By Scott Turner Oct. 17, 2009 in the Providence Journal

When I needed a place to “chill” during childhood I snuck into a nearby garage, snuggled in my own thoughts and dozed off.

I think of that oasis when I visit the Moshassuck River. Cool, damp, serene, sometimes smelling of oil and gas, home to Roger Williams and the Industrial Revolution, it’s the “river where moose watered” long ago.

The Moshassuck, with its beginnings in the tiny streams of Lime Rock near Lincoln, slices through a valley once the natural course of the Blackstone River until ice jammed it eons ago. Look west from College Hill to the 180-foot summit of Windmill Hill to witness the Moshassuck’s natural corridor.

It is “an old, old path,” said Greg Gerritt, founder of Friends of the Moshassuck, an advocacy, protection and restoration group. The valley was a main line before, during, and after the Revolution, when manufacturing was king in Rhode Island, and the river served as industrial sewer for mills, metal works and textile factories.

Today the Moshassuck shares the valley with hundreds of home and commercial properties, and major routes, including Interstate 95, Amtrak and MBTA rail lines, and North Main Street. At least 29 roadways cross the river across several communities.

Last week, I ran into Gerritt on my way to the river. We walked over to Collyer Park. Although the whine of interstate traffic dominated, I could still hear the water rippling over fallen trees.

We stood under a red maple on the stonework of the channeled bank. Sunlight pierced the crimson foliage, illuminating the river bottom. The summer algae and sewage smell were gone.

Gerritt said that in about 10 years, completion of the Narragansett Bay Commission’s combined sewage project would finally rid the Moshassuck of human waste.

In Collyer Park, Friends of Moshassuck have transformed a field of invasive Japanese knotweed into a budding river bottom forest of red and silver maple, sweetgum, red oak, river birch and white ash. The trees produce shade that suppresses the knotweed.

Japanese knotweed spreads rapidly into dense thickets, particularly along shorelines, withstanding drought, and flooding and high heat. It can reach 10 feet in height, with broad, oval pointy tipped leaves.

I’ve watched the trees planted by the Friends spread from atolls into a growing riparian forest, and the knotweed underneath begin to whither.

A trail of thick black plastic, dotted with the lemon-yellow land snails that congregate on it, winds through the new forest, which produces a fruit cereal display of gold, orange, red, purple and yellow in late October.

When a train in the valley discharged a three-second wistful warning whistle, I thought of our restructuring world in which so many people live in constant fear and uncertainty.

Restoring the health of local environments is a way to repair the world, Gerritt said. “If we don’t heal ecosystems, we won’t make it on this planet.”

Once, the Moshassuck fueled the greatest nation on earth. Then the river was left to die.

Still, the not-always-pretty Moshassuck flows to the sea. From its banks, Gerritt has seen menhaden, suckers and sunfish, fox, muskrat and herons.

Repair work by the Friends of the Moshassuck reminds me that mending can take a long time.

It was dark in the garage, where I once found refuge. There is light along the banks of the river, where a group of people believe they can transform the survival of an individual resource into a meaningful community for all of us.