Middlesex Canal Museum Art

See if you can spot Faneuil Hall!

WHERE IS UR PASSPORT DEAD MUSQUASH

I have a belly shirt and a pig on a leash!

HELLO I SEE U R BUILDING A CANAL!

Middlesex Canal!!!!!

 Story time!  Sometime last year, I went to this restaurant in Woburn with my fance food friends, and it was in the old Baldwin mansion.  I of course wanted to know if they were connected to any of the Baldwins I knew (the brothers Baldwin, and the best Baldwin, James) but it turns out this Baldwin was a dude who fought with George Washington in the Revolutionary war, and propagated an apple and was so into it that it was eventually called after him.  During this wikipedia dive, I found out that Baldwin was also the first superintendent of the corporation which built the Middlesex Canal. 

What the fuck is the Middlesex Canal, and why had Lizzie and I, the brilliant historians that we are, as evidenced by this blog, never heard of it? We went to the Middlesex Canal Museum to find out more.

The museum is in Billerica, by the Concord River, which served as the main water source for the canal.  (Horn Pond in the Wu was an ancillary source).  That dam in the first picture has existed in some form since the 1600s.  I made a dam pun to the fabulous volunteer staffing the museum, Neil, but he ignored it.  This was our first indication that Neil was a smart man. 

Post Revolutionary war, it was evident that a more efficient means of obtaining raw materials and shipping goods was needed, and the roads were either shit or non-existent, so a bunch of business bros were like "yo let's build a canal," and business bro #1 John Hancock was governor at the time, and they formed a corporation that sold private shares to finance it.  In a who's who of the revolutionary set, shareholders included ol' big signature himself, John Hancock, eventual Prezzes John Adams & John Quincy Adams, James Sullivan (of Sullivan Sq fame) and of course our apple bro Loammi Baldwin.  They broke ground in September of 1794, and all 27 miles of the canal, from Charlestown to East Chelmsford, were hand dug over the course of ten years.

The canal itself was generally only 3.5 feet deep, and in a practice called "not crossing streams" so they could control the level of the water, the canal didn't connect with any of the other water ways nearby, so they had to build aqueducts (8 total) to ensure smooth sailing over rivers like the Shawsheen and the Merrimack (parts of the giant aqueduct over the Shawsheen still exists).  There was some sweet lock action, too, to deal with changes in height in relation to sea-level. 

FUN FACTS:

Passage on the canal was not allowed at night, so there were taverns built, including the "Horn Pond House," by, you got it, Horn Pond, and Horn Pond itself had a little island on it that housed a dance hall and a bowling alley.  Woburn as always brought the party. 

Musquash, aka Muskrats, and other similar animals would eat the sides of the canal, so people were paid to kill them and bring in their little dead bodies.  RIP Musquash :(

Eventually there was a canal built which connected the Charlestown mill ponds to the Boston Harbor, which, at the time, was located by Faneuil Hall.  Guess what there's a street there now called CANAL STREET.

The canal shut down in 1853.  Railroads came along and were like "lol we operate in the winter how about you?" and the canal was like ":( no" and it quickly fell into disrepair.  Bridges were ripped down, and the canal filled in in parts.  Parts of it are under the Mystic Valley Parkway, and Boston Ave in Medford crosses the Mystic River where the canal did, but parts of it are still visible and walkable, including a stretch by the aforementioned Baldwin Mansion (which was moved across Rte 38 bc the original location was made into a parking lot, natch). The shareholders lost their money and the canal WAS PROMPTLY FORGOTTEN. 

Anyway, if you have a chance, go check out the museum.  Hopefully Neil will be on duty, because he was super knowledgeable, and had all the hot canal goss.  Plus there are EXCELLENT displays.  10/10 would recommend for Neil + Dioramas. Lizzie bought me a sweet canal mug and xmas ornament, so if you want to come over my house and look at those, maybe I will let you...

Tug and Pull, i.e. the Descent

 On the way down, the sun came out, and sweeping vistas dominated.  Our brakeman let us know that the locomotive taking our car down might have to do a little "tug and pull," to get us going, and said "get ready for the tug and pull," "you can't be standing up for the tug and pull" and I laughed a lot because I am a sad person with a juvenile sense of humor.  Tug and pull. Heh. The brakeman also continued to advise us to buy shit in the gift shop and eat some bad pizza, and also to buy the souvenir photo taken by the "cogarazzi" as our trip commenced.  Lizzie and I were both annoyed at the cogarazzi joke which we thought our brakeman had made up, but no, oh no, it is the real name of the overpriced photo company.  Lizzie and I both bought one. 

Mt. Washington Cog Railway Review:  A+ for gorgeous scenery.  A+ for trains, trains are fun. D- for capitalism.  C+ for puns.  A+ for the tug and pull.  Would ride again.

Mt. Washington Summit

WE MADE IT.  After a very challenging climb down three stairs, we made it to the summit, asked the guy manning the visitor's station a question, but he was super rude so being the intrepid explorers we are, we made our own way through the fog to the actual summit.  And dear lord.  There was a line to the actual summit, and it wasn't super long but there was this family of about 10 people who mistook the summit for an America's next top model photoshoot, and one woman was screaming instructions at the other people (OPEN UR EYES.  MOVE UR HIP UP ONE INCH AND TO THE LEFT) and ate up way too much time while the rest of us fought the urge to hurl them off the mountaintop in a sacrifice to whatever gods might be listening.  We were surrounded by misty clouds, and it was cold (who knew) and maybe the flip flops we were wearing were a mistake (a pre-teen lectured me about this for about 5 minutes as we climbed down the rocky slope.  THANKS MOM.  I GET IT.) but it was most excellent, and I'm so glad we didn't have to hike down.  Mt. Washington is on the Appalachian trail, and there's about 300 miles from Mt. Washington to the end of the trail, and we saw some pretty exhausted but excited hikers. 

XTREME WINDGUSTS

 This here is "Jacob's Ladder," where the trestle reaches it's steepest point.  Also, did you know that Mount Washington is subject to XTREME weather?  (FINALLY WEATHER FOR MY GENERATION).  (Actually, our brakeman told us he was XTREME and would like to ride the devil's shingle and we were like lol ok Eli you do you.)  Well because of the XTREME weather, (the highest windspeed not involved in a cycle was recorded here at 231 mph) the treeline ends about 5000 feet below where the treelines end on most mountains.  Weak-ass trees.

Mount Washington Cog Railway

Hi!  It's been a while!  So Lizzie and I had big plans to do a state trip to South Carolina and Georgia in early June, but all sorts of things went wrong, including delayed flights and mechanical issues on flights and rain and oh did I mention that my garbage boyfriend broke up with me via text message so when we finally did get there all I did was cry and watch bad TLC for two days (though I did get a tan, which is challenging for those of Irish descent--someone called me a "daywalker" which I think is a zombie reference?  Either way I'm in).  It was enjoyable for everyone and LIFE IS A RICH TAPESTRY.  In any case, Lizzie took me up to Mount Washington for my birthday, yay!  Neither of us had ever been to the summit (highest in the Northeastern US, 6288') so we went up the Cog Railway, which was built from 1866-1869 (or 'Colonial Times', according to our brakeman).

This cog railway, our brakeman told us, is the oldest in the US, and for a while, was the steepest at one point until the Swiss ruined it, like they ruin everything.  There's a coal driven train that goes up, but ours was bio-diesel, and therefore didn't have to stop midway up to waste thousands of gallons of water to make that steam business happen.  Yay!  Also, back in the day, workers at the top would ride slideboards they'd invented down the railway which they named "Devil's Shingles" which probably was an indication that it wasn't the best idea, as flying down a mountain at 62mph on a piece of wood maybe isn't super safe, and the slideboards were banned after an employee died in 1906.  Buzzkill.  Anyway, it's about a 45 minute slow ride up to the summit.

After one Desecrates, one Must Consecrate

 Before the dam was built to flood the valley and create the Wachusett reservoir, this stone church was built (1891) at the juncture of the Stillwater and Quinapoxet River, where they merged into the Nashua river.  Though homes, mills, and farms were lost to the purposeful flooding, the church still stands, and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.  It's one of the most photographed landmarks in the region, and for good reason, as if you look very closely to where Lizzie is pointing, the walls are filled with incredible, stirring art.

A Portent

This was lying on the ground at the mouth of the tunnel, and we went in anyway, headstrong fools that we are.

Haunted Ass Abandoned Train Tunnel

So mine and Lizzie's real goal in Clinton, MA was finding this abandoned train tunnel.  When the Nashua River was dammed off, the original train tracks were flooded, and so this tunnel was built in 1903 for the Central Mass Railroad.  At the time, it was the second biggest tunnel in the state, at a whopping .2 miles.  Just 50 years later, the tracks had been ripped up, and this tunnel abandoned by the state.


To find the tunnel, we first had to locate the remains of the trestle on Boylston street.  Once you found the trestle, you had to climb a small hill to where the tunnel's mouth sits, and at the top, you could see the headless trunks of rest of the trestle sunk into the reservoir on the other side of the street. 

We hadn't originally planned to walk its entirety, but when we could easily see the, well, light at the end of the tunnel, we decided to pass all the way through, though we knew the tunnel was supposedly haunted, and that a young girl had been found dead here 40 years ago.  After all, it was early afternoon, and we had hours of light left, and the tunnel was so short. 

Time seemed to slow down once we passed through the tunnel's wide mouth.  The cold granite around us dripped eerily, and the .2 miles stretched on, and on, and on.  Lizzie and I joked that at this point, we were more concerned with the living--if there were people hiding in the dark corners, behind the crumbling concrete.  We walked on, and on, and on, joking with each other until we finally hit the opposite end.  Time returned to its normal pace.  We laughed about how creeped out we'd been.

But we had to go back through to get out.  Had hours passed? We reentered the tunnel, following the non-existent tracks back (though somehow, they've appeared in this picture--the ground is rocky, full of crumbling stones, but there are no actual tracks), toward the eerie light, through the dripping ceiling, shivering as the ambient temperature dropped degree after degree.  When we got to the center of the tunnel, it was so cold that we could see our breath--it hadn't felt like that on the initial pass.  Noses running, hands freezing up like they do after a first, damp, snow, we stopped for a minute, feeling a strange thrumming in our chests, as if an actual train were passing by.  We heard the low rumbling,  thum-thum-thum-thum, and nervously mumbled about the magic of physics before picking up the pace.  Again, the compact tunnel somehow stretched on for miles in both directions--we'd look back at the exit behind us, to the exit in front of us, both light, and beckoning, and still felt trapped in a never-ending purgatory of freezing darkness, with the bass of a passing train vibrating around us. Our echoing footsteps seemed to be in vain, as the exit's light loomed in front of us, somehow staying the same distance away as we moved in what we thought was a forward direction.

But we made it out.  The feeling slowly returned to our fingers.  The tips of our noses warmed back up in the fall sunlight.  We joked about returning sometime at night, but neither of us are ready to board that ghost train quite yet...

Dam Fine Dam You Have There

 Guess who went to the second largest body of water in Massachusetts today?  That's right, LIZZIE AND I DID.  So circa 1897, this dam was set up here to block off the Nashua river, which flooded parts of a bunch of towns around Clinton (where this dam is) creating the Wachusett reservoir, which filled by 1908.  The only downside is that now you have one less place to pee in the area, because you could have peed in the Nashua river and no one would have batted an eye--PEE AWAY, GOOD SIR--but now people get all weird if you defile a public water source.  THAT'S PROGRESS FOR YOU.

Galloping Gertie

CONFESSION.  Last night I was having trouble sleeping, and as I was drifting in and out of sleep, my brain pulled the phrase "Tacoma Narrows Bridge" out from my subconscious.  It was kinda creepy, but we are staying in Tacoma tonight, and my brain didn't want me to miss out on Galloping Gertie, which I have been on and off obsessed with since learning about it in 11th grade physics with Mr. Hoar.  (His real name).  Now there are two bridges, but originally there was only one, and the towers of the bridge you see on the left are the originals.

Planning and construction on the original suspension bridge began in 1937.  Construction workers, observing the motions of the bridge deck, nick named it "Galloping Gertie."  I pause for a question here.  If it was observed that the bridge was shimming because of side winds, why didn't they try to address the issue before opening it to traffic?  They did open it to traffic on July of 1940, and the bridge collapsed dramatically only 4 months later.  Lessons were learned about forced resonance, wind frequencies matching structure frequencies, and luckily there weren't any (human) fatalities.  RIP Cocker Spaniel.  Because of complications from WWII, the bridge could not be rebuilt until 1950, and the old deck is at the bottom of Puget Sound, where it is now a reef.

Here, see for yourself!

Things Aren't As Dead As They Were 35 Years Ago So That's Good I Guess

 On the way down from Johnston Ridge, we stopped at Coldwater Lake, which was created from parts of rivers being dammed off by sediment and other debris.  That's Mt St Helens in the background with her post 1980 flat top look.

Aggressive Chipmunks are Aggressive

"Guess where I'm gonna shove your squirt gun..."

Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!

In late March, 1980, Mt St Helens experienced a small earthquake, and steam started venting from the top.  By the end of April, the north side of the mountain began to bulge.  It kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and all the local folks were starting to get annoyed that they couldn't go to their cabins, and that certain roads were closed, because it seemed like nothing was going to happen, until May 18th, 1980, when a 5.1 magnitude earthquake happened, triggering the collapse of the north face of the mountain, which you see here, resulting in the largest landslide in recorded human history.  Chunks of super heated mountain mixed with ice and snow, creating mudflows that roared down the mountain, filling the valley, leveling trees, killing people and animals, and destroying bridges and lumber camps.  After the collapse, a lateral explosion of ash erupted, sending ash out as far as Missoula, Montana, where the skies were so dark, they had to use streetlights and headlights during the day.  People thought the Soviets had attacked, but in reality, it was just the deadliest volcanic event in the history of the US, with a 230 sq mile blast zone.

We went up to 4200 feet here at Johnston Ridge, which directly faces the crater.  Mt St Helen's was pretty chill today, but evidence of her destructive past was etched into the hillsides, and evident in the old forest trees which were blasted from their stumps.  Parts of the mountain, now called hummocks, litter the valley.  I went up to the top of the observatory, and when I came back down, Lizzie was listening to a lecture by a forest ranger, who began his spiel by shooting a chipmunk in the face with a green squirt gun he kept just for that purpose.  The chipmunks here are very large, squirrel sized, and aggressive, and will have their revenge.

As mentioned, 57 people were killed in the eruption, including 83 year old Harry Truman (not the ex president, another Harry Truman) who had stubbornly refused to evacuate, as well as volcanologist, David Johnston, who was stationed at this ridge, now named for him, observing the mountain for his assistant, who was away at a conference.  The 30 year old Johnston radioed in "Vancouver! Vancouver!  This is it!" before getting hit with chunks of steaming mountain, and neither his, nor Truman's bodies were ever found.

Lizzie and I watched a 15 minute movie, which was a super spooky and kind of depressing story of the eruption, which began with Johnston's last words.  (Okay his last raidoed words.  The poor man's actually last words were probably more along the lines of "FUuuuuUUuuuccckkk!")  There was a baby in the theater, and whenever they would run the camera with pyroclastic flow noises and perspective, the baby would start crying.  They really loved the pyroclastic flow angle, with overwrought music, and Lizzie and I were like 'WHO MADE THIS?" and it was a production company out of Boston.  Go figure.  THE EARTH IS A LIVING PLANET.  A LIVING PLANET WHO SOMETIMES GETS MAD AS FUCK AND BLOWS ITSELF UP.  Mt St Helens was active again in 2004-2008, but the eruptions were small in scale, mostly venting steam and enlarging the lava dome, and pushing up long shafts (heh heh) of solidified magma referred to as "whalebacks" by the scientist on one of the interactive screens activated by a button I mashed like a 4 year old.  GIVE ME MORE INFORMATION.  PUT IT IN MY BRAIN.

Crow Friends

Our next stop was the Hoffstadt Bluffs, where we had a meal of food overlooking this flood plain, which now rests a mile higher than it did before the 1980 eruption.  It also has a memorial to the 57 folks who died in the explosion, as well as this crow here who we made friends with by feeding her parts of our lunch.  She would grab her snack, fly away, eat it, hop back sideways and be like "MORE SNACKS HUMAN."  Now we have an army of crow friends.

BIGFOOT

We found him!  He was by this poor little A-frame house by the Toutle River.  The Toutle River took a lot of the mudslide debris from the 1980 eruption, and this little house here got filled with mud.  Also Big Foot moved in.  Bad luck all around.  We talked with the owners of a near by shop who owned this house, and she was super impressed with Lizzie's job but could give a shit about my exciting Academic Administrating.  Should have told her we're waiting on the Rabb explosion/mud slide any day now...

Silver Lake

 Our first stop on our exciting Mt. St. Helen's tour was Silver Lake here.  It is ridiculously pretty, and APPARENTLY GOOD SQUATCHIN' COUNTRY.  Here is Lizzie tree-knocking, which is one way to attract the squatches.  So far nothing...

Caulk the Maude and Float it

 Hiiiii!  So yesterday was a big travel day for us.  We took the ferry from the San Juan islands to Anacortes, and then drove south through some pretty awful traffic to Kelso, WA, where we were staying before heading to Mt. St Helens the next day.  Since we were so close to the Oregon border, we popped over the Columbia river and had dinner in a town where apparently three people were murdered earlier that day.  Nice.

Fashion Break

Modeling the latest in life jackets and spray skirts 2015.

We Didn't Die While Sea Kayaking

For today's adventure, we went with a tour group on an orca kayaking trip.  Our guide was a young man named William, and he drove us to the launch, had us watch a 12-minute power point presentation/"video" in a nearby hut about not touching/feeding/harassing/making direct eye contact with marine life, before giving us very specific and complicated instructions about setting up our kayak, what to do if we capsize (give up and become friends with the seals--become queens of the seals) and how to use the rudder, all of which we promptly forgot.  Lizzie was brave and took the back seat and steering job (my job was to look out for rocks.  ICEBERG RIGHT AHEAD) and after we were able to free ourselves from a sandbar, we launched pretty easily and trailed slowly after our group.

Lizzie and I are maybe not in the best shape, but we hauled and were mostly able to keep up.  We only stopped a few times to stare at the seals, one pictured below, but unfortunately on this part of the trip we did not see any orcas.  Aside from the seals, we saw a dog which I mistakenly thought was a deer for a minute, a couple of crows, a sparrow chasing a butterfly (the butterfly won), a few geese and a seagull.  Also, at one point, William took of his shirt and we were like "we are Nanas, please put that back on," but he had taken it off to show us kayak rolls.  We declined to try it ourselves, as did the rest of our group.

When we returned to the launch, we had to give our boats a sponge bath and haul them up to the shore, but I need to work on my guns, because Lizzie had to ask William to help me with my end of the boat.  I AM A FAILURE.  Also, I didn't have proper footwear, so I was windmilling on this slippery rock, trying to get my balance, and Lizzie had to shove me in the back to prevent disaster.  That tricksy center of gravity...

 We kayaked for three hours, and then William drove us back on the sea road, and I spotted some orcas in the distance because I am a boss at seeing (not so much at kayaking) and Lizzie and I stared at them, but not directly in the eye.

Okay.  So I hope you all can still respect me after I tell you what happened next.  William dropped us off, and we were about to make the mile walk back to our hotel, when another guide asked us "how was the paddling?  Did you see any orcas?"  As you know, stupid jokes are my jam, so I said "It was great! We saw some whales from the road.  I like to think that the fins were like like an orca middle finger."  WELL.  This did not sit well with the guide who said, "You know orcas have a migration path of 200-500 miles, so seeing them at all, even from the van instead of a kayak, is a magical experience."  He was not pleased with me, and I am pretty sure they are not going to let me take the ferry out tomorrow, and will leave me to swim back to Anacortes in my whale joke shame.  I dunno, I thought it was a killer joke.  HA HA.  Killer.  You know.  Like Killer Whales?  yeaaahhhhh.

My shoulders are gonna hurt so bad tomorrow...