Subcontinental Shoreline Seer

You know how sometimes a song just falls out of you and then the universe decides to fuck with you in the most perfect way possible? That’s what happened with “Geometric Shoreline.”

I wrote the thing maybe two, three weeks ago. It started as this hazy memory of a mushroom trip on a little rock peninsula sticking out into a reservoir up in the hills — wind whipping the waves, four of us shoulder to shoulder, hair blowing back like we were in some dramatic movie, feeling like the entire fucking planet was putting on a show just for us. I put it all in there: the high moon wind leaning in, the teaspoon rivers, the peninsula laughing, the whole “waves of oppression” bit that got instantly torched by the one guy in the group who could see straight through our white-guy profundity. I called him the Subcontinental Seer because he was from India and he had this way of just… seeing. And the song had that line in the chorus that felt like it belonged there from the beginning:
Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through.
I recorded a version, threw some trippy artwork on it — real mushrooms, cartoon mushrooms, shorelines, geometric patterns, the works — and dropped it on YouTube. YouTube took one look and said, “Nope. Too many mushrooms. Take it down.” So I had to rewrite the visuals, tone down the obvious, and put out a safer cut. The first version sounded like some lost Outlaws or Marshall Tucker Band track — loose, gritty, Southern-rock swagger. The new one came out more psychedelic bluegrass, which I actually dig. Songs do what they want. You just get out of the way.
But here’s the part that still has me cracking up weeks later.
Right around the same time I was finishing the song, I stumbled on this map of southeastern Wisconsin and there it was — the actual Subcontinental Divide running right through Menomonee Falls like some glacial middle finger to geography. Same word. Different continent. The song had already been carrying “Subcontinental Seer” for Sunil, and suddenly the planet itself was handing me the real thing: a low, invisible ridge that decides whether rainwater ends up in the Great Lakes or the Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a subcontinental divide. I knew the big Continental Divide out west, but this one? It felt like the song had been waiting for me to catch up.
And that, my friends, is when the whole thing got stupidly funny.
Because the song also contains the single greatest spontaneous sentence ever uttered by a human being coming down off mushrooms.
We’re talking thirty-five years ago. A different trip, this one in Amherst. We’d been out hiking all day, got filthy, soaked, the usual. We get back to the grad-house busted mansion, strip off the wet clothes, and drape them over the woodstove because that’s what you do when you’re twenty-something and living like animals. The clothes come back to life stiff as corpses. Meanwhile we’re all coming down from the peak, so of course we’re smoking bong hits like it’s our job. The two brothers who were in medical school at the time — brilliant, hilarious, future doctors — are there, along with me. We’re in that sweet spot where everything is still a little funny but the edges are starting to sharpen again.
And out of nowhere, one of them — the one who always delivered lines like a surgeon with a sense of humor — looks down at his now-rigid, woodstove-crisped jeans and says, deadpan:“I bong-i-nate my bong-in in my rigor mortis haberdashery.”
We lost it. Hit the floor. Could not stop. The kind of laughing where you think you’re done, you’re actually crying, you try to breathe, and then thirty seconds later it hits you again like a second wave and you’re right back on the ground.
I still laugh about it thirty-five fucking years later. Just typing it makes me grin like an idiot.
Because think about it. This guy is in medical school. He knows exactly what rigor mortis is — the postmortem stiffening of muscle tissue when ATP runs out and the actin and myosin lock up like they’re never letting go. He’s learning how to pronounce it in cadavers and autopsies. And instead of using it for its proper, serious purpose, he looks at his stiff-as-a-corpse denim and decides the word now also applies to pants that have died on a woodstove and come back as formal wear.
Haberdashery. That’s the chef’s kiss. Haberdashery is the fancy old word for a gentleman’s outfitter — hats, ties, tailored jackets, the whole Savile Row routine. So he’s standing there in his resurrected, corpse-stiff field clothes like they’re a three-piece suit from a Victorian tailor. And the verb form — “bong-i-nate” — that’s him taking the casual act of smoking a bong and turning it into a medical procedure. Like he’s performing some kind of clinical bong-ination on the bong-in itself. It’s Latinized absurdity delivered with total medical authority.
It’s layers on layers of funny. The sentence is funny. The context is funny. The fact that a future doctor weaponized his professional vocabulary on a woodstove comedown while wearing dead jeans is funny. And then thirty-five years later some AI language model does a deep linguistic autopsy on it like it’s Shakespeare and that somehow makes the whole thing even funnier.
That’s the part that killed me when I read it back. The essay dissected the sentence with this top-shelf, scholarly precision — breaking down the -ate suffix, the taxonomic -in, the transfer of clinical meaning to domestic denim — and I’m over here crying because it’s all true and it’s all ridiculous. It’s like watching a heart surgeon perform open-heart surgery on a rubber chicken. The analysis is so good it heightens the absurdity instead of killing it.
And that’s the friendship, man. That’s what those years were like. Every sentence was a potential punchline. We were smart enough to know how ridiculous we were and dumb enough to lean all the way into it. Nonstop hilarity. Not the loud, forced kind. The kind where you’re just existing together and everything becomes comedy because you’re all tuned to the same absurd frequency.
So now the song has both Subcontinental Seers in it — the one who called out three white guys on a windy peninsula, and the glacial one in Wisconsin that I didn’t even know existed until two weeks after I wrote the chorus. The high moon wind is still leaning in. The Seer is still smiling. And somewhere in the background Paul is still bong-i-nating his bong-in in his rigor mortis haberdashery, and we’re all still falling apart laughing on the floor.
The song knew more than I did when I wrote it. That’s the best part.

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

What's Really Under 49 Mechanic Street — And What We Could Do About It©2026 John F. Sendelbach

You've probably heard about it at Town Meeting — the roughly quarter-acre parcel with a barn, sitting right next to the elementary school, that the Select Board wants to declare surplus and transfer to Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity for affordable housing. The need for more housing is real, no argument there. But the more I dig into this property — and I mean that literally now, because I went out and walked it — the more I think the people pushing hardest to move fast haven't looked carefully at what they're actually dealing with. Or what they might be giving up.

I'm not an engineer. I'm not a lawyer. I'm a resident with an internet connection, some curiosity about the maps, and now a pair of boots on the ground.

Start with the maps. Pull up MassMapper — the state's own GIS tool at maps.massgis.digital.mass.gov — zoom in on 49 Mechanic Street, and turn on the wetlands layers. You'll see a blue line running across or along the edge of that parcel. Cross-check it on the National Wetlands Inventory or the town's own AxisGIS viewer. It shows up on all of them. That line is Mechanic Street Brook — a real historic waterway, a tributary of the Deerfield River, draining a watershed of roughly 0.64 square miles, that was partially piped and buried as the village grew, the way a lot of New England streams were. It passes through substantial culverts beneath Route 2 and Mechanic Street itself before eventually discharging into the Deerfield River between the Iron Bridge and the Bridge of Flowers.

Here's the part that isn't being said at town meetings: that brook triggers automatic jurisdiction under the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. It doesn't matter that it's been buried. It doesn't matter that it only runs hard when it rains and goes quiet the rest of the time. Mapped streams — perennial, intermittent, even seasonal vernal features — bring a mandatory 100-foot buffer zone with them. Any building, grading, or significant site work within that buffer requires formal review by the Shelburne Conservation Commission, either through a Request for Determination of Applicability or a full Notice of Intent. This isn't a technicality. This is state law, and the Conservation Commission has independent authority to enforce it regardless of what the Select Board wants to do.

I don't think most people at the last Town Meeting knew that.

Then I went and looked for myself.

I walked the area recently and recorded what I found. At the front of the property, near the street, there's a surface drain inlet — exactly the kind of infrastructure that collects water sheeting off the road and channels it underground. There's a low point at the back of the lot where leaves have been moved by water flow, and the terrain has that worn, hollowed quality you see in historic stream channels. Someone has already placed pink survey flags in the vicinity. I noticed what appears to be a catch basin in the area. Whether that's a prior assessment or routine municipal maintenance, I don't know — but someone has been paying attention to water movement here.

I also got a look at a pipe — the kind of outlet you'd expect from a buried drainage conduit. It's consistent with what the maps suggest: water doesn't disappear, it goes somewhere, and in this case it appears to travel underground through the village drainage network and discharge into the Deerfield River through a large concrete spillway. That outlet sits roughly a thousand feet as the crow flies from 49 Mechanic Street, right between the Iron Bridge and the Bridge of Flowers — exactly where the maps show Mechanic Street Brook meeting the Deerfield.

Then a neighbor told me something that made everything click.

A resident who lives near the property gave me permission to see part of the water course from their yard. And then they told me something I hadn't expected: within the last generation — within living memory, well within a human lifetime — Mechanic Street Brook ran right through the backyard of 49 Mechanic Street. Kids played in it. It was a real, flowing stream, strong enough that people remember it fondly. At some point, it was diverted. The water was rerouted, channeled underground, and sent toward the river through that concrete spillway. The hollow you can see at the back of the property isn't a coincidence. It's a scar. That's where the stream used to run.

And when I mentioned this to someone else later, the response was matter-of-fact: oh yes, everybody knew that building was built on top of water. Common knowledge, apparently — to everyone except the people making decisions about it at Town Meeting.

This is not ancient history. This is a living watershed with a documented diversion, physical evidence still visible on the ground, and eyewitnesses who remember the stream in its original state. And it almost certainly means the property carries wetlands jurisdiction not just because of what shows on a map today, but because of what was deliberately moved away from it within recent memory. The Conservation Commission and MassDEP take the history of alterations seriously. You can't simply divert a stream and declare the land clean.

The barn is part of this story too. I got a look at it. It's in rough shape — the foundation is a serious concern, though the back end holds up better than the front. The footprint is historic, which has value, but any renovation or demolition would almost certainly require Conservation Commission review given what's underneath and beside it. Some have floated ideas beyond housing — a community space, a museum, something connected to the watershed's cultural and natural history, or a piece of a larger Pocumtuck State Park vision for the region. Given what I now know about the stream that used to run through this property, those ideas deserve a serious hearing. More on that in a moment.

The politics. The town previously tried to fund a pre-development environmental study — wetlands delineation, soils, flood review, the works. It failed at Town Meeting on a 41-41 tie vote. Now there's talk of a more comprehensive assessment in the $30,000 range. Some residents say skip it, sell it, buyer beware. Others are pushing hard to get it to Habitat regardless. At one meeting a Select Board member got red in the face when a resident pressed on the buildability question. That's not an answer. That's a tell.

Buyer beware doesn't override the Wetlands Protection Act. No buyer — not even a well-funded nonprofit with grant money — can build without going through the Conservation Commission. On a quarter-acre lot where the back portion appears to occupy a historic stream channel and the front sits within range of an underground drainage conduit, the actual buildable area could be quite small. That means potential variances, mitigation requirements, added costs, and no guarantees.

One more thing worth noting. The stream doesn't just affect 49 Mechanic Street in isolation. The brook appears to run along the front corner of the lot before going underground, and mapping of buried stream features can carry positional uncertainty of twenty feet or more in either direction. That means the hundred-foot buffer almost certainly extends onto neighboring properties as well. That's not a reason to panic — it's a reason for anyone with interest in this corner of town, whether buyer, abutter, developer, or neighbor, to understand the rules before making plans. The Conservation Commission exists precisely for this purpose. A formal determination protects everyone, not just the town.

The suggestion... before the town transfers a public asset with documented environmental constraints and public funds attached, residents deserve straight answers. Has the Conservation Commission been asked for a formal determination on the brook and its buffers on this specific parcel — including its history of diversion? What does the buildable area actually look like once the rules are applied? What variances would be needed, and how realistic are they? And are there other uses for this lot and this barn that might serve the community better with fewer obstacles?

There's also a concrete next step any interested party could take right now: the Water Department has maps of the underground drainage network. Pulling those would show exactly where all of this water goes and confirm what the neighborhood already knows from memory. That information should be part of any serious assessment of this property.

If the $30,000 study is the tool that gets us real answers, do the study and share the results publicly before any final vote on transfer. If it shows real barriers, that's not failure. That's responsible government doing its job.

Now for the bigger idea.

What if instead of asking how we squeeze a house onto this complicated little lot, we asked a completely different question? What if the regulatory obstacle is actually pointing us toward something better?

Mechanic Street Brook ran through the backyard of 49 Mechanic Street within living memory. A neighbor told me the kids played in it all summer long because it ran so strong. Someone diverted it — quietly, within the last generation — and sent it underground to the river through a concrete spillway. The hollow where it ran is still there. The land remembers. What if we unerased it?

This is called stream daylighting — removing pipes and culverts, restoring a natural channel, letting buried water flow above ground again. And before you think it sounds like an expensive fantasy, understand that it's already happening all over Massachusetts, including right here in the Connecticut River watershed.

Consider Smelt Brook in the Boston suburbs — Weymouth and Braintree — a stream that was heavily culverted and buried under roads and development for decades. The town daylighted a section using roughly $1.6 million in MassWorks grants, replaced aging infrastructure, created a public walkway and pocket park along the restored brook, and improved fish passage for migratory smelt. Completed in phases around 2020 to 2022, locals now have a living stream instead of a concrete pipe. Or look at what the Charles River Watershed Association has done daylighting buried tributaries — Cheesecake Brook in Newton, Canterbury Brook in Mattapan, sections of the Muddy River. Classic erased urban streams, now open again, with natural channels, riparian vegetation, and measurable improvements in water quality, habitat, and flood resilience. The Island End River in Everett was daylighted in 2021. These aren't wilderness restoration projects in remote forests. They are exactly the scale of a quarter-acre village lot next to a school.

And we don't have to look far for precedent on stream engineering in this specific watershed. Hurricane Irene tore through the Deerfield River valley in 2011 and washed out riverbanks, roads, and infrastructure right in our backyard. In the years that followed, the Franklin Land Trust, Mass Audubon, and others did extensive natural stream and riverbank restoration work throughout Franklin County — using bioengineering techniques, rootwads, rock vanes, floodplain reconnection, and native plantings instead of armoring everything in concrete. That work is still cited as a model for climate-resilient restoration in western Massachusetts. We already know how to do this here. We've already done it.

The original diversion of Mechanic Street Brook was almost certainly a response to flooding complaints — neighbors with wet basements, water over the banks, the usual pressure on a small-town public works department. Pipes and culverts were the quick answer. But modern stream science knows that burying water doesn't solve flooding — it concentrates it, speeds it up, and pushes the problem downstream. What's called Natural Channel Design, now used by the Army Corps of Engineers, MassDEP, and watershed organizations across the country, takes the opposite approach. You restore gentle meanders, pools, and riffles. You slope the banks properly. You plant native trees and deep-rooted shrubs to stabilize soil and slow water. You reconnect the stream to a small floodplain so it can spread out during heavy rains instead of shooting through pipes. The result is better flood control than the pipe ever provided, plus clean water, fish habitat, cooler stream temperatures, and something you can actually see and touch and learn from.

Picture what this could look like at 49 Mechanic Street. The channel is restored through the back of the lot, following the hollow that already marks where the water used to run. Native plantings stabilize the banks. A small interpretive area tells the story of Mechanic Street Brook — where it comes from, where it goes, and what lived in it before the diversion. The barn — with its historic footprint and its back end still structurally sound — becomes a watershed learning center and field station where kids from the elementary school next door study the living system at their doorstep. On rainy days you watch the brook come alive. In spring you look for returning species. The land gets to remember what it once was.

This isn't just a nice image. It's a fundable project. Stream restoration and wetland daylighting open doors to grants that straight housing development cannot touch — MassDEP wetland restoration funds, (Massachusetts grants $1.4 million for wetland, river restoration, The administration of Gov. Maura Healey awarded more than $1.4 million on Feb. 26, 2026, to support river and wetland restoration projects across Massachusetts.) river stewardship programs, climate adaptation and resilience money, wildlife habitat grants, educational partnership funding. The barn's proximity to the school makes it competitive for environmental education grants that rarely find a ready-made site like this. Affordable housing has its own funding streams, and there are other town-owned parcels that may be far better suited for homes without the regulatory complexity of a historic stream channel running through the back yard.

There is also a deeper dimension here that deserves to be said plainly. The Pocumtuck people lived in this watershed for thousands of years before European settlement. They understood Mechanic Street Brook not as a nuisance to be managed or a pipe to be buried, but as part of a living system — the same system that includes the Deerfield River, the Connecticut River, the fish that ran up them, the birds that followed the fish, the plants that held the banks, the groundwater that fed the wells. Indigenous cultures valued that little stream on a level that modern development planning simply doesn't have language for. We came in and erased it. We called that progress.

Restoring Mechanic Street Brook wouldn't undo everything. But it would be an honest acknowledgment that the erasure happened, and a real step toward repair. In a region that takes the Pocumtuck legacy seriously — and Shelburne Falls does, more than most places — that matters.

BRING BACK THE FISH CYCLE www.ctriver.org/migratory-fish

This could be a prototype. Small New England towns have buried streams all over them, diverted within living memory, their channels still visible as hollows and scars in backyards and vacant lots. What if one town — this town — decided to unbury one? What if 49 Mechanic Street became the demonstration project that showed how it's done: the engineering, the permitting, the community process, the grant funding, the educational partnership, the before and after? What if the lesson traveled from Shelburne Falls to every other town sitting on a buried brook?

The maps are public. The law is public. The water runs where it runs, whether we acknowledge it or not. The Conservation Commission meets the second Tuesday of every month. The Water Department has the underground drainage maps. The Franklin Land Trust and Mass Audubon have done this kind of restoration work right here in Franklin County. The tools exist. The knowledge exists. The living memory of what this stream was exists, in the neighbors who played in it as children and still live on the street.

What exists right now is a choice. The town can rush to transfer a constrained public parcel for a housing project that may face significant regulatory obstacles and deliver less than promised. Or it can stop, look carefully at what's actually there, and ask whether this particular piece of land has a better destiny than a difficult variance application.

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook. Let the water come back. Let the kids find it.