RiverStoriesDavidBrule

June 2, 2020.

Not many people call this place where I live The Flat anymore.

But for 200 years that has been the name of this curious place. Part real, part imaginary as you will see. The Flat actually is flat, a broad flood plain terrace that fans out a square mile or two along the paguag, or Millers, River. Our river bore down through the till and sandy sediments left by the last glacier 15,000 years ago, when post-glacial Lake Hitchcock drained. Prior to the first white settlements here in 1802, the Pocumtuck and the Sokoki peoples lived and farmed The Flat since before the year zero. Paleo and Archaic peoples came even 10,000 years before them. This is an old place. Every stone, tree and singing riffle in the river has a story to tell.

We came to live here ninety years after great-grandfather Judah and his wife Lizzie decided to buy this house and land for a few hundred dollars in 1882.

The shape of this settlement is the curious part: the river nowadays encircles and wraps itself around the neighborhood of about two dozen houses. These houses were built on the next-to-most recent floodplain terrace. When the leaves are down you can look up and see where the river began its drilling down. One terrace up there has its matching terrace on the other side of the valley, about 200 feet above us. The current floodplain riverbed is about 15 feet below our house on the edge of The Flat. That river is still doing its work, flowing by here day and night.

There ‘s only one way in and out of The Flat. One street leads down into the neighborhood, and three dead-end streets fan out from there. The land Judah bought in 1882 forms a woodland green belt that encircles the whole settlement. The river flows west, coming down from the branches that start out near two fabled mountains: Wachusett in the east, Monadnock in the north. It runs up smack into the red bedrock of Mineral Mountain that towers over our neighborhood. To be sure, as one old-timer said:”No minerals, and not much of a mountain” But it is home to bears, wildcats and great horned owls.

Fortunately for me, Judah bought the last house on the edge of The Flat, on the edge of the flood plain terrace, overlooking the river. That terrace comes to a point, carved by the river that abruptly flows north at a 90 degree turn right here after coming west for all those miles from Wachusett. We have our campfire on the edge of that terrace that feels like the prow of a ship, but we weren’t the first to chose that vantage point. We once found a worked stone projectile spearhead there, dropped or buried more than 7000 years ago. This is one of the places where the real and the imaginary intersect. Many stories have come from this spot, many more to come.

Judah also bought 8 acres of river shoreland fields, probably cleared by Indians. I don’t find it ironic that great-grandfather Judah was himself part Indian, a Nehantic, far from the Black Point Reservation in Lyme.

We still call that piece of land The Pasture, even though it has gone to woodlands since the great floods of 1936 and 1938 when the river scoured away the topsoil and covered the pasture and fields with river bottom stones.

I never thought I would leave my life in Paris, France to come back to spend more than 40 years in this old house that Judah bought on The Flat, but that’s what I’ve gone and done.

In this age of satellites and google earth, you can see The Flat from outer space, but you can’t see the stories that come from here, that’s the invisible part.

Bear with me…