My friend assured
me that the trail was an easy walk along the river – well, a brook really, a
tributary of the Naugatuck – and it would be much cooler by the stream. And
there was some very interesting stonework to be seen on both sides of the river.
I’d spent the morning driving to and from an appointment with an Infectious
Disease doctor with results that left me more ready to sit around and mope but
my good friend talked me into it, as if saying “Don’t give up, don’t let the
disease rob you of this opportunity.”
We travel to the
end of a street I’ve never been on before, park by a quarry, pass by the
powerlines where a wide swath of ground up stone is a bright new scar on the
Connecticut landscape and turn onto the trail along the brook. There’s a rusted
old iron bridge we pause by, and later I find that it was built in 1884 to “accommodate
two lanes and exceptionally heavy loads...countless tons of product fresh from
the Waterville factories began their journey to distant destinations,” linking
to a railroad line that dates to 1850...
There’s
years and years of stonework on that steep bank where the railroad bed is and
we marvel at it from the trail we are walking on the opposite bank and we stop
a minute to descend from what I slowly realized was a sort of causeway built
into that side of the riverbank. I had to get a closer look at the lowest and
closest to the river stonework, noting the bright white quartz rhomboidal that
admittedly does not show well in this photo: 
I had not taken
my camera (well, cellphone) out of my bag up until this point, captured a
couple images before that photo above was taken (or “mistaken,” you could say).
I did take one photo before that, a possible zoomorphic stone in that causeway
wall, perhaps the head of a turtle and a hint that we might have been walking
on an Indigenous Stone Structure of undetermined age:
Ascending back up, I got a better view of the stones I’d
just carefully climbed down, resembling another turtle-like head and a boulder
that looked like a shell with what resembles the nuchal notch of an actual
turtle shell:
I culled a few
images of that “wall” and the trail that I found online since the low state of
my battery power on my two devices severely limited my ability to take my own
photos. The “little hints” that I found other people speculating about never
included any mention of a possible “Indian Causeway” or even a single mention
of the long presence of Indigenous People in the area.
You will find some mention in the older local histories such as Orcutt's:
This
is a photo that Wikipedia uses that often appears on those sites about walking
trails. I don’t know the trail well enough to know exactly where this is but
that’s the Possible Causeway on the right:
One of my own:
Above: Angling around this stone, getting the darker background of a tree to highlight the Pink Moccasin in bloom, if you look across the brook you’ll see modern stonework with obviously some sort of Portland cement used for mortar on the sheer wall below the railroad bed. The band of white quartz highlighted on this triangular boulder could be said to evoke an image of a rattlesnake head, the rather round or oval shape representing an eye...
The other side:
Fair use of the Wikipedia image includes the
statement that I could alter the image seen earlier, so of course I’ll just
overlay an eye of a rattlesnake that I lifted and often use:
But you know my friend really wanted me to
see what he said that even to his skeptical eye was a “big turtle.” Call it
coincidence if you will but as he headed to one side to give the proper
perspective of size to the photo, I walked past a large boulder of this
familiar shape:
"Manitou Stone"
I know the left side is out of focus – and the
narrow neck doesn’t show well – but I’d really have to say that this is an
example of some rather large features of the Sacred Indigenous Ceremonial Stone
Landscape, turtle eyes overlaid onto the original composite photo:
My friend had one more "larger boulder" he really
wanted me to see:
An interesting walk to say the least, another
Flickr album with all the embarrassing bad photos of the day, surely more to be
added if I ever get back up to this spot again:
Tim can you see the art at the smallest levels as well as the big stuff. Spirits everywhere?
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