Blackstone

The Blackstone Valley with its river and power from it to run mills is my ancestral home. The river flows into the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay in Providence, Rhode Island. If there were no city buildings, I would see it out the window here in my rented apartment, only a few hundred yards below Benefit Street on College Hill. The river used to be covered up by the city, but it has been unveiled in the urban renewal projects of the past two decades. Gondolas now ply once polluted waterways, and on special nights workers ignite large pots, restaurants extend tables on the sidewalks where there once were enbankments and musicians create harmonies of what they now call nights of "river fire."

Were it possible to travel upriver, eventually I would wend my way north and west into Massachusetts, up to Whitinsville, like some anadronous fish, presumably returning to spawn and die there, depositing my life's work, my total assets, my milt. Not being a salmon, having already spawned, so to speak and not died yet, and never having explored the backwater of the once important river, I need only pursue the metaphor. After a life of travelling aimlessly both near and far afield, this locus from whence my father's forebears have all descended has a strange attraction, a subliminal allure. I feel drawn to learn more about the place, its history and to learn my place in an age of manifest transition and suburban wandering. There is no need for me to remain rootless, or to feel as if I am a Yankee version of gypsy or sephardim. Some would call me, derisively a "swamp yankee" while others, probably more accurately, would label me a "WASP" or a "blueblood" or New England's "Brahmin," or the sum of all of these. I came from this place and I can return at will. I can go home again because this is the exploration of an idea and a feeling, not any kind of visitation. This is a journey of self-discovery. I am headed back towards a mythic place. It is no Byzantium or a place for old men* [reference Keats' Sailing to Byzantium, cq]; it is a north and western wilderness, a frontier place where I may set my spirit free. It is hard to create literal vistas from a river valley, so I will need to travel within to imagine them. I have a time, a place and now a purpose. The Blackstone River and its valley, my Panama Canal, my personal version of photographer Red Hallen's obsession to document its making. A man a plan a canal Panama!