Seeing Things
When you read a book by a gifted naturalist or attend a presentation by an expert in some aspect of an intricately complex habitat, you often notice how amazing it is that somebody could not only learn so much but also retain it well enough to convey. There is an intimacy in an expert’s knowledge of the subject that is almost embarrassing to contemplate. As often as not, the presentation resembles a public announcement of a private religious experience.
The knowledge demonstrated by such experts has usually been gained by countless hours of contemplative observation. It is not coincidental, I think, that David M. Carroll spots turtle habitat and the turtles residing there out of the corner of his eye. He has said there is no explanation for it, but he senses it before he sees it. There is something about the right conditions being present that makes him turn and look. In other words, he knows the habitat without thinking about it.
In his autobiography, Self-Portrait with Turtles, David M. Carroll describes the onset of his Gnostic journey into the arboreal world. He had just signed a contract to illustrate a U.S Forest Service book about trees:
Long before I heard the term “treehugger,” I had the habit, as I headed out to seek the first spotted turtles coming up from hibernation, of embracing red maples and white pines in celebration. I would run my hands over the bark and hold hands with alder, highbush blueberry, silky dogwood, black chokecherry, and their shrubby compatriots while traversing the uncertain terrain of the turtles. Now I welcomed the opportunity to understand trees in a more scientific sense, to add that layer to the kinship I felt with them, the druid going back into the lab. I began to see trees from the inside out and to better comprehend them as living organisms.
Evident in almost every sentence written or spoken by David M. Carroll is the respectful awe with which he regards the natural world.
This respectful awe is how many of us in the SRWA regard the Shawsheen River. It strikes outsiders as strange that such a short, narrow river should inspire such strong feeling. An extreme example of this was a foreign visitor to the Shawsheen River who once asked me if there wasn’t really an English word other than “river” that described such a narrow ribbon of moving water.
The fact is that the Shawsheen River, despite its small size relative to the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, is an extremely complex ecosystem. Given that I see more diversity in flora and fauna in two miles of the Shawsheen River than I ever have in ten miles on those other two rivers, I suspect that the Shawsheen’s ecosystem is as much as or more varied than the ecosystems of those other two rivers.
Over time — and maybe it is just a matter of time — or acclimation, we reach the stage where we know a Snapping Turtle is there before we see it. Sometimes the eye just naturally changes focus and lands on a resting fish. For whatever reason, in certain frames of mind, the wildlife on the river just ignores your presence. The Mink slinks toward its prey as if you weren’t there; the Otter glances at you but takes no notice; the Painted Turtles sit as if paralyzed by the sun as you paddle closely past; the Kingfishers swoop down low and near as if in greeting. In moments like these, you are in a state of awareness and grace that can only be called “incipient gnosis.”
That, I think, is what brings us back to the Shawsheen River time after time. Sometimes we are intent on cleaning it or clearing it of obstructions, but most of the time, what we’re really looking for is a deeper understanding of the eternal, cyclical forces that vie, combine, and convert to create the ever-changing but constant natural mystery that is the Shawsheen River.

The Fifth Woods & Meadow
The trip described in this article is the recommended Trip B on the Shawsheen River Recreational Map. It is described as “Shawsheen/Mohawk (#11) to Lowell Junction Road (#14)” on the map. As the title of this article suggests, I refer to it as “the fifth woods and the fifth meadow.” It is also often described as “Strongwater Brook to Interstate 93.” Regardless of how you name it, this trip is about four and a half miles long, and it takes you through the complete range of Shawsheen River habitats.
The last trip description in this newsletter brought the paddler through the end of the Fourth Meadow and into the beginning of the Fifth Woods, just below Bridge Street, at the confluence of Strongwater Brook and the Shawsheen River. The trip described here begins there and ends just after the river enters Andover.
It starts out with three moderate paddling challenges and ends with a portage, which is why it is normally done as part of the longer seven-mile paddle between the Knights of Columbus in Tewksbury and the Ballardvale millpond in Andover.
Put-In/Take-Out
This is one of the most accessible Put-Ins on the whole river. On the right side of Shawsheen Street in Tewksbury (heading toward Andover), shortly after you pass Bridge Street, there is a small dirt parking area with room for four cars. A few short steps down from this area, you find yourself on a nearly level apron of land that juts out into the river. Strongwater Brook flows into the river to the right.
You drive to the Take-Out at Lowell Junction Road by taking River Street away from Ballardvale. When River Street reaches a Y, take the right side of the Y, which is Lowell Junction Road. Follow Lowell Junction Road to the end, where you will see an enormous bio-science installation on the left and a pine-tree park on the left side. There is space for two or three cars to park on the side of the road.
On the river, you reach the Take-Out at the end of the trip is shortly after you paddle under I-93. Along the right bank, the wetland vegetation — in this case principally Purple Loosestrife — continues for about two tenths of a mile. At the end of the wetland vegetation, where it gives out to hardwood trees and other upland vegetation, you will find a path. That is your Take-Out. The place where you should have parked your car is about fifty yards from the river.
The Fifth Woods
All of the paddling challenges on this trip occur within the first half mile, and they are all associated in one way or another with the old mill that once stood on the island in the middle of the river.
The first is the Mill Street bridge which, in an unintentionally ironic turn of events, was officially named the SWEAT Bridge when it was opened a few years ago. (For those of you who are new to the river, the Shawsheen Watershed Environmental Action Team, or SWEAT, was the forerunner of the SRWA.)
This is truly one of the poorest, most inappropriate bridge designs ever constructed. In high water, the base of the bridge forms a wall of water at either end. If you are in a kayak, you will need a spray skirt to avoid getting swamped as you pass through either end of the bridge tunnel. If you are in a canoe, you should have the person in the bow put his or her paddle down and hang onto to the gunnels. In low to middling water, this bridge is not a problem, though you may scrape the bottom. If the water is low, though, you will definitely have problems with the two upcoming challenges.
The second challenge is the island on which the old mill stood. You have a choice of going straight through the millrace, which is a rocky stretch of rapids, or going around to the right, through the old spillway.
The latter is my preferred route. If you go around this way, you will see that a path has been cleared between the rocks just wide enough to let a canoe through. As you follow that path around the island, you need to stay to the left of the channel, next to the island, where there is another opening just wide enough for a canoe. The choice between these two routes is only an issue in middling and low water levels. In high water, both are effortlessly passable.
The third and final challenge is the old mill’s tailrace; that is, the water below where the old mill stood on the island.
After you pass the island, the river widens over a rocky/pebbly bottom through which no channel has ever been carved. Unless the water is high, you will most likely scrape the bottom as you pole your way through this section, which is about a tenth of a mile long. By the time you pass under the old railroad trestle immediately downstream, you will be afloat again.
When you pass under the trestle, stay to the right. The remnants of some old metal structure are on the left side of the underpass, and this structure frequently catches things floating downstream. If you stay to the right as you pass under the trestle, you won’t have any problems.
As you paddle through the pool after the trestle, you should note the left bank. You’ll see rampant erosion caused by the river’s high flows. Yes, that is how high the water gets, usually at least twice a year, and sometimes even three times if we catch some rain from a passing hurricane in August or September.
When you leave the pool below the old trestle, you will see a house high up on the right bank. You will undoubtedly notice the creative use of old tires along the river. The residents have built a retaining wall out of the tires. These must be the only tires in the river that we don’t object to.
You will pass a few more houses as you paddle through the Fifth Woods, but none are obtrusive, and by the time you leave the Fifth Woods, you’ll probably be noticing how few houses there are along the river here. It’s one of the nicest aspects of this particular trip.
The Transition Zone
As you begin to approach the end of the Fifth Woods, you will notice black willows among the swamp maples and oaks. The black willow is a wetland tree, and its presence among riverine hardwoods seems to indicate a zone of transition between woods and meadow. This section is about a third of a mile long, and it is here that you will see the most piscatory birds.
In this transition zone it is common to see more than one belted kingfisher, greenback heron, and great blue heron. This zone of change itself is surrounded by meadow. You can see vast open spaces just beyond the trees as you paddle through. It’s almost as if this riverside stand of trees is a hardwood inroad into the wetlands.
After you take a left turn by a cluster of five black willows at the apex of the curve, you enter the Fifth Meadow. The power lines you see crossing the meadow downstream mark the point where you are more than halfway through this trip.
The Fifth Meadow
If you have a copy of the SRWA Guide to Recreation, look at the photograph on the cover panel. That is a small section of the Fifth Meadow. You will paddle through the entire Fifth Meadow, just below which you will enter another transition zone that leads you into the Sixth Woods.
As in all of the other meadows in the Shawsheen River watershed, the river meanders through the Fifth Meadow as if reluctant to actually go anywhere. There are multiple 180-degree turns. In fact, here are the statistics:

180-degree turns — 9
90-degree turns — 4
45-degree turns — 3
At less than three miles, this is one of the shorter meadows in the watershed, but it is also one of the broadest. Once you’re in the meadow, you will see only one house high up on the left side. Rather than finding it jarring, you will probably find yourself envying the owner, who probably has one of the most spectacular vistas in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Like the First and Fourth Meadows, this meadow seems to be waging a winning battle against the Purple Loosestrife. Although that exotic invasive plant still retains some dominance in small spots of river frontage, it seems to have been supplanted largely by native sedge grasses and cattails. The wildlife seen in August in this meadow were river otter, muskrat, and mink. The Canada geese and mallard ducks were conspicuously absent.
Most of the Fifth Meadow is in Tewksbury, and although the line is not evident anywhere on the river, it is generally accepted that once you can see I-93 as well as hear it, you have crossed into Andover.
I did this trip (and the one I’ll describe in the next Shawsheen Trib) about ten times this summer, only twice without encountering other paddlers. Most of these people put their boats in at the Ballardvale millpond, which is where the next trip I describe will end. If you decide to put in at the millpond and paddle upstream, you should be aware that you can park in the Shawsheen Rubber lot only on weekends. During the week, they take those “reserved parking” signs seriously.

The Annual SRWA Canoe Clinic in Andover
by Ken Doran
kdoran@analogic.com
In what has become an annual event, the SRWA worked with the Town of Andover’s Recreation Department to promote an educational event aimed at teaching safe and effective canoeing techniques to anybody interested in learning them.
The SRWA Canoe Clinic took place on the evening of Tuesday, July 27th, at Pomps Pond in Andover. The event was coordinated through the town. The trip leaders were provided by SRWA. The proceeds from the event were donated to the SRWA.
Approximately seventeen adults and children joined us on the paddle in a group of six kayaks and four canoes. Bert Batcheller, Jack Brady and Ken Doran from SRWA were the co-leaders.
We met at the pond beach at 6:00 p.m. and teamed up canoeing partners, identified the specific boats for individuals, and fitted life-jackets and paddles.
A brief on-shore review of canoe and kayak basics followed. The paddle lasted a little over an hour and included a trip around the perimeter of the pond and wetlands. We also gave a brief talk on the history of the pond and the wildlife we might see.
The highlight of the trip was the great blue heron nest in the top of a dead tree between the pond and the wetlands. The nest had three baby herons, each about one foot tall.
When we returned to the beach, the town recreation staff had made a campfire, cut roasting sticks, and produced the necessary ingredients for “S’mores” — a traditional evening fireside treat that is constructed by placing a roasted marshmallow and a slab of Hershey’s milk chocolate between two sheets of graham cracker. We all enjoyed this special treat at the end of the paddle.
This looks like an event that may soon become an annual tradition. We hope so. It’s not often that teaching and learning get to be this fun. Please check this newsletter next May, or visit our website at www.shawsheen.org for the next time this event or any other is scheduled by the SRWA.

The July Cleanup of the Bayou in Lawrence
by Bob Rauseo
BobOtter@AOL.com
In total, we had six canoes at our July cleanup in the Bayou section of the river. They were:
Joe Moore
Brian Moore
Ken Doran
Bob Rauseo
Lee Walus & Lee Yates
Frank Perdicaro w/ daughter & grandson
The shore crew who met us at the Take-Out to help unload everything consisted of:
Judy Barber
Suzanne Robert
Jack Brady
We put in at Riverina Road in Andover and slowly made our way to Costello Park in Lawrence. By the time we reached Rte. 114, our canoes were already full and had become difficult to control. They were behaving more like overburdened barges than canoes at that point, so by the time we actually reached the Bayou, we were just paddling through so we could unload at Costello Park.
The take of trash for the day consisted of:
25 car tires
2 truck tires
A large pile of metal debris
The car tires were delivered to Schlott Tire in Tewksbury that Saturday afternoon. The two truck tires were left at Costello Park, but I picked them up later and took them to Routhier Tire in Littleton. The large pile of debris was picked up on July 24th by WE GET RID OF IT (WGROI).  There are still several truck tires, many car tires, and a lot more trash that we couldn’t fit in our boats but that is ready to be ferried to Costello Park.
The following Saturday, I met the WGROI truck in Chelmsford at 8:30 a.m. and led them to four trash storage sites to collect trash. The bike lock on the jungle gym at Costello Park was gone. Although the jungle gym was back in the river, the guy who owns the trucks next to the park came over and cut it up so it could be hauled away.

Being There
For the last four years, I have been urging the readers of this newsletter to put their canoes and kayaks into the Shawsheen River and revel in the wonder of its wildlife. In the course of researching the trip described on previous pages of this issue, I paddled back and forth through the same river section numerous times.
If you do any trip often enough with the intention of describing it, you reach the point where the object of the trip is to recognize where you are and what comes next rather than the majesty of nature. In this state, I confess, I made the nine-mile trip at least three times without noticing any wildlife other than squirrels, grackles, and blue jays. I didn’t even see a duck or a goose. Where was my much vaunted wilderness?
I realized later that, as I mentioned on the first page of this newsletter, one has to be in a certain frame of mind to see what is clearly there. (For the record, I relinquished my fascination with Asian religions three decades ago.) Then again, there is the simple truth that phenomena do occur.
Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Quite possibly, I have been out on the river enough over the years to be in the right place at the right time more often than most people.
This notion occurred to me at the September meeting of the SRWA, when Ken Doran took off on a tangent about a recent Tuesday evening on the river with Bob Rauseo. There was a hint of wonder in his voice, which caught my attention. (Usually Cap’n Chainsaw injects excitement into his accounts only when he’s talking about how big the tree was that he had to cut up.)
You have to picture this to get a sense of what Ken was saying: Bob Rauseo sitting in the stern of the boat, paddling and steering, with Ken standing at the bow — Kids! Don’t try this at home! — and scanning the river bottom.
What Ken was telling me was that some combination of things had fused to create ideal conditions for tire hunting. The light was at the right angle, the wind was absent, and the water was clear. The result was, as Ken put it, “just see it and grab it!”
The reason I mention this is that, on that one Tuesday evening, everything was splendidly arranged for the perfect tire hunt. It seems right that it lasted only a brief time. It got dark before they had retrieved many more than half a dozen tires.
Ken’s wonder at his luck in witnessing ideal conditions set me to thinking about some of the truly remarkable things I’ve seen only once on the river. I think most of them have probably been described in these pages as something you will likely see only if you get out there, but now I think otherwise.
Almost fourteen years ago, I had spent about a month paddling on the Shawsheen River before I even knew its name and had sadly decided that its clear water was lifeless. Then, in the section I now know as the Fourth Woods, a mink popped up on the left bank and looked at me. It then dove into the water and, to my complete astonishment, swam under my boat to the other side, where it emerged and loped along the bank beside me for about five or six feet before disappearing. That was a happy moment for me. If this nameless stream could support a mink, it had to support the prey it lived on. I met Bob Rauseo and SWEAT six or seven months later.
A dozen years ago, Bob Rauseo and I took a photographer upstream through the Third Meadow to document an illegal dumper’s activity. As we paddled upstream, we could hear what sounded like irregular but very loud banging and scraping. It sounded almost as if somebody were striking a buried rock with a heavy shovel. The noise got louder as we progressed upstream. What we found at the apex of a bend in the river were two large snapping turtles trying to do one another in.
The experts will tell you that there is no record of a snapping turtle biting anybody while it is in the water. This should not be taken to mean that a snapping turtle will not bite another turtle. We watched these two armored combatants for several minutes before we paddled on. They were gone by the time we returned ten minutes later, and I have never seen snapping turtles do anything like it since.
It was a practice of mine at the time to note when the local papers announced a new reporter. I would invite the reporter out on the water and show him or her how beautiful the river was and how that beauty was marred by tires and other trash. We always got laudatory copy out of these trips. A couple of weeks after the incident with the two snapping turtles, I took a new reporter out into the First Meadow. We were about to do our first cleanup at Rte. 3A, and we were looking for some publicity. It was a short trip upstream. The reporter, a young woman just out of journalism school, remarked that she felt as if she were “in the wild.” As if on cue, as the words left her mouth, a mother raccoon crossed a backwater ten feet in front of us with four baby raccoons in line behind her. They were cute enough to make a cynic choke up. The reporter sat in the bow of my canoe awed into silence. When we got back to the Put-In, she had the photographer take a shot of me holding up a lawn chair that I had yanked from the bottom. It made the front page of the paper on the Thursday before the cleanup, for which we had at least forty local volunteers and a video crew. I haven’t seen another raccoon on the river since.
When I started writing the trip descriptions for this newsletter, I was much more diligent than I am now about studying the section I describe. I started with the First Meadow. Throughout July I paddled that stretch over and over again, to the point where I became fascinated by the backwaters. (That fascination lingers to this day.) Every backwater had unique characteristics, but one thing was common: there were hundreds of turtles in each one. These turtles would be basking in the warm shallow water just as you see others basking on trees and rocks above the water. Their shells and heads were out of the water, and the backwaters looked as if they’d been paved with extremely rough cobblestones.
Then a turtle would become aware of me, and all of a sudden there would be a massive stampede out of the backwater and into the river. This happened time and again, and I saw it so often that month that I assumed it was normal and included it in my trip description as something to look for. I have paddled back and forth through the First Meadow countless times since then, and I’m always looking for crowds of turtles basking in the shallow backwaters. I haven’t seen it again.
The one-time sights have appeared frequently this year. The difference is that I now recognize them as rare events to be savored.
On the Vernal Equinox canoe trip last March, we saw huge clouds of ducks and geese exploding into flight every time we rounded a bend in the river. The water fowl were too numerous and too varied to count. It seemed miraculous that such a small river could support so many birds. In retrospect, this was approximately equivalent to entering a houseful of partying teenagers and wondering how all those kids could live in the same house. Two weeks later, on the first of the monthly downstream trips, all we saw were the occasional mating pair trying to hide in the meadow grasses.
It was on that trip two weeks later that I paddled past a juvenile beaver in Bedford. It sat on the bank and watched me as if I were the most interesting oddity it had seen in its young life. My daughter Miranda paddled by a little later. It watched her and then dove into the water, eyeing her from under a tree branch as she passed. The only other beaver I saw this year was an adult sitting high up on a grassy bank in Andover. I barely caught a glimpse of it as it bolted like lightning to the river.
One of the peculiarities of the Shawsheen River has been the dearth of frogs in it. Although we have occasionally heard frogs, especially in the spring, we never see them. The small pond in my backyard teems with frogs, yet the river nearby always seemed to have none. On July 17th, while the rest of the SRWA were busy in the bayou, my daughter Katherine and I performed a cleanup through the Fourth Woods and Fourth Meadow.
We managed to pick up a lot of trash, but the most important thing about that trip — the most amazing thing — was the number of frogs we saw. We thought it might have been because we have so many frogs in the water right beside our deck in the backyard that our eyes are accustomed to picking them out. Anyway, on that day we saw several dozen frogs, each one solitary, lying as still as a predatory stone in the duckweed-laden backwaters. I was thrilled. I’ve been back a dozen times since that day, and I haven’t seen another frog. For some still undivined reason, the conditions were just right that day for so many of these usually hidden amphibians to come out into the main stem of the river.
I end this article with another exhortation to get out on the river. In late September through the middle of October, the fall foliage is truly astounding. You should also keep an eye on the space overhead. The period of peak foliage is also the migratory period of the osprey. If you’re lucky, as I once was, you might see an osprey with a wriggling fish in its talons fly ten feet over your head as it leaves the water.
You just have to be there to see it.

The Common Muskrat
The common muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) is by far the most common aquatic mammal in the Shawsheen River watershed. When you see a brown head in the water that suddenly disappears, chances are you’ve just seen a muskrat. It is much smaller than a beaver or a river otter and much less secretive than either. The muskrat is known to burrow through levees and dams rather than climb over them.
Description: The head and body are 10 to 14 inches with a tail that is 8 to 11 inches long. It weights 2 to 4 pounds. Its fur is a dense, rich brown, overlaid with coarse guard hair. The belly is silvery. The tail is naked, scaly, and black, flattened from side to side. The tail alone is sufficient to distinguish the muskrat from all other aquatic mammals.
Habitat: The muskrat inhabits freshwater marshes as well as the edges of ponds, lakes, and streams. Its den is usually burrowed into the stream bank but may also consist of a small lodge fashioned out of cattails, roots, and mud.
Food: The muskrat feeds mainly on aquatic cattail roots, pond lily tubers, and other aquatic vegetation but may also consume mussels, frogs, and fish.
Reproduction: The muskrat breeds several times between April and August. It normally has two or three litters per year with five or six young in each litter. The gestation period is three weeks to one month.
Source: This information was gleaned from a variety of public-domain documentation.

The Jewelweed
The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) is also known as the “touch-me-not.” It is a flowering bush with succulent branches and sometimes hundreds of orchid-like, small (one–inch) golden flowers. The fruits of this plant are swollen capsules that burst at the touch when ripe. The sap of the jewelweed is said to cure the itch of poison ivy. This cannot be verified because, by the time you can recognize the jewelweed, the risk of contracting poison ivy is past.
The jewelweed can grow to be as tall as six feet and just as wide. The jewelweed sometimes looks like a golden cloud unbound from the earth. Most of the time, however, you’ll see one or two stems about two feet tall, each with five or six flowers.
The jewelweed flowers in August and September, at about the same time that you see the brilliant red cardinal Flowers. The jewelweed and the cardinal flower both bloom during a period when most of the other flowering and seeding plants have gone to seed, thus making each spectacularly evident.
Source: This information was gleaned from a variety of public-domain documentation.

The September 11th Cleanup in the Fifth Woods & Meadow
September 11th was a beautiful early autumn day. The sky had very few clouds, and the sun was warm but not hot. The water was almost high from the remnants of Hurricane Frances that had dropped almost six inches of rain in the previous week.
There was one canoe and one paddler on this cleanup:
John Hicks-Courant
I put in at Strongwater Brook and headed downstream. For the most part, I picked up individual bottles and cans caught in the backwaters. It looked for the first mile as if I might not even fill my boat. Then I arrived at one of the spots that had inspired me to do this cleanup.
By the time I pulled out of the river at Ballardvale, my 19-foot canoe was full to the gunnels, and I had:
Enough bottles, cans, sneakers, and fishing equipment to fill a forty-gallon contractor’s trash bag
Three tires
A hundred pounds of finished lumber
It was extremely gratifying to clean up the messes I had noticed over the course of the last two months in researching the trip report earlier in this newsletter.

The Annual End-of-Year River Sweep!
It’s that time of year again. We’ll be closing out the cleanup season with a River Sweep from the middle of the First Meadow in Bedford through Billerica and into the Fifth Woods in Tewksbury. We will meet at Middlesex Turnpike at 9:00 a.m., and we will pull out at Strongwater Brook, just below Bridge Street, a little after 12:30 p.m.
In the process, we will pick up everything we can, mainly bottles and cans along with occasional plastic garbage bags. The tentative date for this River Sweep is Saturday, November 6th.
Dress in layers and bring a dry bag or something else to keep the clothes you shed dry. This is a terrific way to end the cleanup season. The water is almost always high, and you pass through three sets of woods and four meadows.
If you have never participated in a cleanup, this is the best one with which to get your feet wet (figuratively speaking). You don’t have to get out of your boat; you just dump whatever you pull out of the river into the bottom of your boat. At the end, we put it all in trash bags and haul it away. Please join us!