…and The Downeaster stops, briefly, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. I hurry to leave.
The city, I recall, was another New England mill town. I later learn that its red-brick mills, powered by Merrimac River water, used to make shoes. All the New England mills used to make something. Now, if they have survived, they are up-scale restaurants, and consulting and insurance offices, all on first floors.
I walk down the platform, enter the parking lot and start down an incline to the closed mills.
A big man with a Harley Davidson shirt is beside me.
He also rode The Northeaster. He tells me that he is an EMT in Boston. I say, “You must have seen it all.”
He turns and almost lectures me, “Never say you’ve seen it all!”
We keep walking. He has a ride waiting. I have a four-mile walk past mills, over the river and what was the owners’ section of large homes to Haverhill’s outskirts.
Fresh hay is in the muggy air.
The river is fetid in the muggy air.
The mills are still in the muggy air.
The EMT has the day off ….
Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky, August 2010 in central Maine
arriba unidad/abajo divisiones – awip – no wall/no war – peace
