After the excitements of the '96 dive
season -- swept-away railway trestles! giant prehistoric varve-scapes!
a whole new species of riverine bloodworm! -- you might think that Ed,
Libby, and Andrew would be sitting around watching the calendar, fiddling
with the equipment, and generally drumming their fingernails waiting for
warmer water temperatures on the Connecticut River.
But no. Faculty couple Ed and Libby Klekowski and grad student Andrew Wier
are not only river-rats, but lab-rats, of the first order. Consequently
they're spending the winter writing papers and grant proposals and working
away on their "Connecticut River Divers" web-page -- check them
out at http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/conn.river/ -- as fast as their little fingers will go. If
they haven't produced a highly original guide to this understudied watercourse
within the next several years, and gotten a whole lot of other people as
worked up as they are about the history and natural history of the river
in our midst, they'll know the reason why.
Ed Klekowski is a peripatetic botanist who's previously appeared in these
pages expressing enthusiasm, in his saturnine way, for biota as diverse
as the ferns of Nagasaki, the ancient oaks of Poland, and Caribbean coral
reefs?. Libby Klekowski is his wife and comrade-in-research. Andrew Wier
is a master's candidate in plant pathology, a tranquil and bearish young
man with beautiful manners who studied with Ed as an undergrad and is now
practically his blood diving-buddy. "They have the same temperament,"
says Libby. "They both like to go slow and look at everything."
On a sweet, sharp day in late October these three bioteers bobbed on the
surface of the Connecticut River in rural Northfield in a modest metal
launch with a slightly reluctant outboard motor. The boat was acquired
with part of a faculty research grant. The motor was on loan from geology
professor Julie Brigham-Grette, who's trading it for underwater photographs
of varves, or layered sediments of Glacial Lake Hitchcock. An underwater
wide-angle lens came courtesy of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate
Studies Fred Byron. Current fund-raising goals include the acquisition
of dry-suits that will allow exploration of river biosystems in winter.
"Our funding is pretty catch-as-catch-can," says Klekowski. (Ed
and Andrew were willing to pose at the edgy of the wintry Connecticut in
their summer gear, but they're not such numbskulls as to go into the water
that way.)
On this next-to-the-last dive-trip of the season, underwater time would
be approximately three minutes. Not because of the temperature -- although
Andrew, first over the side, popped up again saying "Whoo! Whoo!"
in a voice an octave higher than the one he went in with -- but because
water released from upstream dams had stirred up more silt than the diving
lights could handle. "Braille diving," Klekowski calls such conditions,
when the visible "water column" around the divers shrinks nearly
to their noses. No exploration, and no photography, in that.
So Ed and Andrew wrestled themselves out of the flippers and air-tanks
and wet-suits they'd just wrestled themselves into, and turned the launch
upriver toward the Vermont-New Hampshire border and a brushy little island
that Libby had found mentioned in one of the historical accounts she's
been perusing -- a murder site, if memory serves -- to lunch on sandwiches
and the hot milky tea to which the Klekowskis became attached when Ed was
doing graduate work in England.
It's hard to exaggerate the charm, for a dweller in this valley, of being
down on the roof of the river, eye-to-eye with the islands, ogling the
cornfields from below. The Klekowskis, who live in Leverett, think they're
probably not alone in having admired the Connecticut rather absently for
most of the 29 years they've lived here. Only last summer did they
start getting into the river in a big way. Ed was alerted to its underwater
interest by conversations with Blake Gilmore and Skip Dunnell of Valley
Divers in South Deerfield, whom he calls "the pioneer explorers of
the river up there," and who were "seeing stuff they thought
was neat and odd, but they didn't know what it was."
The neat, odd stuff -- flights of shallow, sandy stairs along the river
floor -- turn out to be remains of the enormous, glacier-fed lake that
stretched from what is now northern Vermont to what is now central Connecticut
, some 15,000 years ago. Each "step" is a layered couplet representing
a year in the life of Glacial Lake Hitchcock: a stratum of the clay that
settled out of the sluggish, freezing water of the winter lake, and a silty,
sandy stratum deposited during the summer ice-melt.
The modern river is itself a souvenir of the prehistoric lake whose course
it follows. Where it's cut down into the ancient lake-bed, says Klekowski,
"it's like diving in Lake Hitchcock when mastadons were drinking out
of it."
The geological thrills and chills are joined, for these ardent observers,
by the allure of historical anecdote, historic archaeology, and, of course,
field biology. Libby Klekowski has been in charge of reviewing the historical
record; her work enables the trio to imagine the park-like, but depopulated,
valley encountered by early European-Americans whose had diseases preceded
them from the coastal colonies and wreaked havoc among the inhabitants.
Poignantly, the wise resource-management by the native people of the valley
produced an exceptionally pleasant and tractable landscape for their successors.
"We always have the impression that settlers had to hack fields out
the forest," says Klekowski. "Not here. The best lands were already
cornfields."
Libby Klekowski has catalogued the plants mentioned in such early accounts
as the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, who was abducted in an Indian
raid on Lancaster in 1676 and was brought as a captive to the Northfield
area. "Rowlandson mentions eating a `ground-nut' that's been identified
as Apios americana," says Libby. "Well, we still have
that plant on the river." Rowland's descriptions were in fact so clear
that the Klekowskis followed them to a site where the raiding party dug
ground-nut, and dug it themselves. "And ate it," adds Ed. "Very
good, actually."
Klekowski is similarly enthusiastic about the existence, if not the flavor,
of an as-yet-unknown species of the genus Axarus -- called "bloodworm"
for its terra-cotta color -- that he and Andrew found groveling in the
clay river-bottom. "No, it's really neat," he protests in defense
of the unprepossessing creature, the larval stage of an ecologically important
group of aquatic insects. The bloodworms constitute a staple of the Connecticut
River food-web, living on riverbottom debris and providing protein to larger
and more mobile animals such as fish. "And nobody knew they were there!"
says the scientist with satisfaction. (The worms are providing academic
protein too, as the subject of the paper Ed and Andrew are writing in collaboration
with entomology grad student Sean Werle and invertebrate biologist Douglas
Smith.)
The charms of the enterprise multiply as you listen to the Klekowskis talk
about it, lending color and substance to their assertion that this river
-- so surprisingly unplumbed given the reams of scholarship, poetics, and
rhetoric the valley has inspired over the past 350 years -- could be one
fabulous teaching tool. Underwater, he and Andrew have collected not only
bloodworms and varve-flakes but tales. Giant, craggy carp and bass standing
their watery ground against the intruders. The ghostly wreck of a railroad
bridge toppled in the flood of `36. The "plunge pool" of a vanished
waterfall, so deep the divers haven't yet reached bottom. Stretches of
water so swift they've had to crawl along the riverbed "like rock-climbers,
our flippers flappin' in the current like pennants!"
Up on the surface, the looming banks and grizzled islands grow more and
more allusive as the Klekowskis learn more of their human story and note
more of their natural history. That bright blue October afternoon Ed was
getting exercised about trees with adventitious roots shooting out both
above and below the waterline. About the profiles of islands low and eroded
at their upstream ends, piling up prow-like downstream. About ice-gouges:
those often massive, sidelong scars on the trunks of trees growing low
along the water.
Look at an ice-gouge, he said, and imagine the cracking, smacking, passage
of the mallet of frozen water that left its mark there. That's an instant
in the winter life of the river in our midst. "Very dynamic,"
said the scientist bobbing in the boat, as his friends looked on and smiled.
"Things coming and going all the time." Always more to look at,
he added. Always more to see.
