ESSAYS AND ANECTDOTES

Essays can move, inform, inspire, educate, aggravate and a lot of other stuff. Think about it then take a shot at it. Send it to us in an e-mail and who knows, you may be the next Elia!

(Posted 6/8/05 - Reprinted from Maysville (KY) OnLine with permission from Museum Center, Maysville, KY 41056 )
From an 1870 paper:
Ice is the great excitement on the Kennebec (river) this year, and fortunes are to be made, money circulated and labor in demand; there was estimated to be stored from Richmond to Hallowell, a distance of fifteen miles, 250,000 tons of ice last winter, and not 30,000 unshipped; by October 1st there was not a pound on the Kennebec; this winter, probably double the amount will be stored, that ever was in Maine.

There are five companies who have begun operations between Gardiner and Richmond, in addition to those already at work.

I believe the that the ice business on the Kennebec is in its infancy, for the water of the Kennebec is pure, the current is rapid, which makes the ice better, for the quicker the water the harder the ice.

Storing the ice: If I were to build an ice house for six or eight persons, I would build it 10 feet long, 8 feet wide, 5 feet high in the clear -- put some loose boards on the ground -- have some studding 10 inches -- double boarded and filled with saw dust, no matter how close the ice comes to the boarding; have the roof shingled -- with a ventilator therein to let off the bad air, have a ditch all round the house, say three feet off, bank up all around the house, for a current of air underneath will waste almost as
fast as you can put it in. After the ice is all in, cover the top with
sawdust, six inches deep, and it will keep years. I helped ship ice last June, seven years old, solid and blue, as when first put in -- and of two of the buildings the roofs blew off over a year ago, and the ice under the covering of sawdust showed no waste; cakes that would weigh from 6 to 1,000 pounds were so clear that a newspaper was read through the block, the paper on the outside and person standing on the other.

(Posted 2/20/05 by Bob Demers - Gardiner)
Swimming in the Kennebec (in the Good Ol' Days)
Back in 1937 when I was ten Ma would round up dad and us kids once a month or so for a trip over to Chelsea to visit Gram and Gramp Getchell. The road they lived on ran along a ridge a few dozen yards above the River and as far inland. The Sherwood family lived next door. They had a bunch of boys. I thought I knew them all, but every so often one or two more would show up until I finally lost count.

One of the big attractions for those boys was swimming in the river, which was about a ten-minute hike down over the hill to the ferry landing. For a long time Ma would never let me go with them. She never said why and I didn't ask. I sensed that it was probably better to leave it at that.

Frank Hassan was the full-time ferryman for the Chelsea-to-Hallowell ferry. The ferry was a rowboat. It cost ten cents to be rowed across and it took about the same number of minutes, depending on the tide and current.

Up until then I'd never really looked at the river close up. I mean really looked. Usually my attention was in the bottom of the rowboat watching the water seep through the chinks and wondering if we were going to make it to the Hallowell landing before we sank. This time something caught my eye in the water alongside the boat. I won't describe it here but if I did, you'd know what it was right away. I pointed it out to Ma.

"Now you know why you shouldn't swim in this river," was all she said. I understood right away. Putting it in its best light, that river was so polluted you could walk on it.

After that, Ma let me go down to the river with the Sherwood boys. She never made me promise not to go in. She never had to and she knew it. You couldn't see a foot into the water and joining those boys diving out of sight in that soup didn't appeal to me one bit.

The River has come a long way since then. The mills are long gone taking most of the industrial waste with them, and the sewage from tens of thousand of well-fed families is otherwise disposed of. I'm not big on rules but a few well-placed regulations prompted by a lot of sharp-eyed and dedicated conservation groups got the river out of that mess. Those and other groups are working hard at keeping it from ever getting back to those "good old days." Amen to that.

(Posted 2/20/05 by Peter Morrissey, Sidney)
When I was just a little a boy--about 5--I remember the old ice house on the riverbank in Randolph. People would cut ice in the river and there were horses on the ice. I also remember there were races with horses on the ice. That was around 1950.

Once my older brother took me to the old Gardiner-Randolph bridge to watch the rushing torrents during the hurricane (1954?).

It was impressed on me by my father that the river was dangerous and that we were not to go near it, especially in the winter.
We were aware that it was there, watched the huge plates of ice pile up against the bridge each winter and got excited when the bridge opened to let a boat through. We wandered freely all over town walking or on our bikes, but never went on the river ice in the winter and never went swimming there in the summer. Never.

In high school (early 60's) I went fly fishing for striped bass - and there were others who fished in the river - but my fly line would get so oily and gummed up that I would have to take the line off the reel and wash it each time I went.

In the 80's when I went fly fishing in the river I caught brown trout on a dry fly, unheard of 30 years earlier. I also remember swimming in the river during the Whatever Races in the summer. Now that was something

(Posted 2-20-05 by Anita Morrissey - Sidney)
When I was a young girl growing up on Dresden Avenue in Gardiner, I paid little attention to the Kennebec. It was something people crossed to get to the other side. My father crossed it to go to work at Togus, my boyfriend and I crossed it (in the winter the large green plywood walls would be erected cut the wind) to go to the double feature at the Randolph Theater (50 cents!)--and the whole family crossed it when we took the pop-up trailer to Small Point Beach in the summer. The river itself was never a destination.

There were stories (legends?) about the foulness of the river. For example, if one fell in the water accidentally, the film of filth left on the body could not be washed off. Boats were ruined by the crud in the water. And it smelled bad, really bad, especially in the dog days of August. The worst story of all was that the brown objects floating down in the current were chunks of human...waste. We were afraid and stayed away.

One day in the 1950's the plumbing in our old home backed up. The cause, it was discovered, was that the house had never been hooked up to the city's sewer system. Our "waste" and and that of several other homes on the street emptied into a small stream which carried it along Kingsbury Street to the river. In those days, I guess, the river was used to carry all manner of foulness to the ocean from both homes and industry. Things changed when the sewer treatment plants went in.

Now I drive along the river through Hallowell on my way to work. There are mornings when I stop to take in the beauty; a blue heron on the sandy shouls along the bank or the rising sun lifting mysterious mists from the water. It is not the same river.