Temple Stream Page 14

  New Englanders are always sure someone else is doing something stupid for show!

  The stream is never terribly wide there, but had been quite high after rain. We dragged the boat down the beaver ramp through a small forest of false hellebore, big ribbed leaves on tall stalks, just the height to soak our thighs with dew. “Also called Indian poke,” Nancy said, reaching into the hawthorn brambles and parting the thorny branches without a care to re-veal nodding leaves. “More wood anemone,” she said, then pulled gently at a tangle of vines: “And here’s a wild cucumber.” That brought her face-to-face with a prickly, spiky plant still sporting last year’s red berries: “Yuck, barberry. Invasive!” She backed out, looked up, took a serrated heart-shaped leaf in hand. I might have guessed dogwood, but she didn’t give me the chance: “See this? That’s your wild raisin.”

  I slid the canoe into the water, tossed the paddles in, the one life jacket, and Nancy climbed aboard. I hopped in the stem and pushed off such that the current caught the bow, and we were quickly dragged downstream. Nancy paddled expertly, draw stroke, cross-draw, brought the bow into the current, and we headed up.

  “I didn’t expect a canoe ride,” Nancy said happily. “I grew up canoeing—I was the kid who would go with my father most often. We’d go white-water canoeing with some die-hard canoeists from the Appalachian Mountain Club—caught the spring runoff on some wild rivers.”

  We pulled into a cow ramp. The day had grown balmy, nice breeze from the west. The banks are high there, where the stream has cut through the bottomland. We climbed up to the hayfield. “Buttercup,” Nancy said. “Yuck. An alien from Europe.” Long pause. “Well, now we’re being encouraged to call them ’naturalized.’ And I guess you can’t ignore aliens in Maine. They make up a third of the plants around here. And I’m basically an alien here, too, being from Connecticut, so I shouldn’t be so snobbish. I’m going to have to shift, not make them out to be such bad guys.”

  “Coltsfoot,” I said, pointing to the familiar naked stalk and yellow flower growing in the middle of the path.

  Nancy tried to hide it, but she distinctly made that face—coltsfoot an alien—a snobby grimace that went against her natural cheerful lineaments. We crossed the field on muddy tractor ruts. “Oak ferns,” Nancy said as we reached the forest edge. “These are my favorite little ferns.” They were small, like miniature bracken, delicately branched, stood erect on their dark stalks, leaves horizontal to the ground, a handsome little group.

  We continued up the hill, left the tractor path halfway up, ducked into a long-uncut section of my dairying neighbor’s forest: mixed hardwoods, tall and stately, a few white pines. We crunched through the dry leaf mold, eyes cast downward. “Well-drained habitat,” Nancy said. “Depauperate, meaning: kind of barren. Let’s move.” She pointed down through the wood to the edge of the hayfield, a large boggy area, greener. As we made our way, she said, “his whole ridge was probably in cultivation up to fifty years ago or so, seventy years. So you’re not going to find unbroken speciation, undisturbed forest soils—none of that.”

  The second we reached the edge of the wet area she crouched to caress a small plant with triple-lobed, egg-shaped, serrated leaves hiding amid spring-pale poison ivy, which we both ignored: “This one is toothwort, a toothache medicine, Cardamine diphylla. It’ll bloom soon. It’s not an ephemeral. Also called crinkleroot, guess why. Worts were medicines. The word stems from the Old English for root.”

  The ground beneath our feet grew wet, then wetter, and we slogged into a thick stand of balsams and hemlocks rising from rocky soil, ferns coiling up from every hump and crevice, every rock a moss garden. Several balsam firs had fallen over and their root masses stood in arcs like dark crèches. Nancy said, “This is a nice rich spot here. And oh! Oh, look.” She hurried to where the ground rose into a dry hump not twenty feet from the field’s bright edge. The hump was covered thickly by tall leaf-pairs newly emerged, pale green, not so much goose quills as angel wings. Nancy knelt among them: “Remind you of Clintonia? I’ve made that mistake before. But do you know what these are? Let me try that knife of yours.”

  I handed it over. Quickly she dug down along the white, deep stem of one of the plants. She rooted with the knife blade and with her expert fingers a long, careful time, eventually came up with a slender white bulb. “Wild leek.” She cut it and held it to my nose and it was good—smelled of garlic and onion both. “Oh, delicious,” she said. “These are really rare. Very special. They speak of a habitat long undisturbed. And they’re true ephemerals, Bill.”

  A mosquito buzzed in my ear, landed on my neck—the first of spring. The sun bore through the budded branches above us and warmed my shoulders, seemed indeed to warm my soul. The field was bright with sunlight, just ten paces distant, but a universe away. Far across those brilliant grasses lay the bed of the stream. The sky was bluer for the juxtaposition with the high branches of the firs around us. The fragrance of the leek lingered and I felt myself urging toward the light, toward the open, even as Nancy bent lower, moved deeper into the bog and darkness—the leeks had won her over. She muttered, “See how green the floor of the forest is here? I knew it. From the ridge this just looked hold.”

  We mucked along through vernal puddles and rotted leaves, in and out of the warmth of the sun, over an old stone wall, around fallen firs, under a broken popple trunk, finding specimens of nearly all the plants we’d seen so far, ignoring the aliens more and less vehemently (I am one to quickly adopt the prejudices of a teacher). Then a new one, just getting started, two different kinds of leaves, one heart-shaped, one with sharply elongated toes: “Small-flowered crowfoot. Now, that’s a native. It’s a buttercup, but not the European that you see everywhere in the fields here—it’ll bloom in June.”

  Another deeply lobed leaf lurked a little further along, and I would have missed it without my guide, mistaken it for crow-foot. Nancy said, “Wild geranium.”

  I said I had some in my garden.

  “Oh, no. People think so around here, but what you’ve got is actually just a garden variety—that purply stuff that makes great mounds of vegetation? That was cultivated long ago. But this is truly wild. It’s called spotted cranesbill. Geranium maculatum. The flower has a bit of a beak, thus the common name. Very special.”

  I felt again the sunny pull of the field, so near, but Nancy crept yet deeper into the bog. “Foamflower,” she called. I trotted to catch up to her. ’’I’m looking for one in bloom for you And here we are.” Tall fuzzy stem, flowers on a raceme, only one open. “It will make a show,” she said. Then, with her grin: “Not a true ephemeral. “

  We climbed over the remains of a tremendous yellow birch trunk, skirted a pool by hopping rock to mossy rock to stump to hummock. Everywhere I stepped I was suddenly aware of the forest floor, of what I was trampling, could suddenly name the victims of my boot, could not always avoid stepping on some lovely flower, tender plant.

  Abruptly, my guide was splashing off across the rocks in the direction of a certain wide hummock. I followed, Watson after Sherlock Holmes, under the branches of a small beech still rattling with last fall’s dried leaves. At the hummock—an old stump buried in moss—Nancy crouched, sighed, gently tipped up a tiny palmate leaf for me to admire: “Dwarf ginseng. The prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. So fragile. One of my favorites. Cutest little thing! So fleeting,” she said, meaning that in their fleetingness all plants are ephemerals, despite whatever official classification. I found myself wondering if Earth itself is but something in bloom for a billion-year moment.

  That grin. The plants were indeed cute, each leaf whorled around a slight stem and divided into three leaflets like charms on a bracelet, two plants on each side of the hummock, which was a fairy-ground. We searched the immediate vicinity then, but found no further examples of the dwarf ginseng. Those few, those four, about to bloom, showed precious beads like pearls, buds for the flowers to come. “Any day now,” Nancy said. “Oh, the flower is so delicate.” Sh
e opened her Newcomb’s guide to show me the bloom as it would soon be, a tiny explosion of white flowers. “It’s in its own family. Araliaceae. This is Panax—P. trifolium, for the three leaves. Very rare around here. Oh, you are lucky to have this habitat nearby.”

  Without Nancy, I would have trampled the uncommon little plants without notice. We lingered over the ginseng awhile, stood up from it only reluctantly, climbed back over the stone wall, back under the broken popple, back around the vernal pool on stepping-stones and stumps, under the reaching branches of a white birch, and into the field and bright sun-light. Three hours had passed since we’d crossed the stream, three hours like no time at all. We struck out through timothy grass to the water, trying to love the naturalized buttercups as we went, the settlers’ clovers. At streamside we walked the wrong way to get to the canoe—I was following Nancy; she was following me. But the diversion brought us to another rich plant patch, up in an uncultivated area on the high bank of the stream, wild leek abounding, that new friend.

  “Ah,” Nancy said, “and this is bloodroot.” This one I knew well from a patch deep in our backyard. It was in bloom, the single wide leaf of each plant folded around the single stem as if presenting to the world of sky the single white flower. Nancy pulled up a specimen, broke the root, dabbed a little of the pale blood on the back of my hand by way of etymology.

  “Okay, and here.” Just at the crumbling edge of the bank, the stream flowing fast below us, my guide squatted once again and cupped a tiny plant, showed me the tender flowers—white, five petals, lovely striations of pink on each. “Spring beauties—that’s the common name. Claytonia virginica.

  “These are true ephemerals.”

  Happy too, I stopped to inspect the beaver stump I’d seen chickadees attending—and found a nice cavity and a few shreds of nesting material, but not the actual nest. Nancy, no bird head, called me over to something more important: “Here we go,” she said. “Dutchman’s breeches. Another true ephemeral. You look all day, and finally here they are.” This one had a nice, well-divided leaf, looked tender indeed. ’There will be no sign of these guys in a few weeks.” She splayed the foliage over her hand, unfolded her necklace magnifier for the first time that morning, squatted down to look closer. “So fleeting,” she murmured.

  I squatted with her, head to head, shared the eyepiece back and forth, found the next plant, shifted on our popping knees to look. The flowers were puffed, pretty, creamy yellow, shaped something like their relative the bleeding heart, two distinct horns making the legs of a little pair of short pants. We looked and looked more.

  I was a boy, a boy with his mother, and Mom knew the world.

  Footnote

  1. “May-Flower,” by Emily Dickinson: “Pink, small, and punctual / Aromatic, low, / Covert in April, / Candid in May, // Dear to the moss, / Known by the knoll, / Next to the robin / In every human soul, // Bold little beauty, / Bedecked with thee, / Nature forswears / Antiquity.”

  Summer Solstice

  FINALLY IT WAS JUNE. WE PACKED UP THE OHIO HOUSE, stuffed the dogs into the car, waved good-bye to our acceptably bizarre subletter, drove home a thousand miles via two motels: Juliet was six months along and couldn’t ride forever. Wally whined as we pulled into the mouth of our road. Desi joined him, having caught the scent of Temple Stream. And here was the house, smaller than in memory, in more desperate need of paint, more ramshackle, hardscrabble, isolated, forlorn. White planks from the long horse fence I’d built along the road with such effort and expense lay broken in the grass—snowplow damage. Ms. Bollocks hadn’t done the usual repairs, always in favor of leaving signs of our foolishness in returning to this godforsaken place. We pulled into the empty driveway, sat there awhile staring at the sobering tableau, then let the dogs free. They exploded into the yard, dog delirium, dog joy.

  On the kitchen table, a crayoned note blamed me for the fence and explained that as the electric bill was clearly in my name, no money was owed by her, this on top of a numbered sheet offour botched phone messages in a huge, childish hand:

  1. SIXIY MINUTES PRODUCER BUT I DIDN’T HAVE A PENCIL

  2. JULIET’S MOTHER OR FATHER WANT A

  3. SOMEONE WHO HAVE A CONTRACT OUT ON YOU

  4. A MAN CALLED

  In the freezer compartment of our fridge we found candle butts melted into our best little dishes (this in response, I guessed, to my complaint about the gobs of candle wax on bare tables the previous year, which in turn had been a response to my own lackluster apology for getting candle wax on the picnic table Ms. Bollocks had left in our yard the year before that). In my top dresser drawer I found a fancy, unopened penis-enlargement kit that must have cost plenty, message unclear. In the wood stove we found a season’s worth of densely packed paper trash, primarily pizza boxes. In the woodshed, a thoughtful-seeming pile of firewood turned out to be an old telephone pole preserved in chimney-clogging, seam-dripping creosote, carefully cut, split, and stacked. In the bread box, still in the plastic bag I’d zipped closed with my own hands six months before ... the corn muffins we’d left her in welcome, encased in green mold so dark it was black. In the oil tank: nothing.

  SOLSTICE, ROUGHLY TRANSLATED, MEANS SUN STANDS STILL. And the sun stood still at the notch of Spruce Mountain. Slowly, under its influence, we opened like flowers. I stopped at the diner for blueberry pie, asked Zimbabwe to tell Earl we were back if she saw him: time to get our firewood in—we’d be staying all fall. I felt myself breathe again, began to see past the scruffier elements of our surroundings to the sublime. We swam in the local ponds, we waded in the stream, we brought lobstahs and steamahs home from Dunham’s Lobster Pot and ate them on the deck at sunset. Sitting back-to-back on the couch, we read terrifying pregnancy and parenting books, compared notes in hushed tones. I was going to have to vacate my studio upstairs, make room for a crib and rocker, changing table, toys. Time and space were no longer ours.

  On the twenty-second of June, first day of summer, I made the enjoyable walk out to the mailbox, stood in the sun sorting the stack, came to a spotted envelope addressed with my own rubber stamp, and stamped again, in red: RECEIVED IN BAD CONDITION. I started when I realized what it was: one of my bottle notes, this one mailed back to me by one John Atwood, of Fairfield, Maine.

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

  APPROX: 1 MI JUST BELOW THE SHAWMUT DAM

  2. On what date?

  JUNE 19, 2000

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

  BASS FISHING

  P. S. YOUR BOTTLE LEAKS.

  The Shawmut Dam is on the Kennebec River just above Waterville and more than sixty river miles from our place, an hour by car on good roads: I’ve fished down there. My bottle had made it over the Davis Mill dam in roaring water, taken the harrowing gravel-pit turn into the Sand, bobbed past Pierpole’s camp in Farmington Falls, surfed the rocky white water of New Sharon, negotiated the series of wide meanders where the Sandy meets the Kennebec, raged eight or more miles through the Bombazee Rips, spun through the Central Maine Power turbines housed in the huge dam at Skowhegan, spun again in the Great Eddy of the Kennebec, spurted thence fourteen miles to Shawmut Dam and its complement of fear-some turbines, finally pulling up in some reeds after the riffles near Goodwin Corner, nine months of travel to reach its fateful meeting with John Atwood, who’d only come for bass.

  JULIE T AND I BURN ABOUT SIX CORDS OF FIREWOOD A YEAR, releasing quickly the carbon that nature would have released through the slower fires of death, rot, or ingestion. The first year in the house, I bought our wood what is called tree-length, sixteen-foot logs of rock maple, beech, a little oak, a little ash, one stick birch, all dropped on the grass of my side yard from a log truck with a boom and claw in a neat, imposing pyramid that would promise months of morning work, but only twenty-five dollars a cord. You balance on the pile in ear protectors and chain-saw eighteen-inchers by the hour, slowly diminishing the mou
ntain. And then comes the splitting. I like the heft of my splitting maul, the crack of the wood, the rhythm that develops, the sore muscles. My friend Bob Kimber uses nothing but an axe, expertise I don’t have, and came to help me keep pace with the season that first year. But mostly I was on my own, an hour each summer morning of hard labor: free workout, no gym. Finally, there’s the stacking, a log-by-log process of bringing the wood into the shed and piling it such that air can circulate between the splits. Last comes the burning, an armload at a time, the summer’s seemingly unassailable pile slowly succumbing, all the way through to the last fire on a rainy day in June, just before the next load of wood arrives.

  The year we bought the woods next door, I took all our fuel from it, thinning and culling about as much as I thought the small acreage could sustain. That, of course, was much more work than tree-length, very difficult on my own with only a chain saw and peavey pole, wheelbarrow for a skidder. I learned how dangerous the work is, and what poor firewood popple makes, and how much carpenter ants like black cherry.

  After a year of tree-length and a year on the woodlot, I was quite ready for what’s called “cut, split, and delivered,” for which the going rate was ninety dollars a cord, leaving only the stacking and a little recreational splitting for me. I began buying from Earl, who delivered my wood for the couple of years before I took the Ohio State job, excellent loads of well-cut and uniformly split hardwoods. (When his first delivery was complete, I started to write him a check. He said, “Now, what am I supposed to do with that?” He didn’t believe, he said, in “banking relationships,” had never had a bank account of any kind.) But when he learned we were headed for Ohio, that was the end of it. He let it be known he could no longer supply us, not even a small amount. Among flatlanders, in Earl’s estimation, there were two types: summer yups, and year-round summer yups. Year-rounders you might tolerate. But Earl wasn’t in the business of summer yups, no-suh. By then the firewood was mostly Ms. Bollocks’s problem in any case, and she had her own ways of obtaining it.