Into Woods Read online

  And you know, you don’t want to bug your host, don’t want to take advantage, don’t want to be there every second, never give them a minute to themselves. The Kimbers, bless them, they had their own routine of swimming every late afternoon. So Juliet and the dogs and I swam elsewhere often—the Sandy River especially, sometimes further away: Long Pond, Porter Pond, Clearwater Lake. But Sky Pond had charms like no other: its calm, its containment, its leaning trees. And was close to home, as well. Juliet and I tried coming later than Bob and Rita might, but that gave us the feeling of avoiding them, which was not our plan at all, though it was awkward nevertheless to run into them unannounced. Awkward for us, anyway: Bob and Rita didn’t seem to mind. Except maybe at times the rambunctious dogs, who can’t check their ecstasy at seeing the Kimbers, who launch into sarabandes of delight, a barkanalia. Wally particularly is in love with Bob, having stayed with them during a long trip Juliet and I once took, moons over him, wants to eat him up, climb in his pocket.

  And it’s always Wally in trouble. One of his worst transgressions was of a late summer’s evening, air warm, sky already coming dark, when Bob spotted a large snapping turtle swimming under the dock. I saw it, too, and we pointed and exclaimed and Rita came to look but never did see the turtle because our interest in the water right there caught Wally’s interest and he leaped in just where the turtle was. Oh, Wally! Rita said, genuinely pissed. She had wanted to see that turtle!

  I felt like a cowbird chick. I was a cowbird, all right.

  It’s not that I dreamt of owning a Sky Pond camp—that was too much to ask—but I hatched this plan: access. I especially wanted to get down to the pond with my canoe and do a little fishing without imposing on the Kimbers in any way. I’d heard from several neighbors that the pond was stocked with brookies, and Bob had mentioned pickerel, too. And a morning of perch ain’t bad either. No one mentioned bass, but I bet bass were in there, too. (Bass, as it turns out, are not.)

  So what about the outlet brook that flowed down to the Temple Stream over the lip of the ancient beaver dam? What of that? On the way home from our next Sky Pond swim, I had a look, drove up the dirt road that passes by the end of the pond, that passes along the top of what amounts to a dike, a dike built primarily by rodents. I drove slowly. You couldn’t see Sky Pond at all through the thick alder leaves, but the alders were growing just there precisely because water was near, growing there soaking their roots in boggy percolations. The outlet stream, though, flowed nicely, flowed mildly but visibly under a little steel deck bridge which was not much more than a long section laid across the stream’s banks. I stopped on the bridge, looked down happily. The water was four feet below, but looked pretty inviting, wide as the canoe was long, deep enough to paddle, mildest current. Access.

  Juliet was game. We’d take the next beautiful morning off from projects. And that morning came a couple days later, a Thursday in July. We made a lunch—nice sandwiches and carrots and chocolate cookies, jugs of water, packed that and two big old towels and our swimsuits and a picnic blanket in the wetbag, also lots of other stuff: fly rod, fishing vest, length of rope, notebook, paddles, life vests, bird book, binoculars (two pair), drawing pad, plenty of pens and pencils.

  We had ourselves a perfect day, clouds at the horizon only, puffs of dreams unmoving. To Sky Pond! On our own terms! Skyward ho!

  And off we went, leaving the dogs home, poor beasts. But they’d be havoc in the narrow stream, and havoc with lunch. I parked the old truckeroo in a spot that had been parked many times, a little turnout. And breathlessly (I’m always breathless at a new canoeing place—not sure why), breathlessly I pulled the canoe off the truck, flipped it onto my shoulders, tipped it up to see out a little. What I saw was Juliet, looking like a model in her thrift-store bell-bottoms and spangly top, her sassy new haircut sharp at her shoulders, all that blond thick hair flashing in the sun, game smile flashing, too, got the paddles and life vests while I carried the canoe on my head. “Nice hat,” she said, old joke.

  “Nice haircut,” said I, no master of the comeback. I mean, her haircut was nice, why would I make fun?

  At the bridge I just plunked the canoe (a Mad River Explorer, chunky, funky, well used), plunked it down off my shoulders with a bounce, slid it bow first into the Sky Pond outlet stream, one smooth motion till I had to let go and the little boat tipped sideways, splashed in on its edge, taking a large gulp of water over the gunwale. So haul it up by the bowline, tip it, drip it, drop it correctly, guy it up to the bridge lengthwise. And it just fit bank to bank, measuring the bridge and the outlet stream precisely: sixteen feet.

  Juliet dropped the paddles into the boat, dropped the wetbag and the layers of other stuff, then considered how to climb in. This would be no mean trick, with the canoe floating wobbly under the bridge. She lay down on the steel decking, swung her long legs out over the void, waved her feet experimentally over the canoe, kicking, but reaching nothing. She swam her arms then and we laughed until it wasn’t so funny, she kind of stuck there on the bridge with her legs waving, her chest and belly pushed into the steel decking uncomfortably. Finally she made her move, lowered herself a notch, kicked the gunwale, pushing the boat farther under the bridge and out from under her. I pulled the painter in the very nick of time as she dropped, she not realizing the boat was in motion under her, this perfectly timed, supremely lucky motion that brought the gunwale back under her foot, past her foot exactly as she dropped.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Cake,” Juliet said. She brushed at her bell-bottoms and at her spangly top as I turned the canoe upstream using that bowline, turned it upstream with some force to get it moving, hopped in myself as the boat headed pondwards, leapt in what would have been a perfect graceful motion if I hadn’t missed the wicker seat trying to sit, missed so as to fall on my butt on the bottom of the canoe behind the seat, my legs arched over the seat, my head back on the stern board.

  “Earthquake?” Juliet said.

  “Just another new way to do things,” I said.

  “I’m hungry,” Juliet said.

  “We’ve got a nice lunch,” I said. “Thanks to you.”

  “Stop here and eat? We could sit on the bridge.”

  She is funny. And we sort of laughed, but sort of it wasn’t that funny, since it was noon already and I was hungry too, starting to get that impatient feeling you get around the undertrained wait staff at resort restaurants. But we were off in the perfect day, perfect hungry happiness knowing that the pond was not a hundred yards away, lunch imminent, then maybe a swim. We paddled. The alders all around the outlet stream were thick, much chewed and trimmed by beavers, dense and forbidding. You’d never get a canoe through that in a million years even though flat water stood around them, never get through there at all without the stream and its beavers having cut this right of way, having cut their own little permanent channel in what I gathered was a kind of sub-pond a degree of altitude lower than the main pond’s surface. There must be a beaver dam ahead. And there must be another dam behind, the one forming this dead water, the actual main dam forming Sky Pond, which must be somewhere out of sight below the steel deck bridge just before a mild fall to the Temple Stream.

  The channel made a small turn in the dense alders, and sure enough, we were coming up on a beaver buffer dam, freshly topped. Bob had recently complained of the pond’s level being higher than normal, and here (along with recent rains) was why: the beavers had added about six inches of material to their secondary Sky Pond dam—it crossed the channel here and continued on, sinuously, as far as I could follow it through the alder thicket, the whole construction backing water very calmly, just quietly holding back the whole top six inches of Sky Pond (how many gallons would that be? How many pounds?!). I bumped the bow of the canoe and thus Juliet up to the dam works, but she just sat, staring ahead, nice strong shoulders from years of swimming, thinking about something so very important that she didn’t notice we’d paused, didn’t even notice the bump.
/>   So I stared too, not to disturb her, admiring the dam some more, the flat surface of pond slightly higher than the water we floated on at present, this long present moment, these beaver sticks chewed and stripped and pale (and at that moment looking strangely delicious), these alders around us, this blue sky above, great white arks of cloud forming, Sky Pond ahead. After several hundred heartbeats, Juliet noticed we were stopped.

  “Get on out?” I said.

  “Not on your life,” she said.

  “Just climb up on that bigger log there.”

  She didn’t so much as twitch a muscle toward the bigger log. “‘Just climb up on that bigger log there,’” she said, quoting me precisely.

  So I turned the whole boat, backed myself up to it, and precariously climbed out, one foot then the other on that bigger log. I didn’t want to damage any of the beaver works, but wouldn’t—they had placed this thick log of popple atop the masterworks here, and this bit of inspired engineering I found I could stand on, full weight, without influencing it in any way. From that perch I bent to grasp the gunwales of the trusty canoe, turned it till Juliet was right there beside me, took her hand, pulled her up and onto the log with me. There the two of us teetered, quickly hustling the canoe over the dam (much shallower on the upstream side), over the dam and into the higher water, like going through a lock from one world to the next.

  Back into the boat, and onward.

  But the channel is far less defined than it’s been in its first hundred yards. In fact, now there are two distinct channels, one straight ahead (which peters), one hard left, to the west. We paddle on against the mild current, bearing ourselves ceaselessly into the sky.

  The clouds, lovely, seem to be getting bigger, taller, grander, grayer. And suddenly a full-figured one blocks the sun. I’m chilled just as suddenly, feel my feet damp in the well of the canoe, and the chill walks up my legs.

  But westward ho! Lunch awaits!

  We paddle through the continuing maze of alders, north a ways, seeing glimpses of the pond, then a little east, then north again, then hard west. The false channels are so short we don’t have to follow any. But the real channel has gotten shallow, and we’re often scraping aquatic grasses, the water slower over them, pushing instead of paddling. Finally we’re out of the alders and into the light of the pond—the pond!—oh, it’s lovely, not twenty yards away if one could walk or fly. But the channel ends. Grass hummocks stand in our way like humped dwarfs. The water all around us is filled with grasses and thick with dead leaves.

  Decision made, I say, “I’ll pull us right to the pond and just dry off later.”

  And hook a leg over the gunwale, gingerly disembark, one foot on a hummock. The hummock flops sideways while my other foot forces the canoe away. I go into a split that can only be corrected by hopping awkwardly off the hummock and into the water, which is cold, too, and knee deep, then thigh deep suddenly, lapping my cutoff shorts. Juliet turns to see what all the commotion has been. “‘Pull us right to the pond!’” she says, quoting me again.

  I laugh and hold the gunwale and take a step, which brings me up on something submerged, back to knee deep. The pond is just there—just those twenty yards. I push the canoe over the grasses in water and get about ten feet further, stepping carefully, perhaps walking the length of a huge old log, perhaps walking the spine of a sea monster—the leaves and muck are too thick for me to see my feet, though the leaves and muck are plain to see through the clear top layers of water. A tornado of silt emerges at each slow step. The sun comes out. “Let’s eat on those rocks over there,” says Juliet, pointing—a short paddle across the pond, nice rock next to the closest camp, the camp with the homemade roll-out dock in full hot sun—so inviting, so close. I step again, step right off my sea-monster log, sink thigh deep. Another difficult step, pushing the canoe and Juliet ahead of me, and it’s just a little deeper, though the bottom looks the same—loose leaves, tornadoes of silt, a foot deep. But I’m sinking. Slowly, slowly, I’m in up to my belt. “I’m sinking here,” I say.

  Juliet looks back, says, “Hurry, then.” She’s kidding. I think I detect some concern in the changing lineaments of her face.

  But I sink some more, up to the bottom edge of the photo of Big Bend National Park on my t-shirt. Juliet’s wryish face gives way to an alarmed face. “Stop sinking,” she commands. She doesn’t want to have lunch alone.

  I’ve got hold of the gunwale of the canoe, so I don’t think I’ll go under if it comes to it, but I can’t pull myself out of the muck because my weight tips the boat too much. I’m up to my nipples. Calmly, or at least trying to speak calmly, I say, “Do you think you can pull the canoe up a little? Maybe paddle some or push with the paddle or something along those lines and get the stern over me?” If I can hook my arms over the point of the stern, I can pull up against the whole length of the canoe, and Juliet’s weight. Her spangly shirt glints in the sun. She sticks her paddle in to test the depth, and it sinks in muck, too. And then she paddles, giving it a good go. In fact, she thrashes the pond surface, but the boat is hung up just enough on grasses that only pushing off the bottom is going to work. But there’s no bottom. Now I’m up to my shoulders, and that’s really enough. I grab the gunwale, say, “lean hard to starboard.”

  “What does starboard mean?” Juliet says calmly.

  “Toward the pond,” I say. “At least in this case.”

  “Your hair is going to be ruined,” Juliet says. And if you’ve seen my hair you know that this is very funny. We start giggling as my scraggly ponytail goes in, too, and then my chin. I think of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, that unforgettable final scene in which the burly logger is trapped underwater by a whole tree trunk in a flood, caught under there but in contact with the living world, holding hands with his brother, who’s helping him breathe through a reed, and our man is breathing through this reed and has every chance of survival (the flood-waters are receding), but he just can’t stand it and he laughs, laughs and laughs and laughs till he runs out of air and drowns, right at his brother’s feet, his poor brother unable to help him, laughing too.

  But Juliet and I laugh because I’m up to my lips now and still sinking and Juliet’s leaning and I’m pulling hard on the gunwale, tipping the boat hard my way despite Juliet, tipping the boat with my greater weight and really the weight of the bottom of the pond, which is the weight of the entire planet, and the boat’s tipping and Juliet is leaning and I can feel my fake Tevas straining at their cheap straps and I can feel my shorts coming off, but pull myself mightily, glad my arms are strong, pull down on the canoe, Juliet leaning further yet, I pulling hard, drawing my knees up in the horrible muck, pull, grunt, pull, increments of nothingness as the planet lets me go, pulling, breathing, trying not to laugh anymore though Juliet is wracked with giggles, pull myself stinking chthonically, popping suddenly right up and into the boat on top of the wetbag, which sudden action prompts a sudden reaction: Juliet almost flops in, too. But she grabs the opposite gunwale and saves herself. Whoosh! I’m alive and only wet to the neck. I scrabble around and get back on my seat. “Your turn,” I say.

  I’m freezing.

  “Lunch?” Juliet says.

  We sit a long time, just looking at Sky Pond. It’s right there, lapping the last ridge of hummocks and sticks and bog matter only fifteen yards from the bow of our boat, and surely there’s a way to do it, but. But. But we’re starving. There’s an ancient, ancient stump off to port twenty feet. “We’ve got a hundred feet of line in the wetbag,” I say. I point to the stump, thinking how somehow you might lasso it and use it to pull boat and all to a firmer bottom.

  “No,” Juliet says.

  I retrieve my paddle from the well of the canoe, push on a hummock to starboard, free us from the grass trap, and we back away from our one chance to make Sky Pond our own. We paddle backwards a hundred feet or so till there’s a false channel we can turn in, and we do turn, and head back the way we came, looking one more time at each small
channel to be sure, but there is no path to Sky. So back over the beaver dam, locking down to the sub-pond level, then to the bridge, and climb out of the boat, onto the steel deck, nicely solid. Pulling the boat back up by the bowline I feel that my arms are sore. Both arms, some funny muscle used only for bog self-rescue, placed there by God for bog pulls only, just in case, and today I had to use ’em. Ow.

  We get everything loaded and it’s two o’clock before the cowbird chicks are unpacking a soggy lunch on the Kimbers’ dock in shivering shade under growing clouds. And the sandwiches are very good, the carrots terrific. The chocolate cookies are the best ever made or conceived.

  Last bite and the sun comes back long enough to dry the mud on my legs, long enough to warm me so I can strip and dive in.

  Sky Pond!

  My friend Wes McNair, poet and professor, a lovely man the height and shoe size of a basketball star, eyeglasses of a poet, eyes of a poet (basketball skills of a poet, too), all gentle intelligence, long hands, New England to the bone yet tender (he’s full of hugs, our Wes, no frost there), tells me with some excitement that a camp is for sale on Sky Pond. From what he tells me, it’s the one on the property adjacent to Kimbers’, the only camp on the north end of the pond, the only one with southern exposure, the flag camp, we’ve called it, because the people there fly an American flag. Wally and Desi have made quick reconnaissance missions down there adjunct to our walks to Kimbers’. But we cowbirds—Juliet and I—we’ve only looked off the bluff where the leafy two-track driveways part in a Y.

  Now Wes’s wife, Diane, singer and librarian (though not at the same time, one hopes), vegetarian cook and gardener (these related), Yankee wisdom, Yankee clarity, Yankee skepticism (that’s our Diane), but full of a kind of un-Yankee, fully generous, marvelously melodious laughter, Diane gets behind the project, and before you know it, it’s done. There’s been no realtor, no ads, the word of only one mouth: Bob’s. A national bank won’t cough up the money, but our lovely local savings bank (Farmington, Maine) doesn’t hesitate, and the McNairs’ camp mortgage is secured.