The Northeast Regional, Part I: Salt Ponds and Fog

The southeastern CT shore as viewed from
Amtrak's Northeast Regional.

I'm on the Northeast Regional from Boston to NYC. First time in two+ years of pandemic time. The Ides of March. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong and I'll have no rationale -- say, a nuclear war started by Russia in Ukraine -- to run home prematurely.

This train service humps its way down the New England seaboard -- South Station, Back Bay, Rt 128, Providence, Westerly, Mystic, New London, Old Saybrook, New Haven, NYC. It rides the rails of the geography of my youth.

Boarding, I succumb to instinct and get a seat by the left-hand windows. As we run from downeast to southwest, these face the coast and the tracks run right along the shoreline.

I've driven down to Boston from Maine and already, by southern Maine, the coast has softened and by the time we get to to the salt marshes and broad rivers of CT it appears to me to be almost velvety in color, hue, and form. There is something so inviting and welcoming to me about those lengths of salt grass and cat tails and sand, the flat, calm, warmer horizon merging seamlessly into sky without the familiar border of granite teeth.

I get curious around Westerly RI. Even though I grew up on its beaches and in its restaurants and bars, house sitting here for my high school English teacher -- and even though, at 15, I was arrested here -- I realize I know little if any of its meaningful history. What I do know: that Stonington and Westerly high schools have one of the longest-running Thanksgiving Day football games in the nation (Bears vs. Bulldogs) -- that I think we never won during my tenure there?! -- and that there was a large Italian population (of which the cops were particularly comprised, at least in our urban myths).

When I look it up, I'm surprised and even a little delighted. Like where I now live, Westerly was historically a granite town -- maybe thus the Italians, as in Stonington, ME?! Not only that, but Westerly granite is known for its pinkish hue -- just like Deer Isle, famous for its pink tricolor.

Yet even more delightful are the salmon: “The Pawcatuck River flows on the western border of Westerly and was once renowned for its own species of Westerly salmon, three of which are on the town's official seal."

Its own unique species! We knew the river only as a state boundary, one we crossed fluidly and with regularity. It's short, only about 15 miles long, and flows into Little Narragansett Bay.

And the salt ponds. It's a wonder any of us survived weekends as teen agers driving in this area during the 1970's: drinking, smoking weed, driving through the inevitable fog. Driving into trees and cement block houses, going through windshields and losing too many lives.

But those beautiful large salt ponds, three in all, "serve as shallow, reef-like pools whose outer walls form the long, white beaches for which the town is renowned." These carry the names the land's original inhabitants bestowed upon them, and flow from my mouth in a round, familiar way that makes me homesick. Weekapaug. Misquamicut. Maschaug.

White America. Always driving into the fog, crashing, continuing on.

#StoningtonCT

#NortheastRegional

#Westerly

#Mystic