The Black Brook by Tom Drury

Author:Tom Drury
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

III

GLOVES

15

Out in the country west of Tableville, a naturalist in a red wool coat stood in an earthen trough, surrounded by nine neighbors, and swing reporter Paul Emmons, on a road called Whiskers Lane. It was a cold morning and the wind had been blowing hard for days. Paul wore a pair of gloves and the felt hat that he had found in the attic.

“This is where it was?” asked the naturalist.

“And where you’re going to make it be again,” said a woman named Suzie Turner. She pulled her hands into the cuffs of her coat. “Am I right?”

“Calm down,” he said. “I’m a naturalist.”

“And I’m an engineer,” said his partner.

“We’re on your side,” said the naturalist.

“We don’t take sides,” his partner quickly added.

The naturalist dropped to his knees in the bed of the missing river. “What we have here is opportunity as well as misfortune. With the water gone, the vegetation seizes the opportunity to migrate. You can see this happening. This maidenhair fern is making its move.”

“That’s all academic,” said a man named Richard Legros. “Nine months out of every twelve, the last sound we hear at night is the water running over the stones. We want our stream back. A ditch full of ferns won’t make us happy. Our children play in that river. Our dogs wade in that river. We have inner tubes. We have canoes. The science of it, we could care less.”

“The state of Connecticut is not fighting you on this,” said the engineer. “You want to restore the stream. We want to restore the stream.”

“Do it, then, right?” said Suzie Turner.

“What my partner and I have to do now,” said the engineer, “is go back and study the USGS maps to figure out where this brook came from.”

“It’s not a brook, it’s a river,” said Richard Legros. “It courses and rushes.”

“You called it a stream,” said the engineer. “I’m only going by what you said.”

“Semantic arguments will get us nowhere,” said the naturalist. “Until we know where the waterway came from, it’s wild speculation to say where it’s gone. One possibility, the obvious one, is that the river has dried up, in the course of natural events.”

The neighbors rolled their eyes and clicked their tongues derisively. “Our weather hasn’t been dry,” one said. “We’ve had lots of rain. There’s water everywhere. I have water in my basement as we speak.”

“Rain and snow are only part of what determines the incidence of surface water,” said the naturalist.

“A big part, though,” said Suzie Turner.

The naturalist shrugged. “Anybody know what time it is?”

“A quarter to eleven,” someone said.

“That’s right,” said Richard Legros. “Run off to some other site.”

“Patience, Rich,” said Suzie.

“It’s development,” he said. “Some developer has blocked our river, and because it’s only Tableville, because it’s just a pack of disgruntled nobodies in Tableville —”

“The last one on board requests permission to draw up the gangplank,” said the engineer.

“I was born here,” said Richard Legros. “That house right over there — that is my house. What sort of engineering have you done?”

“Coffer dams,” said the engineer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.