Waterways, Watersheds, and Penguins: Part 2

Rivers

One source of my current obsession with rivers is that I cross the Charles River a lot. I've been noticing this for some time. Every time I drive to Providence I cross the Charles five times, and every time I drive back I cross it seven times. I enjoy understanding this, and I want to share my knowledge. Of course the general explanation is that I'm not going in a straight line and that the river is not going in a straight line, either, but there are interesting details. For example, you can see high places here and there that account for bends in the river. And there is the coincidence that the river runs right through the area where Route 128 connects with the Turnpike, where there are looping, branching ramps (different ones for different directions of travel), and that just at that spot the river is as wiggly as it ever gets. I could go on, but maybe I'll spare you.

Of course, when I'm making those drives alone I don't spend the whole time talking to myself about crossing the Charles. That would be boring. If I am in a geographical mood, I can find other things to think about. For example, between the last crossing of the Charles and the first crossing of the Neponset, where exactly does the highway cross the watershed? There used to be a sign: "Entering Neponset River Watershed", but it must have disappeared when they widened the highway. Where was it? Common sense says that the divide must be either at this one high point in the town of Dedham or at this other high point in the town of -- well, I think that that other high point is also in Dedham, but I can't be sure: somewhere between the "Entering Dedham" sign near Exit 17 and the "Entering Dedham" sign near Exit 15 the road must have left Dedham. There ought to be another sign: "Entering [town]". Westwood, maybe? I wonder if there was a sign before they widened the highway ... But I see that I am digressing. Let's get back to rivers.

Watersheds 

And let's get this "watershed" business out of the way. Many of us know that the good old sense of that word is the sense that I used it in in the paragraph above, as opposed to the sense of the highway sign. As Henry Fowler puts it in Modern English Usage, a watershed is "the line of high land dividing the waters that flow in one direction from those that flow in the other, called in America a divide." He goes on, "The older of us were taught that that was its meaning, and the senses sometimes given to it of river-basin and catchment area and drainage-slope were mere ignorant guesses due to confusion with the familiar word shed." He laments, but he also concedes that the battle has been lost, that it has been lost for some time--and he is writing all of this in 1926. Of course the battle was lost: battles like that are nearly always futile.

Where does that leave us? The new sense is thriving and the old sense is not dead. In context it is usually easy to distinguish the two senses. No problem, right?

Well, I have no problem when other people use the word, but I have a little problem every time I use it. I feel the need to make it clear that I know the history of the word, and even to show that there is some part of me that disapproves (like Fowler) of the upstart modern sense, however convenient it may be. For the rest of this series of posts I will try to set those feelings aside and freely use "watershed" interchangeably in both senses.

The Charles, the principal river in these parts, flows into Boston Harbor. The Concord River, not so many miles west of here, is a tributary not of the Charles but of the Merrimack, which it joins at the old mill town of Lowell, well to the north. The Merrimack has a lot more water flowing through it than the Charles does, and most of its water comes from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, still further north. I have sometimes wondered what a map of these watersheds would look like--I mean, a map showing the outlines of these drainage-basins, catchment areas, valleys--these watersheds. And there must be what I would call a triple point, a place where three watersheds come together: those of the Charles, the Concord/Merrimack,  and the Mystic (what a great name!), this last being a smaller river that enters Boston harbor just north of the Charles. Where's the triple point, I wonder? I've worked out that it is somewhere in Lexington, but I'd like to know more. And where does the Charles-Mystic divide run from there? It has to go through parts of Belmont,  Cambridge, Medford?, certainly Somerville. That pond in front of Belmont High School--it receives water from a brook running down from Belmont Hill, but where does the water go from there? I suppose either to the Charles by way of Fresh Pond or to the Mystic by way of Alewife Brook (another fine name). Come to think of it, the space between Fresh Pond and the railroad tracks near Alewife Station is so flat that the question of locating that divide has got be a subtle one. Besides, whatever divide existed there in a state of nature must be long gone: that flat space is largely paved over now. I mean, there is a shopping center with a big parking lot on each side of you as you drive away from Fresh Pond on Alewife Brook Parkway, a.k.a Route 2 westbound, a.k.a. Route 3 northbound, a.k.a Route 16 eastbound. (Routes 2 and 16 are state highways; Route 3 is part of the old Federal Highway System.) But I see that I have wandered off the subject again.

Penguins

When Tesi was a child, her family used the word "penguins" as a private signal meaning something like "That's quite enough, dear. I think you can stop talking about that specific topic now." It was a reference to the following true story (I found this version at the website Futility Closet):

In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion. She wrote, 'This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.' American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read."

Imagine that you have guests for dinner. One of your children starts giving an account of something that happened to them, or something they did, or something they have been learning about, and it is an excruciatingly detailed account, and the end is nowhere in sight. The time has come for drastic action, but you don't want to embarrass the speaker, so you casually work the word "penguins" into a sentence, something like, "Was there anything about penguins in it?"

If all goes well, the child quietly gets the message and cedes the floor. He or she probably flashes the signaler a quick irritated look, guests may raise a few eyebrows as they try to work out what just happened, and life goes on. (Occasionally the child will go beyond flashing looks and loudly reply, "It is not penguins!")

I have been saying "child", but theoretically it could just as well be an adult who requires this treatment. Some families probably have more need of such a private signal than others; we certainly find use for it around here.

I'll get to Cheesecake Brook next time. I have a lot to say about it.