Tool Town Left to its Own Devices
by Dave Fromm
The greatest sporting event you’ve probably never heard of happens on a Saturday afternoon every April in the hardscrabble North-Central Massachusetts town of Athol. It is called the Athol-Orange River Rat, it’s a five-point-two mile canoe race on the Millers River between Athol and the Orange Dam, it comes right at the beginning of spring when people are feral and the water’s freezing and sometimes there’s still snow on the ground and they’ve been holding it for 57 years. It is one of a kind.
* * *
Athol is a proud, mostly-post-industrial town of about eleven and a half thousand people that sits just north of the haunted Quabbin Reservoir on Route 2 between Greenfield and Fitchburg. The skyline is dominated by the smokestacks of the L.S. Starrett tool company, which has produced “precision tools, gages, measuring instruments and saw blades for industrial, professional and consumer markets worldwide” for over 140 years. Originally a Native American fishing village called Pequoiag, Athol was repurposed in 1735 by settler families and subsequently incorporated in 1762. Its name means “New Ireland” and is pronounced “Ath-all.” In the 1800s, Athol was a thriving manufacturing center, the surrounding waterways powering saw mills and grist mills and cotton mills. A trolley system connected it to its regional neighbors and a southwestern rail carried goods to Springfield and beyond. The bandstand at Brookside Park hosted big names like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Tool-Town, that’s what they called Athol back in the day.
The trolley system was wiped out by a hurricane in the 1930s and then the railroad disappeared when the Commonwealth flooded the Swift River Valley for the Quabbin. Route 2 (now 202), which runs from Boston to Greenfield, bypassed the handsome downtown. As it became cheaper to make things elsewhere, Athol’s mills and factories started shutting down. Millworkers lost jobs. In the 1980s, the Union Twist drill factory shuttered and Athol had the highest unemployment rate in the Commonwealth. A decade later, grassroots revitalization efforts took a hit when longtime Main Street shops lost a battle with a Wal-Mart Super-Center outside of town.
And yet.
Starrett still sits at the east end of downtown, along a curve of the river, and in the morning the shadows of the stacks stretch down over the credit union and Kellie’s Cafe and Tool-Town Pizza.
* * *
The River Rat began on a spring night in 1964, when a couple of guys from Athol were drinking with a couple of guys from Orange at what was then the Silver Front Café and is now the Steel Pub on Exchange Street. There was a fishing spot they wanted to get to down by the Orange Dam and why not a friendly wager as to who could paddle there first? Sounded like a good idea, as many things do while drinking. So they raced. And the next year they raced again. And over time the race grew into a staple – the staple – of the local calendar, loosely organized at first but fun and contagious, and what else was there to look forward to during the long winter months? Gradually they added a carnival and a parade and, in 1981, an after-party so large and raucous that it had to be broken up by the state police. Shortly thereafter the Athol Lions Club stepped in to chaperone. Now the River Rat weekend attracts up to 20,000 visitors and pumps $1 million dollars per year into a local economy sorely in need of it. Grown and flown natives of the area, given the choice to come home for Easter or the River Rat, return for the River Rat. There’s a spaghetti dinner and a pancake breakfast. One year a canoeist flew in from Alaska. Another year the race featured 418 boats, which is a lot of boats for a small river.
* * *
Despite growing up at one end of Massachusetts and going to school at the other, I’d never heard of the River Rat. One obvious reason was that I’m not a serious canoeist and while I’ve done the requisite for a Berkshires native it was all on lakes, where the option of starting and finishing at the same location removes much of the need for effort or logistics. The Berkshires have rivers, of course, but the vibe is pretty placid. The other reason I’d never heard of the River Rat was that I’d barely heard of Athol, except once when a columnist at my college newspaper suggested that it was named by “a disgruntled person with a lisp” – a quip which brought an immediate and pugilistic rebuke from the school’s proud Athol alums. For a lot of us from the (relatively) more cosmopolitan edges of the Commonwealth, North-Central Massachusetts, between Greenfield and Leominster, was a blank space on the map – indeed on a popular novelty illustration of the state the area bears the legend “Here Be Dragons.” (The Berkshires are labeled, not inaccurately, “Cultured Hill-Folk.”) I hadn’t spent much time in the area, never really knew anyone from there, never had a reason to go there. The closest I’d been was a summer basketball camp at Holy Cross in Worcester, whose hilltop campus seemed positioned in part to keep an eye on the wild communities to the north.
* * *
My wife and I had moved back to Massachusetts from California in 2008 to start a family and once we finished unpacking it was 2016, we had two kids under ten and I was desperate for distractions, the riskier the better. My dad, a psychologist, says that every expectant father dreams about motorcycles – perhaps it follows that every parent of elementary school kids dreams about getting into a small boat in a current. One day, searching the internet for age-appropriate outdoor activities, I came across a Facebook page for the River Rat, where people would upload videos from previous years’ races.
These videos looked insane.
Most of the videos were of the start of the race, which (I learned, Googling feverishly) begins on a narrow bend of the river near the Alan E. Rich Environmental Park, a grassy haven for damselflies and ticks and wildflowers in July – but not in April. In April, the meadow is haggard and the river is bare and swollen, with a fast-moving current courtesy of snow-melt enhanced by thousands of gallons of water pouring through the Tully and Birch Hill dams. Planning goes on for months beforehand. The Army Corps of Engineers is involved. Sponsors are lined up, safety teams assembled. Main Street is blocked off to traffic. Then the river rats show up.
Imagine, on average, three hundred canoes lined up along both banks, bows pointing out like the quills of a porcupine, the six hundred canoeists within those canoes clinging to roots and tree branches and each other to avoid getting sucked into the current and thereby disqualified for a false start.
Imagine that among those six hundred canoeists are probably sixty nationally-ranked paddlers, another hundred serious local athletes, legacy entries, tourists, thrill-seekers, father-son teams, grandparents, newlyweds, newcomers, people in costumes, people with large foam hats, people in fishing canoes, people with coolers.
Imagine that the canoes are seeded along the banks according to a blind-draw lottery conducted in the town hall the night before, right after the spaghetti dinner, a lottery that might result in dozens of the serious paddlers starting the race toward the back of the pack, while people with plastic rats on their heads start closer to the front.
Then imagine banks lined with spectators made gaunt and punchy by winter, drones buzzing through the air, smoke from backyard grills and food trucks hanging over the river, vuvuzelas, air-horns, backyard bands, police lights flashing.
Finally, if you’re so inclined, imagine within this madness a moment of tension, a moment in which the previous six months of winter and sixty years of racing and maybe even the previous two hundred years of hardscrabble survival curl taut around the river like a spring. And then a cannon goes off and all the boats surge toward the middle at once.
Here’s one video, if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/XR4a9r7S8sM. It’s like Pamplona with a chance of drowning.
* * *
I asked my childhood pal Chris if he wanted to do the 2018 River Rat with me. Chris comes from a skiing family and in 1989 he’d been the best high school cross-country skier in the Commonwealth. Even in his late forties, with little appreciable effort involved, he was still a freak of an athlete. I was a basketball player in my youth and Chris and I had never done anything like the River Rat together except for once, one long-ago September Sunday, when we were fourteen-year-olds on a Josh Billings triathlon team. I rode a bike from Great Barrington to Lenox. He ran around Stockbridge Bowl. We met at the finish line and never did it again. After high school we’d lost touch – I’d gone to Boston, then law school in D.C. and then married life in California, he’d gone off to ski at St. Michael’s in upstate New York before embarking on something of a nomadic life. He’d restored houses in Baltimore, worked in bars in Denver, poleaxed through Alaska, barnstormed across the great flatlands of the West. He’d been in Europe, met someone, then was back in Baltimore without her. In 2017, he’d returned to our hometown to look after his aging parents, driving into town in an enormous backcountry firefighting jeep equipped with a rooftop axe. He had braids in his hair and a foot of unruly beard. It was a disguise.
When I asked him if he wanted to do the River Rat, he said something like “Hmhmhmmm, it doesn’t sound fun.” This wasn’t a no, though – this was in fact the way Chris said yes to things – so I showed him the videos. He remained noncommittal. I sent in our $42 registration fee and waited to see if things would fall into place.
They did. Chris had a clear schedule on the weekend of the race and no legitimate excuse. My parents’ Nordic neighbors had a canoe we could borrow. My wife agreed to let me go if I promised to not drown. The weather looked good, with highs in the low 50s and a mild chance of rain. We were in.
* * *
The Saturday morning of the race I got up at 6:30 to pack a bag and meet Chris in the parking lot of a 91-adjacent Barnes & Noble. I had two paddles, two life jackets, a change of clothes and my bike. Our plan was to drive to Orange, lock up the bike near the finish line, then go to the canoe start in Athol, park the car and unload the canoe. That way, when the race was over, one of us could ride the five miles back to Athol from Orange, get the car and drive it down to the canoe.
Chris pulled in at 7:45 a.m. but instead of bringing the backcountry jeep he was driving a white van with plywood over the rear windows. He had an assortment of vehicles. This one looked like the van of a man who could both remodel your kitchen and abduct your neighbor. Our borrowed canoe was cinched to the roof.
Chris was wearing glasses and cargo shorts and tennis sneakers without socks. He’d cut his hair short and shaved his beard, code-switching from Juggalo to accountant-on-vacation. As we drove northeast around the Quabbin, he reminded me that as kids we’d once come up to the Athol area to attend a culturally misappropriate Boy Scout-like camp called Indian Guides. This must have been in the late seventies. I didn’t remember Indian Guides but talking about it brought back a memory of a photo I’d seen in a bin in my childhood closet: a group of six or seven white kids, wearing arts-and-crafts headdresses, standing in front of our dads. We’d all gone by Native American names for the weekend. Chris was Little Red Feather. I was White Eagle. I don’t remember what my dad’s name was but Chris’s dad was Brown Beaver and another dad was Big Wind. It was a good weekend and I’d totally forgotten about it until Chris brought it up. We decided it was an omen. Of what, we weren’t sure.
* * *
As part of the River Rat festivities there was an early-Saturday road race called the Big Cheese 5k that raised money for the local Meals-on-Wheels program. After locking up the bike and parking in Athol, we figured we could run a 5k and feel good about ourselves no matter what happened on the river. Registration was in the basement of the Athol town hall, a stately building at the top of Main Street with curved stone staircases and a large auditorium where they held the seeding lottery. We got lanyards with badges that said Double Duty that were supposed to get us free stuff but we never figured out what and didn’t try that hard. I asked a lady at the start of the 5k how hard the course was and she said, “one hill,” which was not true. Chris ran in his cargo shorts and tennis sneakers and finished 23rd out of 500. I finished closer to 300th, but we saw a lot of lovely neighborhoods and parks and the atmosphere was festive. There was a parade, people lining the streets. Happy faces and brisk spring air.
Afterwards, we went looking for the offices of the Daily News, the newspaper that handled race logistics and could tell folks who missed the Friday night seeding lottery, as we had, what their pole position was. The maps on our phones led us to a one-story brick building on Exchange Street, next to a vacant lot and across from a fire station. The front doors were locked but the words “River Rat” were written on a sheet of notebook paper that was taped to one of the windows. We followed an arrow on the sheet to a small annex off of the building’s flank and went inside.
Two men and one woman were behind a counter folding race t-shirts. They were older, looked local, and regarded us with something between bemusement and skepticism. I felt a little like the college kids at the start of American Werewolf In London, when they enter the pub on the moors and the music stops.
“First-timers,” I said, stating the obvious. “Looking forward to it. What do you recommend as far as strategy?”
The race folks looked at each other. Finally the oldest one of them shrugged and said, “Stay out of the river.”
He started laughing.
The other man shuddered. “I went in the river one year,” he said.
“Never been the same,” said the woman.
Now they were all laughing.
“Got life jackets?” the first guy asked.
We nodded. Life jackets were mandatory.
“Zip ‘em up!” he said.
Chris and I had discussed the possibility of capsizing on the drive up. The videos made it seem like a possibility. I did not want to capsize. It was still mid-April. It had snowed fairly recently and would in fact snow again before the end of the weekend. Going into the river – a river with a two-hundred-year-old industrial history – and having hundreds of canoe paddles sweep down like scythes toward my head was not how I wanted to spend a Saturday.
“I’ve never capsized in my life,” Chris had said in the car.
“Don’t jinx it,” I’d said, too late.
We looked ourselves up on a race list on the wall. We were seeded 86th, in the top third of the boats.
“Can we get t-shirts?” Chris asked the laughing officials.
“Sure,” one of them said, tossing us t-shirts. “Don’t get ‘em wet.”
We walked back to Chris’s van and drove over to where some canoes were loading into the river, on the side of a residential street near a bridge on the west end of town. The river was maybe fifty feet wide at this point. The water was high and copper-colored and, my fears notwithstanding, after years of mitigation efforts it’s clean enough to eat the fish you catch out of it.
We got our Nordic neighbors’ canoe off of Chris’s van. It was a perfectly fine canoe, suitable for an afternoon of leisure on Laurel Lake. We carried it down onto a sandy launch. Then we watched as sleek boats, each one thinner and more polished than the next, lined up on the boat launch like it was a car show. Not every canoe, but enough of them. These were racing canoes. Some bore scars. Some people wore wetsuits. Some people had GoPros mounted to their helmets. Some talked about the water height three years ago. Everyone was in a good mood.
Chris and I looked at the helmets and started making nervous jokes, reassuring our canoe that it was fine just as it was.
A guy near us said something like “you going to Seeger’s after the race?”
“We don’t know who that is,” Chris said.
“We’re not from here,” I said.
“Seeger’s having a big party,” the guy said. “You should go.”
We shrugged.
“Hey,” the guy said. “Can I borrow some duct tape?”
He didn’t say why and we didn’t ask. Duct tape could be for anything. Chris went to the back of his van and got some duct tape.
The guy thanked us.
“I’ll give this back to you at Seeger’s,” he said.
“Or you can just leave it on the van,” Chris said.
“White van?” the guy asked.
We nodded.
“One or the other,” the guy said.
He left to do whatever he had to do with the duct tape. We stood on the bank, watching the boats line up and getting more and more anxious. These people were serious. Even the ones in costume.
Eventually, it was time to get in the boat.
We carried our canoe down to the water’s edge. We had a debate about which position was the power position and which position steered. Chris seemed pretty sure but I didn’t believe him. Eventually he got in the front with the better paddle. I pushed the nose out into the current and climbed in the back. We eased into the middle of the river and made our way across to the far bank, where small wooden posts demarked the seeding corrals – 1-25, 26-50, and so on – and the canoes were layered like shingles. We executed a dainty little pirouette and I grabbed a root sticking out from the bank to hold us in place. There was a downed tree angling out of the water directly in front of us; it was treated as part of the race. The canoeists around us seemed substantially more experienced. They strategized – who was going full-bore at the gun, who was cutting out wide, who was holding back to see how the pack shook out. Chris and I took this all in silently. In the near distance we heard someone singing the National Anthem. The canoeists around us fell quiet. Things got tense.
“I love you, man,” I said to Chris. “Just in case I don’t get another chance to tell you.”
Then the anthem ended and a cannon went off.
* * *
The boats directly around us fired out into the middle, trying to get ahead of the masses. Paddles chopped at the water and spray flew through the air. We hung close to the shore for the first fifty yards, taking a wide curve under the bridge. Families waved flags and yelled at us as we slid under them. Canoes banged our sides and paddles clipped our blades. Fast boats went by us like barracuda, their paddlers synced up military-style, baseball hats and mirrored shades, the Seal Team Sixes of canoe racing. “Hut!” they chanted. “Hut!”
We were not like that. We had not agreed on a cadence or a rhythm other than a generalized “when I switch, you switch” strategy. Still, we were sort of killing it for two guys in a borrowed boat who’d never canoed together before. We were passing people, steering around wrecks, charting a course. A canoe near us t-boned a slower boat that had listed sideways. A boat floated upside down under the bridge as its paddlers scrambled for the shore. Another boat floated sideways along the far bank. It was empty. There was no time to look for its occupants. Then we cleared the bridge, the river opened up a little and we relaxed.
That’s when our bow brushed against the bow of another canoe on our right, just as a fast boat came from behind us and tried to split the gap. I couldn’t get my paddle into the water because the fast boat was pushing against our stern. Chris couldn’t get his paddle into the water because the slower boat was in the way. The thing to do would have been to lift our paddles out of the water and center ourselves in our boat, perhaps even to reach out to their boat for stabilization, but we weren’t experienced enough canoeists to feel comfortable grabbing someone else’s canoe. Instead, we each leaned slightly away from contact, slightly towards the left. The right side of our boat came up, the left side dipped. There was a moment when I thought we could get it back, shift our weight and re-settle. I saw Chris glance back at me and smile. It was a rueful smile, the smile of a man who’d jinxed himself – and, by association, his canoe partner. Then we went into the river.
It was cold. A cold slap. An electrical cold, if that makes sense. A copper wire shoved up your spine.
I surfaced, feeling like Ishmael, feeling like holy shit is this real? Am I alive? Will I stay alive? Boats flew around us. I heard a passing canoeist say, “You guys okay?” and I said yeah before I knew if it was true or not. Our Nordic neighbors’ boat was drifting sideways down river, its slick hull the carcass of a whale. For a second I thought maybe we could right it and climb back in, but the water was deep and I couldn’t feel the bottom. Chris was holding onto the bow. While we had discussed not capsizing, we hadn’t discussed what we would do if we did. I realized – it seems like slowly but it probably wasn’t – that we had to swim. Actually swim, holding the canoe, or we’d just float on down the river. We kicked our legs and tried to push the boat towards shore. I was aware of the other boats racing past us – so many boats we’d just passed ourselves, plus all the others from the back. I know they were there even though I don’t remember seeing any of them.
A river safety guy in a red dry-suit leapt from the banks and swam out to us. He was tethered to a tree and pulled our boat toward the edge. By then it was completely submerged. When I could, I stood up, felt my feet sink into river mud, and was surprised to find my paddle in my hand.
“I’m freezing,” said Chris, waist deep. He was holding a paddle too. It must have been instinctual.
The crowd along the shore screamed at us with un-tempered glee. We were what they had come for. They cheered when we waved to them. We tilted the boat over and the river safety guy said, “You want to keep going?”
Did we want to keep going? I looked at the canoes gliding by us on the water, then at Chris. He nodded.
The safety guy held the boat steady for us. The crowd cheered louder.
“Wanna come with?” I asked, climbing back in.
“Good luck,” he said and pushed us out into the current. We yelled to the crowd and they yelled back.
The rest of the race was less eventful – how could it not be? – but as the worst had already happened we could chase down stragglers without remorse. We’d been baptized, we had scalps to take. The middle miles were serpentine, looping up and down and back on themselves. We sailed through flooded meadows and between shoreline rocks. Around mile two-and-a-half we saw a nice boat get crushed against the piles of a low bridge. The river safety guys jumped into action there too. At mile four we passed a huge party on a shorefront lawn. Seeger’s? Maybe, but maybe not. People lobbed Bud Light tallboys to the canoes around us. They landed like mortars. Mile five was a windy straightaway flanking an Orange industrial corridor. We stopped talking and Chris set us to a martial rhythm, heads down, chests bent, four paddles a side before switching. Boats around us slowed to a crawl. Canoeists lamented. The river seemed to flow in both directions at once.
We weren’t keeping track of time, but eventually we reached the Orange Dam and executed a sharp U-turn to pull up alongside the Billy Goat boathouse, finishing in 90th place, only four positions behind where we started but light years behind the fast boats. Watermen from Orange held our prow as we stepped out onto the cement embankment, then we carried the boat up to the boathouse. There was a street fair along the riverbank, with bands and fried dough and fortune tellers. An enormous policeman was standing in the road, the crowd flowing around him. I asked him where a guy could get a beer and he said, “Follow these knuckleheads and bring me one.” We walked down the road to a ranch-style bar with a firepit in the back. Seeger’s? Still not Seeger’s. Children frolicked. A cover band played Aerosmith. Canoes crowded the parking lot like seals on a dock. Our clothes became cool and stiff. We got two beers apiece – Shock-tops, manageable – and cheeseburgers from a backyard grill. A guy we’d joked with at the start – not the duct tape guy – grabbed my arm and said, “hey, what did you think?” and I could only shake my head at him. He nodded like he understood. Eventually, we left the firepit and found my bike. Chris rode back to Athol to get the van. I dragged our canoe through a field as the sun sank and hypothermia crooked a finger. Then Chris pulled up. We changed clothes in the van, strapped the canoe to the roof and headed west towards the mountains. They cancelled the pro-am on Sunday because overnight temps dropped into the thirties and snow fell.
* * *
We did the River Rat again in 2019 and watched a boat get split in two. We watched the safeties fish out other upended canoeists. We brought friends, family. I brought my mother-in-law, who took one look and got back in the car. We’ve eaten the fried dough, dodged the tree-stumps, pushed wayward paddles back towards disarmed paddlers. We’ve heard the cheers from the banks and the wind through the spring reeds, felt the suck and catch of the shoreline mud, the heedless joy of a river released from winter. COVID cancelled the race in 2020 and again in 2021 but when COVID’s gone Athol will still be there, tuned up and ready to go. The race is a part of the community, a metaphor for the whole thing – spring, grit, the rebirth, the resurrection, all that. Or maybe it’s just a canoe race in April?
Maybe it’s all those things. Chris is heli-skiing in Alaska right now. He sends me videos of snow twirling into vortices beneath the blades of the copter he’s in. He demurs whenever I mention the River Rat, he’ll grumble when it’s time to sign up, but he’ll come along. We’ve gone into the river and will never be the same. Plus, we never did get his duct tape back. I’m sure it made its way to Seeger’s, though, so I expect we’ll find it eventually.
Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir called Expatriate Games and a novel called The Duration. His basketball essay,”Give and Go,” was featured in Sport Literate‘s “25th Anniversary Issue.” He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.