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WANDERING LEWIS CREEK by Kevin Dann G'85
I began
haunting the banks of Lewis Creek twenty years ago, after I first moved
to Vermont. Though my family and I settled in the La Platte River watershed
just to the north, I always found myself drawn to Lewis Creek as an avenue
of exploration of Vermont’s Champlain Valley landscape. While a canoe
trip down the La Platte frequently brought the sights and sounds of the
present into view, when canoeing or walking along Lewis Creek, one was
in the presence of what seemed largely a nineteenth-century landscape. Like
so many people who have moved to northern New England in the past few
decades, settling in Vermont was for me an attempt to go back in time,
to flee the placelessness of the modern world for a much mythologized
past. I had grown up in northern New Jersey, at the edge of metropolitan
New York’s expanding megalopolis, and during my childhood the last
few farms that surrounded our home were transformed into commercial and
industrial parks. The
brook that ran by our house was for the children of our neighborhood a
route for exploration and discovery, and we used the brook as a way to
escape time. We usually did this by going upstream, for the further one
progressed downstream, the more denuded and despoiled were the banks,
the more polluted was the water, and the more illusory was the sense that
we were the brook’s original explorers. Upstream, we could indulge
our fantasy, as roads and houses gave way to fields and woodlots, and
cellar holes and other ruins that only added to our mission of discovery. Like
that little brook, Lewis Creek and all of New England’s streams offer
us, as they did first the region’s aboriginal inhabitants and later
the European colonists, avenues to explore both space and time. In this
well-watered land, we all live within a short walk to some channel draining
inexorably toward the sea, and whether we follow it upstream or down,
there is no more inviting guide to get to know one’s place than stream,
brook, and river. Every
river explorer needs guides, and in my wanderings of Lewis Creek, I came
to have as my companions three individuals whose investigations of the
natural world took them often into the Lewis Creek watershed — Rowland
Evans Robinson (1833-1900), an author and illustrator whose artistry sprang
from a deep love of story and place; Cyrus Guernsey Pringle (1838-1911),
the “prince of plant collectors,” who knew better than anyone
the plants of the Lewis Creek watershed from Gardiner’s Island to
Hogback Mountain; and John Bulkley Perry (1825-1872), whose twin call
to God and geology makes his writings a wonderful window into the late-nineteenth
century imperative to reconcile religion and science. All three lived
during a time when science was transforming American life, and all had
vocations that were impacted by, as well as spoke to, the changes that
science and technology were effecting. More than any other era, the roots
of Lewis Creek’s present seem to lie in that historical moment between
1860 and 1900. Though a century away, it seems close and contemporary.
The same sights and sounds elate us, and the same tragedies befall us. One
great difference for us as contemporary explorers is that while Robinson,
Pringle, and Perry never questioned the “reality” of Nature,
its “givenness” as a realm of transcendental truth, we live
in an age in which it is increasingly common to think of Nature as constructed
by us. These men knew the land firsthand: Pringle and Robinson were farmers,
and they had to struggle when they attempted to replace that economy with
plant-hunting or writing and sketching. Reverend Perry was but once-removed
from toil upon the land, in that the majority of his congregation were
still farmers. Because
our lives are largely removed from physical labor upon the land, we find
ourselves more than ever in need of Nature as a bulwark against the “virtuality”
of the modern world. Today, the discoveries that we make in our wanderings
— of a new location of a rare plant, an otter’s den, or a Paleozoic
fossil — are essential because they take the place of the old economies
— farming, forestry, hunting — that once bound most of the watershed’s
denizens to the land. Recreational sources of personal satisfaction rather
than practical contributions to scientific knowledge, our finds can also
now be deeply re-creational as well, for each act of physical discovery
more than ever brings to us psychic and spiritual renewal. It
may be that the very act of reflecting on the idiosyncratic history of
natural scientific discovery within the Lewis Creek watershed is also
a defining moment. Along the banks of Lewis Creek and every other river
in New England, and indeed, in North America and all across the world,
innumerable incidents of discovery occur every day, both by professional
naturalists and amateurs. The thrill of finding — whether the object
of one’s search or some serendipitous surprise — unites us with
Pringle, Robinson, and Perry, but we just as surely share with them the
tragedies of losing. Sometimes finding, sometimes losing, onward we run
like the river to the sea.
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Lewis
Creek is a middling river, anonymous and unseen to all but a few fishermen,
canoeists, and the neighbors who live along or not far from its banks.
It boasts no spectacular falls, no epics of adventure and discovery. Though
a part of one of North America's largest watersheds — the St. Lawrence
— it is itself one of Lake Champlain’s lesser tributaries, draining
an area of only about 100 square miles. No warships have been built on
it like on Otter Creek; no historic figures are associated with it like
the Allen brothers and the Winooski. Its pleasures are small, intimate
ones, the very sort that can be found along every river of any size in
the New England region.