Running the watershed

I grew up in Massachusetts, two miles or so from the New Hampshire border. Now, I live in New Hampshire, three miles from the border on its other side. I grew up in a smallish town, and now live in a decidedly smaller one. In both places I’ve encountered the pride and suspicion of the native. Fifth and sixth generation natives with long memories and tendencies to refer to houses as “the Gauthier place” or “the Cote place” long, long after any Gauthiers or Cotes have lived there. We’ve lived in our New Hampshire town for about five years now, and we might as well have just pulled in with Massachusetts plates about yesterday. This place can be fiercely tribal and suspicious of outsiders (as prospective Senate candidate and suspected carpetbagger Scott Brown may soon find out).

Every Sunday, my mother down in Massachusetts makes an elaborate supper for our large, local family. Given enough daylight and time, either I or my husband runs over there for the meal. Last time I did the run, I took a route that crosses the Powwow River four times. This river runs through my hometown of Amesbury, but gets its start up here in New Hampshire. The basin it empties backs up to a ridge a mile and a half north of us where Route 107 runs west to east through town. A drop of rain striking the north side of that ridge runs down to the Exeter River and on to the brackish Great Bay. A drop striking the south side will find its way to the Powwow, across the border to Amesbury, over the spillways on the lakes, then through downtown where it careens over a falls, past the remnant of the old water wheel and sweeps into a dark hole under the old mills. It flows through tire studded mudflats, under the highway, and finally on under the haunted Bailey Bridge where, they say, a carriage drawn by ghost horses passes some nights. There, the Powwow is obliterated in the courses of the tidal Merrimack, sweeping out to sea.

As I ran the route the other day, it struck me as funny to think of being seen as an outsider in my little New Hampshire town. The arbitrary nature of the lines we draw, making this side mine and this side yours. This boundary a town, this a state. You, a native, me a foreigner. Our lines of convenience and commerce, and yet, the river finds the route of least resistance, going with gravity until it finds the ocean. I grew up along this river, and it is indifferent to the border it crosses, twice in a lazy oxbow up by the north end of Lake Gardner. I went away to college and lived along the tributaries of the Connecticut River. I went to vet school and lived along the Blackstone River’s feeder streams. And then we came back home, leaving my home state, but reentering my childhood watershed.

I suppose I will always, in the eyes of the natives of this New Hampshire town, be “from away.” But viewing such human comings and goings from down at the waterline, it looks decidedly like I never really left.