Temple Stream Page 13

  Almost all beavers are born in late May or June (there are rare examples of fall litters), meaning that almost all beavers are Geminis (as is Juliet, and as are some five hundred million humans besides her), which must count for something. The litter size is one to five creatures—tiny, complete beavers, already showing their buck teeth. These kits nurse for up to two months. The female of the couple is the primary caregiver, mostly stays in the lodge to nurse and warm her babies. Before one month of age, they try the water and before long have learned to swim through the tunnels and out of the lodge. On the night of my canoe trip the colony’s matriarch was most likely nursing kits back in the lodge.

  The big beaver on the gravel bar—Papa? some bachelor uncle?—finished barking his stick and slipped into the water with it firmly in his teeth, headed upstream to the dam: more lumber. The yearlings swam by in tandem, up and down, back and forth, paying me no mind, disappearing underwater for minutes at a time. Then, in a particularly quiet moment, one of them startled me by leaping loony out of the water and onto the bank full speed, as if chased by a shark. The shark in the skit turned out to be his sibling, who appeared as suddenly with a hiss like laughter, leaping onto the gravel. The first character parried and leapt and bowled the second over, scurried into the water. The shark tumbled and hissed and leapt into the current after his prey, and the two of them sped at me, dove under the boat effortlessly, surfaced in the shallow water beyond, wrestled there a full minute in splashing abandon loud as a city fountain, dove suddenly and were gone, leaving moonlit ripples and plain silence.

  THE TROUT LILY IS NAMED FOR ITS LEAF, A BROWN-MOTTLED, fishy shape that leaps from leaf-litter rapids in large schools throughout our woods, often through a layer of late snow. The flower—a limply epicene hand bedizened with sweet spots of red—appears later, fades quickly, dries, falls. The leaf loses its mottling as summer comes in, grows tattered, settles back into the forest floor. Later in summer, adventuring white roots show aboveground like so much strewn spaghetti as the essential plant below works to increase its domain.

  I’d known the trout lily from childhood, though not by name. Inspired by Connie Nosalli’s sense of precision, I went to look it up but found that the Peterson Wildflowers my mother had given me when I was in college had gone missing. At Twice Sold Tales (an inviting forest of used books in a beautiful old storefront in downtown Farmington), Peterson was between visits. But I found a stem little handbook dated 1910: hardcover, faded lettering, nice paintings of specimens, old-fashioned handwriting in brown fountain-pen ink on the fly-leaf—This hook belongs to Muriel Winter.

  Right in the store I looked up my plant, discovered its name and, further (rightly or wrongly—there’s still plenty of lively disagreement even in botany, the settled science), that it was a spring ephemeral. Spring ephemerals, the encyclopedic voice of the handbook explained, are plants that arise and bloom and fade in earliest spring, all before the leaf canopy above comes to rob light.

  The trout lily led me to a closer inspection of the forest floor. I was pleased to find that nearly every odd leaf was familiar to me—not always by name, but by the simple expertise of boyhood, which was the last time I’d spent so much of each day just looking hard at everything. I’d had my own names for the little plants of the woods: “thumb things,” for example, which fuzzy leaf I still recognize wherever I see it (field or sheep sorrel, according to Muriel’s handbook—if you are a kid they are good to eat, if adult, quite sour); “frog belly” (or live-forever, a sedum—I used to put the thick leaves in my mouth to loosen the skin, then blow them up—thus the name); ’ “eyeballs” (deep-purple berries, dusty bluish leaves, not in Muriel’s book). I know more about these plants now, but keep the old names anyway. And as a boy I knew actual names, too, and the generic names of many things. My mother taught me a great deal informally on walks, and I’d been a Boy Scout, too, and been to summer camp, aced contest quizzes for prizes like lanyard kits: trillium, Indian pipe, club mosses, poison ivy, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wild violets (in yellow, white, purple, or blue), wild cucumber (those spiny fruits great for practical jokes), bluets (darling little light-facing stars, blue, white, or blue and white), coltsfoot (flower something like a dandelion, but no leaves around it, and for that reason called son-without-father in England, where it’s from, a pharmacy escapee, once used as a cough remedy).

  Later in life I wanted to know more, and book learning—even with Muriel over my shoulder—was slow and often inconclusive, so: I invited an old acquaintance named Nancy Prentiss to have a look at spring plants with me. She lives in Industry, the next town north of Farmington, on a settler farm set amid lots of good forestland that backs up Norton Mountain and the True Mountain Ridge. Her husband, Mark, is a cabinetmaker who’s evolved into a log specialist—he searches out, cuts, dries, and sells only the most musical wood from Maine trees to makers of violins and guitars (few trees, even within a given species, are instrument quality, he told me: in the heyday of Maine logging, all work would stop when a melodious log came gonging down the flume, and it would be saved for the fiddle shop), also baseball bats (some of the heaviest hitters in the major leagues are using Mark’s flawless maple now: it’s hard as George Steinbrenner’s heart).

  Nancy is a field botanist. She earned her master’s in marine invertebrates from the University of Maine at Orono, but her first love (and the subject of her B.A.) is botany. At seven she had a flower book like Emily Dickinson’s, in which she pressed flowers from the abandoned fields around her family’s house, each with the Latin names penned in her “little scrawny handwriting.” She’s tall and athletic, strong, walks with confidence—hard to imagine anything about her being little and scrawny. Driving, she watches the road verges. In fact, she’s full of stories of rare and remarkable plant species encountered just down an inviting path during a lull in a Little League baseball game (she and her husband have three boys, who, the first time I met them, were dressed up as beavers for Halloween) or, by way of contrast, above the tree line in alpine arctic-tundra zones with one or another dean of area botany. I knew that Nancy was besieged by friends and fans and news-papers looking for identifications of odd plants, and indeed she sounded ambivalent on the phone when I called.

  But she agreed to help me. And on a Friday morning, just before the start of her popular May-term field botany class at UMF, she rearranged her schedule to come identify Temple Stream ephemerals. Ephemerals, she had explained to me, grow fast from extensive root systems, throw leaves up, make all the photosynthetic nutrients they need for root growth and sustained life in a month or so, and then disappear from the upper world entirely. The rest of the year, that long period of leaf senescence, ephemerals spend in improving the root and slowly spreading. During the short leaf-and-flower season the plants are operating in cold temperatures, diverting nutrients to the brief green growth at a high rate that requires rich soil, the kind found in healthy forests.

  Nancy arrived on that cool, bright May morning and pulled her sweater over her head immediately, dropped it back in her car, tucked her turtleneck into her blue jeans, fixed her shining auburn hair, put a special little necklace magnifier around her neck, all business, and finally gave me her cocked smile. She’s got a good nose, solid chin, wore a look of harried confidence, but with something a little suspicious in her gaze (like a mom whose child is being awfully nice to her and taking an interest at last: What’s this kid really want?).

  She said, ’’I’m pretty busy this week. We’ll have to be efficient!”

  So I trotted to the barn for canoe paddles, and then we were off. Right behind the break in the stone wall that is the entrance to our little woods, she spotted a nodding, somewhat limp plant with pleasingly blue-green leaves standing all by it-self: “Blue cohosh,” she said. And, delicately, she showed me the unassuming flowers, which were mostly green, with a hint of yellow. “They have blue berries later,” she said, and flipped expertly through her Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide to show me dramatic blue beads t
hat stand on upright stalks, each with its own stem, six or so in a group, delicious-looking but inedible, even mildly poisonous: the eyeballs of my youth!

  “It’s not an ephemeral,” Nancy said, meaning Let’s stay focused.

  We moved on, eyes to the ground, me following, absently using my canoe paddles as walking sticks. A certain pretty-leafed plant caught her attention. “Three-lobed leaflets,” she said, crouching to caress it fondly. “Tall meadow rue, which won’t flower until midsummer. Thalictrum puhescens. Bursts of white stamens, no petals. Buttercup family. Not an ephemeral.”

  She pointed offhandedly to a very familiar arched stem of alternate ribbed leaves. She shook the stem for me. “Do you know this?”

  Not intimately—but I recognized it.

  “False Solomon’s seal. And this one is false hellebore.” Another familiar plant, large leaves on a thick stalk growing in a wet spot. “Could be called false skunk cabbage, too. People around here do call it skunk cabbage, but it’s not. Skunk cabbage simply doesn’t grow here.”

  I got a superior feeling because I’m from Connecticut and I know from skunk cabbage. Nancy is from Connecticut too. She built her wry smile efficiently—she’d found someone who liked a skunk cabbage story. “And people around here know I’m looking for skunk cabbage, in order to establish its range in Maine, and they call me all the time, and sometimes I go out to look, and it is always, always, false hellebore. But there is skunk cabbage down along the coast. I’ve seen it there.”

  False Solomon’s seal and false hellebore are not ephemerals—they would be around all summer, the leaves getting more and more torn and frayed and broken, but hanging on. The false Solomon’s seal flower is a tall white spray. The false hellebore flower is a greeny-yellow, star-shaped thing, and the plants get very tall, over my head in places. Why “false”?

  “That just means they were once mistaken for something. There’s no judgment implied.”

  The ferns aren’t ephemerals, either, but there they were, curling up from the ground, most at the fiddlehead stage. The first one we saw was a sensitive fern, which did look rather moody with its naked red stalk. Nancy pointed out the previous year’s fertile fronds, which stood up dryly, tall brown sticks with long clusters of brown beads at their tops. I knew these fronds from Juliet’s late-fall bouquets—they’d been in our blue vase all winter. To tell the truth, they looked like seventies-vintage Thai sticks, buds of serious marijuana tied to satay skewers that soldiers stuffed into their green underpants and brought back in prodigious quantities from Vietnam.

  I moved toward the stream, could smell the stream, but Nancy walked only a few yards before she was squatting again. “Now, this is running dewberry,” she said. “Or dwarf raspberry,” a pretty, viny thing growing along the ground. When you stopped to look at it, it did have a sense of speed. I ventured the opinion that the flowers looked like strawberry blooms.

  “Good, good,” Nancy said. “Rose family. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, too. Dewberries are like underweight blackberries, very seedy and sour.” She moved on, looking at everything. A vision of my mother came unbidden, my younger mom, that wavy dark hair crossing her eye, cigarette at her lips, 1959, saying the names of plants so tenderly. I basked in her warm presence, those rare chances to be with her alone: gentian, mustard, horse-balm, rose. Wild sweet william, she’d say, and that was a flower, and me.

  Nancy said, “Club moss. Star moss. Nice mat of it there. These lichens are pretty. I find them interesting, but I’m waiting until I can invest some time in learning them. This is more blue cohosh. There’s that false Solomon’s seal again. Good rich soil. And, oh ... a silvery spleenwort. And this.” She kneeled, pointed out a small leaf pushing its way up through a hole in a large pad of moss. “This is Canada mayflower.”

  Nancy was visiting with old friends now, visibly relaxing. Al-most dreamily: “See, it’s just a leaf at this point, but it’ll end up with two or three leaves on a stalk that will culminate in a white raceme, which is small individual flowers each attached to the main stalk by a little stem. Some people call it wild lily of the valley, and it grows like that, spreading, forming large patches if the habitat is any good. It’ll bloom by late May.”1

  While she inspected the foliage, I poked around and found a hidden little white flower of my own, pointed it out tentatively.

  “Good, good,” Nancy said. “Oh, that is interesting.”

  I beamed.

  She said, “Goldt hread. Coptis trifolia.” She squatted down and dug quickly, carefully pulled a tangle of bright yellow rhizomes and roots up out of the leaf mold without detaching them from the soil: threads of gold indeed. She said, “I taught an elder hostel once and these great older folks knew all these important things we’re forgetting. When I showed them goldthread, an elderly man—he’d been very bored—got all excited and said he remembered digging goldthread for a penny a pound for the pharmacist. These were all medicines then. Can you imagine what it would take to get a pound of this stuff?”

  We passed through an old loggers’ clearing filled in with bracken, a tall fern with strong stems, very upright. I said the name, proud of myself. Nancy merely nodded. “You know English novels? When they say they’re off in the bracken? And Peter Rabbit? He was always lost in the bracken. It forms these dense colonies and gets waist-high. Good place to hide.”

  We moved on, but not far. I pointed out a nice patch of bluets, white flowers the size of blouse buttons standing on lank stalks no thicker than pine needles.

  “The settlers called them Quaker-ladies,” Nancy said. “Also innocence.” And the flowers did seem to nod modestly, intent on the good.

  We made a brief effort at hurrying, made some progress toward the stream, but Nancy stopped again: “Oh, you know this stuff,” and bent to pluck a single leaf, which she popped in her mouth. “One of my very favorites. And good in salad.”

  “Trout lily!” I said triumphantly, I hadn’t known they were edible.

  The hundred or so feet to the stream was slow going—plant after plant, name by name. When we finally got there, Nancy gazed briefly at the high water. The sun reached us there and it was hot. A common yellowthroat, newly arrived, sang somewhere among the ice-flattened alders. The buds on all the trees were ripe to bursting, tinting the naked branches of the forest canopy across the way fresh green, a distinct softening of the sharp contrasts of winter. “Nice,” Nancy said. But seconds later her head was down again and she was pointing out a single leaf with the size and shape and bend of a goose-quill pen. “Clintonia borealis, named after Governor Clinton of New York.”

  I had gone to college in Upstate New York, so knew something about the governor and ventured it, sounding like a schoolboy: “He was mayor of New York City for ten years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, then a U.S. senator and a failed presidential candidate, then sponsor and commissioner of the Erie Canal project, and author of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution.”

  Nancy dismissed all that with a wave of her hand: “He was an amateur botanist, too.”

  We ducked through the tangle of alders and red osier dog-wood, eyes on the ground. A stick poked my ear. I said, “Here is some more Canada mayflower.”

  “Canada mayflower,” Nancy said, straightening. She kept her voice efficient even while the muscles of her face relaxed in fondness for the plant, said, “Exactly right.” And then she told me the next thing, the inefficient thing: ’You know, I’ll never ever forget where I was when I first saw it. Canoe trip with my family. And I had my little field guide and looked it up and there it was. I pressed it in my collection. Wrote the scientific name, Maianthemum canadense. Never forgot it.”

  She straightened, pushed along the stream into thicker undergrowth yet, said, “Hobblebush.” She opened a passage through blackberry branches and alder shoots with her hands, stood intimate with the blooming shrub, pointed out the large clusters of white flowers. “Now, look at these—the big, showy flowers around the outside are j
ust that, just for show—the real flowers are in the middle here.” They were tiny indeed. “Honeysuckle relative, a Viburnum. A shrub. There’s another Viburnum you probably have around here, northern wild raisin, it’s called—has an edible fruit the settlers collected.”

  She crouched obliviously down through the scratching branches of the hobblebush to show me further treasures, the first a tiny thing with drooping leaves: “Windflower. Anemone quinquefolia. Also known as wood anemone.” Next, a slightly bigger plant, more upright: “Sessile-leaved bellwort, Uvularia sessilifolia. See how the leaves wrap the stalk? That’s what sessile means. Uvularia means bell-like, referring to the flowers. Not an ephemeral. Also known as wild oats.”

  We broke out of the verdure and onto the old beaver path to the water, where my canoe waited. Aware of how much of her time I’d already taken, I suggested we cross the stream.

  Nancy grinned. “So that’s what the paddles are for.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. People are so eccentric. I just thought you carried paddles around.”