Beautiful but cruel, the Saco reveals her many moods

By GISELLE GOODMAN, Staff Writer

Copyright © 2002 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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	Staff art
	Map of Section Three, Dayton to sea: click to enlarge.

	A slide show of photos

Most people refer to the Saco River as an "it."

Not Glena Waterhouse. To her, this river is a definite "she." The river, she says, has too many personalities to be anything else.

Photographer Gregory Rec and I find Glena on our last 15-mile leg of the river, between the Skelton Dam and the sea, raking the sand on her tiny beach. For years, Glena has owned a camp on the Biddeford side of the river, just above the Route 5 bridge that connects the river's namesake city, Saco, with rural York County.

Glena calls herself the "River Queen" and she is madly in love with the Saco River that flows by her camp. Here the river's banks are wide, the water rust-colored, the bed covered in juicy green water plants. Here, the grand oaks, maples and pines come right down to the river and some of them grow almost perpendicular to it. Very soon, the river will spill over the last of the dams and head to the ocean. The banks will give way to estuaries. The water will become salty and the Saco will complete her 134-mile journey from the mountains.

"She's a moody river," says Glena as she gazes across the water, which on this day seems to be flowing backward. "Today, she is schizophrenic."

The Saco River is lazy at times, especially in Buxton around the dams, where she doesn't do much except sit and look pretty. She is sleepy, mostly in the winter when her waters freeze and the campers go home. She is playful, evident when she tossed our 18-foot Old Town canoe around like a toy down the Limington Rips. She is the charming and gracious host, especially up north when thousands of people party on her shores.

The river is also cruel and vengeful.

This is fueled by the legend of the curse of the Saco River. Everyone we meet on the water seems to know about it.

It goes like this: In the summer of 1675, rowdy sailors from an English ship rowed up the river and came across an Indian woman who was paddling a canoe with her baby son. The sailors taunted her, asking if it was true that Indian children could swim at birth. They attacked her and tossed the baby in the river. The mother, who some say was pregnant, dived in to save the child. They both died.

Enraged, her husband, an Indian chief, vowed revenge. He went down to the river and commanded it to take the lives of three people every year.

In many years, the river has complied. Last year, two people died on the Saco River - a man who drowned in Fryeburg and a boy who jumped off a bridge and broke his neck.

The river took her first life this year - that of a child - on July 24.

His name was Christopher Bolduc. He was 11 years old. On a day when Greg and I were upriver, just about the time we came around a bend to find the Bar Mills dam, he jumped off the Pine Street bridge with some friends. He went missing and the next day, police found his body 75 feet down river in 10 feet of water.

When we reach this section of the river, a lump rises in my throat before I can even see the bridge. The river here is so beautiful. It is an amazing bit of nature sandwiched between two very busy cities. The banks, for the most part, are covered with nothing but trees and pickerelweed. The air smells moist and forested. A cormorant takes off from the water.

It seems so harmless.

The Pine Street bridge is a reminder that it is not. Graffiti covers the concrete and rocks, big bubble letters that say things such as "sloppy," "thug" and "get high." There is also a wreath, a memorial, brown and wilted by the time we see it, on the top of the bridge where the kids jump.

We stop the canoe 75 feet down from the bridge.

I wish I had some flowers to leave here. Some color for this sad spot in the river. Something to honor little Christopher.

And then, a dragonfly appears. It is vibrant, blue, beautiful, and for a moment it hovers over this place where the Saco became angry and ugly, where she took a moment to live out her promise to the chief before heading to the sea.

The dragonfly dips its wings in the water, once, twice, and then it is gone.

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