Walking to Vermont: A Journal

Starting at Norwich, Connecticut

The Falls at Yantic

A small 19th century print of a wooden bridge over a steep, gorge-like waterfall was haphazardly framed and hung behind the sofa in our main family room. No one ever remarked on it, I had no idea what it illustrated or why it was hanging there, and no one ever thought to enlighten me. Never did I ever think to ask about it. It was simply there, one of a few of the slightly frightening totems of my mostly happy and secure childhood. It created a slightly pleasurable buzz and was part of the unquestioned background of my daily life.

This image was part of the mysterious, slightly attractive and compelling terrors that both repelled and drew me to them. I would evoke this image after I’d been put to bed and the lights were off. Just before drifting off to sleep, I would call up this image and experience a strange vibration. It felt as if it encompassed my whole body, or at least my head, though it was not a vibration that involved any moving parts. It’s hard to describe, but it  was both comforting and disturbing at the same time. In one sense, I suppose, I was experiencing falling into sleep in an almost literal, visual way as I thought about falling through the floor of the bridge, or it collapsing under me. Scary and attractive, the image was deeply a part of me. 

I think it was the combination of the height of the bridge, its fragile qualities, and the gorge with the violent waterfall over which it spanned. There are the little tiny figures going to and fro on the bridge – and in my imaginings, I was there with them. Maybe I could see the falls below my feet, as in my imaginings I passed over the bridge and looked through the slats of wood on its floor. Maybe I conflated it with some other images – sources unknown – of rope bridges over deep chasms, or maybe even some forgotten direct experience with heights and rickety bridges. I don't know, but this is where my story seems to start.

It turns out, although I never knew this until long after I had grown up and the picture had gone elsewhere and I somehow or other pieced it together, that this picture was from the town where my mother had spent a happy year living with her grandparents. It must have had some significance for them, and some significance for my mother, to have been saved and framed as it was.

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