'The Trout Pool Paradox'

The Housatonic River in Cornwall, Conn., on the edge of the Berkshires

“Right here at my feet is what I’ve come to think of as the trout pool paradox….The trout pool is a place for solitary contemplation, for romantic love, for a sense of reconnection with lost wilderness. And yet paradoxically, the pristine trout pools of western Connecticut nurtured the most noisome and alienating developments of the American industrial revolution – factory towns, foundries, mass production, the modern armaments and aerospace industries.’’

-- From The Trout Pool Paradox: The American Lives of Three Rivers, by George Black. The book explores the histories of the Housatonic River and two of its tributaries — the Naugatuck, which for a long time was a dumping place for toxic industrial byproducts and human waste, and the Shepaug, known for its fine fishing. The editor of this site, Robert Whitcomb, lived near the Naugatuck in the ‘60s and remembers the river often changing colors depending on what the factories along it were dumping and pouring directly into it, much of it poisonous in varying degrees.

Trout fishing with fly rods became popular in New England in the 19th Century even as industrialization began to pollute many of them of the region’s streams.

Finally, some loyalty!

“Waiting for My Master” (encaustic, toner transfer), by Heather Douglas, who has a home in tiny Cornwall, Vt., in the Champlain Valley. She’s a member of New England Wax.

The Champlain Valley

Classic New England: The Cornwall Congregational Church

They're dying. Good. I need the rest

“Autumn’’ (1896), by Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha

"I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing."

- - Mark Van Doren (1894-1972, poet , critic and professor at Columbia University and long-time resident of Cornwall, Conn.). Cornwall is on the east bank of the Housatonic River in the midst of the mostly bucolic Litchfield Hills. Mr. Van Doren wrote a poem, “The Hills of Little Cornwall,’’ about the town in 1939. It starts:

“The hills of little Cornwall
Themselves are dreams.

The mind lies down among them,
Even by day, and snores....”

The Housatonic, by the way, is much cleaner now than when I lived near it in the ‘60s, when General Electric and other companies were pouring toxic chemicals into it upstream.

West Cornwall (part of Cornwall) Covered Bridge.

A sketch of Cornwall by John Warner Barber (1835) shows the buildings that had been used by the Foreign Mission School, to the right of the church at center. The school, which was only open in 1817-26, trained young foreign men to be Christian missionaries.

The Scots: Reality or romance?

For Scotland to secede from the United Kingdom would be the triumph of romance over political and economic reality. Scotland is a windy, wet and cold place. The weather will feel a lot worse if they spin themselves off.  They think they'll be able to build a bigger, better welfare state on the proceeds of North Sea oil and gas. But that stuff will run out.

And why stop there? ''Freedom'' for Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall! Liberate the  whole Celtic periphery! Detach Brittany from France and Galicia from Spain, too! (The Irish Republic is quite all right.)

Vladimir Putin must be happy at the prospect of these little regions in Western Europe splitting off and thus inevitably weakening the Western Alliance.

I'm a quarter Scottish ancestry myself (McKay and Simpson among the family names). There were some productive people in the crowd, including the physician James Young Simpson, but also a large quota of  crazies and alcoholics  (or, to be more precise, crazies self-medicating with booze ).

They used to recite Robert Burns ad nauseam, though I always liked his line, translated from the weird Scottish dialect:

"Oh would some power the gift give us, To see ourselves as others see us.''

-- Robert Whitcomb

Et Vive le Quebec libre!