Into Woods Read online

  And the tire reappears long seconds after its immersion, appears many yards away, cresting like a dolphin. Logs pop out of the water like Titanic fishes, diving at the dam head-up the way salmon do (in fact, you see in the logs how salmon accomplish their feats: they use the power of the eddy, swim hard with the backcurrent, leap—even a log can do it!), leap among froth and playground balls and tires and bottles with caps on, balls and bottles and tires ajumble, reds and blues and yellows and pinks and purples and greens and blacks, bottles and aerosol cans and balls, balls and tires and logs and tree trunks and chunks of Styrofoam, all leaping and feinting and diving under and popping up and reappearing in colors not of the river: aquas and fuschias and metallics, WD-40 blue and Right Guard gold and polished wood and black of tire and crimson board and child’s green ball and pummeled log and white seagulls hovering, darting for fish brought to the tortured surface in the chaos of trash and logs and toys, all of it bobbing, the logs diving headfirst at the dam, the balls rolling and popping free of the foam for airborne flights, and tires like dolphins, and softballs fired from the foam, and polished logs, and a babydoll body, all of it rumbling, caught in the dam wash for hours and days and nights of flood, rumbling and tumbling and popping free, rolling and diving and popping free, bubbling and plunging and popping free.

  Footnotes

  1. Home of at least some of the “Friends of the Olentangy,” one of whom gave me a call after the first publication of this essay to invite me to plant trees along the river with his group. I said no, thinking it a conflict of at least my interest to get involved with the PR arm of such a large corporation.

  2. I’m not making any cause-and-effect claim here, but in the months after the first publication of this essay, the embankment under the catering facility and the grounds immediately around it were cleaned up quite thoroughly, and have been attended to since.

  3. There’s some kind of valve system here that’s been replaced since the first publication of this essay. The new stuff looks pretty sophisticated, and the stench now is quite a bit less, yet still formidable, especially after rain. The pool in the river below stays thawed in winter, and ducks seem to like it.

  4. And, come to think of it, a number of green-painted fifty-five-gallon drums, first about a dozen, then a few more each month or so, till there were over a hundred. You have to love the green paint, the purposeful co-optation of environmental-movement symbolism. These barrels disappeared just after the first publication of this essay, though again, I don’t claim any connection. And one day I saw the “Neighborhood Outreach” truck from one of the huge local hospitals, an eighteen-wheeler, make its way into the chain-link compound and drop something—what exactly, I couldn’t see from my vantage point, presumably some kind of outreach, though!

  Sky Pond

  In Maine, access to a swimming hole on a nice hidden lake or pond is not limited by any general law but only by NO TRESPASSING signs, generally placed on trees along roads one knows are near water by evidence of the quality of the sunlight and sometimes by cheerful stacks of little boards painted with family names and nailed on telephone poles, surmounted by the uncheerful and usually larger sign: PRIVATE. But even if there are no warnings, it’s a hard heart that can walk right down some stranger’s driveway to jump in a jewel Maine lake or pond.

  The way in for the landlocked, then, is properly through the woods, crunch and snap down through the forest, picking a starting place where there are no driveways, dead reckon and battle your way downhill (it’s always downhill, the last way to water, or something’s amiss), hike till the water shines and flashes through the low branches of its trees, find your own little rock to sit on pondside, or, when the gods are with you, your own little beach at the lake. But that relies on a lot of luck and too much pluck for me most days—usually the spots where there are no driveways only persist in that agreeable condition because down at the water where a driveway would have led there is no proper shore, no place to build a camp, and most often the hiker ends up wrong side of a beaver bog or in the windward shallows, stiff breeze in the face, wading through muck and leeches thinking whether he can quite dive yet or needs to struggle further. Or you find that you’ve walked in behind the posting, nicely avoiding the signs (and so enjoying the woods) but not avoiding the trespass, and there’s that big fellow raging over in his aluminum rowboat.

  Anyway—Sky Pond had been like that for me. I’d crunched down through the woods—very steep grade—beaten my way down with my fly rod sometime during Juliet’s and my first spring in the neighborhood (our house is three miles downstream) and noted eight camps, one a derelict, the others but one empty off-season, the occupied one proud across the thickest part of the pond high on a granite bluff behind stately pines. On the shore below that camp and on the boggier shore below its neighbor camp a total of three boats were turned turtle—a canoe and two rowboats. That day there was no breeze at all and the water was the sky and showed its own shoreline diving into the sky. So the poet named the pond.

  I wanted a canoe. Here, by God, you’d do well in a canoe. Far off to the left you’d explore a cattail bog, far off to the right an alder bog. Well, far is only the word for the man on foot at the shores of a pond with no fisherman’s paths around it (not so rare in Maine, where there are so many ponds and lakes). According to the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map (a tall book of maps, which I’d left back up in the cab of my truck), Sky Pond is something slightly less than six-tenths of a mile long, two-tenths of a mile across at the widest point. I could swim to any point on its shore faster than I could walk.

  As at most unbothered ponds, the trees at this northwestward shoreline were ancient and leaned out way over the water, all those decades of seeking light, leaned way out over their own tangled roots, these exposed by winter ice and the multicentennial splash of small waves. Under water in a pond like this, one sees “dead Indians,” trees fallen in and preserved by the cold for centuries, all pointing to the deep center of the pond.

  Trees, trees—gorgeous, but really there was no place to get a good cast, and the wading wasn’t great. Yuck: a thick, rich, old humus bottom under twelve inches of water that nevertheless put you up to your thighs immediately, so no way to get yourself properly out from under the leaners to fish. Still I tied on a black beetle imitation—just a spot of yellow on it—and pulled in sunfish one after the next, trying not to torture them, popping them off the barbless hook right at the water, not even bringing them quite to hand, enjoying this, and the smell of fish that got on my fingers, and the sharp pricks of their staunch dorsal fins and the wriggle of the little lives inside scales, the furious kicking caudal fin, the heat of life in their rolling eyes. There’s also pleasure in the little mind game of knowing one wouldn’t have starved had everything depended on the fishing.

  The only places I could see around Sky Pond to cast were the cuts in front of the camps—and I’m just not the sort to stand in someone’s yard, whether they are gone or no. Some roll casting got my beetle out to four or five little yellow perch. A nice afternoon of it. My first Sky Pond day and the last for a couple of years: other places I could get my canoe in more easily, here you’d have to trespass. So Sky Pond resisted me, enforced a natural privacy not entirely invented by its lucky landholders.

  My next Sky trip was a few Junes hence, after I’d made the happy acquaintance of Bob Kimber, who is an outdoorsman and a spirited, sunny writer, also a translator and a Princeton Ph.D.—but never mind all that (things he wouldn’t tell you right away anyway), he is Bob and always cheerful and funny, always with a project and a helping hand. He’s got a full head of white hair and gray and keeps himself groomed and lives in work clothes a lot and barks with laughter at one’s jokes and makes his own great jokes and stands a little wiry and not too tall, gestures when he talks, waves his beat-up hands. He’s handsome, too.

  This day he has invited me to help him rebuild a friend’s simple dock on Sky Pond, their old one having partially sunk and rotted some
after many good years of service. Hot day and Bob and I are up to our hips in the chilly waters of June, pulling the old floater free—it’s simply built, just spruce boards nailed across two stout trunks of spruce—twelve feet out into the pond, simple as that, and our new design will imitate the old one, do for the next twenty years. We pull the old floater free from the chains that hold it (these nailed to roots, ubiquitous Sky Pond roots), then just scoot it along the bank like a submarine coming in for shore leave, just a periscope and deck showing, send it along a hundred feet or so where it parks itself under a leaner and will sink over years to join all the dead Indians sunk there, to be preserved like them by the cold.

  That particular camp is toward the alder end of the pond, west side, and in June one saw the lily pads floating across the way in bright sun—frog-jump leaves still small, blooms still tight balls. And to the south one saw electric lines, which must follow a road, and the road must cross an outflow stream, that is, pass over a bridge, but the land falls away over there, falls below pond level, which means there is a dike of some sort, a long dam, one would guess, which means beaver work, millennial beaver work, Sky Pond a beaver impoundment, could be 10,000 years old, 20,000, I don’t know. The Sky Pond outlet stream couldn’t be very long—it must join the Temple Stream immediately, the Temple Stream which I knew well even then, better now—it flows hidden in its own cut behind the Kimbers’ farmhouse not a mile downhill from here in the intervale, then two miles more flows through the pastures below my own, and some of what flows is Sky Pond waters.

  Bob had already cut trees for the floats and we just splashed them in the pond using a Peavey pole (my first time—Bob is always teaching me new things, showing me new tools, generous man), Peavey pole and log hook, splash and float and guide, lined the floats up parallel and sawed spruce boards to four feet, nailed these one at a time across the two new floats and pretty soon had a dock to stand on and dive.

  After that we took the right of the helpful to take a swim now and again off that dock, I and my wife, Juliet, Bob and his wife, Rita, she a Swiss expatriot with wry smile and undependable knees. I mention the knees only because it explains her caution and force with our overexuberant dogs—one playful tumble into Rita might pop every tendon in sight. And our boys were playful, all right, racing through the underbrush with the Kimbers’ late Lucy, an elegant little dog, chaser of chickadees (our fellows lean to squirrels), black flags of hair, gone a little white at her snout, distinguished older lady, and a very cheerful swimmer, since gone to her reward. Our Wally is a big mutt, black and white, all chest, a mighty swimmer (the spaniel in him), always has to be in the lead (whimpers piteously if he gets behind), shoulders out of the water. Desmond, our smaller dog—half Border collie, half Boston terrier, very handsome despite the odds—Desi is a more desperate swimmer, sinking up to his ears, kicking those little paws, always aimed at the nearest way out but happy to swim nevertheless. The three dogs would gambol and growl and tumble all around Rita’s knees till Wally and Lucy hit the water, Wally in the lead, of course, snapping water bugs, and off the two of them would swim while the people among us got down to swimsuits, then one by one leapt or dove or climbed down off of the new spruce boards into deliciously warm water (if the weather had been sunny) or startlingly cold (if it had been raining), and we’d stroke and paddle and kick and glide straight across to the lily pads, turn when the cords of the plant wrapped our feet like seaweed and brought the idea of sinking to mind, brought the long hair of Undines to mind, those malevolent water sprites of olden Europe who lured sailors, swimmers, drunkards to watery deaths through siren visions of beauty.

  What lovely swims we had, the pond suddenly our own. We’d chat a little, our chins in lapping wavelets, then swim hard, an hour or so’s outing at the onset of many fine evenings (I believe the Kimbers swam every evening; we only joined them occasionally). But then the folks who owned the house turned up, about August, and the dock wasn’t ours anymore. Nor Sky Pond, suddenly. Well, there are plenty of places to swim in Maine in August.

  One of the camps came up for sale. This availability not the kind of thing normal mortals hear about. But Kimber has his Olympian ear to the pulse of the town of Temple and an eye to the sky and certain mysterious soulful links to Sky Pond, and had long wanted his own bit of shoreline. So pretty soon I was lucky enough to be helping Bob finish building his own little dock down the hard slope from his camp, an older, hand-built cabin with chimney about to fall (it has done so since) and outhouse tilted, lovely porch reaching out into the trees on stilts incompletely stoned-in for a basement beneath, a rustic place, complete with a couple of hundred yards of shoreline that includes one of the Sky Pond beaver lodges (at the mouth of a brook), west side of the pond, nor far from where I stood fishing those years before. Access is a long and finally steep twitch road, little used, two grassy lanes not for just any all-wheel-drive vehicle, in fact in Bob’s vision for foot traffic only, and once in a while for his cat-tread tractor.

  Bob has invited me down to help with the dock with his usual generosity. He won’t need my help all that much, but knows the little help I’ll give will earn me a lowered-guilt family ticket to come swimming summer evenings just this lovely trio of miles from home.

  When I get to the camp, hammer in hand, the dock is about built already, spruce boards, once again, but on a standing frame, and with a ladder. Wally has preceded me and is already halfway across the pond, zigzagging after water skeeters and dragonflies, no competition for first place to distract him into straight lines. Desi greets Bob effusively. And Greg Kimber is there, too—didn’t see him at first—home from his on-his-own adventures and up to his chest in the pond, holding boards for his dad. Of course, there’s the usual father-and-son-doing-a-project-together tension in the air. I bark out jokes to make room for my presence. “Let me stand on your shoulders, there, Greg,” stuff like that, not really funny at all, but funny enough.

  And Greg wades up out of the water. He’s built slender like Bob, his hair long, his head full of gardening knowledge and good dreams of communal living and community life. He’s a serious young man but good-humored. One feels well observed by him, but never judged. The dock’s about finished when we hear the first rumbles of thunder. The pond goes all dark, flat and smooth, then suddenly erupts in wind devils and then whitecaps. Boom and crack, the storm is upon us, first drops falling, pond leaping up to meet the sky.

  “Let’s get in the water,” Greg says wryly.

  We hustle up to the shack, a few seconds scrabbling up the hill, but we’re soaked down by the time we’re inside. Desi trembles, presses up against my leg, quavers and whimpers, pants grotesquely. Wally, oblivious, just likes being with everyone, wags his tail, looks for a hand to scratch his ears. The rain redoubles. The surface of the pond goes invisible—it’s all rainfall—, only the big white pines exist out there anymore, and the rain, the rain, the rain crashing down, close lightning, boom again, and crack. Desi quakes. But it’s energizing, the storm, pure gaiety. The porch roof, which is also the porch ceiling, begins to drip a little, then to actually leak, then to rain upon us.

  “Roof is pretty good,” Greg says.

  Bob’s thinking, already coming down the hill in his tread-tractor with a load of shingles and rolls of tar paper and two ladders and ropes and maybe someone to help.

  After that good day, Juliet and I and the boys swim off Bob’s dock and never have that feeling of being somewhere we shouldn’t, somewhere someone else considers private, the feeling we’ve had elsewhere. We swim across Sky Pond nearly every day in summer, sometimes with the Kimbers, often not, dogs in the lead, Juliet next, I always following, swim across to sit on a big rock over there in the sun, get warm, return, the widest part of the pond, not quite a quarter mile, no lily pads, often a loon diving nearby then surfacing nearer, diving, surfacing farther, diving, surfacing unseen. Wally pursues for a time, but soon returns to dragonflies and water skeeters—he’ll never, ever get near a loon.

>   And after the swim if the mosquitoes aren’t too bad we just stand on Bob’s dock and watch the water and maybe talk a little about the work of the day, what I’ve planted, what Juliet’s painted, what Bob is writing, what Rita is translating, how the various gardens are doing, what books we’re reading. It’s a very sturdy peace and with the exercise a bright one, bringing mind and body together into one pure thing. Some evenings a beaver swims by a hundred feet out, close enough to inspect us, get a sense of us. He swims past slowly, as if nonchalant, but his head turns subtly, watching.

  One evening when we are just Juliet and me and dogs, I chance to look up. High, high above us there are dark birds working insects. At first I think swallows—but these are not swallows. Too big, though it’s hard to judge size against nothing but clouds. The white spots on the underwings are unique—I take note, then look in my bird book at home: nighthawks, bearded birds, not properly hawks but whippoorwill relatives, nighthawks wheeling, diving, my first sighting ever. Sky Pond gives one these gifts.

  The walk back up the trail from the Kimbers’ is always sweet and quiet. One looks for mushrooms in the edges of the trail, looks for warblers in the firs, for lady’s slippers in the leaf mold, for newts in the wet spots, for squirrels to chase, finds them all, this paradise.

  So Sky Pond had accepted me, but only as a guest. And even as the guest of someone so generous as the Kimbers, I felt like Odysseus on Circe’s Island, or less exaltedly, Nick Carraway at Gatsby’s, or less yet, the neighbor kid at the house with a pool, or worse, a servant invited to Cinderella’s ball (not even the char girl herself!), or lower even, the bride’s brother’s buddy who happens to be in town, or lower yet, a temp worker at his desk among dot-com millionaires. Lowest of the low: a cowbird egg in a warbler’s nest.