Five: The Choking (1946-1960)
They called it prosperity.
I watched it arrive from the riverbank the way I watched most things arrive, quietly, from a distance, with the particular patience of someone who has learned that the thing humans call progress and the thing humans call damage are frequently the same thing wearing different clothes.
The boys came home from the war and the factories did not stop running, they simply changed what they were making. Providence had been a jewellery city before the war and it became a jewellery city again, and a textiles city, and a metals city, and all of that making and grinding and producing poured itself, as making and grinding and producing always does, into the nearest available water.
My water.
I noticed it first in the fish. The fish always know before anything else does, before the instruments the university boys would eventually develop to measure such things, before the newspapers decided it was worth reporting, before the city fathers looked up from their ledgers long enough to notice that the river running through the heart of their prosperous city smelled of something that was not river. The fish left the upper reaches of the Woonasquatucket first, then the Moshassuck, pulling back toward the bay the way a hand pulls back from a hot stove. Slowly at first, then all at once.
Lord Dagon’s waters were being poisoned and the people doing the poisoning were being written about in the newspaper as pillars of the community.
I found this, and find it still, extremely clarifying about the nature of pillars.
The covering came in stages, which is how the worst things usually come. Not all at once, which would at least have the virtue of clarity, but incrementally, each step small enough to seem reasonable, the sum of them a catastrophe that no single person had exactly decided on. A culvert here. A fill project there. A road that needed to go somewhere and found the river in its way and concluded, as roads always conclude, that it had the right of way.
By the early 1950s significant portions of my rivers were gone. Not gone in the way that things that have never existed are gone, but gone in the way of things that have been buried alive, still present, still moving, still cold and dark and patient beneath the concrete and the asphalt and the weight of a city that had decided it needed parking more than it needed water.
I felt it the way you feel a change in pressure. A tightening. A diminishment of something I had not known I was taking for granted until it began to be taken from me.
The others felt it too, though they expressed it differently. The younger ones grew irritable and then despondent in the way of people who cannot name what is wrong with them but feel it in the body regardless. The older ones, those of us who remembered Innsmouth, recognised it for what it was and said nothing, because we had learned that saying what is wrong does not always help and sometimes makes it considerably worse.
We are not, as I have mentioned, a people who speak extensively of what is happening to us. We are much better at enduring it.
But endurance has its limits. Even for us.
Henryk came to me in the summer of 1950 with the look he had inherited from his mother, which was the look of someone who has made a decision and is informing you of it rather than asking your opinion.
“We are leaving,” he said.
I looked at him for a long time. The water around us was not what it had been. Even here, in the lower reaches closer to the bay, there was a quality to it that had not been there before the war. A taste. A wrongness that was not the natural wrongness of deep water but the introduced wrongness of things that had no business being in water at all.
“Where,” I said.
“Judith Point. Maybe further south. The water is cleaner there. The bay is still good.” He paused. “Marta is expecting again.”
I looked at my son, this man who had been born in Innsmouth in a year when Innsmouth was still a place, who had grown up in Fox Point when Fox Point still had its back against clean water, who had tried to go to war for a city that did not know he existed and been turned away by a tired doctor who had seen enough strangeness for one lifetime.
“How many are thinking of going,” I asked.
“The Marshes. What is left of them. The Silvas from the fish market. Some of the younger ones I do not think you know well.”
This was the fracturing I had felt coming the way you feel weather. Not all at once. Not a breaking. Just a slow separation, family from family, the community that had built itself carefully in the Fox Point shadows beginning to pull apart at the seams like something that had been wet too long.
“And you,” I said. “What do you want, Henryk.”
He was quiet for a moment in the particular way of a man who knows what he wants and is not certain he has the right to want it.
“Clean water,” he said finally. “For the children. Clean water and somewhere we do not have to hide quite so completely.”
I appreciated that he didn’t twist the knife by stating that he wanted to be there for his children, unlike me. It was a subtle kindness.
I thought about Innsmouth. About the streets that were ours and the reef below and the gold that came up from the deep and the particular freedom of being exactly what you were in a place that knew what you were and did not flinch from it.
“Go,” I said. “Take Marta and go. The water here will not improve before the children are grown.”
He went. He took Marta and what they could carry and they went south along the bay toward cleaner water, toward wherever the current would take them and whatever life they could build close enough to the deep to remain themselves. I watched them go with the particular feeling of a man who has made the correct decision on someone else’s behalf and finds it does not feel as correct from the inside as it looked from the outside. They would surface in official records eventually, as we all must surface eventually, wherever the human world required their names on a document. Until then they would move as we move, close to the water, below notice, carrying Dagon’s mark in their blood through whatever lives they made in the years ahead.
I stayed. Someone had to stay, and I have never in my life been able to leave a thing that was still alive beneath the surface, however much that surface had been built over and poisoned and claimed by people who did not know what they were claiming.
Also, I am extremely old and the thought of relocating after twenty years in the same stretch of river was exhausting in a way I did not care to examine too closely.
But mostly the first reason.
The 1950s in Providence were, from the surface, a picture of the postwar American dream in its most earnest and least self-aware expression. The East Side filled with young families. Brown University expanded. The downtown shopping district along Westminster Street hummed with the particular energy of people who had survived something terrible and decided the appropriate response was to buy things.
From below it was a different picture entirely.
The Woonasquatucket ran grey and thin beneath its concrete lid. The Moshassuck carried whatever the dye houses upstream decided to put in it, which varied by season and by what corner had been cut that week in the name of the profit margin. The Providence River itself, my river, the one that ran through the heart of the city and out to the bay, was cleaner than its tributaries but accumulating the insults they brought down to it with the patient resignation of something that has no choice but to receive what it is given.
I received it too. We all did. The community that remained in Providence, those of us too old or too stubborn or too something to follow Henryk south, felt the degradation in ways I will not describe in detail because some of what we endured in those years is not something I choose to put into words. It is enough to say that the water that is your home becoming hostile to you is not a small thing. It is not a thing you adapt to. It is a thing you survive, or do not, and some of us did not.
We lost three in those years to what I can only describe as a kind of withering. Not illness exactly, not in any way a human doctor would recognise or a human death certificate would record. Simply a diminishment, a slow fading, as though the water that sustained them had been diluted past the point where it could do its work. They went quietly and they went confused, which is the worst way to go, not understanding why the world that had always held them was no longer holding.
I said the old prayers. I lit what offerings I could manage in those grey and diminished years. I felt the prayers heard in the way I always feel such things, distantly and without the comfort of certainty, which is perhaps not so different from how the humans feel their prayers answered, and perhaps that is the most honest thing I have said in this entire document.
I think of them still, in the quiet hours of this June night in 2025, the ink drying slowly on the page while the river moves outside and the city above sleeps its brief human sleep. I think of all the ones we have lost, to the poisoned water, to the long years, to the simple human choices of those among us who looked at what they were and decided it was not what they wanted to be. Those last losses sit differently than the others. The withering took people from us without asking. But some looked at Dagon’s mark in their blood and chose to walk in the other direction, and that is a different kind of gone entirely, and I will not pretend otherwise, not even here, not even in a document that no one may ever read.
We are fewer than we were. We have always been fewer than we were. This is the fact I have been writing around for five entries now and I find I am tired of writing around it.
The city above continued its prosperous choking, entirely unaware that it was choking anything other than itself.
Federal Hill in those years was a world unto itself, which suited us well enough as neighbours go. Certain Families had made themselves the unofficial government of a significant portion of Providence’s informal economy, which meant that Federal Hill ran on its own logic, its own loyalties, its own careful system of who saw what and what they did with what they saw. We had no dealings with the Families directly. We are not foolish enough to have dealings with men in the Families directly. But we existed in a kind of parallel obscurity, two communities that had each concluded that the less the authorities knew about their business the better, and that shared understanding created a kind of neighbourly equilibrium that served everyone adequately.
They did not ask about us. We did not ask about them. The river ran grey beneath its concrete lid and above it Federal Hill made its own arrangements and Providence looked the other way with the practiced grace of a city that had been looking the other way since before the Revolution.
It was not a good decade. But we were still here at the end of it, which in my experience is the minimum acceptable outcome and occasionally the best one available.
In 1957 I went to the surface on a night in October when the air had that particular cold clarity that comes just before the season turns, and I walked, slowly and with considerable effort and a very large coat, to the stretch of road that had been built over the upper Woonasquatucket, and I stood there on the pavement and I listened.
You can hear it still, if you know how to listen. Beneath the road noise and the city noise and the general clamour of a place that never quite goes silent, the water moving in the dark beneath your feet. Patient. Cold. Unchanged in its fundamental nature by everything that had been piled on top of it.
Still there.
Still moving.
Still waiting for someone to remember it was there.
I stood on that pavement for a long time in my very large coat and I thought about Innsmouth and about Henryk and about the three we had lost and about the tired doctor from Cranston and about what it meant to be a people who endure.
Then I went back to the water, because that is what I do, and I waited.
I have always been very good at waiting.
– S.Z., Providence, June 2025
