The Founding Fish by John McPhee Page A

rock would have looked about as they again do now, and the bateaux surely had no choice but to bag up here, too. There were two hundred and twenty of them, newly made of green and shrinking pine, and eleven hundred Revolutionary soldiers, some in the bateaux, some on foot along the banks, collecting at places like Six-Mile Falls to portage the boats or haul them up the rapids. Local farmers came, with oxen, to help. Passing through here in September, 1775, Arnold’s was the inspiring expedition that attempted to capture Quebec, meanwhile encountering so much cold, swamp, snow, and hunger that the soldiers—who included Henry Dearborn, of New Hampshire; Daniel Morgan, of Virginia; Aaron Burr, of New Jersey—boiled their own moccasins for soup.
    Thirteen years before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the first English settlement on the Kennebec River was established. Flowing straight south from what would become known as Moosehead Lake, the Kennebec was the central thoroughfare of Maine. When the Plymouth Colony was eight years old (1628), Plymouth set up its own trading post on the Kennebec—forty miles inland from the ocean, at a place known to the Kennebecs as Cushnoc. According to the Abenakis, of whom the Kennebecs were a band, cushnoc meant “head of tide” or “where the tide stops.” The tide stopped at a rapids squeezed by Cushnoc Island. Ocean ships were stopped there, too. Traders continued upriver in smaller boats. This moment in any major river—the site of the first rapids above the sea—is known universally as the fall line and is an obvious place for a city. Richmond, Washington, Trenton, Troy, and Montreal grew at the fall line of rivers. Fort Western was built on the fall line of the Kennebec—on the left bank, close to Cushnoc
Island—in 1754. As early as 1785, settlers there were speaking of the island, the rapids, the ledges, the gravels as a suitable site for a dam, and in 1797 the island, the fort, the native village, and the white settlement became the Township of Augusta in the Massachusetts district of Maine. In red brick and white clapboard, among state buildings of Maine granite, Augusta is still a town—larger than Montpelier, smaller than Juneau.
    A t about six A.M. on July 1, 1999, the first of more than a thousand spectators began to collect above the eastern end of the Augusta dam, in a place known locally as the Tree-Free Parking Lot. Tree-Free Fiber is a bankrupt company that recycled paper. The view was immediate, across three hundred yards of barrage—called Edwards Dam since the eighteen-eighties, when the Edwards Manufacturing Company bought it and was soon operating a hundred thousand spindles and employing a thousand people in one of the largest cotton mills in the world. The dam was veiled now in falling water, an exception being a gap at the west end, where sixty feet had been dismantled and removed. A curvilinear cofferdam, convex to the current of the river, ran like a short causeway from the west shore to the broken end of the dam, cupping the wound and holding back the river.
    The crowd gathered in suits, ties, and combat fatigues, sandals, sneakers, boots, and backpacks—babies in the backpacks. There were port-a-potties, T-shirts for sale, booths of brochures—Trout Unlimited, American Rivers, Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services. There was a row of television cameras. A helicopter preëmpted the sound of the river. With “Muddy Water” and “River” and a banjo and a guitar and a pennywhistle, a trio called Schooner Fare tried to compete. Two fixed-wing planes, one of them on floats, flew in circles even tighter than the chopper’s. The people had come to hear the Secretary of the Interior, the
Governor of Maine, and the Mayor of Augusta—but mainly to witness the freeing of the Kennebec, the breaching of the dam.
    To dam-allergic conservationists, the idea is