By Jake Hogan

Stories from the Dirty Wu

By Jake Hogan

Chickadees in a Chain-Link Fence

I am nine years old and I know everything.

A month ago, Anthony and I were staring up at the sky from the half-acre of asphalt where we have recess. There were no clouds, but the sky was dotted with the white shapes of seagulls circling us above, sojourners from the shore ten miles east. “Why are they here if the ocean is far away?” he asked. “Do they think the pond is the ocean?”

“No, they came here for these,” I told him, as I shook the last Cheez-its from a Ziploc bag into my palm.

“They like it here because it’s dirty,” he said. “My dad says in Winchester they call it the Dirty Wu because when the wind blows over there from Woburn, it smells bad.”

I didn’t like that statement. I’d heard it called that, but I’d never been told that the name referred to a smell. I wanted to tell him that I thought he was mistaken, but if I’m wrong, he might think he knows more than me. So I just said, “I know,” and decided to fact-check later.

The truth is, I am nine years old and I know everything, but I learned it from people who know even more, inheriting information in anecdotal adages. My grandmother has lived here for all sixty-four years of her life, and her mind hosts a dense compendium of things I ought to know—all the stories they don’t write down.

Like how before fridges made ice cubes, Puggy next door was the iceman, and he took horses out onto the pond in winter to cut ice. “Don’t you ever walk on that ice. You’ll fall through like the horses,” she would say. “Their bodies are still under there.”

It’s a no-go in the summer, too. “There used to be a beach on Horn Pond,” she told me, pronouncing the name like ‘honpon,’ “and when I was your age I nearly died because the weeds pulled me under.”

“And when she was young, your mother ran out the front door screaming ‘cause a man in the pond was drowning. She was gonna jump in the pond and I had to hold her back. Guess what the man was caught on? A mattress spring! Someone dumped a mattress in there and killed that poor man.”

If the pond could talk back to us, I wonder if it would apologize. My grandmother told me that before I was born, my great aunt Sheila had just graduated from the high school and was driving with her friends when she swerved off the road and plummeted into the water.

But you can’t really blame the pond for that. Besides, there are good things, too.

When we walk up Horn Pond Mountain, we can see all the way to Boston, and my grandmother showed me where the ski slope used to be. I like to stop and look at the wooden statue of Winitihooloo, who she tells me lived right where we live 400 years ago. There’s music in the sound of crickets chirping at sunset, and there’s art in the way that fog swirls up from the water at sunrise.

Still, some parts are less than pristine, like the rusty, warped chain-link fence around the old reservoir, now colonized by invasive reeds—the natural world mirroring the human. There are plastic water bottles crushed into the fences’ holes, abandoned by people walking the paved path around the pond. The steel wire diamonds are the perfect size for a chickadee, though, and there’s always a few jumping through the holes again and again, like it’s a game.

I’ve adopted my grandmother’s way of understanding the environment, some murky combination of distrust and gratitude. For each springtime walk around the pond, chatting with the snapping turtles and gliding parallel to the swans, she told cautionary tales.

I’m nine years old and I know everything, but it’s the type of knowing where the knowledge lives in a communal well that has been poisoned, just like the ones in real life. The warning I heard most often was to never drink the tap water. They say that the factories put chemicals in the river or buried them in barrels and those toxins got into our water and gave a bunch of people cancer. I used to think she was exaggerating to scare me into a life of Poland Springs brand loyalty, but I came to find that this warning was either ironic or true.

Last month, after my chat with Anthony, I went straight home to my grandmother. I sat next to the hospital bed they set up in our living room and asked her if our town is called “The Dirty Wu” because it smells bad.

She didn’t answer right away, and I worried I had reached a limit on such lessons. But like a frozen lake thaws, she melted the pause, telling me in a shifting tone like waves lapping against sand, “No, they’re just jealous.”

I don’t think that the land we live on wants to hurt us, and she must know that too. Regardless of all that she’s seen, she still loves the pond across the street, so much so that today, per her request, we spread her ashes over it from the mountaintop. From there, you can see all of Horn Pond, our house, the pondside power plant, and the respites of green dotted among the gray of homes and roads. Pavement and pollution criss-cross on the map, but there are still gaps of trees and nicer things. Even though it’s surrounded by concrete and steel, the pond and its woods sing and dance like chickadees playing in a chainlink fence. On the walk home, I saw a little brown animal I’d never seen before swimming in the water. I wonder if my grandmother is fond of these creatures or if they have wronged her somehow. Perhaps, like the pond, they are somewhere in between an old friend and a persistent enemy. It occurs to me that my soul’s portrait of this landscape is still only half-painted and that I’ll have to color the rest in myself. So, I’ll talk to the rocks and the rivers and listen for replies on the wind’s breath. I’ll ask my questions to the pond, and the poison barrels, and Winitihooloo, and the seagulls. Regardless of what they tell me, though, I’ll never trust the tap.

An Illegally Buried Barrel of Solidified Industrial Waste Clears His Name.

I’d like to address the accusations. Really, I think that

I’m the one who should be angry.

Let me be clear: my lid is firmly sealed, and I am not leaching chemicals into Woburn’s groundwater. Even if my contents were contaminating the soil, most of the gunk in my 55-gallon volume may be solidified animal fat from a tannery, for all we know. Meanwhile, you’ve had a century of problems with PCE, TCE, PFAS, arsenic, chromium, lead, and likely more you don’t even know about yet.

Nobody cares about that, though. They just hear me introduce myself as “Illegally Buried Barrel of Solidified Industrial Waste” and they immediately think to themselves, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

You think I don’t feel guilty? If I could dig myself up, I would, but this isn’t the fate I chose. My steel could just as easily have been a nice fence, or maybe a telescope; useful things. But instead, my utility is to a select few, while my existence is of disservice to the rest.

Resent the people who buried me here illegally, those who had resources and options, rather than a limbless metal shell. Attack whatever system forced me to be part of the problem, and get off my back.

The Life, Death, and Carving of an

American Tree

When I was a seed, I knew nothing but the basic instincts baked into my being. When you’re a seed, you feel yourself fall just before the pressure of soil piles above you. That’s when the overwhelming urge to stretch comes over you, and suddenly your root has burst forth into the ground. Your reality shifts when you unfurl your first leaves and feel the sun. It’s all in perspective now, your simple existence. You will live to stretch your roots and drink from the Earth while sprawling your leaves under the daylight. Long ago, when the stars were visible, you would spend the night relaxing under a blanket of faraway suns and wonder if they were surrounded by celestial flora. I guess you wouldn’t get it if you aren’t a tree.

Those are the memories I hold onto from when I was alive, still growing on the shady south bank of Horn Pond. For a while, I was lucky. The pond got poisoned and the roadways grew, but between them, my little slice of woods persisted.

My good fortunes faltered when they paved a footpath five feet from me. The soil went sour. I grew weaker until one day, a strong gust left me a snag of my former self.

From that jagged, crooked trunk, I was carved in man’s image. Now, I stand with a fish in my right hand and a braid falling over my shoulder. I represent a figure from one of the pre-colonial legends of this pond, published in a book two centuries ago.

The man whose likeness I’m meant to bear, Winitihooloo, loved a woman who lived at my pond. However, I prefer the story about that woman’s father, Wabanowi. One night, Wabanowi was awoken by a spirit who guided him up Mount Mianomo. There, he entered a cave which closed behind him and he fell into a deep sleep. He awoke years later and the spirit told him that she brought him there to spare him from witnessing what happened to his community. Looking out over the pond, he saw smokestacks rising from foreign chimneys, but no trace of his family.

That’s just a story, though. I’m not old enough to know how much the original was watered down as it flowed from one colonist to another before drying up as ink on a page.

But I too would like to be buried, led underground by a kind spirit and left there to sleep through a burgeoning storm, a seed once again.

Maybe when I woke up from that stasis, like Wabanowi, the world I knew would be long lost, faded into the void. My fellow trees would be clear cut or scorched, and the lake would be gone too, taken as vapor on the wind.

Or maybe I’d emerge into a dense forest full of trees much larger and older than me. Their roots would be drinking clean, fresh water, and their lush canopy would be reflected in the brilliant clarity of the pond. At night there would be a speckled sky above us, no longer saturated by LEDs and incandescents. Unobscured, I would feel the stars greeting me, hugging me with their light like an old friend returning home. H

Art by Sadie Holmes