I live in a small Hilltown up Route 9 from Northampton that has many beautiful vistas and pretty spots, some cultivated, some natural. Among these beautiful places is a narrow stretch of marsh, roughly 300 feet, along a town residential street.
This marsh is stunning in its array of wildflowers amidst a background of low ferns. I walk by it every day with my dog and feel a surge of inspiration from this display of natural beauty. And then it abruptly ceases, as sharply as a stick in the eye, as this gorgeous stretch of marsh now transitions to a raw ditch, slimy water at the bottom, which was dug by a public works backhoe.
This ditch stretches for 150 feet to a driveway culvert. The point of this ditch was to address a complaint from a resident about stormwater ponding in the street in front of her house. The thought was to improve the drainage of this area by installing a wider driveway culvert and digging a runoff ditch through the marsh to a nearby stream.
A reasonable plan, you might say, but for the following facts: marshes make perfect stormwater runoff absorbing and dispersing structures. And they can be beautiful as well as functional.
I know the town public works people were doing what they thought was a good thing. But what they forgot to do was think beyond the obvious (diverting water with culverts and ditches) to the less obvious consequences.
The result is what environmentalists like to call “unintended consequences.” I’d like to think that the remaining stretch of undisturbed marsh was the result of more encompassing thoughts taking hold. Or maybe because someone said to the town, what the heck are you doing?
Whichever, most of the marsh still remains, doing its natural functions, to disperse and absorb the stormwater and gladden hearts of passersby with its beauty.
Bruce McCutcheon
Williamsburg