In October 2013, my good friend Mike and I took a canoe trip down the Connecticut River from Bellows Falls, Vermont to Springfield, Massachusetts, with the simple goal of telling a story about the people and places that relied on the Mighty River. Prior to our departure, I read several classic river narratives (by Dickey, Twain, Abbey, Jerome, Raban, Thoreau and McPhee) and was yearning for my own river adventure. For various reasons, we pulled out a day early, in Holyoke. Since that day, I’d felt a lack of closure–I needed to paddle through the city I grew up in, Springfield and I needed to make it to where we said we’d take out originally. Since the trip, Mike continued his education in radio journalism at the now-dead Salt Institute in Portland, Maine and I left New England for jobs in Alaska and Washington and although I was in some of the most incredible places I had ever seen, I longed for the Connecticut and that last section we left unpaddled.
At the end of this past summer, I geared up for a short day’s paddle, gave Mike a call and grabbed the canoe from the Hampshire College Outdoor Program. Like last time, we ate breakfast at Stables on Route 9 in Hadley. Earl dropped us off below the Holyoke Dam and we were off. And like last time, within the first two minutes we nearly flipped ourselves in the calmest water imaginable–we both looked back to see if Earl saw us fumble, but we were alone together with a wide river before us.
We paddled through mellow waters, exploring the skeletons of industry along the river corridor between Holyoke and Springfield. For a beautiful September day, it seemed odd that we had the river to ourselves. Besides occasional fisherman, summer party boaters, naturalists, and recreationalists, the river stays quiet. And because it quietly snakes through the mill towns and industry centers of New England, it provides the perfect respite from the busyness of our lives and will provide an unforgettable urban adventure, if we let it.
The story I wrote about my trip with Mike can be found in the links below. The links pull the story in chapters from a blog I created in our initial planning of our trip. I intend to write a future post contrasting sections of my narrative with Mike’s. It is fascinating to me how two people can be in the same canoe on the same river, but leave with an entirely different story. Each of our stories has a vastly different tone, confronts different issues, highlights different themes and even bends the reality of the experience in a way that will leave the reader wondering which one of us is truthful and which isn’t. The pieces should be read side by side–it will be the only way you as the reader will understand what it would truly be like to sit in between Mike and I amid our cargo, both physical and metaphorical. Stay tuned.
Down the Connecticut with Mike
A Classic New England Adventure
Joseph Lawrence Olbrych 