Aug 30

Written by: FRCC
8/30/2011 10:23 AM

 As a recent immigrant to the Farmington Valley, I have no fond childhood memories to share of summer days along the West Branch.  The rivers of my pre-Clean-Water-Act youth were in fact unapproachably filthy and toxic.  Except for one.  And I was reminded of that one river the first time I stood on Hogback Dam, looking at West Branch Reservoir. 

Hogback Dam felt familiar as soon as I set foot on it.  The beautiful construction style and the shapes of the surrounding hills gave me a flashback to Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts, which was not only a haunt of mine but part of the family, so to speak.  My grandfather was one of the engineers on the project in the 1930s, and my father did survey work and other tasks during the construction of the reservoir, which supplies Boston’s drinking water.  I will never forget my first childhood visit to Quabbin, where the impounded Swift River sits in a huge swath of protected watershed land-- the first forest I ever entered that was big enough to be free of traffic noise.  It drew me back again and again, and still does.

There’s irony here.  As a river advocate, maybe I’m supposed to have fallen in love with some wild, free river during my formative years.  The Swift River being a big dammed lake, I fell in love instead with its whole watershed.  The watershed forest at least was still there, better protected than it ever would have been if the river (and five valley towns) hadn’t been sacrificed to make a reservoir.   Thus I learned early about enormous trade-offs.

That’s why I feel kinship with the West Branch of the Farmington, flood control reservoirs and all—I grew up with a highly managed river that was still a wild and scenic paradise.  Now, when I paddle the cold, clean West Branch in Barkhamsted or New Hartford, I know that its flow is controlled from upstream.  I know that this affects the ecology of the river bottom and the future of the floodplain forests.  I know that the river isn’t what it was.   But it still has a great deal of forested land to protect its headwaters.  And it has local friends and protectors who probably know far more about river management than their grandparents did.   And improvements are possible.  With all that, I can hope that this river’s trade-offs will be wise ones, and that kids here will be able to fall in love with the Farmington for generations to come even if, like me, they start off standing on a dam.    

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