Ben Cosgrove

 



The city, however, does not tell its part, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.



 



Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities  



 



On April 28, 1938, the Western Massachusetts towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich received a notice informing them that they were no longer in existence. “By the terms of Chapter 321, Act 1927,” it began, “you are hereby notified that the corporate existence of the aforesaid towns ceased at 12 o’clock midnight, April 27th.” Town officers were instructed not to carry on any municipal functions after that date, only to do “such acts as are necessary to affect the transfer of properties of the municipalities to the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission.” The letter was signed by R. Nelson Molt, the commission’s secretary.



This was no great surprise to the inhabitants of these towns. Some years before, the state of Massachusetts had decided to flood the area then covered by the four rural municipalities in a grand solution to the increasing need for water in the ever-growing greater Boston area. Residents of the Swift River Valley watched in disbelief as state officials, engineers, then surveyors, and eventually lumberjacks swarmed over their land and began the long process of taking it from them. The construction of the reservoir would be one of the most ambitious civil works projects in history, but it would result in the forced removal of all residents in each of the four communities.



The enormous Quabbin Reservoir (the name was taken from a Nipmuck word roughly meaning “place of many waters”) would supply water to Boston and the many burgeoning suburbs that had, at the time of the District Water Supply Commission’s decision, swelled to proportions that strained the resources of the city.



Historically, Boston had always struggled to bring in enough water to adequately supply its residents. It had first seen the need to reach outside its municipal boundaries for water as early as the late 1700s, when pipes were laid between the city and Jamaica Pond in Roxbury. Disputes some thirty years later led the city to look instead to Long Pond in Natick. Rapid industrial and population growth, however, soon necessitated diverting water from the Sudbury River, and when this proved futile, the subsequent creation of the Wachusett Reservoir on the Nashua River. This in turn would prove sufficient for only thirty years after its construction in 1908. A more sustainable answer to the water problem was desperately needed.



The creation of an enormous reservoir in western Massachusetts seemed to be an ideal—if grandiose—long-term solution: the topography of the Swift River Valley was such that a couple of well-placed dams at the southern end could turn the whole region (an area of roughly 40 square miles) into a gigantic bowl with the capacity to hold 412 billion gallons of water. Aqueducts and an impressive system of tunnels would move the water east to Boston and the suburbs, and all that would have to be cleared out in the process was a few small towns. The plan was, in many respects, a resounding success—the project created much-needed public works jobs during the depths of the Great Depression and today more than 2.5 million people draw their water supply from the Quabbin reservoir—but the success came at a great cost to 2,500 people who would lose their hometowns forever.



Many could only sit back helplessly as their trees were clear-cut, their buildings razed or removed, and their dead relatives exhumed and relocated. Over 7,500 bodies were moved from the cemeteries of the Swift River Valley and reinterred elsewhere. The living lost homes, jobs, and history with little to no provisions made by the state for their aid or benefit.



One woman, forced to leave Greenwich with her family as a young girl, remembers,“wishing that the Boston folks would choke on their first glass of water from the Quabbin.” Another resident, quoted in Evelina Gustafson’s particularly heartbreaking 1940 book on the then-recent disappearance of the towns, said “with tear dimmed eyes…‘I little thought that one day these childhood haunts would be closed to me forever.’”  The only hint of the human consequences of this civil engineering project to appear in the near-500 pages of the Federal Writers Project’s otherwise effusive 1937 publication Massachusetts: A Guide to its People and Places is a note that says, “The route south of New Salem will be changed somewhat when the Quabbin Reservoir occupies the valley.”



The meetings during the planning stages of the project took place in Boston, on the correct prediction that the residents of the doomed communities would not have the means to travel to the city to make their voices heard. This set an unhappy precedent for how the concerns of the valley’s residents would be considered. The people whose lives were so inextricably connected with this land would ultimately have little to no say in the circumstances of its destruction.



Their fate is often overlooked, however: most histories of the Quabbin focus on the event as a triumph of civil engineering, writing off its indisputably tragic aspects as the inevitable side effects of progress. These were decisions made in the years just before the Great Depression, a time of an increasingly modern America, and the notion that the urban machine should thrive at the expense of a few bumpkins currently occupying what had become very desirable land was hardly offensive when viewed through the modernist lens of a society in the process of ecstatic urban growth. However, many (not least the displaced residents themselves), were troubled by the thought of the loss of these communities and sought to preserve the people and places that would be sacrificed for the sake of the big city to the east.



Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich would sink below the rising waters of the reservoir. As Boston was reshaping its own landscape, replacing water with landfill to support a growing population, the residents of the Swift River Valley would feel the dark irony of progress as a river they’d known all their lives was transformed into the 38.6 square miles of water that would spread over and erase their land and history.



 



It is a false comfort to say that these towns now lie at the bottom of the reservoir. They are not anywhere. The land that once held them has been reshaped and changed by the waters that swallowed it, the residents are dead or displaced, and the buildings have been destroyed or relocated. Nowhere in the world, for example, is there an Enfield, MA. So in the late 1930s, for the people whose lives had been so closely tied to those towns, the notion that they would disappear without a trace was unacceptable, and a few decided to do something about it.



The Swift River Valley Historical Society occupies an unassuming set of buildings in New Salem, a neighboring town only partly flooded in the creation of the reservoir. In the years since the creation of the reservoir, it has grown from a small collection of photos and trappings to a massive and comprehensive archive chronicling the valley’s history and abrupt disappearance. It now comprises three buildings, the Whitaker-Clary House, containing most of the collection, the Prescott Church Museum (hauled over from Prescott before the flooding) and the Carriage House, which contains an engine of the Dana Fire Department, various pieces of farm equipment, and an assortment of hand tools in addition to countless other odds and ends. It is managed by a devoted assembly of unpaid volunteers, several of whom are among the last surviving residents of the towns.



That the society was founded in 1936 is a testament to the fact that the residents’ desire to assemble and preserve their local history was (unsurprisingly) spurred on by the impending demise of the four towns, by the threat that the very ideas of those communities might be drowned along with their physical settings and disappear forever. The urgency with which the act of preservation had to be approached sets the mission of the Swift River Valley Historical Society apart from other historical societies:  if you were confronted with the imminent destruction of everything you knew, what parts would you take away so that the whole could be remembered?



This was one in a series of burning questions facing the society’s founders. What mode of preservation would be the most effective? And what things were already preserved? Despite the absolute elimination of the towns and the land that they occupied, some reminders of the communities nonetheless remained: not only did most of the displaced residents continue to live in the region for the rest of their lives, leading lives not terribly different from those they might have lived had they been allowed to stay, but you can even follow several roads, including Main Street of New Salem, directly into the waters of the reservoir if you go far enough. Whatever means the society would use to preserve those towns would have to focus on what could not be recaptured, and so the curators looked to the region’s recent past.



The versions of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana that are preserved by the society remain (perhaps for the obvious reasons) frozen in a very specific time. The artifacts collected speak to the character of the towns as they were in the early twentieth-century, complete with heirlooms from previous generations and a subsequent awareness of the towns’ recent past, but the communities depicted by the hats, photographs, and furniture of the SRVHS are plainly ones that know nothing of space shuttles or rock and roll, or barely even of World War II. Here it always is the nineteen-thirties, and always will be.



It is clear, however, from every detail down to the Depression-era one-room schoolhouse replica, that this was intentional, that the SRVHS indeed aimed to capture these towns as they were just before the time of their flooding. The story that it tells is more than just a history of these towns themselves—it is also about the tragic series of events that made them so significant. These communities are being preserved not only because of the simple fact that they aren’t here anymore but so that visitors might get a more complete idea of what it felt like when they were taken away. The society is preserving not only physical objects, which stand in for the towns themselves, but also an emotional reaction to the flooding.



What other way is there to preserve the feeling of a tragedy than by capturing the affected community up to and including that moment in time? The Swift River Valley municipalities had a history that decisively ended beneath the waters of the Quabbin, meaning that the SRVHS had its work cut out for it in its efforts to reconstruct that history.



What defines the identity of a city or a town? It is certainly more than landscape: Rome without seven hills would still be Rome (and indeed the hills are nearly invisible today), just as Boston remained Boston even as it quadrupled its size, expanding horizontally out into its watery environs and sacrificing its own hills to create the fill with which to do so. The built environment and the artifacts it yields are certainly better reflectors of the human influence on a place, but only to an extent: how much can a total stranger be expected to glean about Greenwich from a set of cooking utensils? Could New York be captured by a coat-rack, or even a subway map?



The idea that place can be satisfactorily defined by a discrete set of spaces and tangible objects is problematic, and its limitations are noted by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities:



 



I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves; but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn.



 



It is not the artifacts themselves but their inherent connections to the people of those lost places that make them so attractive to those who are trying to reconstruct the idea of a society. Since so many of the people who knew this land are now gone, the only way in which their lives can be recaptured is through the things that they used and touched. The artifact is a stand-in for the person who cannot be there, and it is up to the visitor to fill in the imaginary space between the concrete object and its relationship to a different time, place, and set of people. A historical museum, then, takes a leap of faith in assuming that its patrons will know to seek out that connection.



Museums like the SRVHS are predicated on this assumption, that the spirit of a community can be kept alive through its paraphernalia. But the idea expressed above by Calvino is not lost on them: as SRVHS president Elizabeth Peirce points out in her introduction to “The Lost Towns of the Quabbin Valley,” the Arcadia Press book authored by the society, artifacts and photographs cannot reconstruct, only approximate:



 



What was sacrificed? Gone are the sawmills, gristmills, and cloth mills. Gone are the factories where boxes, brooms, bricks and buttons, nails, pails, piano legs, carriage wheels, and hats were made. Gone are the mining of soapstone and the making of charcoal. Gone are the orchards with 50 varieties of apples, the berry fields, and the market gardens. Gone are the doctors, dentists, lawyers, statesmen, artists, poets, writers, musicians, photographers, inventors, educators, and yes, patriots. Gone are the good times of the Grange, the neighborhood clubs, singing schools, debating societies, husking bees, quilting parties, and taffy pulls.



 



By and large, these are things that could not have been preserved in any literal sense. A few buildings were moved out of the valley (in addition to those now occupied by the society, there is at least one notable example of a home that was transported to Dorset, VT and reconstructed there), but due to the low income of many valley residents, most homes and public buildings were simply razed to make room for the water. Beyond that, it is impossible to imagine how these things that Peirce lists among the most important elements of the lost towns could possibly be kept for future generations. How do you keep alive the idea of an apple orchard if the actual land it occupied now lies beneath a massive body of water? How can you archive the idiosyncratic community that would have resulted from this specific set of “doctors, dentists, lawyers, [and] statesmen,” all interacting with each other in a way that can never be totally reconstructed? The Swift River Valley featured a unique community of people, the essence of which could not survive such a transplanting unaltered.



The collection of the SRVHS represents simply what the valley’s displaced residents ultimately decided would be the best way to preserve and honor a collective idea both of the places that they lost beneath the water and the group of people that had inhabited those places. The idea that a place can be reconstructed by pulling together as many of its tangible, material artifacts as possible is an interesting one—certainly a former resident of Dana or Enfield will experience a surge of memories upon viewing a photograph of a particular house or examining a doll that might have belonged to a childhood friend. But as the number of valley refugees shrinks further and further with the years, the question of whom these towns are being preserved for becomes an increasingly important consideration.



The uninformed visitor to the museum is presented (ignoring, for the moment, the details that deal directly with the flooding) with a set of trappings that could spell out any part of rural New England in the early twentieth century. The melodeons, the farm equipment, the children’s clothing—these are items that could just as easily have appeared in the collections of countless other small-town historical societies.



How are these artifacts different from those of any other town in that period? The simple answer is that they are not. While there are certainly exceptions, a number of the items contained in the vast annals of the SRVHS could have come from any town in a similar time and region. Speaking generally, the only difference between most of the pieces in this collection and those in others like it is that here, the baseball uniforms and fire engines say “Dana” or “Greenwich” on them.



The exceptions to this rule, the things that remind the visitor of the unique fate of these towns, pose different problems. Copies of the letters from the state informing residents of the situation; a program from Enfield’s Farewell Ball; a relief map showing the stages of the reservoir’s construction. While these artifacts are certainly remarkable for their poignancy, they play into the unfortunate fact that for most outsiders (and as the original residents age and pass away, nearly everyone is one), the most notable thing about these places is that simply they are not there anymore.



The land on which Dana, Enfield, Prescott, Greenwich, and small parts of other communities were established now lies quietly at the bottom of the reservoir, and the number of people who can remember that land when it belonged to four small towns is diminishing rapidly. And though the younger generations may learn, even deeply appreciate the story of those towns, it is unavoidably a different sort of understanding that they experience. No combination of artifacts will awaken nostalgia for life in 1920s-era Dana or Prescott for someone who never got the chance to experience that firsthand—all it can do is dispassionately suggest what these places were like in their last moments. A lot of the artifacts are commonplace things that but for their context would never be associated with such a specific location and story, unremarkable but for their invisible history. Nothing ties them to these places but the society’s determination to preserve the mythology of the four towns by presenting their history as a series of objects.



Peirce wisely and sadly notes that the society’s mission is a necessary but bittersweet one. It is, she says, “a story about times that once were and can never be again [that] is remembered and told over and over at the Swift River Valley Historical Society, where that story is frozen in time.” Frozen to be sure, but necessarily so. The Quabbin towns never got the chance to exist beyond the 1930s, and any story or memory associated with them unavoidably stops there.



On April 27, the eve of disincorporation, the residents gathered in the Enfield town hall for a “Farewell Ball,” featuring a live band, a dance floor, and, assuredly, an overwhelming sense of imminent loss. At midnight, the musicians struck up an emotional rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” before the attendees sadly shuffled out and the hall was locked up for good (one resident observed, “It is no longer a town hall in a town that is no longer”). The following day, they would walk away from the places that many of them truly felt they belonged to but would never even be able to visit again.



Only the youngest of those people in attendance that night are still alive today, and they, along with the very few other onetime residents of the valley, have the distinction of being the only ones who can remember the four towns that were lost to the reservoir, the only ones who can ever possibly understand what those places were truly like. When they are gone, Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich will cease even to be memories, existing only in the clothing, photographs, hand tools, and fire engines contained in the rooms of the Swift River Valley Historical Society. 



 



“Prescott is my home, though



rough and poor she be



The home of many a noble soul



the birthplace of the free



I love her rock-bound woods and hills



they are good enough for me



I love her brooklets and her rills



but couldn’t, wouldn’t, and



shouldn’t love a man-made sea.”



 



Charles Abbott (Prescott resident), 1921



 



 

There are only about 4,500 people living on the tiny island of Heimaey, and each summer they have the rather unique distinction of being outnumbered by puffins, nearly a thousand to one.



The people know Heimaey as the home of Iceland’s most important harbor. They also know it to be the largest island in a volcanic archipelago called Vestmannaeyjær that lies about six miles off the mainland’s southwest coast, where Heimaey lies north of the smaller islands of Alfsey, Brandur, Suðurey, Surstsey. Puffins, who tend to be deaf to concerns of commerce and unintimidated by pronunciation, care only that Heimaey is an excellent spot to lay eggs. People have lived in the village on Heimaey for well over a thousand years, and puffins have almost certainly been coming here for longer than that.



Puffins live at sea for most of the year and return annually to their burrows onshore for the warmer months. For whatever reason, the cliffs of Heimaey have long been prime real estate in the puffin world. The birds return to Vestmannaeyjær in enormous masses late each spring, whereupon they immediately set to the tasks of courting, mating, and tending to the resulting eggs. In mid-summer the eggs hatch, and the rest of the adult puffins’ season is spent attending to the shrill demands of the infant chicks—known, rather adorably, as pufflings.



It should perhaps be pointed out that pufflings may in fact be the cutest living things in the world. They’re downy, wide-eyed, and almost perfectly round, and even when they’re finally large enough to toddle out into the world on their own, they are still only about the size of very young kittens. Their voices have not yet hardened into the groaning yawp of a full-grown puffin, and their audible communication consists almost entirely of a light, agreeable peeping.



They mature quickly though, and during the last weeks of summer, the chirping balls of waddling fluff wander out of their burrows and amble clumsily off of the island’s cliffs to leave Heimaey in their first flight. It takes them straight into the ocean, where they’ll stay at sea for a year or two. They learn quickly to fish and to fend for themselves, and within two months of their freefall from the Heimaey cliffs, many will have flown over a thousand miles to the waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Some years later, they’ll return to Vestmannaeyjær, and will again and again after that: puffins mate annually, and tend to continue the practice throughout their thirty-year lifespan. This naturally results in a stupefying output of pufflings for one island. But that first step, getting off of Heimaey on one’s first try, is harder than it seems.



 



When the pufflings emerge from the burrows, their parents have often left already, leaving their offspring’s fate to the centuries of preprogramming that ought to be guiding the baby birds instinctively into the ocean. They leave at night, and appear to use the moonlight’s reflection on the water to set their course. This, alas, does not always work out. Pufflings are sometimes not as savvy as Nature might have ideally had them, and each night, hundreds of the young birds become confused, disoriented by the lights of the village. They crash-land into the human settlement on Heimaey, whose innumerable dangers range from cars and trucks to predators and starvation. Furthermore, the pufflings are trapped and helpless on flat ground, unable to fly at their young age without the benefit of a cliffside drop to start from.



And so, during the weeks in late summer when the pufflings are making their migration, the children of Heimaey come out every night in droves to rescue the wayward ones, the birds that spiral into town by the dozen every hour. They sweep the street corners with flashlights and load whatever befuddled pufflings they can find into cardboard boxes, in which they transport them home for a night of recuperation. The next morning, the rescued puffins are brought to the seashore, pointed vaguely westward, and thrown wildly, wings flapping, into the sheltering sea. This is by now a longstanding tradition on Heimaey, recently formalized and endowed with the endearingly clunky label “Psyjueftirlitið með Brúsi Bjargfasta.” This translates literally as “Puffling Patrol with Milk Jug the Rescuer,” but in fact refers to the author Bruce McMillan, to whose name the closest phonetic equivalent in the Icelandic vocabulary appears to have been “Brúsi” (“milk jug”).



In 1995 McMillan published a photo essay for children called “Nights of the Pufflings,” which brought international attention to the young puffin rescuers on Heimaey.  In addition, the Psyjueftirlitið is partially intended as a way to gather information about the birds so that they might be better served in years to come. Rescuers are asked to register and weigh each bird they find, to note the animal’s condition and the date, time, and location of its discovery.



The last photos in McMillan’s book are of some small, cherubic Icelandic children releasing pufflings into the ocean. In the first, one of the birds is cradled in a girl’s arms and looking around contentedly. In the second, a young boy on a beach is crouched like the center on a football team, holding between his legs not a ball but a confused and yet strikingly unperturbed puffling.



The final image is of a girl on the release of this same motion. Her hands are over her head and in the distance ahead of her a recently-flung puffling is twisting, rearranging itself some twenty feet above the ocean. The bird may not look very confident at the moment of the shutter click, but its wings have awkwardly unfolded and it’s looking straight ahead and it’s angling down into the vast blue expanses of where it meant to go in the first place.



 



***



 



On Cape Cod, baby sea turtles hatch from eggs buried on the beaches and skitter down into the water at the mid-summer moment when they finally sense it’s warm enough to do so. The distance from the nests to the surf can be a long trek for a tiny turtle, but in most places, scores of helpful volunteers manage to arrive just in time to help the hatchlings along to the ocean, watching as the young reptiles paddle cheerfully off into the sea. For a while, it’s a great place to be, and the turtles grow quickly while feeding in Cape Cod Bay over the next few months. But their lives are very quickly complicated by the fact of New England seasonality.



The waters off Wellfleet in December are nowhere anyone wants to be, particularly if you are cold-blooded. As such, it is common practice among the turtles to migrate south each fall with as much haste as their species can muster. But each year, a surprising number of the juvenile reptiles either forgets to migrate or just can’t figure out how. Their body rapidly assumes the temperature of the water around them, they go hypothermic, and many die. Others drift to shore, where they lay helplessly, running the risk of being eaten or worse.



Luckily, Cape Cod is home to many who care deeply about this sort of thing. The hypothermic turtles are scooped lovingly up from where they lie on the beach, or are swept up from the frigid waters of a Massachusetts winter into rowboats and Boston Whalers to be ferried ashore. The volunteers spirit the turtles away to rehabilitation centers running all the way from Woods Hole to Maine, where they are treated for their symptoms and slowly warmed back to life. After the winter has softened into spring and then summer, the turtles are discharged and brought back to the outer Cape, where they are returned to the water in the hope they can get it right this time.



In the winter of 2008, five Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles, members of the most endangered species of sea turtle in the world, were beneficiaries of this practice. And on a cloudless day in late July, they were ceremoniously released back into the water in an event attended by throngs of cheering onlookers. Two had been equipped with alien-looking, antennaed satellite tags that would allow their post-release wanderings to be monitored by the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. The affair was covered by media ranging from the Cape Cod Times to Smithsonian Magazine, on whose website one can watch a video that sets the turtle’s release to some of the most soaring, triumphant orchestral music ever heard.



In it volunteers, their arms clamped around the wriggling Kemp’s Ridley’s, emerge one by one from a crowd of board shorts, sunglasses, and straw hats, and carry their charges down to the lapping water. They lay them on the beach and the turtles lift their hoary heads to the shoreline and crawl purposefully toward the ocean. This takes a while.



Their unhurried walk home goes off more or less without a hitch. In one case, one of the turtles gets knocked back by a few waves, gives up, and opts instead to sit stubbornly on the beach to the certain frustration of the assembled crowd; it has to be picked up and manually tossed into the surf by an embarrassed volunteer. The others are more resilient, however, and as violins fly skyward and cymbals burst joyously on the soundtrack, they trudge into the churning ocean like tanks into battle. And the crowd, unexpectedly attentive, watches admiringly until the last turtle, the radio antenna on its back slicing neatly through the gentle waves, has disappeared once again into the sea.



 



***



 



The Trans-Canada Highway plows straight through Alberta’s Banff National Park. In the beginning, it wasn’t a very serious concern: this section of the highway was designed as a quiet two-laner, a means for a leisurely drive through one of the most scenic places in North America. But as Canada grew, so did the highway, which has since become a vital link between the country’s east and west. Over the last thirty years, parts of the road strung through Banff have out of necessity been pumped up into a very serious, four-lane, divided highway. In a National Park, the road now looks somewhat out of place.



Canada approached the highway-twinning matter delicately. Recognizing the importance of keeping important habitats connected, they poured money into developing ways for animals to continue going about their lives with minimal impact from the human construction. As a result, there is now no other location in the world with as many or as many different types of wildlife crossings as Banff. The crossings range widely, from fifty-meter wide overpasses to tiny concrete tunnels, and they can accommodate everything from insects to grizzly bears.



As part of the highway project, the park also developed a groundbreaking system of video-monitoring the crossings around the clock, which has collected a record amount of data about the animals’ migration habits. Since the full-time monitoring program started in 1996, Banff has counted hundreds of thousands of times that eleven species of large mammals have used the crossings. The animal crossings have been a resounding success by virtually every measure.



To promote the projects, a page was set up where a visitor to the Parks Canada website can peruse a series of photos, taken with the remote sensing cameras, of various animals utilizing the crossings. In one, a family of grizzlies clambers over an earth-covered overpass; in another, a wolf slinks through a concrete tunnel. A third shows a pair of deer at the entrance to the Redearth Creek Underpass, an elliptical, metal culvert. Behind them is the large rock bed and three-meter-high ungulate-proof fence that the park installed to corral them into the tunnel and protect them from the screaming four lanes that here fall just out of frame.



One deer is beginning to proceed on through the tunnel, but her partner has paused. She is looking quizzically off to the side, to the fence, to the boulders, almost as if she is wondering what else she could possibly be expected to do under the circumstances.



 



***



 



The British Hedgehog Preservation Society is headquartered in Shropshire, England, whence it issues leaflets about hedgehog awareness, newsletters illuminating recent hedgehog-related research and news articles, and the occasional catalog of hedgehog paraphernalia (the “Hogalogue” perennially features themed neckties, cookie cutters, and stationery, among other hedgehog must-haves).



The BHPS is far from being a passive, everyday fan club, however, and when a systemic threat to the well-being of their beloved erinaceids is perceived, they have been known to leap into serious action. Such was the case in 2006, when the society went to war with the McDonalds Corporation over the treacherous shape—that is, one misleadingly inviting to a hedgehog, who stands a chance of being trapped inside after venturing in for residual ice cream—of the restaurant’s McFlurry dessert containers. Society members searched roadways for the containers and carried many captive hogs back into the wild where they released them by hand. But, as the newsletter lamented that summer, “it will never be known how many were never found at all.”



The petitioning went right up to September of 2006, when McDonald’s made the following announcement:



 



“In consultation with the BHPS [British Hedgehog Preservation Society], we have undertaken significant research and testing to develop new packaging for our McFlurry dessert that addresses this issue. We are delighted to announce that we have now introduced a new lid with a smaller aperture for our McFlurry dessert. The smaller aperture of the lid has been designed to prevent hedgehogs from entering the McFlurry container in the unfortunate incidence that a lid is littered and is then accessible to wildlife.”



 



The new McFlurry containers hit British McDonald’s locations within days of the press release. In the time since, the Society, arguably the local authority on such matters, has not reported a single hedgehog found trapped inside an ice cream container.



 



***



 



“One night, there were so many woodfrogs coming down the hill that I could hear it,” Steve Parren says, and even over the phone you can tell his eyes are widening in memory of the experience. “It was cool and freaky at the same time, you know, hundreds if not thousands of animals bounding down that hill at once.”



Parren is the state biologist for Vermont, and the hill he describes is near his home in Monkton. It’s wooded and undeveloped and it folds down into a marshy wetland. The adjacency of these two environments amounts to some sort of utopia for salamanders, frogs, and their kin. An unbelievable number of species are now in the eons-old habit of spending the colder part of the year upland and summering in the marsh. The Monkton-Vergennes Road cuts directly through this habitat. On nights in early spring when the rains come, thousands of animals, having finished their winter term up on the hill, skitter down en masse to the wetlands to breed. And they just get massacred.



There’s a curve in the road as it rounds the hill, making it hard for motorists to see the parade of creatures making for the wetlands (especially on the damp nights that the animals favor for traveling). And the recent uptick in traffic along the Monkton-Vergennes Road from cars avoiding the construction on nearby Route 7 doesn’t help the body count either. “You always see dead things by the side of the road there,” a younger Monkton native notes when it’s brought up. “Not just the amphibians—and there are a ton of those, to be sure—but coyotes, raccoons, I saw a fox once. There’s a lot of emotionally salient death that happens there.”



The state biologist obviously loves these animals, and you can tell it pains him to deliver the statistics he’s been collecting about the site for the last two decades. “We have well over a 30 percent death rate at that one site,” Parren sighs. “Every single night, literally hundreds of animals get run over, just in the space of about eight-tenths of a mile. A couple of years ago, I’d estimate we found one thousand dead animals in that spot over the course of two nights. It’s just unbelievable.”



 



And so for more than twenty years, Parren and a motley band of like-minded conservationists have assembled on wet spring nights to carry all of the frogs, salamanders, and other wetland-bound fauna safely across the road by hand. For years it was just him, but these days there are a few others with an interest in the creatures’ safety. Now, for about three or four weeks every spring, a group of between three and six volunteers assembles in the mist or fog at around ten at night. Defying their own safety, they crouch in the dark and the mud alongside the Monkton-Vergennes Road, picking up spotted salamanders, peepers, newts, and frogs, and carrying them over to where it is safe.



After years of fighting for it, Parren and his fellow conservationists finally won a grant from the Federal Highway Administration to go toward the construction of a box culvert (not unlike the ones in Banff) under the road, a setup that would corral the animals through an appealingly dark and damp underground passage to the wetlands on the other side. It’s a contentious project: not all Vermonters are thrilled to see the transportation funds go toward salamander safety, but the volunteers are delighted. “Even with upwards of eight or nine people out there, a lot of amphibians are getting hit,” one of them told Vermont Public Radio shortly after the grant was awarded. “So they definitely need some other help. The hand-carry method is not sustainable.”



There are still a lot more funds to be tracked down though, and Parren doesn’t expect that they’ll be able to break ground on the new culvert (he’s ultimately hoping for many of them, maybe even like ten) until the fall of 2011 at the earliest. While building something like this into the design of a new road would be pretty simple, trying to retrofit a two-lane state highway running through central Vermont (not an area known for an abundance of convenient alternate routes) is “a bit harder,” he admits.



“It’s really just a tragedy, the fact that something as arbitrary as a change in how humans get around can so dramatically upset the way that these animals have lived for thousands of years. Now it’s just the changes in human traffic patterns that are putting all of these countless species in severe danger of local extinction.” It’s this sympathy and understanding that brings him back again and again to the roadside on rainy nights in March and April. Parren and his fellow volunteers have carried amphibians for decades now. All of it has been to protect a way of life, one now critically endangered by environmental changes that fell well beyond any of those creatures’ control or even comprehension.



 



***



 



While the oldest part of Heimaey has been around for 12,000 years, most of its northeastern corner has only existed since 1973. In that year, Eldfell, a innocuous hill to the east of the village, surprised everybody by blowing tons upon tons of ash across the island and setting in motion a lava flow that would very nearly necessitate Heimaey’s permanent evacuation.



For months, the lava seeped over and around the island, swallowing Heimaey’s built and natural landscape and throwing the fate of its all-important harbor into serious peril. Five thousand people fled the island in fishing boats and several small propeller planes sent from the mainland; an extensive arsenal of water pumps was assembled and deployed by the Icelandic government in a desperate effort to hold back the advancing lava.



Within five months, the island had grown in size by one-fifth. Over 400 homes had been destroyed. Their owners, faced with the choice to stay or go, had emptied their houses, swept the floors, and in some cases even watched helplessly as the shells of the places where they had so recently lived were crushed and consumed by ash and molten rock.



But even as the lava came, the prop planes and fishing boats carried the evacuees safely to the mainland. And the pumps did hold back the lava, at least enough to preserve most of the village and commercial access to the harbor. And after it was all over, the boats and the airplanes reassembled on the south coast of Iceland and loaded up the people who had been forced to leave and carried them all back home.

Sometime last spring, I was driving through northern Minnesota when the road I was on passed over a small waterway. It was an unremarkable little brook lazily worming through the forest, but a sign on the shoulder identified it as the “Mississippi River.” I pulled over and reversed back to the bridge in an extended double-take. There it was, though. The mightiest vein of the continent. From here it would grow dramatically as it moved southward and its tributaries flooded in from across the country, giving life to Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and countless settlements in between. But up here in Paul Bunyan country, it was just an unmajestic trickle. It was oddly thrilling to see so mighty a river in such an undeveloped and vulnerable state, almost like walking in on a head of state without his clothes on. Without much further reflection I drove on, inflated by a sense of having been granted a window into the inner life of the Mississippi River, a feeling that I knew it better than most because I had seen it like this.



I grew up in central New England and have no great ties to the Mississippi, so several months later it seemed like it might be a meaningful pilgrimage to visit the headwaters of my region’s primary river. I would travel up to the border of New Hampshire and Quebec, where rain- and melt-water collect in the four Connecticut Lakes before taking the form of the Connecticut River and flowing 407 miles south to the ocean, plummeting a total of 2,660 vertical feet toward the center of the earth in the process.



The four lakes are numbered in what has always seemed to me a reverse of the logical order. The true headwaters of the river are at the tiny Fourth Connecticut Lake, at the very tip of New Hampshire. When water overflows its banks, it collects just below in the Third Connecticut Lake, then the Second Connecticut Lake, then finally the First Connecticut Lake. I drove up to the Third on New Years Day of this year. It was brilliantly sunny and bitterly cold. The tops of the lakes were frozen solid and covered in a foot or so of powder. I looked west across the lake from the road, towards the small inlet where water from the Fourth must have been trickling in beneath the ice.



One day all this water would be compelled from this stillness, by something as banal as gravity, to roll and tumble over itself for hundreds of miles, over dams and under bridges, gathering in places and racing violently in others. It would be joined by the White and the Chicopee and become mighty indeed by the time it passed under I-95. Little by little, all of it would fall away, cleaving Vermont from New Hampshire before bisecting Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to empty into and become part of Long Island Sound.



I was struck, however, by the realization that the water in front of me now had nothing to do with any of that yet. It could tell me nothing of New England, or even of the Connecticut River. It didn’t know anything. It wasn’t “waiting” to go somewhere. It was just water. I felt strangely disappointed and more than a little ridiculous.



We tend to ascribe a lot of metaphysical significance to waterways. Not only do they make possible our settlements and show us the easiest paths from point to point, but there’s also something about the idea of one unbroken chain of water unifying a whole region that feels important to us. We read ourselves into places, we retrofit them with our personalities, we make something of them that they perhaps are not. This alone is what makes them places and not just geography. The Connecticut, like the Mississippi, after all, is just water, helplessly doing what gravity demands of it. We are the ones who make it anything else. I knew, just as anyone with a map might know, the path it would all take. I knew the rivers it would meet, I knew the towns that had been made possible by the very predictfability of its route. The water, obviously, could not know or care about any of this.



 I was sorry to lose the feeling that I had seen these great rivers at their purest and most naked. I wanted to think that I would be able to see something elemental here, not only the germ at the core of the idea of the Connecticut River, but maybe even at the core of the idea of New England. The fact is that the Fourth Connecticut Lake will stop mattering to the fate of the river the instant the water moves down to the Third Lake. It will fall millimeters south, and then it’s not part of the lake anymore. It’s only water, and it will wander dumbly for hundreds of miles until at last it meets the ocean.

There’s a great photograph from around 1972 of Bruce Davis and Peter Huse recording the sound of gravel. Davis is walking methodically back and forth over a mess of the stuff, while Huse captures the moment with what looks like a cumbersome array of sound equipment. Both men look deadly serious about their work.



At the time of the photo, Davis and Huse were members of the World Soundscape Project, a small but intrepid band of sound preservationists led by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer and based out of the communications department at Simon Fraser University, just outside Vancouver. The image catches them collecting material for one of the WSP’s more ambitious undertakings, a 10-hour radio series directed by Schafer and dedicated to the analysis and explication of Canada’s sonic environment. Airing over the course of several weeks in 1974, it was beamed out nationally by the Canadian Broadcasting Company to what must have been a rather bemused listening public.



The name R. Murray Schafer looms large in any discussion of “soundscapes,” on which he literally wrote the book. Schafer coined the term to refer to the aural components of the built and natural environment, long overlooked in favor of the visual ones. His interest in environmental sound owed a lot to 1960s environmentalism, and his texts outlined a grave and career-defining concern he shared with other WSP members: that the sounds of the world not only hung in a delicate balance but were in critical danger of being overwhelmed by a postmodern roar of homogeneous, indecipherable noise. Schafer and his compatriots founded the World Soundscape Project on this idea, that the sonic elements of the world they knew were disappearing rapidly and needed protection, that attention needed to be paid, at long last, to the planet’s “acoustic ecology.”



With tape recorders and armfuls of notebooks, the agents of the world’s first sonic conservation group leapt enthusiastically into the field, painstakingly notating the subtleties of foghorns, peeling apart the layers in crowd noise, carefully cataloguing the pitches produced by power lines, traffic jams, cobblestones, animals, airplanes. They published quickly and prodigiously, producing in short order an in-depth study of the Vancouver soundscape, a compendium of noise-abatement laws in Canada, and a comprehensive handbook outlining the principles of acoustic ecology for the amateur sound historian, among others. They wrote a great deal but the written output of the WSP pales in comparison to the miles and miles of tape they recorded. In addition to the “Soundscapes of Canada” program, the group produced several other audio projects and, purely in the interest of preservation and analysis, filled a stupefying number of tape reels with sounds exceptional and mundane, in locations ranging from Victoria to Vienna.



 



Simon Fraser University has become something of a home base for soundscape analysis and composition in North America, and the WSP’s entire sound library has since been digitized and currently resides in a database on the university’s website. Links to various reels are organized there both by location and by subject, grouped under such subcategories as “small town ambiences,” “antique and/or disappearing sounds,” and, perhaps most intriguingly, “soundwalks”. The WSP came to favor this last type of recording, in which the recordist attempts to recreate a particular setting by moving a microphone through a series of acoustic environments—walking from a noisy marketplace down to a harbor, for example. In the later years of the Project, the WSP began to assemble soundwalks from component selections rather than from one unbroken recording. One elaborate example carries the listener from the open ocean, to Vancouver’s harbor under the traffic of the Lion’s Gate bridge, to a baggage room in the inner harbor. 



Barry Truax, a devoted member of the project, names this recording as an important turning point in his career. For him, it was the moment when the presentation of soundscapes became a creative act, a product that could be interpreted symbolically as well as analyzed. He was not alone in this realization. Hildegard Westerkamp, a research associate for the project who has since published numerous articles on the subject of acoustic ecology, discovered that for her, environmental sounds provided the “perfect compositional language.” Notably, many of the acoustic ecologists—Truax, Westerkamp, and Schafer himself—were also composers. And though the WSP more or less faded away in the early 1980s, several of its members and contributors went on to create music with the same principles—sonic awareness, soundscape preservation, environmental responsibility—in mind.



Soundscape composition—that is, composition using soundscapes as source material—is now a startlingly busy and diverse field. It has responded well to the last thirty years of advances in audio technology, which have enabled composers to process their sounds in a seemingly endless variety of ways, highlighting, shading, or rendering unrecognizable the field recordings they used as source material. A broader sonic palette opened the door wide to more abstract representations of the places depicted in field recordings, and soundscape compositions quickly became more intensely personal, more subjective. And the composers of this music, many of whom have spent time as acoustic ecologists, have found that the sounds they collect mean less as raw, objective fragments in a catalog than they do when deliberately manipulated to evoke a sense of place, transformed into works of art.



As a member of the WSP, Barry Truax helped contribute to an unbelievable library of field recordings that numbered well into the thousands. Some decades later in 1991, he composed a piece that combined field recordings with live instruments to craft a loving, stylized portrait of all of Canada in the space of 18 minutes. Of the two endeavors, it is hard not to feel that the latter more effectively communicates a sense of place. Another of Truax’s most notable compositions, *Riverrun*, is built from source recordings of moving water that have been electronically processed beyond any recognition, transformed from ripples and splashes into massive, ambient washes of sound and remarkably, despite the use of what should be radically unfamiliar material, the piece still gives an unmistakable impression of river-ness. Not only do its minute textural shifts encourage careful and attentive listening, but, in the words of fellow composer Mara Helmuth, they also render it a “fluid, transforming entity with such internal subtlety that it is only understood on a large time scale”: nature’s rhythm, if not its voice. The recordings themselves might have had the nature ironed out of them, Helmuth says, but the art of their arrangement—and the space this arrangement allows for subjective interpretation—“closely connects the listener to the physical world.” Which is, of course, what the acoustic ecologists had wanted to do all along.



After years capturing and pinning down sounds, the first generation of soundscape composers suddenly found combining this experience with personal impressions equipped them uniquely to show what a place—real or imagined—was really like, not only how it sounded. Place has at least as much to do with imagination as it does with objective reality, and as a result, the spaces represented in soundscape compositions tend to feel more tangible than the locations captured by field recordings. The difference between a piece like *Riverrun *and field recordings of an actual river could reasonably be likened to the difference between the idea of a favorite red sweater and that merely of the color red. Their creative work could—and does—accomplish what years of the most meticulous research could not. It wasn’t enough just to tell us to listen, or even what to listen for; they also had to show us how.



Westerkamp, by now the creator of dozens of works concerned with the acoustic environment, knows well the power and responsibility of the soundscape composer. The field, she says, is one of the very few “[w]here cultural production can speak with a potentially powerful voice about one of the most urgent issues we face in this stage of the world's life: the ecological balance of our planet.” She is not only talking about sound.



“The soundscape,” she continues, “makes these issues audible. We simply have to learn to hear it and to speak back. The soundscape composer has the skill and the expertise to do exactly that.”