On the 69th anniversary of the Great Flood of August 18-19 in 1955, a record amount of rain fell in this part of the Paugussett Homeland, called Pootatuck by many, a string of floodplains along the Pomperaug River and its tributaries. Here in Nonnewaug, the floodplain filled with water, almost as much as it did during a flood in the mid to late 1990s, quite to that line on the map called the 100 year flood contour, what I imagine was once a glacial lakeshore, described by older residents as worse flooding than the Flood of '55.
The Nonnewaug
Diagonal Stone Fish Weir was washed almost entirely away during this recent major
flooding event of 2024…
I finally walked over
there yesterday to take a look (I had attempted an earlier walk, but wasn’t
able to. There wasn’t a short enough path I could take through the brush and my
arthritic right hip kept telling me to turn around and go back home).
I had felt the heavy
machinery at work, had heard it in the distance over the past few weeks. I saw that
the water company was repairing eroded river banks, heard the cultivator in
Stuart’s field, and brush cutters along the road in the meanwhile. Yesterday it
became clear that the machines and chainsaws were headed to where the remains
of the Nonnewaug Fish Weir were located.
And the weir was very much gone, a few stones at one spot but very much now gone, virtually unrecognizable...
I was relieved in a way that it was the power of the flood that took the weir rather than those machines I hear over there as I write this...
I sprinkled the last of the tobacco from a pouch that I carry, meant to be put down as a something like a prayer, something of a sacrifice, an offering under the open sky...
It was much like saying goodbye to an old friend, a good friend, a special friend who you can't believe is really gone...
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