Temple Stream Read online

  She raised a hand for help climbing out of the water and I took it, pulled her up gently so as not to yank the arm right off of her—that’s how delicate she seemed, weight of a sparrow, bare feet dripping. She never let go of the hem of her skirt, which was a lovely thick drape of blue cloth I couldn’t name—I thought wool, that light sort of wool cloth you find in good pants, with a weave to it. I looked up by my truck and spied her car: an older-model Mercedes, very sporty, polished and gleaming, the same blue as her skirt.

  “You are a lovely man,” she said in thanks.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” I said, giving the words a courtly flourish for her sake; clearly, she came from a more formal time.

  “I would like to go sit on that log.” She pointed upstream to a large beech tree lying stripped on a sandbar in the bright sun. We climbed slowly up the bank and made our way holding hands along a sand ledge that formed a shelf over the stream, a hundred yards or so. At the root end of the old tree a suitable throne had formed, and there my little stream queen alighted, her bare feet in the warm sand. I sat on the log next to her, pushed my heavy hiking boots into the sand to form mounds, kicked them down, formed new mounds, over and over.

  “Tell me your name, winter bird,” she said.

  I did.

  “Tell me what you do,” she said.

  I said English professor, since that was the quickest thing to say and was true at the time, true enough.

  “How unpleasant,” she said pleasantly.

  And I tried to make it sound actually quite wonderful, which you could see was what she’d hoped in a way, that such a job could be wonderful.

  “Do you bring your classes here?” she said.

  Well, no, I hadn’t, but often brought them outside in spring. “But the outdoors, you know, it’s distracting.”

  She grimaced at that observation, said, “It’s the proper distraction. You must bring them here.”

  In the next hour I learned her name, Connie Nosalli, and lots more: that she was from Mississippi originally, that she considered herself “colored” though she was very “light-skinned” in her terms, that she seldom thought about race anymore, except to get out in the sun as much as possible to be as dark as possible in honor of her heritage. Her hometown was called Roxie, near McComb, Mississippi, “not too terribly far” from New Orleans, Louisiana, which she pronounced carefully for me, as if it were possible I might never have heard of it. All this sitting on a log in a stream of talk—clearly she hadn’t had anyone to regale in quite a while.

  She said things like “Tell me about you, and I’ll tell you about what a fool I’ve been, including that I voted for Richard Nixon twice.”

  I told her lots about me, starting with a quick version of my views on Ronald Reagan (loving him, she gasped at my calumny). I told her about my whole life, really. I loved the way she smiled and nodded and frowned and sputtered and laughed and groaned alternately at my revelations. She had a way of keeping eye contact, keeping it most comfortably. I stopped my mounding of the sand, stopped eyeing my escape truck there on the steep bank far on the other side of the stream.

  She’d been born in May of 1908: her eighty-sixth birthday was coming in two weeks. She had a clear, almost British, accent, no trace of the South whatsoever. She had met her husband late—she’d been an “old maid” (she said) of thirty-four, a high school teacher of science who’d never been further north than Jackson till older than that, but who had “started down” to Texas to get a master’s degree in biology, which was just one unspecialized science at the time.

  Later, she would tell me about some difficulties of race she’d suffered: particularly, that she had been “passing” as “white” from college into middle age—staying out of the sun (as she said lightly), treating and bleaching her hair, and simply never raising the subject of her heritage with anyone ever, and no one asked. She was quite proud of herself, not for “passing” but for fooling racists and getting what she wanted, which wasn’t the degree, as it turned out, but a husband. She’d been “injured” as a teen in a way that left her “barren” and “scarred” (I didn’t pry further) and had simply never thought of herself as marriageable.

  After college, which she’d attended across the border at Louisiana State, in Monroe (accent on the first syllable), she’d started teaching high school biology, “passing” once again—never had a date, not once—spending her afternoons in the field making observations, studying at night, amassing a natural sciences library for the woebegone school. Soon she’d tired of that life, wanting more, but stayed with it ten years until she despaired and applied with little hope to graduate schools, using only a first initial and her maiden name. She was the sole woman in her graduate program at the University of Texas, Austin, which covered multiple sciences, just showed up to begin the program without letting them know her gender be-cause no one had asked, and none of the application forms had inquired. “I was so ugly they never balked.” She must have had some stories about the South at that time, but she never told them, never spoke of the South unless I asked impertinent questions, which she answered shortly or not at all.

  She achieved her master’s in two years, but had to leave school in her third, which would have started her on the road to a Ph.D., forced out not by what she’d always feared—racial or gender issues—but by a romantic scandal. She’d fallen in love with one of her professors, an “Italian from the snowy Alps,” as she put it, a charming, tiny man with a thick accent. He was a hydrologist of little note, a sparkling, funny teacher in his sixties, beloved of students but not so much by colleagues at the university, a deeply troubled soul who had lost his family—all but his beloved baby brother—in the First World War. He taught future engineers practical science but saw his own area as purest field science, a kind of formalized love of rivers.

  Dr. Nosalli and Connie had begun their romance (apparently quite torrid for the era—one of Connie’s charms was the constant, coruscating juxtaposition of frankness and modesty), begun it at the end of her first year in school and kept it secret till they were wed, at which time they left for Massachusetts—the professor had applied for and won a fine job with the federal government as a civilian hydrologist for the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1950, flush times, he and Connie bought a secluded cottage on Long Pond, down in the Belgrade Lakes of Maine (about twenty miles from Farmington), and from there they’d explored widely, doing his brand of science, which was also hers, and forming an impenetrably tight alliance, a kind of dual solitude. His pet interest was sandbars, gravel bars, sand carry, and just plain sand, and his late lifework—a hobby, really, since he never managed to write his papers or even abstracts—was the Kennebec River, the Sandy River, and two of the Sandy’s tributaries.

  Memorably, she said, “ he trouble with marrying a much older man is that much older men die.” And, indeed, Dr. Nosalli had died in 1961, at eighty-five, which was Connie’s age when we met on Temple Stream.

  She said, “You could always find us right here on Sundays. In fact, if you want to be in touch, come looking for us. I’m not in the book. I haven’t an address, at least not one I’ll give you! I’m a summer bird!”

  Later, I would learn that Connie came to Temple Stream nearly every Sunday when she was in Maine, which was about six months of the year, from midspring to midautumn (the rest of the year she was somewhere she wouldn’t disclose in Massachusetts, one of the Boston suburbs). And later still, she would give me her P.O. box in Belgrade Lakes, to which I might send an invitation to a summer potluck (these she never took up) or a Christmas card for forwarding. Temple Stream was just a stop on the Sunday tour of her husband’s study locations. And in this weekly tour she not only remembered him and their life together but continued his research, in a way, which in honesty had been all observation. Looking closely at streams was her work and her calling. She seemed a Buddhist nun to me, engaged in this seemingly pointless and purposefully endless task.

  She said, “I think of him e
very day.”

  THAT WAS MY BIRD SPRING. I’D HAD AN INTEREST FROM CHILDHOOD (birding was my only easy merit badge in Boy Scouts), but that was the year I really began to revel in the dawn chorus, to walk around with binoculars, to keep lists and notes and dates, to acquire more and more sophisticated bird guides. Birding, in fact, quickly supplanted my old love of fishing.

  Most of the winter birds were around, of course, what Connie called the year-rounders: the chickadees, three kinds of woodpeckers, the stalwart blue jay, tree sparrows, song spar-rows, the occasional pair of pine grosbeaks, the occasional flock of yellow grosbeaks, juncos in slate flocks, one pair of cardinals dependably, several rock doves (i.e., city pigeons) from my neighbor’s 1820 dairy barn, a large flock of mourning doves, huge ravens, noisier crows, nuthatches white- and red-breasted, pine siskins, redpolls in large flocks, tufted titmice on no discernible schedule, starlings in great flocks, robins, golden-crowned kinglets (a chipper, busy little flock of tiny birds back in the balsams of our woods intermittently), gold-finches. The male goldfinches turned bright yellow from a tarnishy green in late March, just as the summer birds began to turn up.

  Around solstice, a pair of hooded mergansers arrived on the stream, he with his great retractable hat of black feathers, garish parabolas of white behind the eyes, hooked black beak, she with her bouffant feather-do slicked way back—punk-rock babe with Camaby Street dude, sporting around, paddling up-stream and out of sight, floating back on the current and into view.1 They seemed to be looking for nest sites, paddling to the edges of the stream, looking up under snags, inspecting the muskrat den that I’d thought was in use still. Did that winter mink get our local muskrat? He must have, as the birds took over the den, diving to its underwater entrance, appearing any-time I stomped on the opposite bank, popping up out of the water one at a time, male first, paddling fast at sight of me, taking to the sky in squeaky protest, a long loop I followed with binoculars. If I sat out of sight they’d return within ten minutes. By late April, no amount of stomping would get the female to show herself. Only the male would appear, and attempt to lead me away. Of course, I let him. (Later, when the female was out and about with her brood of nine merganserlings, the male went missing.)

  And Wally flushed a common snipe out of the boggy edges of the first hayfield, the bird flying over my head showing that comically long bill and landing not far from my feet, playing statue. The bill weighted the head earthward—the bird looked downcast even though he was a nice, plump, leaf-colored soul, looked abashed, perhaps about that long nose. But he was not abashed, he was a bird, and that beak found food for him nicely, shaped to its use as a mud probe and forceps to search out then pinch and extract worms from soft soils.

  A brown creeper—that small busy bird with decurved bill and self-absorbed air—appeared on the dead young elm where I’d hung a ball of suet in a net bag left over from onions. He started at the bottom of the tree, crept busily up to the suet, pecked out a sample, flew down to the base of the next tree.

  And dream-gazing out the kitchen window while putting dishes away, I spotted a huge wingspan soaring high over the stream, subtle turns to follow the watercourse, an air of dominance, deep calm. It took a minute to let myself see that white head—a bald eagle, of course, on a reconnaissance flight. I watched it a full three or four minutes till it disappeared over the trees upstream, and then I watched the sky where it’d been, dishes forgotten. When I snapped to, I called my friend Bob Kimber, who lives three miles up the Temple. “Eagle coming your way,” I said. A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was Bob: “Here he comes.”

  Later that week I walked down to the water early in the morning to see who might turn up, found the usual chickadees and blue jays. With my binoculars I spotted some juncos, too: winter birds all. Then, just across the stream, a fluttering caught my eye, resolved into a large flock of cedar waxwings busily eating something off the remains of snow. I looked at the granular snowpack around my feet: snow fleas, tiny black bugs hatching everywhere. The waxwings dove and ascended, perched and leapt, noisily snapping up the bounty. I got the briefest glimpses of pointed crests and dark masks, red wax-seals stamped on wings.

  I spotted a sharp-shinned hawk only because it had insinuated itself among the mourning doves in the dog yard, and one of them in fright flew into the big screen on the laundry room window. I turned from loading the dryer in time to see the baffled dove leap to flight from the lawn, only to be snatched from the air by the waiting sharpie: flash of wing, silent death. Later I’d find the feathers fanned neatly on a stump in our woods, all else gone.

  I knew the advent of summer was irreversible when the first grackle of the year appeared, swaggering among the lesser birds under the feeders, collecting the cracked corn I’d strewn. More so when I heard the first red-winged blackbirds calling: that’s a swamp song, the first selection on summer’s sound track.

  An April Fool sleet storm left five inches of the tiniest of ice balls, colorful sun prisms that the mourning doves crunched in their bills one at a time for hours.

  Past dusk on a warmer day, I heard the familiar croak of the American woodcock in my neighbor’s barnyard. Initially, I thought it was a misplaced frog, but then came the twittering tones of the male’s ascent, that weird whistling of air through wings that announced a very fine specimen was here in the world and owned that territory. The female of the pair simply waited on the ground for her lover’s antics to cease, for the ad-vent of the stiff-legged approach he’d make in the end for her favors. I looked to the dusky sky in time to see his spiral progress up and up and up till I lost sight. Then I listened harder. Soon the bird’s invisible plummet to earth was complete, and I heard a brief song and scrabbling, then the croaking again, then the whole process repeated, a cock for each field in the neighborhood, solo croaking, solo flights till mid-night, while the females, less excitable, stayed put. I felt so fond, each male like some bumbling friend with a crazy plan to attract women that in the end, and against all logic, works.

  As April grew, my sightings increased: vulture, mallard pair, fox sparrow. On the fifth, I moved the birdhouses on their posts away from the garden into newly dug holes near the apple tree. That very afternoon a bluebird flew in and perched on the roof of the middle house. In the sun the next morning I spotted darker blue flashes, forked tails in the sky, and the tree swallows were back, birds born in the boxes I’d built: fine by me, even if the result was the displacement of the bluebird.

  Maligned cowbirds joined the other blackbirds: which of the many nesters around would they choose to host their eggs?

  On a walk down to the stream I saw our kestrel—that small falcon—harassing starlings, saw him perched imperious on the popple top he’d always preferred, emperor’s square head. He perched twenty minutes without a movement, surveyed the great world. I left him to it, walked to the water, used my binoculars to scan the trees alongside the Temple, spotted a kingbird. This new arrival took the highest bare branch around, skydived rhythmically for insects. A raucous cry made me wheel to see a kingfisher hunkered on the lowest branches, watching the water for fish: the Temple is a world of kings. And along the sandbars, rusty blackbirds, Lincoln’s sparrows, spotted sandpipers. A savannah sparrow piped on a top-twig perch in the alders, throwing its head back with passion. Vireo, veery, yellow-bellied flycatcher, phoebe, thrush.

  Suddenly, a pair of common mergansers swooped in over my head like aircraft (I could hear their wings whistling), landed fast on the water, skied in on their feet leaving wakes, bright orange bills, the male purest white with a mallard-green head, wingspan of almost three feet (by contrast, the hooded merganser’s span is about two feet).

  On the answering machine at home I found a message from Juliet: driving into town she’d seen wild turkeys in the cleared land across from the Kings’ house. Thinking about that, absently surveying the sky, I spotted the first heron of the year, flying the eagle’s route, but effortfully. In the woods I heard the first warbler song: w
itchety, witchety, witchety: common yellowthroat. A partridge drummed, a hermit thrush whistled.

  Chorus in the evenings: spring peepers.

  Then it was May, and merry, merry. In the yard, purple and house finches sang. In the woods, a hermit thrush called from a regular perch on a low branch under balsams. On the stream, a wood-duck pair mingled with a large flock of black ducks. In the sky, a red-tailed hawk took evasive action, harassed by crows. In the brush, new warblers sang, warblers everywhere, some on migration, some to stay the summer: black-and-white, chestnut-sided, yellow, Canada, Wilson’s. In the neighboring fields, bobolinks tootled, back from a winter’s sojourn in Brazil. Carnaval! Under the hemlocks, white-crowned sparrows appeared, six pair. In the night sky at the edges of the forest the first fireflies blinked. In the neighbor’s high sugar tree that same night, the whip-poor-will sang its first plaint of the season.

  In the heirloom apple trees, a catbird mewled. At the kitchen window, the first ruby-throated hummingbird materialized, pure motion looking for the feeder that had been there the summer previous. In the beaver bog I spotted a sora, a green heron, a night-heron, and, of course, a great blue. Up in the elm tree, our northern orioles were back, working on a nest. From the neighbor’s barn on the first of June, chimney swifts emerged at dawn. Down in the morning stream after, I saw a dragonfly dipping her long tail, methodically laying eggs.

  ABOUT THEN, WARBLER TIME, CAME THE FIRST TRULY WARM morning that spring—an irresistible stream day. I pedaled my old bike half a mile down to Russell’s Mill Road, admiring the tulips and narcissuses of the six neighbors along the way, coasted to the perfunctory concrete bridge over the Temple, a favorite spot to watch the water, just above the spot where Russell had built his dam. Once, a covered bridge stood there, I knew, but the town burned it in 1967 after a truck went through—unsentimental solution. Stubby granite obelisks from the old bridge lay on their sides at both ends: once even the most minor stream crossing could be a thing of studied grandeur.