Waking Up on Turtle Island: Ceil's Stones in Early Spring (Westbrook CT)

Monday, May 07, 2018

Ceil's Stones in Early Spring (Westbrook CT)

(The Late Early Spring of 2018)

The curtain is closing in the Late Early Spring of 2018. I’d driven down to my Mom and Dad’s along Route 9, past all those rows of stones that stretch out in the distance, stones that I’ve never walked beside but gaze at in wonder as much as bad drivers in the stream of traffic will allow. The leaves on the trees are drinking in the previous day’s rain, every cell fully formed and expanding with the water, closing the curtain...

Slathered with tick repellant, the grandkids and I take a little walk down to the river, to the across the street neighbor Tom’s crabbing dock on the Menunketesuck River, named for the alewives, a "river herring" whose population is declining so much that the State no longer allows them to be taken – unless you scoop the landlocked version that has evolved since the numerous dams began being built in the 1600’s at certain lakes including Lakes Quassapaug, Waramaug, and even Highland Lake, all places in Pootatuck/Paugusset territory. These are those fish that, when they “ran” up the rivers to spawn, you could “cross the streams on their backs without getting your feet wet” and harvest by the barrel full in minutes back in the early days of European settlement, if you can believe all those old histories.

The grandkids and I looked but we didn’t see a single fish of any kind, including shad who run when the shadblow or serviceberries bloom...

I suspect an oyster bed (garden?) once existed right at this spot, perhaps when the Colonists arrived and "drove out the Pequots," as they say, but surely long before perhaps. A few long rows of stones lead to it, including this one that extends into connecting rows in the National Wildlife Refuge - where I hear someone is quite interested in Ceremonial Stone Landscapes. I wonder if this person has been reading this blog...