David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Floods of Memories

Flowing water is beautifully hypnotic on a sunny day.  But it’s terrifying when a swollen stream bursts its banks and swallows everything in its path.  

Maybe this dual character of rivers causes floods to be more frequently commemorated than other natural disasters, at least in my well-watered corner of the world.  Typically they’re noted merely with hash marks showing the high water level.  Sure, there are markers commemorating tornados, hurricanes and other weather extremes, but they tend to memorialize a lost life, a destroyed building, or an act of heroism.  We generally show our flood marks without much explanation, like battle scars.

My favorite set of flood lines is just a block from my home in Collinsville, Connecticut. Inside the old Collins Company edge tool factory, generations of workers kept the memory of one deluge after another alive with marks drawn on factory walls.  Faded black letters that appear to have been stenciled, record the heights of Farmington River freshets from 1878, 1896, 1900, 1936, 1938, 1955, and other years not completely legible.

Puzzling Unreadable Plaques

You’d think the very purpose of a commemorative plaque is to be noticed and read.  But lately I’ve discovered many nearby markers posted in public places that are difficult, if not impossible to see.  What good does it do to hang a plaque in remembrance of a person or event if it is unreadable?

For decades I have crossed the Bulkeley Bridge which carries Interstate 84 over the Connecticut River at Hartford, Connecticut.  Its nine granite arches spanning almost 1,200 feet made it the largest stone arch bridge in the world when completed in 1908.  It’s a dignified and sturdy structure, palpable evidence of civic pride.  In an alcove at the center of the north parapet is a large bronze plaque aged with a soft verdigris patina.  It contains a bas relief of a man in profile with words below it.  In the slower paced world of the early twentieth century, I’m sure the plaque was an ornament widely admired.  But today traffic whizzes by at over sixty miles per hour.  With no pedestrian access to the site, it can only be read from a car completely stopped in rush hour traffic in the right exit lane.

Rooftop Theatrics

I keep my eyes angled upward when passing through an area of unfamiliar buildings.  Sometimes there are surprises on high, atop the shingles, steel, or tarred   surfaces of a roof.  It may be a sculpture, a dummy stuffed with newspaper or straw, a bicycle, or other things clearly belonging on the ground.

Roofs are the defining characteristic of a building, the very essence of shelter.  A functional necessity that keeps out the weather, most are fairly standard and dull, hardly meriting a glance, though there are spectacular exceptions.  A roof of architectural virtuosity might draw my attention, but I’m more likely to do a double take when something quirky and out-of-place is sitting on the shingles.  Objects that don’t belong draw my eye and induce smiles.