Grooves in a rock

By NPS Ranger Dan Meharg

Working as a park ranger in the Blackstone River Valley, got me thinking about canals again. The canal along and sometimes in the Blackstone river ran from Worcester Massachusetts to Providence Rhode Island. It was built by Irishmen fresh from finishing the Eire Canal, back in the 1840's.

The main job of a ranger leading a group of visitors, is to help people see things that they have never seen before. Once you've excited them with the possibilities, opened their eyes to some 'very cool' aspect of the 'hidden world', you try and give them seeing skills, so they can make discoveries of their own.

Small stretches of the Blackstone Canal remain: abandoned, but as Henry David Thoreau once said while rowing down an old New England canal, "improved by nature." Tall sycamore and hemlock trees reflect in the blue green waters, tiny green duckweed disks, grace the surface. It's all very picturesque, and visitors appreciated me taking them there. On one such journey, I asked the group if they thought we could find some living proof that long canal boats attached to horses by ropes and harnesses, truly did slide past here. What would that proof look like? I figured that the lines that attached boat to horse would be gritty and sandy, and would act as a giant emery board against any rock they encountered. If there really were canal boats along here, if the past were truly real, then we should find grooves the thickness of a good sturdy rope.

My hunch was a real eye opener for them. The group began a lively discussion about how we could find these grooves, if indeed they had survived to the present.

As we walked along the towpath beside the canal, we decided to think like canal boatmen. All the old drawings and paintings show the boat captains sitting on, or leaning against, the long pole like steering tiller: steering by the seat of their pants, if you can picture that. We probably made a bizarre site to people biking past us on the towpath that day. Twenty people swaying and leaning, all pantomiming tillers, or to bikers watching us, twenty people with some kind of something under their bottoms.

As a group we found a spot along the towpath where we where steering our imaginary boats toward the left bank, while the pretend horse out ahead, rounded a bend on the right bank. This would bring the towrope over a granite outcrop…We all rushed over, and sure enough, there were grooves in the rock: Deep grooves where consistent boatmen made the same steering choice each week, and fainter grooves where more daring boatmen made maverick choices.

The people in that group and I will always have a unique bond because we traveled through time together that day. What started as a conversation lead us on a quest, that then lead to a discovery that transported us all to another time. No archeological report helped us time travel, no lecture by an authority was necessary, it was imaginative thinking by the whole group that found us our grooves. And of course, like Doubting Thomas, we had our physical proof. We could place our hands in those smooth grooves and physically touch truth, and we all gained a whole new way of seeing the old canal.