Week 15 on the Campaign Trail or The Giving Rivers

In the 1950s and decades before that, if one wanted an ice cream cone in East Hartford then the spot to go was the Bergin Dairy on Burnside Avenue. I can still remember those early evening car rides. Margie, my sister, and I would climb into the back seat of the Plymouth. Mom sat beside dad who drove and off we’d go down Burnside Avenue, past Martin Park on the right, St. Mary’s Cemetery on the left, and past a roadside stretch of the Hockanum River to the Dairy. 

The Hockanum River always caught my attention as we drove past it in that old grey coupe. Depending on the evening, its surface could appear to be covered with soapsuds. On other occasions, it seemingly was dyed a bluish green, or a sickly yellowish lime. I never thought to ask to go fishing in the Hockanum. Even at age five, I knew something was wrong with that river. 

It was not always that way with the Hockanum whose headwaters are in the hills around Vernon’s Shenipsit Lake. From there it travels about 25 miles dropping nearly 500 feet in its journey till it joins the Connecticut River behind East Hartford’s Town Hall. Before the Hockanum provided the power to operate nearly 100 mills that bore the responsibility for the river’s then psychedelic appearance, it was home to a variety of wildlife. Along its banks the Podunks, Nipmucks, and Mohegan tribes camped. In my childhood mind, the Hockanum in comparison to the Connecticut, the other river of my childhood, seemed friendlier. In my childish fantasies, I could wade across its narrow width and shallow depth save, of course, for its foul smell and ghastly appearance.

Like the subject of Shel Silverstein’s touching poem The Giving Tree, the Hockanum seemingly offered itself to mankind’s abuse without exacting revenge in the form of costly flooding or in claiming a life by drowning. For its selflessness, the last and greatest abuse occurred with the building of I-84 and I-91 when several acres of river shoreline behind the East Hartford Town Hall was excavated to provide the fill to elevate the highways just mentioned. The beneficent Hockanum no longer met the Connecticut one river to another – rather it dumped into a manmade lake whose engineered channel to the Connecticut was determined in later years to be inadequate.

Silverstein’s poem ends with the child now an old man returning to his friend - the tree - now nothing more than an old stump. No longer seeking to take from the tree - man, the wiser - seeks the companionship of this old friend. In similar respects, the actions of citizens to clean the Hockanum, and the Connecticut rivers parallel this poem. Abused, polluted, its life giving shores filled thus destroying future aquatic and other wildlife, these rivers only recently have commanded any serious attention and restoration. In the case of the Hockanum and Connecticut, residents of Manchester, Glastonbury and other communities have cleaned their banks of trash, supported legislation stopping most of the manmade pollution that poisoned its waters, and reconnected with these waterways as the old man in the poem reconnects with the tree. For this small act of environmental kindness, I imagine these two giving rivers like the tree are once again “happy.”

New readers to this blog are invited to visit “Tom Gullotta for State Rep” to read previous entries to this campaign journal and to view the week’s campaign photo or video clip.