We Were Afraid of the Future

Lyrics

First, the men with the tripods.
And the chains that whispered across the fields in the late summer of '78.
A sound like a snake you couldn't see.

Joseph Davis sent them. Frederic Stearns approved the maps.
Good men, they said. From Boston.
Boston was thirsty.
They spoke of progress in cubic feet.
Of a public good that would flow downhill.
We only understood the length of a fence-line,
the slope of a pasture to the creek.
The weight of a stone cleared by a grandfather's hands.

And we were afraid.
Not of the dark, or the winter, or the usual troubles.
We were afraid of the future.
A future made of water.
A future that would drown our own.

The New York, New Haven & Hartford moved its tracks.
Just picked them up and laid them higher.
We watched a neighbor's house crawl down the road on rollers,
a bewildered turtle.
Some harvested their homes, plank by numbered plank,
hoping memory could be reassembled.
The blasting from the Fayville Dam site became the new church bell,
calling us to a service of departure.

And we were afraid.
Not of the noise, or the change, or the leaving.
We were afraid of the future.
A future made of water.
A future that would drown our own.

They drew a line on the map.
A blue line.
And everything below it ceased to matter.
Farms. Fences. The small stones of a family plot.
They promised a clean, reliable surface.
A beautiful view.
But a lake has no memory.
It just reflects the sky.

The Sudbury Reservoir.
Two thousand acres of forgetting.
Boston is not thirsty anymore.