Paper Pulp
By Christian Arthur

Before they tore down Fitch’s and replaced it with a prissy low-walled footbridge for joggers and moms with strollers, we used to climb up the scaffolding and jump into the river. The youth mind has it’s own logic. The jump was worth it. We would scale the rusty slanted beam higher than the treeline and teeter across to the middle, arms outstretched for balance.
On one side was the shredded metal and clinging wood of the bridge’s remains. On the other side in the river there was a landing spot we knew to avoid. Rumor was, bed springs and a twisted boat trailer lay at the bottom of that dark patch. But we did it all for the exhilarating drop. Not even three seconds. What is the farthest height you’ve jumped from? You are in control for the first eighteen feet off Fitch’s. This is awesome, like flying. Like passing moving along a novel dimension. Then the velocity picks up and right before you hit the water you are moving faster than you can think.
Spring of junior year. Back then I dated Taylor, who gave me a love note, a picture of a river, curling it into a heart, the sun, and my name. She was always giving me love notes, little drawings made in that swirling and organic style a lot of girls seem to doodle with. She did flowers and script really well. Pretty standard stuff until I moved abroad, at least by discernibly small town standards. When I came back to the States for the summer, Tay was involved with someone else, so we broke up. But while I was in Belgium, the little river drawing became a talisman, a symbol of home and the future return. Groton is your average suburban town and Tay was a normal girl, but I made them impossibly unique and special with a conscious yearning. Through experience we learn the terrible power of memory; how we can pollute it, and how it can in turn can pollute us.
I can now look back with the clarity that comes of emotional process. When I landed in Boston, I wondered if the plane had crossed over into an alternate dimension while I slept. OK, there was a little reverse culture shock, and granted, people change their identity by the week in high school, but my vaulted memories were incompatible with this new place that was not the hometown had I left behind. Fitch’s was the physical manifestation of the incompatibility.
“Ewan and Arlo were down at the bridge and the cops came,” Tay gives me a hurried kiss, “We need to go there, right now. Trish and Cait are on the way.” No doors on the Jeep, so our hair was writhing in the roaring wind and I am trying to hide a guilty smile because it feels so damn good to be back. “Fitch’s isn’t cool anymore. The cops come all the time. We don’t go,” she says. In all honesty, my long-distance relationship with Tay existed more in memory than in real life. She was a voice emanating from a cheap Nokia cell phone receiver after the intense beginning in person. Love-drunk teenagers. A million cheap and easy “I Love You’s” Was that a fire fly? Was that a flashlight down by the river that flows and connects town to town, to same old town. How much young love born of this river? How much young love born of memory, itself born of fill in the blank, and where I fill in “the river.”
You know, the Nashua River was once one of the top ten most polluted rivers in the United States? In nearby Fitchburg, the paper mills let the leaving water carry away industrial waste; chemicals, dye, and pulp. Sometimes the river was a different color each day; yellow, red, blue, green, or black, etc. The river was so polluted it prompted an entirely new policy, the first anti-water pollution bill of any state, the Massachusetts Clean Water Act. Marion Stoddart, a local activist, convinced the people in Groton, Townsend, and Leominster, to join together and clean up the river, and screen out the pulp. The color faded from the river, the viscosity thinned. There is a longstanding myth about the extent to which the pulp stacked up in the waters. Oldtimers claim they saw squirrels and rabbits run across the surface. Imagine it’s 1961, and these same oldtimers are kids. The river is indigo. Somebody gets dared to try and cross. Maybe they get a couple steps across the floating hunks of cellulose, before their foot finds no support and they sink up to their neck. The particles of paper pulp coagulate around the arms and legs.
Trapped in a slow-moving pulp-flow. Up on a hill, see a couple leaning in close to talk. They start throwing leaves. This is like a dream world. The indigo-colored, alkaline-tasting water splashing in the mouth, the eyes, the nose. Disorientation. Upstream the paper mills replicate paper roll after paper roll and access memory after memory. I heard on NPR every time we remember something, we rewrite the memory onto our synaptic data bank. Remembering is an act of recreation injecting imagination and affect, pollution. Copy, indigo, copy, copy. Therefore, the things you remember the most are farthest from their original form. You make it something else. For example, sit in the park across the world from your girlfriend and think about your first kiss. If you do this most days after school, you will quickly destroy the memory. Copy, indigo, copy, indigo. After you break up she dies in a car crash in 2012, so when you remember her smile, you remember her smile less. What you remember is not her smile. You distort it. The river is not the river. The river is an indigo river made of pulp that imprisons you:

Sitting on a longboard. Gliding. Turkish golds. Bleary eyes, “Hey, thanks for the ride to school.” C Block. Out by Fitch’s. “Yeah, headed to Fitch’s again.” Jeep, first kiss. I’m drunk. It’s cool. She says it’s cute. [The place where memory holds you] Favorite color: green and purple. “Another cigarette, the plane can wait.” Blue prom dress. North America. “Who is he?” Awkward parties. Doodle in the trash. Did she just try and be friendly? “Oh my god, is she OK?”

Out of these very personal life events, I hope to have produced an instructive or relatable metaphor about the dangers of remembering, one increasingly grown convoluted, because this would be an appropriate form. The danger lies in how we fold memory over, redecorate, burrow tunnels through, and turn it inside out. Most people have loved and lost, and have had friends pass away. These things continue to happen as we age, and I would like to think we get better at coping. This is tragically not guaranteed, of course. We can only hope that somewhere, internally or externally, figuratively or literally, there is a Marion Stoddard and 1,000 people prepared to rehabilitate. We should take care to extend this metaphor further to absolve memory of absolute blame and to acknowledge healthy remembering. To this day, there are mills in Fitchburg, MA making paper and the rivers don’t change color. I am thankful for the clean waters I can call my own, and how I have nice low-walled foot bridge to look out from. The passerby are friendly and sometimes stop to chat. Yes, I always agree sincerely, thank God they tore down that bridge. So ugly and dangerous. There may still be bed springs at the bottom of the river. We can grab some scuba gear sometime to explore that history, but when we do, let’s wade in cautiously from the shore.