Today and Yesterday From the Coolidge Memorial Bridge the broad lowland seems to reach out in all directions towards the encircling hills. Far down the river, the distant bank rises a sheer thirty feet from the water and is high enough to surmount even the worst of floods. Yet each year this bank recedes as the unconsolidated sediment at its base is sapped by the stream and is carried away. Three times the river road has been moved back from the insatiable Connecticut, and today the main Hockanum highway takes the long route far from the water’s edge. _The River Works_ Nearer the bridge the land is lower, and it shows the effects of frequent inundation, but not of scour. A great sand bar lies in the curve of the stream, and the low parallel ridges suggest that they, too, were awash in the Connecticut before its eastern bank encroached so far upon the town of Hadley. The tongue of land which serves as Northampton’s airport is a succession of bars and abandoned channels which record the migration of the river away from its old bank along Bridge Street. The Connecticut is robbing Hadley to pay Northampton, but there was a time when Northampton was pilfered, too. Swales line the landscape as far as Hadley; and each year, at the time of high water, they must now be content with the meager overflow, where once they sped the entire stream upon its southward course. But even now, in flood, their original function may be restored. For the swale just west of Hadley was a roaring torrent in 1938, 1936, and 1896. Indeed, it threatened to appropriate the entire stream, and each of the great curving hollows that furrow the lowland are scour-channels which were made at other times. [Illustration: Fig. 1. _The Connecticut River undercuts the Hadley bank at Hockanum._] [Illustration: Fig. 2. _Natural levees border the Connecticut River south of the Sunderland Bridge._]