The Shawsheen Trib
Volume 4, Number 4
Few things on or in the Shawsheen River are capable of provoking the revulsion inspired by pure ugliness. When I use the word “few” in this case, I mean three or four things, including shoreline construction and water’s edge lawns. These two things can, perhaps over time and with concerted political effort, be curtailed and even eliminated; it’s been tried before and even enacted. The local political will to support the appointed legal agencies responsible for enforcement is the real issue here. There is little we can do about it in the short term.
The other two ugly things in the Shawsheen River are the trash and the exotic invasive vegetation. We deal with the problem of the trash as a long-term effort, and all indications are that we are slowly but quite surely winning. In the last eight river sweeps conducted by members of the SRWA over eight miles of the river, only one tire was retrieved, and no more than six 40-gallon trash bags were filled. This is real progress. Ten years ago, we pulled that much trash out of the river in twenty yards.
Exotic invasive vegetation displaces native vegetation and the insects and animals that depend on it. The ugliness it inflicts on the river and its wetlands is overwhelming. There are two principal exotic invasive species of plant in the Shawsheen River. They are Eurasian milfoil and purple loosestrife.
The milfoil problem is localized, and the habitat within which it thrives is as foreign to the Shawsheen River as the plant itself. After more than half a decade of its overwhelming presence in the Ballardvale millpond flats in Andover, we have not seen the plant take root anywhere else. It is a problem unique to Andover and to the areas of the river dammed by that town.
Purple loosestrife is something else altogether. It is pervasive in all wetland environments. This is not to say that it has completely supplanted native vegetation. Although this eventuality appeared inevitable a few years ago, something mysteriously began alleviating the problem in the First and Second Meadows recently. We suspect the source of the resurgence of native vegetation is the experimental release of a weevil in the Great Meadows National Wildlife Reservation on the Sudbury and Concord Rivers.
The wetlands where this purple-loosestrife-lethal weevil was released are less than a mile from the headwaters of the Shawsheen River. The apparent downstream progression in the lessening of the loosestrife curse seems to support this hypothesis. The diminishment of the problem is not the same thing as its solution, however, and the loosestrife that remains is the stronger stuff. The remaining plants are those that withstood the assault of the weevil. We have to do something about these plants.
As I write this, I know I run the risk of sounding shrilly alarmist. Unhappily, we have a site in our watershed that illustrates the dangers of purple loosestrife with obscene explicitness. This site is in Burlington in a very large Vine Brook floodplain known as Burlington’s “Great Meadow.” To see this marvel, take a left onto Great Meadow Road off Middlesex Turnpike the next time you head toward Burlington Mall. About halfway through this shortcut to the mall, there is an opening in the roadside shrubbery. If you look to your left, you will see wetland that is comparable in size to the First Meadow of the Shawsheen River. It is completely full of purple loosestrife. Even when the loosestrife is still sprouting — from April through July — and the native vegetation normally holds sway, the infestation is so thick and all consuming that no native vegetation still exists in that floodplain. In August and September, when the loosestrife is in bloom, it provides a lurid demonstration of how bad things can get.
I propose an experimental method of confronting the purple loosestrife invasion on page 8 of this newsletter. I hope you will read it and volunteer to take responsibility for one or two small patches of Shawsheen River wetland for next year. If anybody is going to do anything about this problem in the Shawsheen River, it has to be us. Let’s see if we can make a difference, okay?

The Sixth Woods & Flats
The trip described in this article is a two-mile trip into the Sixth Woods from the Fifth Meadow and then into the “Flats.” One fourth of this trip passes through the transition zone between wetlands and woods, another fourth passes through the woods. The Flats constitute the entire second half of the trip.
The Flats is the impoundment behind the Ballardvale dam. The immense, shallow expanse of the Flats is testimony to just how level the terrain is in what would have been the Sixth Meadow but for the dam.
Put-In/Take-Out
The put-in is site number 14 on the recreational map. It is at the river’s edge of a scenic park with picnic benches at the end of Lowell Junction Road in Andover. The take-out is either at River Street, on the right side of the Flats just before they narrow on the last stretch into the Ballardvale millpond, or at the Ballardvale millpond. The latter is the preferred take-out, but it is only accessible on weekends when the Shawsheen Rubber Company is closed.
The Transition Zone
When you put in at the park, you are getting onto the river at the end of the Fifth Meadow and the beginning of a transition zone from meadow to woods. In this zone, you will move between stands of trees and stretches of wetland vegetation.
By the time you pass the old chemical plant on the right, you will no longer hear the traffic on I-93. If you have been through this section before in the last twenty years, you will notice that the old rusting holding tank and rickety bridge have been removed from the river’s channel. In fact, if you didn’t know they were once there, you will see no sign that they ever were.
The Sixth Woods
When you exit the transition zone and find yourself in the Sixth Woods, you will notice the difference from the transition zone. Trees line both sides of the river, and the channel is well defined between the two banks. In the late summer months of August and September, you will see touch-me-not clusters and cardinal flowers on the banks at the base of the trees. From April through October, you will hear and see belted kingfishers throughout these woods. There is often beaver activity in this short wooded section of the river. There seems to be somebody in town who is militant about removing these beavers.
You will paddle under two different bridges as you pass through these woods. After you pass the second bridge, you are at the end of the Sixth Woods. About a hundred yards downstream from the second bridge, you enter the Flats.
The Flats
In the broader floodplains of the Shawsheen River, wind can make a difference in the ease with which you paddle. In the Flats of Andover, however, you do not even have the grass and trees on the banks to break the wind. A contrary wind can make this one mile of the river feel like five miles of hard paddling.
To minimize the influence of the wind, the best route to take as you enter the Flats is left. That is, as you enter the Flats from the woods, you will see an island directly ahead of you. To the right is open water. To the left is a relatively narrow stretch of water bounded on the left by upland and on the right by the island. If you take this left and go straight, you will have taken the shortest route through the flats.
If there is no wind, and if you have all the time you could possibly want, you should take a right as you leave the woods and spend some time exploring the Flats. There is no other place like it on the Shawsheen River. It is the Dead Zone.
Before the outraged e-mails and phone calls begin, let me insert the comment that around the edges of the Flats — in the crucially important woodland/wetland juncture — there are documented populations of rare and endangered turtles and salamanders.
The water in the Flats is inches deep. By that I mean two or three inches rather than eight or ten. This excruciatingly short water column is completely filled with the exotic invasive plant known as Eurasian milfoil. This amazing plant reproduces every year with flowers and pollen; it also propagates by producing roots on any broken piece, which then becomes a new plant. It is something of a miracle that this plant hasn’t taken root anywhere downstream.
As you exit the Flats, you pass through a short section of what looks like real river until you pass under the bridge and enter the Ballardvale millpond.
October 30th, 2004
At 7:30 in the morning, on Friday, October 29th, Bob Rauseo broadcast the following message:
A late blast from the SRWA short notice department, Bob Rauseo, chairperson: Shawsheen River Canoe Trip and Sweep Cleanup Saturday, Oct 30th, 9 AM - 12 Noon
Meet at Pinehurst Park in Billerica (Route 3A)
We will shuttle vehicles to Route 38 (Main Street) in Tewksbury, then do a leisurely paddle, enjoying the scenery and improving the scenery by collecting visible trash and debris.
 
I apologize for the short notice - blame it on Red Sox fever.
Bob Rauseo
I got that message twelve hours later after having spent the previous eleven hours driving a UPS truck and delivering more than 250 packages to the denizens of Groveland, MA. A more dreary, unappreciated, and unrewarding job than that of the UPS package car driver can only be found in the mailroom of a federal agency. When, bone tired and spiritually exhausted, I read Bob Rauseo’s proposal on Friday night, I experienced that old jolt of eager anticipation the Shawsheen River never fails to provide.
If anybody else had issued the call to the water the previous evening, I would have doubted any fellow participants when I awoke that Saturday. The air was a cool forty degrees, and despite the weather forecasts for a cloudy but rain-free day, the humidity was a misty 100%. As anticipated, Bob Rauseo was in the Pinehurst Office Park lot with Sharon Lapham.
Bob and I put our canoes next to the river and the drove to the Knights of Columbus. Sharon provided shuttle services in the Lapham miracle mobile, which is not only perpetually clean but also carries more people than an SUV but occupies half the space.
I joked about Bob’s falling out of his canoe shortly after we put in, and as a consequence, I tipped over less than a quarter of a mile downstream from the put-in. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had done myself a favor. When the mist turned to rain and then back to mist, which happened at least four times in three hours, I didn’t get any wetter. Bob, on the other hand, slowly absorbed moisture until, at the end, he was as wet as I.
In that three-hour, six-mile trip, we collected about seventy pounds of lumber, balls of every dimension, and enough bottles, cans, and assorted debris to fill three forty-gallon contractor’s trash bags. In the process, we experienced fall weather at its best: gray, wet, and chilly.
By the time we pulled our boats out of the water, Bob and I were both hobbling like old men with arthritic knees and ankles. You can’t appreciate how important your toes are for locomotion until you can’t feel them to use them anymore. I was so tired that I lowered the gate of my pickup to lift a bag of trash into the bed. When it came time to put my little red canoe on the rack, I had to ask for help.
Despite the rigors of inclement weather, there were highlights to this trip. These included spotting a great blue heron on the bank and watching it take off. We also saw two belted kingfishers as well as two beavers. We also discovered a new beaver dam about a mile downstream from the Buckingham Road colony. I expect to see a lodge just upstream from that new dam by next spring. As usual, the mallard ducks and Canada geese were present in high numbers.
If you’ve never participated in a River Sweep, you owe it to yourself to do at least one. Chances are very high you’ll want to go on every one that we hold. Barring rain, which is as good an excuse to opt out as can be had, there really is no reason to pass up this way of gently making a substantial positive difference in the aesthetic aspect of the Shawsheen River.
November 6th & 7th, 2004
On Sunday, October 31st, I put my 12-foot, single-seat red canoe in the water behind the tire business on the upstream side of the Rte. 3A bridge; the water was too high for me to paddle under the bridge in that boat. That boat is not conducive to efficient upstream paddling. In fact, it doesn’t lend itself to any kind of upstream paddling. I paddled no further than the new beaver canal I had encountered the previous weekend before I turned around.
On Saturday, November 6th, I changed the boat on my rack from the single-seat canoe to the 12-foot river kayak and put in at Rte. 3A in Billerica. This boat does lend itself to upstream paddling, and I quickly paddled upstream past Middlesex Turnpike to the beaver dam. This section, through which I have conducted no fewer than five river sweeps in the last two months, looks wonderfully clean. What I had not been able to do since early summer, however, was paddle upstream over the beaver dam.
On November 6th, the water was high enough that I shot right over the dam. It felt as if I had returned to a section of the river that I hadn’t seen since last April. In fact, it looked as if nobody from the SRWA had been through this section since last April. Immediately upstream from the beaver dam, there is a dead maple lying across two-thirds of the channel. It functions as a trash strainer, and it is chock full of trash. This unwelcome sight felt like something of a rebuke: See what happens when you forget about a section of this river?
The next upstream mile of the river, from the beaver dam to the beginning of the First Meadow above Rte. 3, was a trash tour. There was too much for me to even begin collecting in the holds of my kayak. Aside from the uncounted bottles and cans lining both banks of the river, there were at least four strainers, each with enough trash to fill a cleanup canoe.
On Sunday, November 7th, I replaced my kayak with my big green cleanup canoe. Putting in at the tree-surgery business in Bedford, I paddled and nudged my way through the second half of the First Woods. There are enough sheets of plasterboard and remnants of pallets in the First Woods to fill several canoes and not an inconsequential amount of assorted debris. This section was not my goal for the day.
About a third of a mile downstream from the Rte. 3 bridge, very close to the spot where a huge tree fell away from the river, a small island about twenty feet long and four feet wide sits in the middle of the river. One side of that island had been converted to a monstrous trash heap ten feet long and just as wide. When I saw it the previous day, I thought I could probably fill my canoe twice with what I saw there. That proved an optimistic assessment.
I spent an hour on that trash heap. Picking at the garbage, dismantling the obstruction one piece at a time, I collected innumerable bottles, balls, and boards. Nothing I extracted seemed to make a difference in the flow of water along that side of the island. Then I uncovered the corner of a concrete former, a structure that looks something like a ladder with backing along one side. After I wrestled that out of the bottom, it looked as if the water might begin flowing. Encouraged, I pulled dead limbs out of the heap, sending some of the larger ones downstream and pulling the others onto the island. Still the flow remained minimal. Stabbing into the mass of remaining trash with my potato hook, I connected with something a couple of feet below the surface.
It was a pallet positioned vertically across the channel, like a gate. As soon as the bottom released the pallet, the water began to flow again. As I struggled with the pallet to get it on the island, the water flushed the remaining trash downstream. That old sensation of exhilaration at the sight of moving water visited me again, and it felt good.
The larger pieces of lumber — a fifteen-foot board, the six-foot concrete former, and the pallet — I left on the island. Getting back into my canoe, I drifted through the open space I had just created in a boat so heavy with lumber and trash that I could barely steer it. I picked up as much trash as I could as I barged downstream.
When I pulled out at Middlesex Turnpike, I had more than a hundred-fifty pounds of lumber and two 40-gallon trash bags of balls and glass, plastic, and pressed foam beverage containers. This section of the river needs at least five more such sweeps before the year ends.
As I paddled downstream in my overloaded canoe, I got a good, long look at the albino red-tail hawk. This is the third or fourth year that we’ve seen this same bird in this same section of the river. How long do they live? Just how territorial are they? Anybody have answers?
November 17th, 2004
After the snowstorm of Saturday, November 13th that blasted our five-boat river-sweep plans, I suffered the old SWEAT angst about a cleanup that was absolutely necessary missed. There was that old SWEAT mantra insistently running through my head: If I don’t do it, who will?
I woke up Wednesday the 17th remembering a string of dreams about cleaning the Shawsheen River. Clearly, things had progressed to the point where I had to get out there and do something or go nuts.
I had been watching the weather carefully, hoping for a chance to get back into the First Meadow and clean up much of what I’d been forced to leave behind on November 7th. On the morning of the 17th, with the promise that the 30-degree weather would heat up to 50 degrees by noon, I put my big green canoe in the water on the upstream side of Middlesex Turnpike.
The air was still cold, and the water was colder, but the river looked as clean as it had ten days earlier when I passed through. After having done six sweeps through the First Meadow this fall, it felt really nice to see that no additional debris had collected.
At the beaver dam, I got out of the canoe and hauled it overland around the dam. This is where I began seeing the trash I had left last time because my boat was too full. There wasn’t that much, though, no more than a dozen bottles and cans in the last half mile of the meadow.
I stopped at the island where I had restored the flow last time. After I loaded the 20-foot-long board and the pallet — the concrete former is still there — I set to work on the rest of the junk in the strainer. It became clear almost immediately that there was a lot more lumber jammed up here than I had realized. For every bottle or tennis ball I pulled out of the branches of the buttonbush, there was another board. When I left the island an hour later, my canoe was full of lumber again. The bow of the canoe sat lower than the stern, which suggested that I had more than 200 pounds of lumber. This made stopping to pick up trash a maneuverability challenge that dramatically slowed downstream progress as I struggled to capture all of the bottles, cans, and plastic debris that I had released from the strainer back at the island.
My second target for the day was the strainer a few yards upstream from the beaver dam. This is a silver maple that the beavers cut down but never bothered to use for the dam. It has several branches reaching into the bottom. Besides serving as a very efficient strainer, these branches keep the trunk of the tree two feet above the water.
After collecting all of the floating debris and lumber I could, I noticed that the water still wasn’t flowing though the branches. Further investigation discovered a crudely constructed raft about five feet long and two or three feet wide. After I wrestled that free, it floated down to the beaver dam and stopped. I’m wondering what the beavers will decide to do with it.
I noticed that the beavers had completely repaired the small dent in their dam that I did when I barged through with a full canoe ten days earlier. I’m sure they’ve already fixed the same dent in the same spot that I did on the 17th. As I made my way down to Middlesex Turnpike, I began to worry that somebody might have seen the stash of lumber I’d left ten days earlier and tossed it back into the river. (I started the day on the other side of the road.) As I passed through the culvert under Middlesex Turnpike, I noticed a large collection of twigs and sticks up against the bank right at the end of the culvert.
The closer I got, the more that collection of twigs and sticks began looking like a beaver lodge’s food stash. Indeed, right there next to the culvert on the downstream side of Middlesex Turnpike, a brand new beaver lodge has been constructed. On the 17th, it was so new that it hadn’t even been covered with sticks yet. It looked like a pile of mud with a strategically placed food supply.
At any rate, the beavers having built a lodge there suggested minimal visits by people in the last ten days. Maybe the rotten weather has limited visits to the river at that site. When I turned the corner to face the take-out, the pile of lumber was still there, exactly as I had left it. I doubled the size of the lumber pile and filled another 40=gallon trash bag.
At some point in the next month, we need to get a team of four or five people to move that lumber into a couple of pickup trucks. We’ll need to form a chain to hand the boards uphill. The whole operation will take less than twenty minutes if we have enough hands. Send mail to johnhc@theworld.com or to bobotter@aol.com if you’re interested in participating.
The Trailer
[ahem]
To buy, or not to buy, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The sore shoulders of outrageous portages,
Or to equip against a torment of transport....
When the SRWA announces an event such as a canoe trip or a river sweep, we always deal with the shuttle problem by leaving our boats at the put-in and driving our vehicles to the take-out.
There, one or two people with excess capacity haul the other drivers back to the put-in. This way, only one or two people have to return to the put-in for their cars after the trip. This becomes a real problem when we succeed in one of our primary goals, which is introducing people to the Shawsheen River. When this happens, we bring from one to three of our extra canoes for people to use. It has often been remarked that fulfilling one of our foremost commitments shouldn’t require logistical athleticism every time.
The most frequently suggested refinement to this clumsy post-trip transportation problem is the acquisition of a trailer that can hold six canoes and/or kayaks. This idea has been circulating long enough within the SRWA that we have identified both the manufacturer and the trailer we would like to purchase.
We have also negotiated a wholesale price that is 25% lower than the retail price. This is a lightweight aluminum trailer that could hook up to Bob Rauseo’s or John Hicks-Courant’s truck or anybody else’s vehicle with a small-ball trailer hitch.
This is the description from the vendor’s website:
Trailex Model UT-1000-6 Six Canoe Trailer
All Aluminum, All Bolted Construction, All Adjustable
Trailex Multiple Canoe Trailers have epoxy coated leaf springs and hot dipped galvanized axles. These trailers require common carrier or motor freight shipment and are easily assembled using only simple tools. Since the Trailex Multiple Canoe Trailers are made of aluminum, they are maintenance-free in addition to being strong and lightweight. Their light weight allows towing with today’s smaller vehicles.

In the fashion of most true non-profit corporations, the executive committee of the SRWA is earnestly ambivalent about spending the money — about $2,000 — for the trailer and sundry accoutrements. First, we all feel it would be a tremendous relief to have the ability to move more than two boats with a single vehicle. Anti-first, it looks like a lot of money to spend on something we would only use two or three times each year. Second, in the form of SWEAT and the SRWA, we have pined for such a trailer for nearly twenty years now. Anti-second, we have gone two decades without such a trailer and managed well enough. Third, we now have more than half a dozen extra canoes available for lending and no way to transport them all. Anti-third, we have never needed more than three of those boats at any given time, and it has never resulted in more than a hassle.
Fourth — Well, you get the idea; we are ambivalent.
So here’s what we decided to do: put it to you, the members and other readers of this newsletter. Do you think we should purchase a trailer to hold six canoes and/or kayaks? Here’s how you tell us “yes.”
Send a check in the amount of $10 or more to the SRWA, 682 Chandler Street, Tewksbury, MA, 01876
In the “Memo” field, please write the word “trailer.” If we do not receive as much as a third of the cost, or $630, in checks from our membership and readers, we will not deposit the checks, and any cash submitted to the fund will be returned to the donor.
So there you have it. You could contribute to the dissolution of our ambivalence, which we would all appreciate one way or the other. I, John Hicks-Courant, am writing the first check for $10.

Purple Loosestrife
How to Identify Purple Loosestrife

Flower: Individual flowers have five or six pink-purple petals surrounding small, yellow centers. Each flower spike is made up of many individual flowers.

Seed Capsule: As flowers begin to drop off, capsules containing many tiny seeds appear in their place. Depending on where you live, plants may go to seed as early as late July.

Seed: Each mature plant can produce up to 2.7 million seeds annually. As tiny as grains of sand, seeds are easily spread by water, wind, wildlife and humans. Germination can occur the following season, but seeds may lay dormant for several years before sprouting.
Leaves: Leaves are downy, with smooth edges. They are usually arranged opposite each other in pairs which alternate down the stalk at 90 degree angles, however, they may appear in groups of three.
Stalks: Stalks are square, five or six-sided, woody, as tall as 2m (6+ ft.) with several stalks on mature plants.
Perennial Rootstock: On mature plants, rootstocks are extensive and can send out up to 30 to 50 shoots, creating a dense web which chokes out other plant life.
Controlling Purple Loosestrife
Controlling the spread of purple loosestrife is crucial to protecting vital fish, wildlife and native plant habitat! Purple loosestrife can easily spread if improper control methods are used. The following simple guidelines will ensure that your efforts to control the spread of purple loosestrife are effective.
In areas too heavily infested to pull, cut or dig plants, these control techniques can still be used to control plants that may sprout as a result of seeds escaping the area. Watch drainage ditches or streams leading from heavily infested areas, as new purple loosestrife colonies are likely to become established there. Pulling, cutting, or digging plants in these more manageable infestations will limit the spread of purple loosestrife beyond the area of heavy infestation.

Digging & Hand Pulling
Pulling purple loosestrife by hand is easiest when plants are young (up to two years) or when in sand. Older plants have larger roots that can be eased out with a garden fork. Remove as much of the root system as possible, because broken roots may sprout new plants.
Cutting
Removing flowering spikes will prevent this year's seeds from producing more plants in future years-- remember each mature plant can produce over 2 million seeds per year. Also, remove last year's dry seed heads, as they may still contain seeds. Finally, cut the stems at the ground to inhibit growth.

Source: from the web:
Minnesota Sea Grant - Outreach
The Purple Loosestrife Project Proposal
There is an easily accessible section of the First Meadow just upstream from the Rte. 3A put-in that is rife with purple loosestrife. I propose that we make a concerted eradication effort on the west bank of the river from the edge of the first backwater to the Twin Rocks, about a tenth of a mile upstream.
In this section, we will pull every purple loosestrife plant we can find as early in the season as possible. The extracted vegetative matter will be carted away and deposited in a compost pile.
A number of native species are making a valiant stand in this section, and if we intervene early enough in the season, these plants may succeed in propagating and spreading throughout the spaces vacated by the purple loosestrife.
This will require constant monitoring and work, but it is on a small enough scale that it is clearly doable. The point of this exercise will be to find out whether, in the small bubble of time our climate allows plants to leaf out, flower, seed, and propagate, we can give the advantage to native species on a small scale.
If it works, we can begin working our way upstream through the First Meadow until we have obtained eradication of purple loosestrife. In a sense, this effort will mirror our decades-long struggle against trash in the river. With an equal level of determination and a modicum of luck, I suspect we will enjoy the same spectacular degree of success.
If this doesn’t work, then we will have to think of additional methods we can implement. If you don’t see the value in at least struggling against this vegetative evil, please go ahead and drive down to Great Meadow Road in Burlington. Take a long, hard look at Burlington’s Great Meadow. That is what we hope to avoid. That is what we need to combat.
The tools we need are:
Shovels
Potato Hooks
Loppers
Garbage bags
Cameras (for gauging our progress)
Your help and cooperation
What do you think? Are you up for it?
Watch the Beavers Grow
In the last twelve months, we have seen first one, then two, then three beaver lodges appear in the upper third of the First Meadow between the Rte. 2 bridge and the Middlesex Turnpike. There is still only one dam, and it is maintained by the middle colony of the three. In the middle of November, a fourth beaver lodge appeared below Middlesex Turnpike. This is probably a brand new pair of beavers about to start a new family. Beaver breeding season is about to begin, and we can look forward to a whole new season of widespread beaver activity in the First Meadow in 2005.
The floodplains of the Shawsheen River are perfect habitat for beavers. They can flood them as much as they want without disturbing humans. Beaver impoundments have a negative effect on purple loosestrife distribution. The deeper water drowns the purple loosestrife. Let’s hope the beavers build another dam.