Blackstone Canal

Yesterday we drove about 20 minutes down to the Blackstone Canal to kayak. I haven’t been there in years. I used to take my dogs walking along the towpath there, which runs along the canal from the visitor’s center at River Bend Farm to Stanley Woolen Mill (see map here), but I’d never seen it from water level. It’s a lovely park, part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, and on summer and fall weekends you see families bicycling the dirt path and people walking dogs. But it’s never very crowded. One winter I cross-country skied along the path which was completely empty and muffled silent with falling snow, and just as I was crossing a small bridge over a lock I heard a whoosh and a giant pterodactyl great blue heron swept out from under the bridge. Another time I brought my parents down to walk there and my father rescued a frog some kid had accidentally caught in his fishing hook, extracting the hook from it’s lip and then releasing the little creature back into the canal.

It was late afternoon by the time we put in yesterday, so there weren’t many people around, and no one else on the water. We discovered the canal isn’t very deep, our paddles pulling up muck so we had to paddle shallowly. Once we got past the pond and into the narrow channel, it was very still and the green mirror reflections made it seem as if we were sailing through a fantasy land with trees above and below and with a thick cord of velvety jewel weed curving around one side. The stone-wall remains of what once were locks or bridges added to the picturesque scene. I’m sorry I didn’t bring my camera – I haven’t thought to bring it because I’ve been worried about getting it wet, but I could put it in a dry sack – we weren’t even on running water.

I saw a small turtle swimming away from my kayak through the muddy water and later we saw a couple of them basking on a fallen thick branch. There were lots of slender blue dragonflies hovering and flitting everywhere. We were able to paddle down about a mile towards the mill before the water got very scummy and we had to turn around. We paddled back past the visitor’s center and up to where the towpath ends at the dam at Plummer’s Landing. The towpath trail runs 3.8 miles in total, and the restored, passable stretch of canal is a bit less but enough for a nice late-day paddle.

After M tied the kayaks up on his car, we drove up the road a little ways and saw a pair of swans in the River City Pond area, and on our way back a snowy egret alone among the tall purple loosestrife and cattails. Loosestrife is terribly invasive, but it is rather pretty. Then we headed home to wash the mud off ourselves, stopping first at the grocery store to pick up fish, veggies, and some shrimp cocktail. I roasted the veggies and then threw in the fish and a splash of chicken broth and it was all pretty tasty. I’d also made orange chocolate-chip cupcakes earlier for M since it was his birthday, so we finished up with those.

Today, unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with a royal pain in the neck, literally. I don’t think it was the kayaking, but an accumulation of sitting at a computer doing those 170+ PowerPoint slides last week (I did say “Death by PowerPoint” didn’t I?) plus slumping on the couch last night watching a movie and some of the Olympics on TV, and then not sleeping well again. I was unable to do much all day but lie on the couch with ice packs under my neck. K gave me some of her Aleve, which helped some and let me write this on my laptop tonight. I guess it’ll ease up with time – and avoiding bad posture at the computer in particular.

I’ll be posting very sporadically this week since I’ll be house-sitting, but I expect I’ll be blog-reading so I don’t feel too lonely. And hopefully doing some writing and some reading. We’ll see…

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