifty feet with the rope. I turned and pulled. That got us to the pool above Coos Falls.

They stop for lunch at Griffin’s Falls. McPhee’s wife, Yolanda, joins them. After lunch, McPhee and Svenhold continue upriver to Stark Landing (“further up all the rapids than we had thought we’d ever get”). They keep going. They pole, walk, and line their way through “boulder gardens and bygone weirs” to Merrill’s Falls in Manchester. (“I found three golf balls in Merrill’s Falls," McPhee says.) 

Segment seven covers the fifth and final day of the trip. McPhee writes,

Making good time on the motionless water, we had soon covered more than five miles, were back in the wooded isolation characteristic of the river, and were looking up a straight shot of two and a half miles to a small distinctive mountain, or, in Thoreau’s words, “We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called Hooksett Pinnacle.” After passing under three bridges, two of them abandoned, we would come to the end of our trip at A.J. Lambert Riverside Park, Hooksett Village, below Hooksett Dam—a spectacular scene colluding natural white cascades with water falling over the dam and plunging from the powerhouse.

The above is a very rough summary of one of McPhee’s most intricate, beautiful pieces. What makes it intricate is the way the two journeys are so closely interwoven. What makes it beautiful is the writing – both McPhee’s and Thoreau’s. The combination is double bliss. 

November 14, 2011 Issue

John McPhee, in an interesting piece called “Progression,” in this week’s issue, talks about, among other things, the background sources of some of his early New Yorker articles. In a way, it’s sort of a companion piece to the fascinating Paris Review interview he did last year. It seems McPhee always dwells on structure whenever he talks about his writing method. In doing so, he sells himself short. Yes, structure is one of the hallmarks of his incomparable style. And yes, it’s absorbing and useful to learn how he structures his work. But structure is only one aspect of his composition. McPhee is a brilliant describer. For example (this is just one among hundreds that can be adduced), in “Ranger” (The New Yorker, September 11, 1971), which he mentions in “Progression,” he describes Hartzog’s boatman, Cal Smith, as follows: “Smith is a big man with heavy bones, frankfurtery fingers, lithic jowls.” How did McPhee arrive at that adjective “frankfurtery”? The average writer – someone like myself, say – would write “thick-fingered” or maybe, if he/she saw, as McPhee did (a mighty big “if”), the similarity between thick fingers and wieners, he/she might say “weiner-like.” But “frankfurtery” takes finger description to a whole new level, an inspired level, in my opinion. How did McPhee think of it? Here’s another example, also taken from “Ranger.” It’s a description of Hartzog fishing:

There are five eyes on his rod. He sights through the last one into a patch of flat blue among high mounds of cumulus. He finds a fragment of cloud loose in the blue and he frames it steadily in the fifth eye while he waits for the glass to bend.

What an inspired perspective! A view of a cloud fragment as seen through the eye on a fishing rod! How did McPhee conceive it? No amount of talk about structure accounts for it. It’s art; it’s inspiration; it’s genius. McPhee’s work brims with it. Here’s one more example. In “The Encircled River - I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977), McPhee provides this arresting image of salmon: “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.” How did he conceive the comparison of river with sky, salmon with zeppelins? In a piece titled “Checkpoints” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009), McPhee touches on his art of figuration. He says, “In ‘Coal Train’ (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one: ‘The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.’” I felt a need for analogy – right there is the nub of the creative mystery. Why does he feel that need? Maybe McPhee can’t explain it. Maybe no one can. It certainly involves more than structure. It’s sourced in the realm of inspiration. I wish McPhee would talk more about it.

Postscript: Last week, when I was in Trinidad, Cuba, I had lunch in the back yard of a little restaurant under the vast green canopy of a giant ceiba tree. The tree’s gray bark was like elephant hide. It struck me that the tree would be worthy of a poem. When I returned home, I opened this week’s New Yorker and was astounded and delighted to find just such an item, a poem by Mark Svenvold, titled “Ceiba Tree, Petac, Mexico.” I enjoyed it immensely, particularly the part about “the broad cloth / of a morning above us and in us, like some momentary shaft, / of sunlight on the floating seed of the ceiba tree, / that hangs like this and like that in the shadows and subaltern greens.” And is this the same Mark Svenvold who went up the Merrimack with John McPhee in McPhee’s wonderful “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003)? I believe it is. Perhaps this is another way in which, as McPhee says in “Progression,” pieces “skein out in surprising ways, finally ending in some unexpected place.”