FIELDS, RIVERS, MOUNTAINS

A note on family.

I am not sure where to begin except with water.

The Connecticut River runs the length of western Massachusetts, carrying

everything — snowmelt, sediment, the memory of ten thousand years of Abenaki and Nipmuck life along its banks in that valley.

Salmon ran it in numbers that are almost unimaginable now.

The Indigenous people who fished it, traveled it, built their communities along

its tributaries called it Quinetucket —

the long tidal river. It was the spine of a world. A 410 mile river that reaches from the border of Canada to Long Island sound.

They were colonizers essentially running for their lives

in search of freedom, but in doing so— they disrupted a thriving civilization.

As American children in history class, we never learned about the millions of indigenous people who were slaughtered for land across our nation.

We learned the anglicized version, the Cowboys vs. Indians version, we heard about the propaganda of Indians scalping women with long blonde hair—not that the French were the ones who brought scalping of indigenous people into our vernacular.

My family came to this continent on the Mayflower in 1620,

fleeing religious persecution in England.

According to family search records, twelve of my grandfathers signed the Mayflower Compact—

in doing so they joined an expansionist project that murdered —

conservatively —one hundred million Indigenous people.

I want to say that plainly. My family were farmers mostly, some soldiers, doctors and reverends— not governors or architects of policy.

But they were present, and they benefited, and the land they eventually settled had been someone else’s home since before recorded history.

Somewhere in the generations that followed, Mary Ball Montgomery was born.

I cannot confirm Indigenous ancestry. I have never taken a DNA test. But I look at her face in the daguerreotype — that particular stillness, those striking bones —and I believe it.

Sometimes when I walk along the Missituck (now Mystic) River, I feel it.

And I wonder about her and about how she actualized as a woman with high cheekbones, swept up jet black hair and a buttoned up dress pinned by a brooch in the 1800’s.

The Nipmuck and Abenaki were here in Massachusetts.

My family was here. Mary Ball Montgomery lived in Enfield,

Massachusetts, in the Swift River Valley,on land the Connecticut River system fed and flooded each spring.

The river was life. The water fed that life. Water is life.

Ichabod Wood fought in the Revolutionary War

and was given land in the Swift River Valley as a pension.

He moved his family from Middleboro, Massachusetts — where the Wood and Fuller families had been since

the Mayflower generation — to what must have been, in the late 1700s, paradise.

Rich bottomland, clear water, boreal forests intact,

the river threading through meadows that flooded each spring and left rich black soil.

Our family farmed it. Had children on it. Buried their dead in it, same as the natives ten thousand years before them— but it wasn’t their land. They took it at gun point.

My great great grandfather Patrick Henry Woods was born in Enfield, Massachusetts — one of the four towns that sat in the Swift River Valley.

He fought in the Civil War, Company K, 21st Regiment that saw action in Roanoke Island & New Bern, Second Bull Run & Chantilly, South Mountain & Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Henry was one of the few soldiers who came home.

He grew old on the land Ichabod had been given for his own military service.

There is a photograph of Henry in his later years, standing on a street in Enfield with his jack russell terrier in a wheelbarrow.

My grandmother Edna wrote his name in blue ink in the corner.

The houses behind him, the telephone poles, the bare November trees —all of it is underwater now.

In 1938 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts completed the Quabbin Reservoir, flooding the Swift River Valley to provide drinking water for Boston.

The towns of Enfield, Dana, Prescott, and Greenwich were disincorporated.

Residents were given notice and told to leave. Some refused until the water was rising. They had a a good bye dance for the town before it was flooded.

The Woods family stones were moved to the Quabbin Park Cemetery.

The Indigenous burial grounds along the river

— almost certainly were not. My whole family is buried in that ground, the ones that I know and the ones I never met.

Edna Charlotte Woods was born in 1918 — the year the first World War ended.

She graduated from high school during the Great Depression.

She learned to play violin and performed with the Old Post Road Orchestra, the Holyoke Civic Symphony, and the Springfield Symphony.

She played violin her whole life until she went blind and couldn’t read the sheet music anymore.

She married Duane Bassett a grandson of William Bassett 1 of Plymouth, whose ancestors were musicians, merchants, and civic figures in Bennington, Vermont — another long New England line, artists and musicians carried forward through generations.

Walter and Grace Woods left the valley and settled in Springfield, Massachusetts where they worked in factories until my grandfather started a plumbing business.

Grace contracted tuberculosis. Walter moved the family up Wilbraham Mountain for the clean air.

They had five children. Two of the boys died young

— Aethelbert in infancy, Stanley at three years old.

Three children survived: Edna, Edythe, and Walter Jr.

I come from a family of storytellers, artists and musicians on both sides, and that inheritance ran forward through all of them.

She raised five children, two by Bassett.

My grandmother took me, her first grandchild, to Springfield Symphony concerts. She took me to see Fantasia in a dark Springfield movie theater, where abstract forms moved to Bach and Beethoven and Stravinsky, color and shape becoming landscape becoming cosmos. Something happened in that theater that has not stopped happening since, the way form and color and music collide to make fantasy. The way internal systems build and save sad children blessed with an imagination.

My grandmother died at ninety-four. She is buried in the land— not far from the mountain her parents climbed for clean air, not far from the river that runs toward the valley that was drowned.

My great grand mother Grace Woods grabbed my arm when I was still in high school and an aspiring writer. She said, ‘Write a book about our family some day.” and gave it a good squeeze.

And perhaps this is the start of it.

My Lazarus Ball return, after twelve years of being mostly housebound in California, in and out of ICU several times, bald, fat from steroids and the depression of watching your life melt away from indoors while everyone else is creating memories.

The Connecticut River still runs.

The Swift River Valley still sits drowned under water so that Boston could become a city.

Henry Woods’ street is still down there, the telephone poles, large field stones, bare trees and the razed house where Mary Ball Montgomery’s children were born.

The bones and stories of the indigenous people who lived there for ten thousand years, not moved during the engineered flooding—are still drowned beneath the Quabbin.

And I still make paintings about being haunted by ghosts.

—Macaulay Woods, May, 2026