(a project of NatureCulture)
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KELT / David Crews

 

“Kennebec River” for Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
by David Crews

This past fall, I found placement to work at an organic farm along the coast of Maine in a little town called Phippsburg. It was Rachel Carson’s third book in her trilogy on the seas that brought me here, and I was immediately drawn—as so many are—to the geology of the Maine coast. Here, bedrock and evergreen forest stretch all the way down to much of the shoreline. The glacial history has both carved a rugged mountain terrain and flooded much of the coast where, at the edge of the sea, one can find some incredible estuary ecosystems. An estuary is an example of an ecotone—a region of transition between biological communities—where saltwater from the sea mixes with freshwater from the river to generate a complex ecosystem in flux.

The below sequence includes separate visits to the following lands protected by Kennebec Estuary Land Trust: Merrymeeting Fields in Woolwich, Bonyun Preserve in Westport Island, Thorne Head Preserve in Bath, as well as a 170-mile trip up the Kennebec River to its source at Moosehead Lake—these places ancestral lands of Amarascoggin, Kennebec, and other Abenaki peoples. The poem includes italicized lines from Rachel Carson, Eavan Boland, and Gautama Buddha.

David Crews
Nov, 2020

 

Kennebec River

1

Maine has its rivers

It was only yesterday in the life of the earth that the sea 
came in

She was here

filling the valleys and rising about the slopes of the hills

on these same rocks—here, at the edge of the sea 

with sounds of estuarine, river, stone

Salt Pond preserve, Reid, Popham beach

the long narrow estuaries of the Kennebec, the Sheepscot, 
the Damariscotta

What does it mean to be a river?

2

At the mouth of the estuary small waves unfold in both
directions of ebb and

flow into themselves

one hundred and seventy miles from Moosehead lake 
here, to Fort Popham

From a distance it looks like a cistern and kayakers 
row in place for exercise

below seals with big moose heads that break the surface 
like whales or distant waves

then drift in the current

where the fish come—endangered anadromous fish
like the Shortnose sturgeon, Atlantic salmon

Carson writes of this

that will travel up the estuary to spawn in freshwater 

A Red-necked grebe makes a way down the shoreline

will winter here along the coast with the diving
birds—buffleheads, loons, scoters, eiders

Like a sanderling I walk back along the beach
where the tide hits each step

thinking how I heard once that an oyster covers 
irritants that enter the shell

with layers of secretions that eventually harden

to a pearl 

3

For no two successive days is the shore line precisely 
the same

My friends speak of a beach on the Maine coast—Bog 
Brook cove

It is almost a ghost forest

where waves crash so hard and for so long the beach itself
is a collection of polished stones the sea returned 

and the sounds of the forest are but the ghosts of sounds

so smooth and beautiful people collect them for jewelry

4

Cormorants stretch their wings between periods of light 
rain

estuary—river of tides

5

Here, at The Narrows

brackish water pushes into whirlpools

disorients perspective and fills in a continual lapping
over and over

These rocks not far from Chop point—the coming of six 
rivers

Androscoggin, Cathance, Kennebec

river of cliff rock shelters, crooked river, still water

Eastern, Muddy, Abagadasset

what does it mean to be a river?

Inside the bay at Merrymeeting fields still waters leave
silt and mudflats

substrate that forms in the quiet current now critical 
habitat for wading birds, Saltmarsh sparrows, mink

Striped bass spawning grounds

and calm mornings save for the distant screaming
of an eagle 

where the water’s surface looks like glass—to hover in
an underwater ecotone

Kennebec indians left wild rice here in and around 
Little Swan island

Champlain entered these waters in 1607

One of the tributaries is Maine’s only known location
for redfin pickerel

In the tidal flats a traveler can find waterwort, Three-
square bulrush, False pimpernel

6

It was 1955

Curious changes have been taking place

and we had record, she had record

with many animals invading this cold temperate zone 
from the south

Mantis shrimp, Sea herring, Green crab

this new distribution related to the widespread change
of climate

7

Kennebec, Kennebis

the tribe named for the river, the river named for the bay 
it emptied to—kinipek 

Their warriors some say once numbered over a thousand

their story like the story of native Abenaki peoples—
driven from the river, into Canada

for the land was rich in fur and trees

As I follow the Kennebec north quaint towns like
settlements mark the river

used for over a hundred years by logging mills, textile
mills

the river once flooded with contaminants down
through Augusta

nearly forty miles from the sea

where the tidal surge still pressed upon the land

where the salmon would run, the sturgeon 

Above the dam at Skowhegan, Anson, the dam at
Wyman lake 

the river begins to look like rivers I have known

those that spring wild with trees from Appalachian bedrock
inside ridges rising

They are always en route to their own nothingness

Here, in the woods around Katahdin forests of ghost trees
come back to me

ghost forest

where every logging road looks like a place to camp 
and the memory of huge evergreens lingers

The Kennebec

leaves Moosehead lake flowing southwest into falling 
sunlight

with a kingfisher, a pair of diving ducks, rippling in
slight rapids as rivers do

—a voice

8

The river carries all of it

You could be the river, she says

whatever is in front of you 

you could carry

9

I walk the wooded trail down to the estuary, a return 

big trees loom—white pine, hemlock, Balsam fir 

they will follow the descent of the land, where the tides
move 

ebb and flow

the water’s pull upon rock, root

wind in the pines

wind in the pines

pine wind

pine song


10

Along the rocks

high tide crashes with thunderous force

echoes from below where mist rises and whips into
the wind

wave upon wave rolling in from a gray ocean, gray 
sky 

a dark line where horizon curves away from itself

and scoters, gulls, lolling up and down in the surf

There is a departure here—

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form

the tide will turn with little notice

the rocks will stay and the currents will move

and the trees will cling and hang their thick green heads 
—an invocation

to the farthest reaches of the sea

Postscript. In New and Familiar Abenakis and English Dialogues, translated and published in 1884 by Chief Sozap Lolô, Abenakis (alias Jos. Laurent), he writes that the Kennebec river, in Abenakis, means "deep river." The research I had found previously pointed me to Kennebec, translated as, "still water." Technically, both get to the same sensibility or endpoint, though to me, this is a perfect example of what I might think of as indigenous wisdom: native peoples who know the land for thousands of years feel a true connection to it, and so, a kind of wisdom arises that is not simply what one sees on the surface but rather what is often difficult to see, or rather, is even unseen: the water of a river runs still because it is deep.

 
 

David Crews is a writer, editor, and wilderness advocate who currently resides in southern Vermont / ancestral lands of Mohican and Abenaki peoples. He cares for work that engages a reconnection to land and place, wilderness, preservation, nonviolence. He currently serves as managing editor for Wild Northeast.. Find David and more of his work at davidcrewspoetry.com

Kennebec Estuary Land Trust (kennebecestuary.org) is committed to conserving land and wildlife habitat of the Lower Kennebec and Sheepscot River estuaries. They are a community based membership organization serving the towns of Arrowsic, Bath, Bowdoinham, Dresden, West Bath, Georgetown,  Richmond, Westport Island and Woolwich.

Other poems by contributing writer David Crews:

Four Poems for Northeast Wilderness Trust
”Liberation Farm” for Agrarian Trust + Somali Bantu Community Association