Every now and then, I come across something that makes the past feel very close.

This time, it was a poem.

In 1878, poet Lucy Larcom wrote a piece called Up the Androscoggin, dated from Berlin Falls, New Hampshire. It was later published in her 1881 collection, Wild Roses of Cape Ann, and Other Poems.

I found myself stopping over one line in particular:

“The story and life of a river
Are the life and the story of man.”

That is exactly the kind of sentence that makes you sit back for a second.

Because if you live near the Androscoggin, or drive along it often enough, you know the river has never felt like simple scenery. It moves through the North Country with a presence all its own. It cuts past old mill towns and mountain roads, through working places and forgotten places, carrying beauty, industry, memory, loss, and change.

Larcom saw that, too.

Her poem begins with the river shining along its windings, rushing forward while hinting at hidden lakes, distant mountains, and the wild country beyond. She calls it a “swift traveller” and imagines its journey from Errol, Magalloway, Umbagog, Bethel, and beyond.

The language is nineteenth-century, but the feeling is familiar: the river as movement, as mystery, as something that comes from far away and carries more than anyone standing on the bank can fully understand.

That is part of why this discovery felt so personal to me.

When I began writing Androscoggin After Dark, I did not set out to make the river feel like a character. I thought it would be setting. Atmosphere. A line on the map. A place where winter ice, spring thaw, summer heat, and fall firelight could shape the mood of each book.

But the more I wrote, the more the river became something else.

It became witness.

It became memory.

It became the thing that kept moving while people tried to bury what they had done.

Reading Larcom’s poem reminded me that this is not a new way to feel about the Androscoggin. More than a century before my fictional motel rooms, missing women, muddy culverts, old ledgers, and firelit riverbanks, another writer stood in Berlin Falls and heard the river telling a larger story.

She heard action. Strength. Restlessness. Romantic endeavor. A dream that never quite fulfills itself.

And maybe that is why rivers keep finding their way into literature.

A river is never only one thing. It is beautiful and dangerous. Familiar and unknowable. Local and ancient. It belongs to a place, but it is always leaving. It reflects the sky while carrying everything underneath.

That contradiction is exactly what I love about the Androscoggin.

Some days, it gives us sunset light.

Some days, it gives us history.

Some days, if you are a writer with a slightly suspicious imagination, it gives you a whole series of dark romantic suspense novels.

I love that she called the river’s song “the rune of a seer.”

That line feels almost eerie now, especially when read from the banks of the same river generations later. A seer does not simply look. A seer understands what others miss. A seer knows that what is hidden is not always gone.

That may be the oldest truth the Androscoggin has been telling.

The river moves on.

But it remembers.