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"The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets."

These taken around 5:30 PM today. The top two taken at Pine Street Bridge. The bottom one is taken from South Bridge and shows how tiny the opening of the arches on the Elm Street Bridge are.

The rain is now intermittently turning to snow or sleet. Total rainfall at Concord Blog HQ 9.33" since Saturday morning. When does this stop, pray tell?


Photos: ©2010 Rich Stevenson, Local Color Images, all rights reserved.

At 2 pm we're about to top 9" of rain since Saturday morning here at Concord Magazine Blog HQ. A resident reported a short time ago that he nearly hit two swimming mallard ducks with his car on Bow Street, it's so flooded; don't be surprised if that road is also shut down until the water recedes.

More photos from around Concord, taken around noon today. Clockwise from upper left: passage of water under the Comm Ave/Pail Factory bridge this morning; the rear of the Main Street Market and Cafe now a parking lot for boats, courtesy of the overflowing Mill Brook; no man is an island, except for the Concord Minute Man, now cut off from land by the swollen Concord River. (click on any photo to see an enlarged version in a pop-up window)

Photos: ©2010 Rich Stevenson, Local Color Images, all rights reserved.

At Concord Magazine Blog headquarters, we've had over 8.67" of rain since Saturday morning (it's almost noon now). And potentially several more inches are yet to fall!  This is hurricane-type precipitation levels -- in many cases, areas that do not flood are flooding now, including many typically dry basements.  This may be one for the history books.

In a town of no fewer than three rivers, three great ponds, and too many streams, brooks, swamps and wetlands to count, this does not bode well. All rivers are or will be above flood stage today. The Milldam (Main Street, Concord center) is expected to flood today. Please use caution parking in low parking areas along the Milldam, or any low lying areas where water may rise quickly.

These streets are closed due to flooding: Cambridge Turnpike, Westford Road and Pine Street.  Likely closings will occur at the Barrett's Mill Road and Strawberry Hill Road intersection area and at Harrington Avenue, between the two ends of Ministerial Drive. Do not attempt, under any circumstances, to drive through flooded roadways. Already there are areas on some roadways deep enough to swamp cars.

Below are photos taken this morning around the Pail Factory Bridge (Comm Ave, West Concord). Note the one of the walkway behind Nashoba Brook Bakery -- the water in the brook is level with the sidewalk. The newly rebuilt earthen dam on Warner's Pond is close to being topped. The Town is sandbagging the area right now. Right now, our waterways are fascinating... and dangerous.  Stay back from swollen rivers, streams or culverts as swiftly moving water can pose an imminent threat to life. (click on any photo to see an enlarged version open on a pop-up window).


Photos: ©2010 Rich Stevenson, Local Color Images, all rights reserved.

Interested in learning more about the proposed Formula Business Bylaw articles for Town Meeting?  Drop in and join Matt Johnson for a conversation about Articles 46 & 47 at the Concord Cheese Shop, 29 Walden Street, between 3:30 and 4:30 pm.

Matt has been following Article 46 closely since its origin with the West Concord Task Force, who recommended that the Planning Board put it on the Town Warrant for April Town Meeting, which they have.

Article 46 (focused solely on West Concord Village Center) was the source for Matt's Petition Article 47 which would apply to all four of Concord's village centers (West Concord, Concord Center, Thoreau Depot District, and Nine Acre Corner).

The purpose of both Articles 46 & 47 is to preserve the unique small-town village character of Concord's village center(s) through a Formula Business Bylaw.  To safeguard against the gradual encroachment and over-proliferation of formula businesses, a formula business bylaw would 1) maintain formula businesses at the current numbers for each village center, 2) cap their size, and 3) require them to meet special permit criteria.

A formula business is any business with standardized, generic features (logo, products, services, etc.) in seven or more locations interstate, intrastate, regionally, or anywhere.  While often referred to as "chains" in casual conversation, the terms are not interchangeable for various reasons that Matt will be happy to discuss with you, along with other aspects of the bylaw.  Come and drop in, if you're in town between 3:30-4:30pm!

Concordian Robert Robillard, posted on his blog A Concord Carpenter Comments:

"The Drinking Gourd Project (http://drinkinggourd.cchumanrights.org/) has been working to establish the Black Heritage and Abolitionists' Tour in Concord.

"The Town of Concord has a remarkable and time-limited opportunity to save a piece of our history: the Caesar Robbins House.

"It is one of the very few pieces of physical evidence of Concord's Black Heritage, and if it is demolished, a grave disservice will be done to our town's history.

"The hope is to move, preserve and restore the home, and have it serve as an interpretive site - as Concord's African American History Museum (of which we have many artifacts and documents from Thoreau and others in the transcendentalist movement), adding to the richness of Concord's story."

But do you know how far this tour has already come? Far enough that they now have an absolutely gorgeous map with 36 abolitionist-related sites in Concord listed and briefly explained. Download it here: http://drinkinggourd.cchumanrights.org/drinkinggourdproject_map.pdf

These locations cover from right in Concord center, to Lexington Road, Walden Woods, Jennie Dugan Road, Monument Street, Great Meadows, and what they call "the Abolitionists Neighborhood"just beyond the Milldam, including Sudbury Road, Walden Street and environs.

Funding to save and move the Robbins house will be coming up for a vote at April's Annual Town Meeting. 

Second of two excerpts by David K. Leff  from Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack, 2009, University of Iowa Press, and published with permission. This book relates the retracing of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack through the author's "deep travel." Here is the previous installment: http://www.concordma.com/blog/2010/03/deep-travel-in-the-wake-of-thoreau.html

Among Thoreau's heirs, Josh and I glided easily into the newly formed river. The sun was unrelentingly bright and reflected off the dark surface as if from a sooty mirror. Clumps of purple loosestrife frequently lit the shallows. Silver maples overhung the water and cast deep shadows, the pewtery undersides of their leaves fluttering in a slight breeze that felt like a warm breath.

Perfection is perhaps Concord's greatest shortcoming. It seems as if not a blade of grass is out of place, and all the shops and restaurants are fashionable with trendy names.  The old houses are well kept and speak of wealth, power, and quaint New England. Not a curl of peeling paint was visible on the ancient clapboards as Josh and I pass through earlier this morning. The roadsides were free of tossed soda bottles and candy wrappers.

Thoreau would surely have railed against today's Concord, with its self-conscious well-to-do ease, probably with greater vehemence than he applied to the town in his own time. In a perverse way, he might have liked the twenty-first century more than his own relatively down-to-earth nineteenth, furnishing as it does greater opportunity for his famous conscience-stinging barbs about the pursuit of goods and status.

My easygoing Josh, with his soft brown eyes and mop of auburn hair, hadn't heard of Thoreau until this morning. He nevertheless had very Henry-like thoughts, complaining about the tourist-town slickness of Concord center. "Dad," he said in a conspiratorial tone as we waited for a map at the Chamber of Commerce, "doesn't this place seem a little fake and touristy? It's sort of like Main Street in Disney World." He rolled his eyes at the woman in front of us who wanted to know where her family could play miniature golf. "It's pretty and everything, but doesn't it seem kind of unreal? All anyone is doing is looking around and shopping."

Precocious thoughts for an eleven-year old, perhaps, but Josh has seen the onset of gentrification and creeping tourism in our own hometown of Collinsville, Connecticut. In simple terms, I tried to describe adaptive reuse of the fire station and the need for upscale niche retailers to fill small-town storefronts that would otherwise be emptied by the influx of shoppers to Wal-Mart and Target. Tourism was just another industry, I suggested. It was keeping Concord center vibrant.

Thoreau-like, Josh stood on principle and would have none of my fancy excuses and explanations. He could tell that my heart wasn't in it, that, at the very least, I didn't like it. I felt like a jerk.

It hadn't previously occurred to me, but Josh was right: there was a remote but discomfiting likeness in Concord center to Disney's Main Street. More troubling was trying to discern which was the copy and which the original. Clearly, Disney mimicked some of the warmest and most heartening aspects of a classic village center like Concord's. But hadn't many authentic main streets been corrupted with the flavor of Magic Kingdom marketing savvy? They often looked nice, but engendered an atmosphere of forced authenticity.

A village center vibrant with commercial activity is the heart of authenticity.  That is what Concord and other such places are all about. Despite being gussied up, perhaps they were more real than commonly thought. The nature of commerce and the people whom the stores served had changed, but not the essential function of the place as a locus of business and a spot where people meet. Perhaps Josh and I were nostalgic political chatter at the tavern or for farmers sorting through bins at the hardware store in our own town.  Can there be any greater danger to an authentic place than nostalgia? What good is a perfectly archicturally preserved town center lacking busy stores and restaurants? It may be beautiful taxidermy, but like a trophy fish affixed to a wall, it is drained of all vitality.

Nevertheless, tourism was not some planned entrepreneurial invention or government economic development program. It was Concord being Concord.

Photos: Top, Milldam, Concord. Bottom, no where in Concord!

First of two excerpts by David K. Leff from Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack, 2009, University of Iowa Press, and published with permission. This book relates the retracing of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack through the author's "deep travel."

At its simplest, deep travel is about heightened awareness. It is careful looking. It is paying attention to what is around you. Deep travel demands that we immerse ourselves fully in places and realize that they exit in time as well as space. A deep traveler knows the world is four-dimensional and can't be experienced with eyes and ears only.

Deep travel is not so much a matter of seeing sights as it is sight-seeking. It is a searching for the patterns and juxtapositions of culture and nature and delighting in the incongruities left by the inexorable passage of time. Deep travelers revel int he wild, inspiriting call of a kingfisher as it flies over a couple of trolling angles with Bud longnecks in one hand and rods in the other. They savor the sight of a tree-shaded burial ground squeezed between big-box retailers on a traffic-choked commercial strip.

Deep travelers look not so much for scenery or enchanting objects as for a tapestry of comprehension woven from stone walls, retail establishments, streets and topographical names, transportation networks, building styles, plant and animal assemblages, advertising signs, and other artifacts. Each element makes a statement about the landscape as a whole and the relationship of one part to another. Together, they tell a story. Deep travel is an ecological way of looking where everything we see has a function and all the parts are related, no matter how seemingly disparate or contradictory.

Like animals that remain intensely aware of their surroundings and any alteration to them because predation or starvation await the unwary, deep travelers work to be keenly conscious of their environs. They strive for alertness and acuity of wildland firefighters or soldiers whose survival depends on their knowledge of topography, history, weather, vegetation, and the observation of changes in minute phenomena. Such mindfulness simultaneously enriches experience and makes the voyager worthy of the voyage.

On a dank, humid July morning, my eleven year old son, Josh, and I launched our canoe into the Assabet River from a grassy ribbon of land behind the large public works complex at Concord, Massachusetts. Although a few paddle strokes downstream of where Thoreau began his voyage, it was a put-in where we could safely leave our pickup, according to local policy, who seemed unsurprised by a request that might have invited suspicion in some towns. Of course, in Concord they must be used to the eccentric requests of visitors, many of whom are on a pilgrimage to the haunts of quirky characters this community has nurtured for centuries... (continued later in the week)

Photos: Top, Hutchin's Farm and the Concord River beyond with moonrise. Bottom, Assabet River. Both ©2010 Rich Stevenson, all rights reserved, Local Color Images

Part 1: Double Feature Sunday, March 7, 1-5 PM

The Inheritance
The Inheritance is based on an early novel written by a very young Louisa May Alcott, who was only 17 when she penned this romantic thriller-mystery. It was put away in a drawer and never published in her lifetime, but was discovered among her papers in Houghton Library at Harvard University and published for the first time in 1997. That same year this Jane Austen-like drama was aired as a television presentation, starring Meredith Baxter and Tom Conti. The story, originally set in England by Alcott and now set in Concord, Massachusetts, is the intriguing tale of a beautiful Italian orphan girl who gets caught up in a hopeless love triangle and struggles with her position in the high-class society into which she is thrown.

Twice Told Tales
These horror stories are based on the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the first, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," Heidegger attempts to restore the youth of three elderly friends. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," Vincent Price plays a demented father inoculating his daughter with poison so she may never leave her garden of poisonous plants. In the final story "The House of the Seven Gables," the Pyncheon family suffers from a hundred year old curse and while in the midst of arguing over inheritance, the Pyncheon brother kills his sister.


Emerson: The Ideal in America
Emerson's belief in "the infinitude of the private man" still resonates with spiritual seekers today. Most people know Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance," but there is much more to the fascinating life of the man and his circle, which includes Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller. The video features interviews with well-known Emerson scholars. You will never look at Emerson - or yourself - quite the same way again. David Beardsley, writer and producer.

New England Transcendentalists
Expert interviews, dramatic recreations at Walden, and major literary works explore the evolution of the Transcendentalists Movement here in the early 19th century. The lives and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau are examined to discover the spiritual foundations for America's first authentic literary voice. James Bride, filmmaker.

Henry David Thoreau: Speaking for Nature
See and hear Thoreau's Concord. Near the end of his life, Thoreau transformed his interest with nature into a passion. Thoreau's plan for his "great work" was nothing less than a comprehensive day-by-day calendar describing the nature of the Concord region. And although his life was cut short, his legacy from that period is astonishing. Walk with Thoreau on an early Spring morning as he delights in the arrival of redwings - calling the river to life and tempting the ice to melt. Follow him into a meadow where the air is liquid with the bluebirds' warble. Paddle up the Assabet to search out painted turtles and the earliest blossoms of the silver maple. Join Thoreau as he solves the mystery of his "dream frog," collects starflowers, violets, and marigolds, and tracks the red fox along the river bank. By Richard K. Walton & John Huehnergard. Richard Walton will be available to answer questions from the audience.

Both events held at The Concord Museum's French Hall and are free, all are welcome.  Sponsored by the Concord Historical Collaborative: The Concord Museum, Ralph Waldo Emerson House, The Old Manse /Trustees of Reservations, Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, the Thoreau Society, the Concord Free Public Library, The Walden Woods Project's Thoreau Institute, The Wayside at Minute Man National Historical Park, the Concord Chamber of Commerce, Concord-Carlisle Adult & Community Education, Walden Pond State Reservation, the Concord Art Association, !the Concord Historical Commission, and the Thoreau Farm Trust. Refreshments by Dunkin Donuts of Concord.

On Friday, March 5th at 7:00 pm, the Drinking Gourd Project will present a screening and discussion of Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. This award-winning film documents the DeWolf family's engagement with their legacy of slave-trading ancestors. Their journey retracing the Triangle Trade -- from Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba is at the center. A discussion with family members follows the film.

Concordian and historian Jayne Gordon will address the life stories and struggle for freedom of early African residents of Concord, as well as the town's leadership in the Abolitionist movement. Local teachers will also speak about their experience teaching related curriculum and how it reaches Concord's students directly.

Come find out how the Drinking Gourd Project is leading an effort to save the Caesar Robbins house, built in 1780 by a freed man and Revolutionary War patriot. The goal is to move the house close to its original location near The North Bridge and restore it as an education
center focused on Concord's African and Abolitionist history. This free event will be held at The Concord Art Association, 37 Lexington Road, Concord, MA.

Watch an interview with Katrina Browne, director of this film and a member of the DeWolf family.