Of the roughly 52 Sundays in each year we’re likely to have walked River Road on twenty. Since we’ve been doing this regularly for more than five years, not to mention the ten before that, we must have ooh’d and aah’d over the fast-moving clean water we follow 100 times or more, pointing out places where it looks like fish darting under the ice, admiring the dogs’ agility in navigating the rocky bottom, looking for trout, shoving large chunks of snow into the river to see how far they will get, playing pooh sticks, envying the dogs splashing in and out and up and down the banks. (See: Gurgle, but quickly) And it doesn’t get old because the river is never the same.

Every town around these parts has a Mill River. I’ve read an estimate that there were more than 5,000 water powered mills (factories) in New England in the 1830’s and close to as many dams. Secretly I think the vast majority of them were right around here since you can’t turn over a stone in a puddle without finding a mill foundation. The dams are tougher to find.

One of the more intriguing documents in the holdings of the Plainfield Historical Society, created by two intrepid sisters who spent forty years of Sundays and other days poking around these woods and the Registry of Deeds in Northampton to work out who lived and worked where, is a list of mills and their owners on this very river. It’s the source of my information.

Our usual trip starts at the Streeter Mill, of which the foundation largely stands, then leads us downriver past the tannery built and operated by Reuben Hamlen and Erastus Bates in the 1820’s. It is an extensive complex that runs farther down the river than most who have even taken a second look at the wonderful ruins consider — to where the banks of the river rise steeply into a chasm lined by natural precipices dotted with stacked stone foundation-outlines of the buildings that once housed a series of so-called tub wheels, the forerunners of the turbine. (Hamlen and Bates were evidently up on the latest technology.)

The scene always reminds me of Melville’s description, in The Tartarus of Maids, of a paper factory located in a holler between “cloven walls of haggard rock” (based on his visit, some say, to a paper mill not far from here in 1851), which I recommend if you like over the top gothic descriptions, or social critiques for that matter. This evocative tale of the industrial machine is set not, as we would expect from its literary roots in Dickens’ writing, among the working girls in Lowell or Lawrence, but in a nightmarish mountain scene with a dark chasm through which the fast-flowing “Blood” river flows to provide power for the infernal machinery. Nature is no friend here, nor, as it was to Thoreau, a force of enlightenment. Rather it oppresses the mind and expresses the dark hearts of men and of the industrial machine they use to shape and use up the populace, especially women, in the process of creating the paper that justifies the oppression: “sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end.” Melville experienced nature as a strong force, but he wasn’t into the whole “nature will make you strong” thing.

Melville was rather old fashioned this way and Thoreau won in the long run, which is one of the reasons we still read the latter for philosophical rather than literary reasons, and the former largely because we have to in college. Nature is now a cool, beneficial thing to most (urbanized) Americans. And I’m a creature of my time – much as I have trouble with the easy back to the land sentimentalism of some of Thoreau’s followers. Other than the occasional flash of literary memory, the river I walk has little in common with its industrial past: instead of a nightmare, the chasm is a source of awe, relaxation and inspiration.

Our industrial systems are much more hidden to me than even the Tartarus of Maids was to its time. As I revel in the river I ignore the Chinese girls who put my camera together as casually as I forget what it must have looked like in the days when the Wilcutt Mill, the halfway point of our walk, produced thousands of broom and brush handles, whip butts, and other wooden tools now collectible, spewing tons of sawdust into the river. (Wilcutt ceased operations in 1924 and the mill — the only one still standing in Plainfield — has an outlet that points straight into the river for the wood “fines,” which were a flammable nuisance. (A government pamphlet entitled “uses for sawdust, shavings, and waste chips,” originally written in 1947 when there was clearly still a limited use for the shavings of green hardwood, seeks to remedy that waste.) Straight into the river. The tiny river. Which must have looked like an industrial wasteland.

As we turn around, just past the mill on the bridge at Union and River, we imagine and marvel once again at the overhead penstock that carried water from upstream across the road into the mill. Local evidence suggests that it was a barrel stave pipeline with hoops, smaller but much like the one that carries water from the Harriman Reservoir to the generating station. Certainly Plainfield would have had the woodworking machinery and the workers to create it. The energy these mills created was bought with great effort.

This bucolic paradise of wood and rock and water was buzzing with work and activity in the nineteenth century. And now the quiet road is closed for the winter, the man who lives in the house besides the mill himself quietly at work or asleep in some room, the stream gently carving a sinuous path through the winter’s ice and snow. Cue the violins.

But soon the river draws us in again and we leave the musings and gingerly hoof it across snow and ice, hand in hand for stability, to get a closer look at the otherworldly mini cathedrals the ice has built across the river. We make it without crashing through which always leaves me a little giggly with relief.

On the way up the hill we point out turtles, ducks, and mostly a lot of aircraft carriers majestically marking rocks in the river. Back at the Streeter mill the rusty water dripping from its dam reminds me that the mill pond was used for a town dump after the sheep were no longer an economic miracle and the satinet mill had burned down a second time in 1874. I wonder whether this river, now clean enough for trout despite that bit of rusty water, ran colors from the dying of the cloth, the tannery, and the hardwood “fines” of the Willcutt and the other mills. What it smelled like. Whether the people who lived up and down the road ever stopped to wonder what happened to all the crap they threw into the river, what it did to places downstream.

Or did they, like we tend to do, think the water coming down from on high was enough to cleanse it all, pushing away the mountain of sawdust with a mighty whoosh each spring, washing their hands of the problem? Is the river erasing its past with every passing season? Is the wondrous world of the ice that I am so entranced with, the cycle of clean water up and down and through the ocean into the air and back down into these very rivers — is that cycle like the landscape I so love a dream that only precious few can have for a short time now?

Well, then, we’d better push our luck and drink this winter’s river until there’s nothing left: canyons of pushing water stilled in medias res; the frighteningly cozy world under the ice; the smooth dark flow that brooks no resistance and leads us to where we cannot see and only feel the fast, cold pull of water that is so much clearer than we ever can hope to be.

Check out the river images. If you click on one, you see them larger. They may take a moment to load.