Changing Currents

As we mature, familiar places take on different faces.

“Long, long be my heart with such memories fill’d! Like the vase in which roses have once been distill’d: You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.” - Thomas Moore, Farewell! But Whenever You Welcome the Hour


By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Op/Ed Editor

One recent afternoon, I had to run to the office supply store and pick up an ink cartridge that I desperately needed for a project due the next day. It was no big deal – at this point in my life, I’m accustomed to rushing.

After retrieving the item, I noticed that the sun was going down, and became momentarily nostalgic. On a whim, I changed course, and drove to my favorite haunt: the boat launch in my hometown.

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia

The boat launch is essentially the parking lot termination of a dead-end street. The pavement at one point falls into the marshland mouth of the Housatonic River, which serves as the demarcation between Stratford and Milford, CT – and also Fairfield and New Haven counties. I imagined in my youth that the road must continue under the water, and up the other side of the river. Later, of course, I understood that one would drown.

The rest of the area known as the launch includes several small piers used mainly for fishing and small sail or motor boats. In summer, the parking lot also houses an outdoor restaurant that was once owned by an older Greek fellow who used to sexually harass my high school girlfriend when she worked for him. It’s okay, though; she quit, and I never liked the food much anyhow.

What has always attracted me most to this spot throughout my life is the relative solitude. As a teenager, I would walk down the precipitous rails and planks, and sit on one of the floating docks that wavered near the shore, letting the currents pull me back and forth. Once I owned a car, I would spend my Sunday evenings parked in front of a swath of reeds at one end of the lot, listening to ambient music and watching the wind roll over the stalks as bugs twirled in the infinitely far-off street lamps. If I was up early enough on certain mornings, I would catch the sun rising over the river, painting it in ascending hues.

The boat launch is popular among the locals during the summer. The fishermen prop their poles in chunks of white PVC tubing that are mounted on the pier, then idle through cigarettes as they wait for their lines to bend. Occasional patrons picnic in their cars or on one of the benches scattered around the area. And on the river, the paper wisps of sails glide blissfully down the lolling waters.

During other seasons, though, the place is mine alone, and that is when I enjoy it most. The frosted grasses in winter, the near desolation of autumn – the area tells different stories at different times.

One late October, for instance, a series of torrential rains over the period of a few days flooded certain sections of the town. In the evening, during a lull in the precipitation, I stopped at the launch, parking perhaps 40 feet from the gentle slope where the pavement was subsumed by the river. I watched as it spread slowly outward, crawling up and over the parking lot. I was mesmerized by the sight of the black liquid that, with measured complacency, rose to replace the solid blacktop. Only when it had come well past the limits of my vehicle could I compel myself to discontinue my presence in this ominously beautiful scene.

Throughout the procession of seasons and years, the boat launch has seemed only to change cyclically, remaining in an overall sense the same. Time draws into the more familiar natural step that I expect of it, and stretches out in expanses as endless as the gulf where the river continuously meets the salty ocean.

It was that broadening circular sensation that drew me on my detour from the store.

I sat on the fringe of a wooden walkway, eavesdropping on the entire world. A stocky, gruff fisher walked past me with his bucket and tools, stopping a short distance off to chat with another man who’d just arrived.

“Catch anythin’?”

“Nah.”

“Long y’ben here?”

“Couple’a hours. Not much doin’ today – yuh just get here?”

“Yeah.”

“Good luck.”

As the two went their separate ways, their conversation sparked images I had never associated with this place. I saw depleted fish counts from the pollution upstream, and remembered that the organization American Rivers listed the Housatonic as the 7 th most endangered river in the nation in 2004. I saw the spreading dead zones in the Hudson Bay, and finally, the awesome cesspool that Long Island Sound – where the Housatonic makes its exit - had become. I recalled the tracking of these trends, the alarm and debate all of these issues had spurred. It was all connected, of course, and I’d always known of the environmental problems that coursed deep within the waters of the area. Until that moment, however, such concerns had not intruded on my reveries. Now they sent me on tangents of cogitation.

The walls of my mental sanctuary fell, and I understood that it, too, was part of the forward projection, no longer an isolated realm.

Fish stocks might return. The river would eventually wash itself clean, if given the chance. But a deeper truth lay in the fact that, even if this rejuvenation were to happen, the boat launch could never be the same. Just as Pangaea would never reconstruct itself, just as Neanderthal man had been lost forever on the precipices of the Iberian Peninsula.

Like the phoenix, the reborn river would be a new and different creature.

With this insight in mind, I bid salut et adieu to a place that could no longer match my memory of it. And as I drove away, I realized something else – I still loved it anyway.