The Dam At Otter Creek

“The Dam at Otter Creek” is a song about regret and the dangers of living in the past, i.e. “reflect[ing] on what’s been done.” The song states that this act of reflecting on the past is “where sadness breaths,” or to me it sometimes sounds like “where sadness breeds,” but either way the meaning is the same: “The sadness of everyone” lives in/stems from the act of dwelling on the past.

In the second verse the song likens this act of dwelling on past mistakes to the act of building a dam. Constantly reflecting upon one’s past mistakes never allows a person to get over/overcome those mistakes, so dwelling on the past is a kind of mental block or dam, preventing progress. Past regrets that should be forgotten never are forgotten. They never become “water under the bridge,” to use that cliché. Instead these regrets get “backed up,” like water, slowly creating a pool of sorrow, perhaps “deep enough to dive” into.

If the previous poster is right about the reference to actual events at Otter Creek Campground, then perhaps the next verse is suggesting that the eventual outcome of diving into a pool of one’s sorrows is drwoning. The “dead man in sheets” is a man who plunged into that pool, committing suicide perhaps, or otherwise becoming lifeless. Despite this man’s pool of sorrow, however, he is “flanked by love,” taken to the river by people who love him, surrounded by feelings of love equal to his feelings of regret, a “love deep enough to dive.” If only a person could learn to live in the present instead of dwelling on the past, or in other words “be here now,” then he could bathe in love instead of regret.

The final verse is actually incorrectly noted here. The booklet that comes with the album shows the lyric as “We took him THREE and three,” suggesting there were six people carrying the dead man, three on each side.

Anyway, using a “stretcher made from trees that passed in the storm” suggests a more productive way of dealing with past mistakes. Rather than damming up one’s regrets and sorrows, a person should use the debris from past troubles, or “storms,” to move forward, to carry them into the future instead of keeping them stuck in the past. The final lines of the verse, “leave the hearse behind, leave the curse behind,” are a simple restatement of the idea that one should let go of the past, live in the present, “be here now.”