On the Nepperhan and What We Call Things

I grew up in Scarsdale, which means I grew up on the Saw Mill River Parkway. It is a road. It takes you from Westchester to the Henry Hudson Parkway that goes to the city, or from Southern to Northern Westchester County. Saw Mill River Road runs alongside it. The name is everywhere. I had never wondered what it meant, whether there had been an actual sawmill, or what stood there before the parkway. It was infrastructure. Background. It was always just the landscape I drove through on the way somewhere else. I would always drive through carefully, because the Saw Mill is one of those old Westchester parkways with lanes so narrow and curves so blind that even at the posted fifty it takes all your attention. You keep your eyes on the road. You do not look around.

When it rains hard, the parkway floods. I filed it under the ordinary nuisances of Westchester driving. It did not occur to me until much later that the road was not flooding from bad drainage. It was flooding because there is a river right beside it — the Saw Mill — climbing its banks and onto the road every time it rains, insisting on itself. I never made the connection.

I left Westchester in my thirties, spent seven years in Colorado, came back in 2016, and settled in Dobbs Ferry — a village on the Hudson, right alongside the parkway I had driven my whole life. For years it stayed background. A commute. A fact.

I cannot say exactly when that changed. Midlife had something to do with it. Getting sober, seven years ago, had more — and the meditation practice that came with it. Mostly, I think, it was the slow work of learning to pay attention, of slowing down enough to actually see where I was. Mary Oliver had been with me through those years, all that patient attention to one patch of Provincetown until the whole universe turned up in it. Then this spring I started reading William Carlos Williams, the Rutherford doctor who spent a career insisting the sacred is not somewhere else but here, in this place, in these particular things. No ideas but in things. Attention as a practice. The local ground as the text. Something woke up. I started writing poems about the landscape I live in, and for the first time I started to look at it.

That is how I learned the Saw Mill has another name. An older one, given by people who knew it long before there was a road. The name turned out to be the start of a story I had not gone looking for.

The name Nepperhan shows up on old maps of Westchester, marking the river the parkway now shadows. I found it while researching the landscape for poems, and it stopped me — not because it was strange, but because it wasn’t. I had seen it. There is a Nepperhan Avenue in Yonkers, running near the river. I had driven past the sign for years without registering what it pointed at. Now the name was everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

Nepperhan. It sounded like it meant something. I wanted to know what.

The internet was not much help. Sources disagreed. Some called it Munsee Lenape for something like rapid little stream. Others gave other translations. A few used the spelling Nappeckamack — close, but not the same word. The harder I looked, the more the meaning receded.

What I did find stopped me cold: the river had been buried. Not as a figure of speech. Between 1917 and 1922, as Yonkers industrialized, the downtown reach of the Nepperhan was culverted — sealed in pipe, paved over, reduced to a drainage problem. The river did not leave. It kept flowing in the dark, unnamed on the streets above it.

Then, improbably, the city undid it. In 2010 Yonkers broke ground on a project to take the concrete back off. They called this........

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