THE RIVER IN MY CHILDHOOD BACKYARD

I never discovered where the Charles River began...

At first, our Auburndale house didn’t border on the river, but a couple of years after we moved in, my father, in a prescient move, bought the adjacent back lot that extended down to a stretch of waterfront on the Charles River. It cost five hundred dollars.

To me, at pre-teen age, it opened up an expanse of adventure. I climbed the ridge behind our house, and there The River spread across to Waltham and the waterscape was a labyrinthine configuration of peninsulas, coves and islands. It was overgrown land with winding pathways.

There was one small island that I could access only by crossing a narrow decrepit bridge with many missing planks and an intermittent railing. It was uncertain who owned it and much of the adjacent shoreline. But in any case, no one seemed to mind my traversing any of it.

 Sitting alone on that island gave me mental transport to imagined wild places. Trees covered most of the land but there were a couple of clearings with views of the unknown territory across the river.

With a couple of friends, I built a raft from abandoned pontoons from the Norumbega boathouse that we poled and paddled on explorations, all the way down river to edge of the Waltham Dam at Moody Street and up river past Riverside Boathouse until the water became too shallow. I never discovered where the Charles River began.

There were two peninsulas that extended, finger like, nearly crossing the river to another island with a narrow channel through which boats could pass. Once Ronny Gramont and I took a young neighbor, Randy Goodrich, out to that island and in a youthful act of treacherous deceit, we marooned him there. No reason, just childish meanness.  I don’t know when we actually planned to bring him back, but he managed to attract the attention of a passing Metropolitan Police patrol boat. They picked him up, brought him ashore and came calling to my house. They told us about kidnapping penalties.

In the hidden privacy of the peninsula woods I tried my first cigarette, detested it, and fortunately did not have the persistence  to ever try one again.

Fishing.  I had no one to teach me – I just experimented with worms dug in the backyard soil, stuck on hooks and cast with bamboo rods out from the dock. At sunset the fish seemed to be very hungry and they bit every time I cast a worm.  They were only tiny sunfish, “flatties” about six inches long and inedible, but I easily could catch 15 or 20 in an evening. I threw them back after extracting the hook, which I imagined to be very painful for the fish. On rare occasions, I would pull in a Perch. You could tell right away because, unlike the sunfish, they gave a bit of a fight.

I remember one day Charlie Scammon, a local father, came down to the river with a sophisticated fly fishing rig. He impressed me with his ability to cast pretty far out. But he never caught a fish. I prided myself that I was a better fisherman than Charlie Scammon.  Or so I falsely thought.

There were the long white canoes, paddled by a dozen white clad women of the LaSall Junior College crew, stroking in unison to the high pitched voice of their coxswain echoing “stroke..stroke..stroke…” gliding across the distant expanse of the river. I could see them even from my bedroom window.

Later on, as an adult I became chronically prone to seasickness

These images remain with few photographs, and as such, perhaps stronger in my mind’s archive.