Chapter 87
The Kennebec River was the artery that nourished the Kennebec Valley, rising in Moosehead Lake to the north, connecting with the Dead River, and picking up minor streams and tributaries on the way to joining the Androscoggin to enter the Atlantic at Merrymeeting Bay.
Before the settlers came, the Kennebec Valley was Abenaki country; after the settlers came, it was still Abenaki country, but with visitors, and following a brief period of tentative commerce with the new arrivals, the natives decided they’d been better off without them and reclaimed the valley for the best part of seventy-five years.
But the region held too much potential wealth for that arrangement to be allowed to continue, so the settlers returned.
The old Cushnoc trading post was resurrected in the improved form of Fort Western, Revolutionary veterans were offered land to farm, and the days of the Abenaki as the dominant force in the Kennebec came to an end.
As I drove to Bingham, some of the fall coloration was still apparent, like the embers of fires that formerly burned brightly: the yellows of elm, birch, and maple, the reds of hornbeam and black oak, and here and there, the faded purples of white ash and witch hazel.
Soon only the greens of the conifers would remain, and staked among them, like sketches unfinished or abandoned, the bare branches of the rest. I caught flashes of water as I neared the Kennebec, and I thought again of that last river drive, and the way the logs had come together to make the water vanish; and I thought also of the dead of the valley, Scott Theriault among them, so that the two combined to form an image of a river thick with bodies, thousands and thousands of them, and the water, when it became visible again, was red with blood.