Back On Home Waters

Getting back on my home waters is something I always look forward to after having returned from more distant places.  I almost always see them differently and with a new sense of  appreciation.

After launching at Lowell Road in Concord, MA I paddled the short distance upriver to the Egg Rock confluence where the Sudbury River swings in from the left and the Assabet River from the right (above photo).

The Egg Rock inscription is now high and dry as the water level has dropped from much higher levels earlier this spring...

Paddled a couple of miles on the lower Assabet with a stop for lunch on Willow Island.  Once back at Egg Rock I ventured up the lower Sudbury to Heaths Bridge encountering some faux critters which I hadn't seen there before...

Not a single Canada goose in their vicinity...can you blame them?


When returning downriver and approaching a locale known as Clamshell Bank I saw this large doe who I suspect will soon give birth to a fawn or two...


She came in and out of the bushes near a spring and large stand of phragmites.  Sometime over the next week or so, while cars and trucks whiz by on Route 2 and ambulances come and go at the hospital, she'll more than likely be giving birth.

Clamshell Bank is located near Emerson Hospital where the river makes a 90 degree bend.  Before the construction of Route 2 and then later the hospital's parking lot there was a sizable shellfish midden here and as this 1995 Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society attests the location was "..one of the most important prehistoric sites in Massachusetts."

Paddling past the hospital always serves to remind me of those I know who either began or finished their lives there.   

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