At the bottom of my driveway, a few yards off Middle Road, the Tiasquam River flows by.
Since it is only six feet wide, it could easily pass for a brook or a stream. Yet it is the Vineyard’s one and only certified river, clearly so designated on all maps. From start to finish it is roughly three miles long.
Tiasquam is of course an Indian name, and of course nobody is quite sure what it means. It was also called Tiasquin, and nobody is quite sure what that means either. We will leave it at that.
When my wife and I built our Chilmark house forty years ago, we had to install a cement culvert
so that the Tiasquam could flow unimpeded beneath our new driveway. We were both charmed by this beautiful tiny river. It burbles and bubbles nicely over the rocks, just the way a country brook is supposed to. A few feet downstream from our culvert it divides around a yard-square grassy island. When we first arrived, three young trees were crowded onto this clump of land, but today only one tree survives.
Below the island the Tiasquam flows on beneath an ancient, open stone wall, built across the stream with great skill and style.
I had the romantic and nonsensical notion that when I retired, I would make wine from the wild grapes along Middle Road and bottle it under the name of Château Tiasquam. I had another notion, equally romantic but less nonsensical, that some day, with guidance from a Vineyard woodland expert, I would pay a visit to the source of the Tiasquam.
I knew in my heart that it would be a pure, crystal spring tucked away somewhere high up in the Chilmark hills.
Alas.
When I asked Chilmark Conservation Commission officer Rusty Walton if he knew where the source was, he said, “Which one? There are a couple of boggy swamps.” This year I visited both. The smaller source is on the Goff property off Tea Lane; the larger is on the Cossutta property off Middle Road. In both boggy cases the specific source is impossible to identify. Not even Pam and Clark Goff or Louis Cossutta, who showed me their respective bogs, can pin them down to a single spot. Both sources can best be described as widespread, indiscriminate seepage. Trickle by trickle, sometimes
drop by drop, the water emerges here and there from the sloppy, dark brown ooze. The Tiasquam
is a river that doesn’t know where it’s coming from.
It also doesn’t know where it’s going. This is a river that cannot make up its mind.
The Cossutta source and the Goff source, in two separate streams, cross underneath Tea Lane and,
still separate, cross through a corner of Walter Silva’s property (now owned by the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank) and then under Middle Road to its south side.
There, on conservation land owned by the Meeting House Road Association, the two streams finally unite. Thanks to a walking trail created by Will Flender, one can actually get an excellent view of what is now a recognizable though minuscule river. However, the newly united Tiasquam doesn’t like it on the south side of Middle Road. After a mere fifth of a mile, it switches back under Middle Road and returns to the north side.
Thanks to this change of venue, four properties briefly enjoy the bustling beauty of the Tiasquam – Lewis, Graves, Sayre, White. We happy few.
But after only half a mile on the north side, the Tiasquam switches yet again to the south side of Middle Road. Its motivation is at best whimsical, at worst irresponsible.
This crossing was the scene of an interesting wildlife event in the first week of October 1988. A scientist from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology spotted a brook lamprey, a very rare member of an endangered species. The brook lamprey, a toothy fish that grows up to eight inches long, hasn’t been seen on the Vineyard since, but Dick Johnson, executive director of Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation and a wildlife expert, says, “They are probably still out there somewhere.”
Once it has crossed Middle Road for the last time, the Tiasquam sobers up and travels, in a fairly orderly fashion, through eastern Chilmark, on through West Tisbury, under State Road, and eventually empties into Town Cove on Tisbury Great Pond. Up to that final Middle Road crossing, man has not interfered with the river, but after that point, man has made many alterations. Some of these changes took place centuries ago, some in very modern times.
Way back in 1688, only a few years after the first English settlers arrived, a fellow named Benjamin Church built a grist mill on the river to grind flour, and eventually the Tiasquam had six such mills.
Ideally a grist mill river should have a stronger flow of water and a steeper fall, but since the Tiasquam was the only river the millers had to work with, they made do with dams and flumes and spillways and water wheels. In 1715 Thomas Look bought Church’s mill, and it remained in his family, and in operation, for the next century and a half. Today, almost three hundred years after that purchase, the three-acre Look’s Pond in West Tisbury remains the largest body of water on the Tiasquam. Shirley Mayhew, who lives on the edge of Look’s Pond, wrote a yearlong journal called Seasons of a Vineyard Pond. Both meticulous and poetic, and accompanied by careful line drawings, it describes the infinite wildlife in this small universe – animals, birds, insects, microscopic creatures. One of the best pieces of nature writing about the Vineyard, it can still be found at
Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven.
Look’s Pond is not the only man-made body on the Tiasquam. Several others are worth attention.
In 1959 Hart and Dora Hillman dammed up the Tiasquam in the valley far below their house on the crest of Middle Road. The dam created a substantial but nameless pond. In the process the Hillmans
discovered a spring in the bottom of the river and decided to install a water wheel to pump this beautifully pure water up to their house. An engineer from the Fitz Water Wheel Company in Hanover, Pennsylvania, visited the Hillmans and designed their water wheel, which was shipped to the Vineyard in pieces. Dora Hillman and her son Tatnall banged the parts together with sledges and rivets. It worked! For the last two years, reports Tatnall’s sister-in-law Sandra Hillman, the water wheel has not been in operation. “It’s perfectly functional,” she says with a smile, “but it’s resting.” It hopes to be in operation again this summer.
Less than half a mile downstream from the Hillman dam is the much grander Murphy’s Pond, created by Stan and Polly Murphy in 1967 by means of an earthen dam and concrete spillway. Their son Chris Murphy remembers that they not only had no trouble getting permission but that the state even sent an expert to advise them on building the dam, which raises the level of the river five feet above the spillway. Unlike the Hillmans’ pond, Murphy’s Pond can be seen from Middle Road as you drive past Wendy Gimbel’s and Doug Liebhafsky’s famous oxen, the most photographed Vineyard residents since the Clintons.
Murphy’s Pond is a paradise for waterfowl. Each summer, geese nest there, and when it comes time to train the goslings to take off, fly, and land, the long waterway is as busy as the deck of an aircraft carrier. Ducks also enjoy the pond, and now and then a heron drops in. Ospreys build a nest nearby every year, perhaps to feast now and then on that rarest of delicacies, a brook lamprey.
Let us flow down to the Tiasquam’s finale, the last quarter mile before it empties into West Tisbury’s Town Cove. You get there by turning left, shortly after the up-Island gas station, on Carl’s Road, named after Carl Magnuson, who owned this land. His son Eric drove me down to the last Tiasquam “pond”
before Town Cove. I put “pond” in quotes because nobody is sure what we have here. Eric Magnuson says, “We sometimes call it Carl’s Cove, after my father, but sometimes we just call it Muddy Pond.” Allen Whiting, West Tisbury’s newly elected pond representative, calls it “a wide spot.”
Indeed, looking at this not very long, not very wide, and in truth, not very impressive stretch of water, I think “wide spot” is about right. Especially when I learn that when the Tisbury Great Pond cut is opened each summer, the “wide spot” water pours out into Town Cove and on down to the Atlantic Ocean. Whereupon the Tiasquam drains down once again to just a small river, which of course is what it has been all along.
A small river, a confused river, a meandering river – and yet there are those who love it.