Walking the Water’s Edge
“Despair is blighted foresight; hope is bedazzled hindsight.” (Source Unknown)
The central loop around Fresh Pond, the water reservoir for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1856, is about 2.25 miles. Sometimes I cheat and walk slowly and gain my steps that way. Walking slowly, and walking the same loop, in the same direction, almost every day, gives me the opportunity to see what’s around me a bit more carefully than when I jogged around the loop over thirty years ago.
The walks nowadays is to keep myself moving as age keeps piling on and it also gets me out of the house, gets me to listen to audio books, and just plain think. The thoughts aren’t profound, however much I wish that were the case.
Between the past (the reveries) and the present (the photographs), the future stands very little chance of making me anxious, lonely, and wanting. So, I walk.
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[All italic quotations from Fresh Pond: The History of a Cambridge Landscape by Jill Sinclair, MIT Press, 2009.]
Located in the northwest edge of modern Cambridge, Fresh Pond is a natural lake nestling in a distinctively glacial landscape. Around 15,000 years ago the retreating ice age carved out its kettle lakes and rocky moraines.
Reverie I
The gray boulders, varnished smooth by the waterfall’s spray, were slippery and untrustworthy, ominously treacherous. We were small, my sister and I, low to the ground, perhaps with better traction as we slid our way up to set of drier stones, to sit and eat our butter-and-egg sandwiches at Hundru Falls, near Ranchi, in what is now Jharkand state.
Every winter, merchants cut the ice from the frozen pond in vast amounts and shipped it for sale as far away as England, Singapore, and India. It was a colossal and profitable industry, but today it is largely forgotten.
The water board acquired and completely cleared all the surrounding land, to limit the polluting effects of agriculture and industry.
Members of an Algonquian tribe (mostly the Massachusett) probably established a seasonal settlement on the north shores of Fresh Pond, which may have survived into the contact period with European settlers. Some anecdotal evidence exists of a burial ground nearby.
Reverie II
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein). I “met” him first when I was seventeen, in a sparsely furnished room in Allnutt South, ground floor, in my college campus at the north campus of Delhi University. The window through which I first glimpsed him was a paperback Penguin published in 1965, Ved Mehta’s Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals, the title from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations “What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly out of the fly-bottle.”
I was young, incandescent, and ardent. The music in my ears was a crescendo. Yes, yes, yes, that is what I want from my life, to evacuate the fly-bottle. At seventeen, it felt as if I was on the banks of a sea of knowledge and many barges were about to leave on voyages. I clambered on.
(1775) George Washington . . . was fighting not just the British troops but also a major outbreak of smallpox in the area that threatened to engulf the Continental Army. Consequently, a dedicated smallpox hospital was set up at Fresh Pond and everybody still healthy was told to keep clear: on July 4th, 1775, Washington ordered that “No Person is to be allowed to go to Fresh-water pond a fishing or any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the small pox into the army.”
Reverie III
Getting out of bed in the middle of the night and getting into the back seat of a car with my sister, four years older, while my parents settled into the front seats, was one of the most delicious anticipations of my childhood. My father maintained that the middle-of-the-night drive out of Calcutta (before Kolkata), through the narrow, mill-lined nineteenth-century roads of Chandernagore, heading west toward the Chota Nagpur plateau was easier without truckers gobbling up the road.
Chandernagore, Chandannagar, a town along the Hooghly river, had been a French settlement. It wasn’t part of India till 1951, four years after the rest of the country was independent of foreign rule, when a plebiscite convinced the French that 97 percent of the population wished to be part of India.
The middle of the night drives held Himalayan promise. My father loved driving. He loved going to what is now Jharkand. Forested, with waterfalls and having 40 percent of India’s mineral resources. Hazaribagh, a place of a “thousand gardens,” named by combining two Urdu words, “hazar” (thousand) and “bagh” (garden) was about 300 miles from Kolkata in Jharkand. We had a house there. Everyone was in a good mood. The dark clouds parted.
In the sun-ignited garden of our Hazaribagh house, reading one of the fifty-six Agatha Christies that I gulped down one summer, I had escaped into my own bountiful garden of my imagination and far from anxious clouds.
The ice industry was one of the more unusual businesses that thrived in Massachusetts during the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Ice had been long been collected from New England’s frozen winter lakes for the preservation of perishable food-stuffs. Country houses and hotels near a water supply, such as those of Fresh Pond, would frequently have an underground vault where the ice would be kept until it was needed. A few enterprising businessmen have even thought to sell ice to those who did not have ready access to a supply. By the turn of the nineteenth century there was a small domestic market, with farmers earning extra money by cutting ice from Fresh Pond for sale in Boston. By its very nature, it was a small, localized, and unremarkable business.. . . [One man turned this] trade into a global, multimillion-dollar industry. The man was Frederic Tudor. . . . He persisted in creating markets for ice and in finding more efficient ways of cutting, storing, and shipping it. . . . [The ice industry grew, competitors appeared and shipping ice to warmer climates from New England flourished.]
Reverie IV
The tepee was perfectly conical with the flaps folded over, allowing a glimpse of the inside, where a patterned rug could be seen peeking through. The wooden scaffolding was symmetrical. The tomahawk was lying next to the open firepit with the flames joyfully glancing skyward. But the trees; the TREES weren’t the firs, the spruces, the ponderosas but lowland maples, elms, and oaks with domed coverings of branches and leaves. The tree was my downfall.
I was six, maybe seven, and the assignment in my kindergarten class had been to draw and color a scene showing how Native Americans lived. We’d been reading about them probably and I’m sure we didn’t refer to them as Native Americans. I won’t repeat the term here, what is now a slur and a neon-sign of cultural insensitivity.
All the elements I had drawn got a swift red-penciled checkmark next to it except THE TREE, which had an “X” slashed through it. I was the top fellow in my kindergarten class, the top boy. But that tree slid me down to second place. My heart was beating very fast, chest heaving, and the tears broke out, flooding my vision, and without conclusion.
Hope, desire, thirst, hunger, craving, longing and most certainly covetousness had powered the cascade of tears.
My teacher, whose name I have forgotten, knew exactly how to quell this calamity—with ice cream. She took me to her apartment on the campus of the school (it was a kindergarten through high school) and gave me a small brick of three-in-one: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
One English writer who visited Fresh Pond during her travels in 1849 and 1850 is typical of her attitude to what she saw. She admired the bucolic scenery, and (without any surprise) noted the way society was keen to celebrate the industry and its production techniques, most of them designed by a local man Nathaniel Wyeth. “The water is like liquid diamonds, so transparent and sparklingly pure. The scenery around is worthy of being mirrored in it. I am told in the winter it is one of the gayest scenes in the world. During the time of ice-cutting, innumerable sleighs assemble on the spot, and the beau monde of Boston are all to be met there. (Source: Lady Emmeline Stuart Worthy, Travels in the United States etc. during 1849 and 1850. Harper and Brothers, 1851)