Temple Stream Read online

  I balanced on the bike by holding the battered, inadequate bridge railing and stared down into the clarity of the pool below, the mud of the spring floods having settled out. The sun was so nice on my back that I contemplated leaving the bike and rock-hopping in the stream down to the Twin Bridges—always a good stretch, but better aboard a canoe in flood time: shoot under the Russell’s Mill Road bridge, rage through a quick rocky rapids, pause in the long pond that bends hairpin around the tip of a nicely mowed peninsula (someone’s pointy yard), finally take a breath and dive into an extended chute of wild water. The same chute that once in a fit of bad judgment I rode with Desi and Wally onboard; we blasted past a porcupine having a drink at the banks while, as it happened, the dogs were looking the other way: close call.

  And many times in low water I’d walked and swum the stretch—deep woods down there, good birding, curious fungi. But it was a bike day, and maybe not a day for perfect solitude, and so I puffed and pedaled back up the hill to our road, took a right and coasted downhill. Not far, just at the place the stream returns to the road, I saw my downstream neighbor Erick Apland standing in his dooryard. He was gazing upward, contemplating a large broken branch in one of the old maples at the front of his property. Erick is my age, tall, large-boned, a kind of Farmington Viking, a builder by trade and a member of the town planning board. You often see his picture in the paper, Erick planting trees on Arbor Day or organizing volunteer projects at the nursing home. His wife is a doctor in town. I’d done a little backcountry skiing with him, drunk a beer or two streamside. His house—one of the originals around here—is beautifully restored, with a magnificent post-and-beam barn of his own design and construction.

  I pulled up and hailed him, and he hailed me: company. “Nice bike,” he said—my bike was a wreck.

  “Nice tree,” I said.

  Mild white water coursed and pounded not a hundred feet away.

  Erick was wearing a green T-shirt printed discreetly over the pocket with the following brief poem:

  TEMPLE STREAM

  POST AND BEAM

  He offered me a light beer. We drank and traded amiable insults, came too quickly to that point in neighborly conversation when the small talk is used up. There was just the sound of the stream knocking gently past. In high water, the knocking would turn to roaring, I knew. In flood, it’d be like locomotives racing all night. We finished our beers. We gazed past the trunks of small trees to the stream. We were two people who knew the water well, standing like mutual friends of the bride at a sudden wedding.

  So I asked about the clover mill, which I’d read was nearby.

  “Ah, the clover mill,” Erick said, and explained: settlers had had to import clover seed, a pricey Eurasian native. To save the expense, thrifty farmers would let a crop go to seed. But hulling clover was difficult, tedious work. Temple Stream power—the height of technology—changed all that, allowed seed to be cleaned in large quantities quickly by transferring motion to a system of notched troughs and hulling boards.

  “Not much of it left,” Erick said. Down at the stream, he showed me the remains: a bulwark of large rocks, flat sides showing, some as big as the oxen that must have helped move them there. The miller was one Moses Craig, who lived with his father. “After the dam and the mill, they built my house.”

  I asked how it was living so close to the Temple.

  “It’s fucking loud,” Erick said, “but don’t quote me.”

  Back on my bike, I continued downstream, past the neighborhood swimming hole, past a fallen house (there’s a bed frame in there still, and a hand pump), and to the Twin Bridges.

  And there was Connie Nosalli’s Mercedes parked in its spot over the water. I found the woman herself perched on a rock in an impossible spot partway across the stream, just gazing into the current with her head cocked, dressed in a fishprint pinafore and big straw sun hat. “Oh, you’re here,” she said when I called, as if it had been me she’d been listening for. “Good, good. You’ll help me to my log.”

  I struggled out to her spot, rock by rock, and rock by rock helped her out of the stream and up the steep bank to the path that took us to her fallen beech tree. There on the smooth wood I helped her sit. She patted the bole beside her and I sat too. The stream tumbled past forcefully, but nothing like in flood. Hidden, a red-eyed vireo sang its strong song: hey-you-two, on-your-log, look-up, look-at-me. The trees, newly leafed-out in palest green, waved and sighed in the breeze.

  At length, continuing some thought to which I hadn’t been privy, Connie spoke: “Fortunately, I make friends easily. In fact, I’m seldom alone. Although, come to think of it, when I’m alone is when I’m most together.”

  More silence, which grew a little uncomfortable. I wasn’t quite sure of my welcome. Connie seemed wrapped in herself.

  Conversationally I said, “So, what are you up to today?”

  “Hydrology.”

  I laughed, but Connie took visible offense, so I gulped it back. And we sat. Then sat more. The stream rose and fell slightly, a rhythm of bubbling then quiet, a swelling and recession of volume. I began to think of exit lines, and once again the sand began to mound beneath my boots. Connie’s bare feet and ankles were tucked into the sand, which she wore like socks. It could not have been very warm, though the sun shone on us still.

  “Hydrology,” I said, trying for a tone of reverence.

  And at length, still aggrieved, Connie spoke: “Water, dear, is what connects heaven and earth. Do you understand? There is a constant exchange, earth to atmosphere. It’s the breathing of the planet.” Then she sighed, deciding to give me the full discussion: Water, she explained, evaporates under the influence of wind and sun wherever it’s exposed, “whether in puddles or ponds or lakes or oceans or streams,” or sublimates from the surface of snow and ice in cold weather. She said the other source of water in the atmosphere is transpiration, water drawn up as sap by plants and trees through capillary action, all the way from the roots through vascular systems to the thousands of microscopic perforations of each leaf, from which the plant exhales it as vapor—constantly, in huge amounts.

  Connie put on her quiz face: “How much do you think ten acres of corn, such as will be grown down the way, might transpire, for example?”

  “In a year?”

  “How about just in a day?”

  “Hundreds of gallons in a day,” I said, thinking immediately that I’d guessed too high.

  “No, hundreds of gallons in a minute! They will exchange to the air thirty thousand, forty thousand gallons of water a day. And remember that a big deciduous tree can give off that much, too, in just a year. Look at all the trees around us here!”

  I pictured millions of gallons flying up from them in aggregate each growing season. Instead of a downpour, an up-pour, more on sunny days. Plants, she told me, are second only to oceans as sources of water vapor. And as vapor, water defies gravity, is heated by the sun and rises like the steam from an iron. “Not that you have seen an iron lately.”

  She was the acerbic high-school teacher she hadn’t been for half a century, explaining the hydrological cycle to a recalcitrant student, winning him with every wile. The stream soughed past; my head filled with scientific questions; I quit my squirming.

  “And, as you have seen in your shower bath, water vapor condenses on cool surfaces. So in nature, from gas to liquid. Which is rain, most often. Your next question: why does vapor condense into rain?” She explained: warm air rises to areas of lower pressure that allows it to expand. The expansion cools the air and thus the water vapor, which forms droplets around motes of dust, and if heavy enough, they fall as rain.

  My teacher looked at me closely to see if she was getting through. “What is a stream?” she asked.

  I had one right in front of me for inspiration. Slowly I came up with this: “A stream is a crowd of attractive water molecules heading downhill.”

  “That’s good. Good. How does the water get to the stream?”

&
nbsp; “Rain.”

  “By what process?”

  “Runoff? It flows off the mountains and the hills and every inclined plane and to the stream.”

  “No,” Connie said. “Though sometimes when the land is saturated or frozen that is true. What actually happens is that nearly all rain soaks into the ground.” And rain fills the crevices between every rock and grain of sand. It fills the holes in permeable rocks; it sinks in at various rates until it finds something impermeable, like a layer of bedrock or dense clay. It then begins to collect, filling all the spaces it can until the land is full, so to speak, at which point the water spills into the streams. Water in a stream and water in the ground are both just rain—the same water, only at different places. And all water is pulled downhill by gravity. Movement through permeable rock is relatively slow. Movement in an open streambed is fast.

  “And to the sea,” I said.

  “And to the sky, as well.”

  “And to the sky.”

  Most of the water on earth is in the oceans, she told me, ninety-six percent or more. Most of the fresh water is in the ice caps, most of that in Antarctica, something on the order of seven million cubic miles, enough to feed all the rivers in the United States for twenty thousand years. A lot of water is in the ground at any one time too. No one knows exactly how much, Connie said, but less than in the ice caps. Yearly, some one hundred thousand cubic miles of water leap into the atmosphere. Most of that falls back into the ocean, but enough falls back on land to feed the streams and rivers and fill the pores of the earth. Lakes get a lot—but all the lakes of the world do not hold as much water as the atmosphere holds in a year, perhaps half as much. And all the rivers in the world at any given moment hold only about three hundred cubic miles of water. The Mississippi might be a mile wide, but it’s not a mile deep. It’s but a ribbon of water and can’t hold a bucket to the sky. Still, it carries something like forty percent of all the water brought to the sea in the United States each year.

  “And here is Temple Stream,” Connie said.

  “Pretty,” I said, pleased when she laughed.

  The sun fell back behind the hill, and we grew chilly fast. Connie rose without my aid, held her arms out to the stream, said, “What gifts you bring us,” and put her elbow up to be taken. My pickup was only ten years old then, but looked a junker next to her swanky. Mercedes. Into which she easily climbed, closed her door, rolled her window down quickly.

  She said, “Another Sunday, then?”

  I said, “Another Sunday, yes.”

  “Hydrology,” she said.

  “Hydrology,” I repeated.

  “It’s no laughing matter,” she said, and burbled out an extended giggle of such merriment that I couldn’t help but laugh too.

  I said, “I’m happy I found you.”

  “Well,” said Connie Nosalli, composing herself, pulling her wad of tissue from her sleeve, daubing her eyes, “that’s what’s so important about spending time where you want to be: you meet people of like mind, or at least you meet yourself.”

  FLASH FORWARD TO THE SPRING OF 2000. ONE EARLY APRIL morning, sleepless with her pregnancy, Juliet woke me, said: “We have to leave Ohio.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Promise me,” she said.

  I promised, just couldn’t say when. I knew at least that we’d spend the summer in Maine—her last trimester—and that I’d be on leave from Ohio State again in the fall: the baby would be born in Farmington.

  In the high stack of forwarded mail that had accumulated during our New York trip (and my solo mission to Maine) came a small padded envelope from Ms. Bollocks, the sort you buy at the post office: inside was a squashed Animal Crackers box containing three hundred forty extremely wrinkled, pawed, and greasy one-dollar bills along with two crumpled receipts, one for a Sawzall ferrule and blades (she’d shopped for these in Pennsylvania), one for the padded envelope. There was also a dim photocopy of a months-old electric bill, copiously marked in red pen, various amounts underlined, crossed out, added, and readded. A triple circle surrounded just the number thirty-four in the bottom line (at least two months unpaid), which in full was one hundred thirty-four. Refrigerator!!! was the only notation. The four dollars unaccounted for after that, I knew, was for the postage, rounded up. In the stack of mail, too, in a red-bordered envelope, lurked a shutoff notice from Central Maine Power. The cutoff date—which was not only Ms. Bollock’s problem—had been March 20, first day of spring, the very day I’d prowled my own property on snowshoes and watched the ice go out.

  In the same pile of mail there was a postcard—image of a sand dune—no return address, Massachusetts postmark, deteriorated handwriting: Connie Nosalli was ill. She didn’t say what was wrong, or how serious just like her, of course), and despite best intentions I didn’t manage to write back: I’d get to it eventually.

  In mid-May there was another letter from Farmington. I braced myself for more bad news. But no. The handwriting was backslanted, large, a child’s. The paper was heavily wrinkled, with a deep fold down the center, and the typing upon it was my own:

  TO: BILL . . . FROM: COLLEEN CALLAHAN

  FARMINGTON ME

  1.As exactly as you can: where did you find your bottle?

  I FOUND THE BOTTLE 200 YARDS NORTH OF

  THE IWIN BRIDGES IN FARMINGTON

  2. On what date?

  MAY 7, 2000

  3. In what circumstances? That is, what were you doing when you happened on your bottle?

  ME AND MY FAMILY WERE FIDDLEHEADING.

  AND I TOBBLED ACROSS THE BOTTLE.

  4. Who are you?

  I AM A STUDENT AT CASCADE BROOK SCHOOL,

  FOURTH GRADE. MR. HARDY’S CLASS. I LIVE ON

  PORTER HILL. I’M TEN YEARS OLD TOO!

  5. Add any notes or information or anything at all you’d like.

  WHERE DID YOU TOSS THE BOTTLE? WHO ARE

  YOU? IS THIS THE ONLY BOTTLE? HOW MANY

  HAVE YOU GOTTEN BACK? WILL YOU WRITE ME

  BACK PLEASE? I WOULD LIKE YOU TO WRITE

  BACK!

  THANKS! COLLEEN CALLAHAN

  My first bottle to return hadn’t gotten far: two hundred yards north of the Twin Bridges, or something less than a mile from home, not far from Connie Nosalli’s log. Colleen Callahan’s address on Porter Hill made her a near neighbor—she lived in one of the unprepossessing new houses recently built on lots cut out of the extensive woods there. Sweet luck! Someone had found a bottle. I wrote her back immediately; greetings and thanks, answers to her questions (who am I?—good question), and said I’d see her in the summer.

  Footnote

  1. Mergansers are in the same family as geese and ducks, but occupy their own subfamily I’ve heard old-timers around here (and Earl) call them sheldrakes, sawbills, and even goosanders.

  Upstream Five

  Russell’s Mill to Our Place

  THE FLAT STRETCH OF TEMPLE STREAM BETWEEN THE REMNANTS of the covered bridge at Russell’s Mill Road and our place is my home water. It’s intervale land, and the stream is mostly sluggish, forms several long pools between high mud banks. The juncture of woods and stream and clearing makes good habitat for wild things: in every corner there’s a world. My neighbor the dairy farmer owns the fields down there. First haying is generally in late June—cutting, drying, baling—all of it a one-man, one-tractor operation. The huge cylindrical bales are beautiful to look at, upward of thirty per field per cutting in good years, four fields of perhaps ten acres each, carved out of the rich intervale a very long time ago, first by the stream, which tends through ice and flood to keep such land open, then by the Abenakis, then by the settlers of the Sandy River Plantation. The bales on a misty morning are mirages, fugitives from some soft-lit Monet.

  Farmers and beavers have had a disagreement about this land for two centuries. Where the farmers see fields, the beavers see ponds. The farmers have long practiced something that’s now called beaver management. But the beavers practice
farmer management, a subtler game. All along the banks of the intervale stream are ramps and slides and bitten stumps and whole sections of cleared woods: beaver work. Bank lodges are the preferred construction in our stretch—harder to see than the familiar mound lodge, more secure, entrance tunnels dug into the mud underwater and leading back to under-ground rooms lined with sticks and patted with mud, water-tight and weather tight except for clandestine air vents opening in among the roots and flowers of the forest floor.

  On a midnight beaver expedition in the moderately high water of May 1995—placid full moon—I floated my canoe quietly downstream, paddling just enough to steer. Watching, listening, breathing quietly; I got the idea to spin the boat and sneak through the meanders ass-backward so as to show as little hull as possible until I could spy around the bend. At twelve-thirty A.M., paddling thus in reverse, I caught a raccoon washing a large egg (several of my neighbors keep chickens). At sight of me, the marauder calmly stuffed the prize in his mouth without breaking it, waddled up into the moonlit trees.

  But I’d hung around enough evenings and early mornings without the dogs for at least the beavers to tolerate my presence; the days of tail-slapping insults were over. Still, I seldom got a long look. I’d devised this middle-of-the-night foray as a way to get more observation time. Even if it didn’t work, I thought, there would be the consolation of bright moonlight on water. After the last bend downstream, in the pond just above the bedrock waterfall under the Russell’s Mill bridge, I nosed the boat onto a gravel bar and sat there waiting. Not long—seconds—and a silent beaver swam by, then another. A third quietly dove and swam under the boat, surfaced quietly beyond with a brief backward look in my direction, sound of bubbles.

  And in the bright moonlight, four or five or perhaps more animals (hard to differentiate individuals of the same size, therefore hard to count) went about their chores. The littlest one turned out to be two little ones, identical yearlings that I finally saw together. The biggest beaver (Wally’s size) surfaced late and sat on the next gravel bar—not too close, thirty feet—and worked on a stick, peeling the bark methodically and noisily chewing it. Not entirely trusting, but tolerant, the animal stopped after each strip had been swallowed down and sniffed in my direction. The stick must have come from the remains of the winter cache—1 hadn’t heard any popple harvesting going on. The gentle animal dropped the stick in the water when the bark was gone, then spent a luxurious twenty minutes grooming. It sat up straight, patted itself aggressively around the belly, carefully wiped at its head with its little front paws like hands, patted its belly again, wiped its neck, and so on, patting and wiping till it had attended to every inch of fur.