What is it about the Shawsheen River?                            
from The Shawsheen Tribune, July 2001
John Hicks-Courant

   'What is it about the Shawsheen River?" This question has been posed to me more times than I could possibly count by people who've dived or paddled with me in and on other rivers. On those rare days when there are simultaneous tours or cleanups scheduled on the Nashua, Concord, Assabet, and Shawsheen rivers, I always opt for the Shawsheen River tour or cleanup. Why is that?
   It sometimes seems likely that it's because I'm lazy and the Shawsheen is the closest river to me. I mean, I actually live in the Content Brook watershed, which is one of the Shawsheen's most significant tributaries. (It drains a quarter of Tewksbury, a third of Billerica, and two EPA Superftind Sites.)
   It could be laziness, but I don 't really think so. I spend a lot of energy on the Shawsheen River. When I speak to groups about the Shawsheen River, I am almost always asked this question: "You've been working on cleaning up this river for more than a decade. Why do you do it? What keeps you going?"My rather glib answer each time has always been that the Shawsheen is a small river with clear water. When you pull trash out of it, the river looks better. When you pull a refrigerator, a few tires and a home oil tank out of the bottom the river flows better. You see and feel the results of your work immediately. In short, I'm a horribly impatient person who needs the instant gratification the Shawsheen River provides.
   This response usually gets a polite chuckle, and I think the audience is usually satisfied with that response. Who would want a serious answer to that question? There's no time for it in the short-response format of a post-presentation Q&A.
   I'm convinced, however, that there really is something about the Shawsheen River that is not shared by other rivers I know. I found it yesterday again, and here I am inspired to attempt its description.
   Rather than strain the limits of my scant poetic skills, what I've opted to do is describe, in considerable detail, the Shawsheen River as it runs through my town, Billerica. This river is not what most of the 40,000 people of Billerica think it is, if they think of it at all. It is more, much more.
   There are six distinctive sections of the Shawsheen River in Billerica. They are:
1.Floodplain 1 (from just above Rte. 3 to the Gateway Willow).
2.Pinehurst (woods & residences)
3.Floodplain 2 (from the beaver dams to just below the power lines)
4.Little England (woods & residences)
5.Floodplain 3 (from the Really Bad Corner to the Middlesex Canal)
6.East Billerica (woods & residences)
   Each of these sections is distinct, and I will describe each of them in some detail each month for the next six issues of the Shawsheen Trib. I will focus on the summer and fall months, when the weather is most agreeable and the flora and fauna are still appreciable to the casual paddler.
   I hope that by the end of this series, we will have arrived at some notion of just what it is about the Shawsheen River.

Footnote:
   Shortly after writing the article above, I put in at 3A and headed upstream to start my research on the next article I'm writing for the Shawsheen Trib. About a quarter mile upstream, I realized there was somebody in a boat ahead of me from the kinds of bubbles I saw floating on the water. After a while, I overtook a guy in his late fifties in a metal Grumman canoe. He had his dog in the front of the boat for ballast. He was obviously an accomplished paddler.
   I asked him if he spent much time on this river, and he told me this was only his second time, that yesterday he put in at 3A and paddled downstream. I asked him what he thought of it, and he said "This river has to be one of the best kept secrets in New England. It's beautitul!" There was plenty of water in the river, the sedge grass was winning against the purple loosestrife, and the blue-bodied/black-winged damselflies were out in numbers evoking Garcia Marquez's most exuberant imagery. This guy was from Ithaca, NY, and he's traveled all over upstate New York by canoe. He told me he knew of only one river even remotely like the Shawsheen, and it was on the western side of the Adirondacks. Our river profoundly impressed him, and I have to say, it was looking absolutely beautitul that day.