By David Detmold
Turners Falls - A cool project is about to take shape on one of the run down concrete pathways leading from the Hill to downtown Turners Falls. After a request for proposals was evaluated, the Turners Falls RiverCulture project has awarded a $4500 contract, which the selectboard signed on Monday, to Sebastian Gutwein and associates of Greenfield, to design and build a ‘Woven River' art installation that incorporates natural elements like stone and living trees with historic relics and of course, bricks and mortar, woven together with living willow and a wattle hurdle flowing downhill, to connect the entire pathway project in a fluid representation of the past giving birth to the future. The installation will hang above, take root and be built beside the town-owned pedestrian walkway that connects the curve of 7th Street with High Street, at the intersection of Avenue B.

Gutwein, reached by phone on Tuesday, said the installation was "all about the love for the past, and bringing the past into the future."

That sentiment may resonate well with local residents who recall the walkways that once led them up to school on Crocker Avenue from their former homes downtown. Though many of them have moved in adult years to newer homes on the Hill, a younger generation of downtown children still makes their way up the crumbling, trash-strewn paths to school, in every weather, gripping the cable balustrades when the sidewalks are slick with ice, or walking slowly with their backs bent diagonal to the ground by the weight of bookbags.

Sheffield parent Diane Ellis proposed the idea of an artistic makeover of the pathways to RiverCulture coordinator Lisa Davol two years ago, and, after a process of finding funding and advertising the concept to area artists, Gutwein's proposal emerged the winner. Ellis, a resident of Stevens Street, led a brigade of students and scouts on Earth Day last year to pick up trash around the pathways. She said at the time she hoped the improved walkways would encourage a two-way flow of foot traffic, with new shops, bakeries, and eateries acting as a magnet to bring folks back downtown again.

Gutwein, a Greenfield resident who grew up in the midwest, has also found downtown Turners to be something of a magnet. "The bones of the town are pretty amazing," he said. He spent time walking and exploring the town as he developed the concept for the pathway installation.

The design is anchored at the top by a sitting wall, to be made up of rocks from different eras of the area's geologic past. A railroad lantern will hang from a branch of one of the great oak trees that form a natural tripod above the path, with the lantern symbolizing the railroad that once ran to the mills. "The trains killed the river traffic," that made the locks and canal from Montague City to the Great Falls a commercial thoroughfare. "But the same sense of striving for efficiency and moving materials to long distances also led to the displacing of industry to the South and overseas and the changing of Turners Falls," Gutwein said.

Live willow stakes will be woven into an urn at the bottom of the path, "an urn to put your thoughts into and influence the growth of the future." In a synthesis of metaphysics and whimsy, Gutwein imagines bypassers placing "small pieces of paper - sort of like a prayer - in the living urn, and next time it rains, the ink and paper would dissolve into the soil, fueling the growth of the future." In case school children and others who use the path do not naturally think of placing written prayers into the willow urn, "A sign will engage unsuspecting gazers to make this symbolic gesture."

A concrete wall and brick pedestal will evoke the brute force of the dam that holds back the river, and the industrial buildings made possible by the strength of that dammed power. The wattle wall flowing through from top to bottom "acts as a thread to pull everything together," evoking "the past growing into the future," as a coppiced tree uses the energy of its roots to pump back into the cutting.

Stenciled onto the actual walk, a poem by Greenfield poet Maria Williams-Russell will gradually wear away as pedestrians walk on it, and be renewed with new paint year by year.
Here is the poem:

This is a village
We are woven bricks
Mudstone and fish
Train rails and intention
We are arrowhead and industry
Water flying over cliff
We are shad bush and oar
Artist and bridge
A village
A quiet cradle of churches
Chestnut and shoal
Lantern and flicker
We are sewn
Brothers and sisters
Soil, song and river

Gutwein will begin work on the installation once the ground thaws completely. Volunteers to help weave the wattle fence, out of apple cuttings from a local orchard, plant the crabapple, hybrid chestnut, or shadbush which will grace the ends of the pathway, or involve themselves in other ways, are encouraged to write Gutwein at: baswein@gmail.com.  Visit Sebastian's website here.