Echoes of Leonardo, Thoreau
Traveling in July, we stayed in a cabin on First Connecticut Lake in Pittsburg, New Hampshire, one of the lakes that constitutes the headwaters of the Connecticut River, which flows 410 miles south to Long Island Sound.
North of the lake is a section of the river - in places it is but 20 or 30 feet wide - that hurriedly tumbles over a rocky bottom, as if happy to be freed of a dam upriver, all the while making a sound people sometimes describe as a dull roar, which, while a passable and understandable representation of the sound, in my view is inadequate to capture the spirit of the river, nor the pleasure we take from the sight and sounds of streams. Mellifluous is a better way to describe the sound of a rocky stream, a word derived from the Latin; mel, for honey, fluere, to flow. So, a sweet, flowing sound, pleasing to the ear.
The Connecticut River in Pittsburg, New Hampshire on a July day, tumbling over rocks, creating a mellifluous sound that draws you to the river.
Henry David Thoreau knew the power of stream sounds to create equanimity. He wrote in his journal nearly two centuries ago; “Who hears the rippling of the rivers will not utterly despair of anything.”
Hiking a trail along the river, enveloped in places by boreal forest of spruce and fir, I stopped and sat by the river. I looked closely, asking myself if indeed every riffle, every splash, every eddy that I saw was unique, an instant in time, never to be recreated. The river as seemingly eternal, yet eternally changing. The night before in a motel room overlooking the Ammonoosuc River downstate, only a sliding screen between me and the river, I listened as I fell asleep, concentrating on the sounds the river made as it coursed over rocks, sometimes curling back on itself in an eddy or sending gentle splashes of water downstream. In moments I was asleep.
More than 20 years ago I covered for The Hartford Courant “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman,” an exhibit of upwards of 120 of Leonardo’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a goodly number of them of moving water, of which Leonardo was a serious student, far ahead of his time. He clearly had spent many, many hours studying the hydraulics of moving water. From his drawings I learned more than a thing or two about how a river behaves as it moves in its realm.
“As always, Leonardo observed details that most of us overlook,” wrote Walter Isaacson in his 2017 biography “Leonardo da Vinci.” Isaacson described a Leonardo drawing of water falling into a pond - “He described the effect of the column of water hitting the surface, the waves that emanate from the impact, the percussions of the water in the pool, the movement of the air bubbles that are submerged by the falling water, and the way the bubbles pop into floral-like rosettes when they reach the surface.”
Isaacson quotes Leonardo himself on the creation of eddies. “The curling motion of the surface water resembles the behavior of hair, which has two motions, one of which depends on the weight of the strands, the other on the direction of its revolving; thus water makes eddies, one part of which is due to the impetus of the principal current, and the other is due to the incidental motion and return flow.”
Henry David Thoreau, the 19th Century naturalist and philosopher who spent countless hours on rivers, and Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance genius who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Two friends of rivers. Inspirations to usa