PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: “Again Ancient”
It has been a hectic week with much to be happy about, but by Friday I ached to be out making photographs, and I followed the Naugatuck River past a series of dams to this one which impounds Hall Meadow Brook Reservoir near the top of the Torrington Hills. If pushed for a word to describe these hills, I might say “primeval." I would say it despite knowing that the land was timbered and mined even as it was dammed and milled. First came iron and timber. Climbing the hill I passed Wolcott Road, named for the woolen mill that that opened here at the beginning of the 19th century and Brass Mill Road, named for the brass mill that followed it. And yet it feels primeval.
I left my car at the northern end of the Reservoir and explored the ruins of some sort of concrete bunker, now roofless, but otherwise impervious to all except gang graffiti. In a scrubby area, where land turned to swamp, a pile of asphalt had been dumped, and I climbed to the top to see if elevation would better tip the pond into my picture. The muffled light of the clouds made the wet hillsides thatchy and added a bit of color. Finally, I walked south along the side of the reservoir on what must once have been the old road into the valley to the point where the road goes under and becomes a highway for fish mostly. In front of me was the rubble wall of the dam with a tiny hut and a stair down that seemed only big enough to let insects climb inside the dam. The dam was one of a series installed by the insects to control the river’s surge and keep it from washing over the flimsy villages in its path.
That was 1955, and it was remembered as the year of the great flood. There is nothing primeval here it is only that here the world feels momentarily in remission while old scars heal a bit and the hills seem again to become ancient and holy.
