Temple Stream Read online

  I’d loved Levertov’s poetry and was pleased to learn she’d lived nearby and written some poems about the area: Levertov was a big fish. And the great, later-to-win-the-National-Book-Award-poet Hayden Carruth had lived in Temple for a while too. But Theodore Enslin was my own big poet, important to me because he’d been a particular obsession of a beloved English professor of mine at Ithaca College—Darlene Mills—and because somehow his work had spoken to me. Until I read Enslin, I didn’t know you were allowed to break lines like that, that words could fall like leaves, that the broken pieces of a poem were as important as the whole, that sense might come in collaboration with a reader, with me. He’d been trained as a musician, and Professor Mills said his poems were a musication of language, and I (a musician too!) felt myself a player in his band.1 Best of all, the man had dropped out of society, gone off to live in the woods, had eschewed the fast streets of New York, left the academic and careerist and sellout poets behind.

  Professor Mills was a nut, at least to my adolescent sensibility, but was passionate about the beat poets and the confessional poets and the language poets, anyone more or less contemporary, anyone who hadn’t died and been interred in the big Norton anthology. Her hair was a fright wig; she had orange lipstick on her teeth almost always; she wore the same dress daily; she sat too close to you in conference. I loved her. She could dig into a single bebop or die-Daddy poem for a whole period, left us seeing the very bricks of the classroom differently, left us staggering around campus with new visionary brains, declaiming. The poem I memorized per assignment was by Theodore Enslin, a long one called “The Town That Ends the Road,” which I’ve only recently realized was about Temple, Maine. I had to stand in front of the whole class and say it, stumbling right to the last stanza: “You have found the town / that ends the road, / but it finds you / as surely. / In your love of it, / you come close to its horror, / and cling there. / It will murder / you in the end.”2

  Dr. Mills okayed my term paper, too, a long treatise trying to fit Theodore Enslin into a tradition. I was unaware that she didn’t believe in the concept of tradition and expected me to subvert the notion. In an authoritative voice, I declared Enslin’s work even more obscure than the poet, thinking obscurity a compliment, and tried to compare him to Longfellow, who was the only other poet I really knew back then, callow lad. In her note back, fierce handwriting, Professor Mills declared that I was the one who was obscure, and how about that? I went to her office to complain, came out with marching orders: show that Ted Enslin exists outside tradition. She loved Ted, as it turned out, had known him in Cape Cod. She handed me a pile of his books and sent me home to write a proper paper, which, of course, knowing nothing, I couldn’t do (and that C minus still stings).

  Still, Theodore Enslin, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the wine-dark sea and the second law of thermodynamics and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck and Margaret Mead’s marriages and the “Two Worlds” of C. P. Snow, joined the long list of arcanities I learned in college that would become part of my mind forever, useful in understanding the world, and also over drinks with smart dates. And to learn when I came to Farmington that Theodore Enslin—my Theodore Enslin—had lived nearby, why, that was as wonderful as if I’d learned that Vlaminck had lived in my house and painted the gardens.

  But Enslin had moved away years before I came, out to the Maine coast, where the moderating effect of the ocean made for easier winters. I asked after him, found he’d left a lot of admiring friends. When he came to UMF to give a reading, it was like meeting Homer. Newly a prof, I stammered and gazed on him (he already seemed old to me), and felt his wise calm, something earned. He signed a book for me—From Near the Great Pine—and I kept it on my desk as a talisman.

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS OF INFANT-ENFORCED DOMESTIC solitude—intoxicating stuff, but trouble in large doses—I needed to get out. I don’t mean out to the wild bars of Farmington, or even out to a movie or some concert at UMF, just outside the house. I swaddled the small creature in blankets and cautiously propped her in a product called a BabyBjörn, a kind of pack worn on the chest, and carried her down to the stream morning and night cradling her head, showing her the changing leaves, all the color floating to the ground, whispering to her always. Once I slipped in icy mud and fell over back-ward, just let myself hit the ground—oof—never took my hands off her, the instinct to break my fall subsumed by the instinct to protect my child.

  The walks in our woods got me thinking about bigger projects, more freedom, treks a three-week-old couldn’t manage: I wanted to find Ted Enslin’s mountain house, for example, which Bob Kimber had shown me offhandedly once on a ski loop. The place had been buried in snow at twilight, and we’d had to hurry past, but the vision had lingered. So, when my mother-in-law arrived to help out for a week, I called my friend Drew Barton, who was always keen for a hike.

  Drew parked his car at the little turnout below John Hodgkins’s house, the old Oakes house, and we piled out into the bright October afternoon, long shadows. “Wood ferns,” he said, quickly taking in the history of the forest around us. “Poppies, birches, black cherry—this was cut in the last twenty years or so. That stuff is older back there. Hard to imagine that this was all fields just a hundred years ago.”

  “Enslin lived in that house right there,” I said. “But not till he came out of the woods.”

  “Whoever built it planted those sugar maples out front. Look at those circumferences now!”

  “Oakes,” I said.

  “Maples,” said Drew. He’s a forest ecologist, and a poet of forests, to my mind. His interest is in the relationship between all the elements of the forest—the big picture—and he doesn’t exclude beauty from the list. His dream day is wandering in the woods, compass in hand, knapsack on back, scientist-vest stuffed with gadgets, fanny pack nerdily frontward, maps and field guides and charts inside. He’s slight, meets you with an open face (scraggly beard notwithstanding), warm dark eyes bespectacled and thus magnified, something shy back in there, something supremely cocky, too, an appealing combination. He speaks fondly and tenderly of almost everything, always frank and forthcoming, funny too, often ribald.

  Drew’s idea of a perfect friend goes together with his idea of the perfect day. A friend is someone you can walk with through the woods inspecting for however long absolutely any-thing that catches the collective eye. My idea of the perfect friend is someone who gets excited about the notion of, say, finding a poet’s lost house in the woods.

  Drew sees his scientific job as making sense of the ecological landscape in space and time. He’s trained to think in terms of deep time, always looking for evidence of disturbances, events in the past—flood, fire, farming, logging, wayward poet—to explain what’s here now, what kind of forests past events favor (or don’t). “It’s all about vegetation,” and “Vegetation is the flesh on the skeleton of the natural world.”

  We hiked at speed up the dirt road side by side, pausing to inspect the multiplicity: mysterious seed pod, unexplained depression in the forest floor, mountain maple, Christmas fern, Japanese knotweed’s upper limit, abandoned apple orchard, spiderweb in dew, elaborate sedge flower dried and preserved and still springing from bristling leaves. “Sedges have edges, and rushes are round,” said Drew, singsong, quoting an old botanist’s mnemonic ditty. “But grasses, like asses, have holes.”

  I quoted Walt Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

  The mild drought of the summer had ended emphatically with a week of rain in early October, and the stream was flowing strongly. For a mile or so it runs hard by the road there, quite diminished from its size at my house, not a quarter as wide, something just a little bigger than a brook, even full. I said so.

  Drew said, “What’s the difference between a brook and a stream?”

  I spoke my old line: “A stream is something you have to think about how to cross.”

  “Too anthropocentric. I’ve alway
s thought of it in terms of trees: they touch over a brook, but not a stream.”

  “So a road is a stream.”

  “Of sorts.”

  We passed Meghan Bitterauf’s party rock, several unoccupied camps, one dilapidated old house covered with a huge sheet of mill cloth, a thick material the paper mills use to protect their gargantuan rolls of new paper, commonly liberated and used around here as a mud-season driveway or a garden cover in winter. Draped over the collapsing rafters of the shack, it made a nice roof till Repairs Could Be Made, that particular form of never.

  The stream fell deeper into the forest, further from the road. We passed three or four modest new cabins, hand-built, metal chimneys pleasantly puffing wood smoke on the cool day. Bright orange signs let hunters and firefighters know a dwelling was hidden up in there. On one sign we noticed that someone had drawn three little stick figures, a family. At the last house, four flags flew: Stars and Stripes, Stars and Bars, MINPOW, Don’t Tread on Me. And as a pair of large canines sprang unchained out of a shed we noted the hand-painted poem posted on a wooden sign:

  BEWARE OF DOGS:

  WE BITE

  Well, they didn’t bite us, only followed at a respectful (but authoritative) distance, barking ferociously: Move along! Drew and I hurried without wanting to seem to hurry, till the dogs fell away and turned for home and we reached a faint track that was the old settler way to Potato Hill, marked clearly JEEP on our map, but too grown in for vehicles. A hundred yards in was the stream and a sweet swimming hole that had been polished into the bedrock by a goodly glacial vortex, sinuous bare stone forming chute and tub down a sharp incline. The air there was loud and charged by the falling water. Our acquaintance Henry Braun, a poet living in Weld on the other side of Mount Blue, had told us that this was the swimming hole Denise Levertov had loved.

  “‘Eros at Temple Stream,’’ said Drew, showing off.

  I’d e-mailed him the Levertov poem of that name some weeks earlier (Henry had supplied it) and was pleased he remembered it at all, said so.

  “Anything with sex,” Drew said.

  We climbed out of the streambed and back to the old road. I’d been this way dozens of times, particularly admired the farmhouse that I knew was coming, one of the last standing relics of the farming past buried so deeply in this forest. (The road itself was another relic, and of course the stone walls crumbling off into the forest everywhere.) I’d described the homestead to Drew with some excitement—goats, chickens, classic Cape Cod house, tall barn, shy occupant good for a wave but no talk, his big poem of a sign, a highlight of the trip:

  DOGS

  BOTHERING

  GOATS

  WILL BE SHOT

  But the sign was gone, and then, around the corner, just as the house should have come into view, a pyramid of waste came into view instead, piles of old lathe and bigger boards and hand-hewn beams and broken plaster and mangled sheets of metal roofing, an exploded orange easy chair high atop, blue milk crates punctuating, waterlogged books, a smashed bureau, an entire existence bulldozed carefully into its own basement and then into a shocking mound. By whom? The barn, same thing, all those old pegged beams a-tumble, partly burned, the odd tire, chicken wire. I was so taken aback by the sight that tears started to my eyes. Drew felt it too—put a hand on my back. Where was the shy man who always waved, and where were his goats and chickens? I’d admired him for holding out. He’d carved a homestead from the ruins of old Temple. The violence looked methodical. We could arrive at no hypothesis.

  We stared. A blue jay piped. That was the only sound, and it was mournful. I told Drew about the goats, how they’d stood in the road and blocked our path when Juliet and I had ventured up here long since, how the chickens had rushed to get around us and back to their pecking, about the little steer on a staked rope chewing his cud standing in his own mud circle in the rudimentary, goat-tended lawn. How the shy man had waved over his head at me as if from a great distance, as if from leagues away, when in fact his door was only fifty feet from the road. Now we could almost feel the forest growing in on the suddenly abandoned place, this final failure of civilization after two hundred years. Soon again, there’d be no obvious trace.

  The settlers’ farms had come and gone. And, as Drew reminded me, two or more harvests of large amounts of lumber had come and gone subsequently. The forest had persisted with barely a blink. Temple wasn’t tender desert habitat, in which scars are permanent. Temple wasn’t rain forest over delicate soils, where clear-cuts never grow back. Still, I thought, huge canopy trees in open glades would look awfully nice around there, an undisturbed, plant-rich forest floor: mosses, ephemerals, rich humus, the million living creatures. I said all that.

  “Just the thing the settlers came upon,” Drew said. “And they hated it.”

  The road after that was two mere tracks. A hundred years back it would have been three, one for the horse. The stream at that place is at its most lovely, a strong brook tumbling through bedrock and boulders in a slight gorge through deep woods, elegiac. Out of nowhere, Drew said, “My father was a nature person too. He died three years ago. His favorite thing was to rock-hop streams.”

  Quietly we came to a log yard, a widened place in the road where someone with a skidder had brought logs for loading onto his truck. Drew looked up into the woods, pointing out the boundaries of the cut, which were property lines. He said, “This is not too bad. Not like down the road, where they’ve cut it right down to the limit, which is thirty basal feet per acre, which could be thirty misshapen trees. But here, see all the good stuff that’s been left? Yellow birch, sugar maple, balsam fir, oak up top. And here we have some beech coming up, some red maple, popple for sure and black cherry, which will both get shaded out, eventually. Much more happening here than back there, already, and this is the newer harvest by years. Not a bad cut. And you know I’m not speaking of aesthetics, but the future of the forest.”

  We walked, Drew talked: “Aldo Leopold has this quote about how an ecologist’s training dooms him to always see the ecological damage in the landscape.3 But I’m an optimist, and even though I do see all the damage, I see the resilience in these forests too, and that makes me feel better about chances for recovery in the long run, or as long as the forests are here, even if they’re very different because of global warming. I mean, I always feel good being in the woods. Especially thinking five hundred years in the future, five hundred years in the past. When I first got to Maine the high levels and poor quality of the cutting bothered me, but now I’m less upset by it—it’s all forest, cut or not, and we’re out here in the forest, and all this could be developed or paved as it has been in so many places, and that’s much worse than any kind of cut. In fifty years, this could be Connecticut, houses everywhere on two-and three-acre lots, or it could be even further regenerated from the farming days, and cut over yet again. Which one would we want?”

  We passed a new beaver dam that pooled the Temple in a thicket of alders and new popple: venerable beaver habitat re-claimed. Staring at a new stump, Drew said, “Beaver are a keystone species.” And he explained: the pond builders alter the environment and make new habitat, create their own ecology, make opportunities for a host of other species. Further examples of keystone species are oaks, elephants, and people.

  We hiked onward, slowed as we heard a truck coming, stood at the verge to let it pass: not just a truck, but a familiar orange GMC pickup. Earl Pomeroy. With a passenger. A passenger seated right up close to him, close as a high-school girlfriend. He slowed, had a disdainful look at me, pulled to a stop past me, made me walk to him twenty yards. The person at his side was a woman with long, dark hair, attractive features, dark eyes amused. She was tiny, even compensating for the impression of tininess caused by proximity to Earl squashed in the driver’s seat. My face—it must have betrayed everything. He grinned over her head, grinned through his beard, those dainty teeth. I had never seen him grin like that. He grinned, and grinned wider, seeing my grin. We didn’t
have to say a word.

  But I spoke: “Earl! Jesus! What the hell are you doing way back here?”

  “None of your beeswax, Professor.”

  The tiny, sturdy woman seemed willing to meet new people. Earl’s massive biceps pressed her shoulder, his big forearm hung down her side, his big freckled hairy mitt over her little pale hand. She said, “I am Dunya.”

  Earl said, “And who’s your little friend?”

  Drew stepped up, meaning to introduce himself, but Earl jammed the old truck in gear and it leapt, throwing gravel and dust, roared around the corner, and was gone. We watched after them. I was speechless. Dunya? So much for good logging versus bad logging and basal feet per acre; Earl had found him-self a woman! Further, I’d had a revelation: the two of them lived up there somewhere. Drew and I hiked on in their dust. I did my best to fill him in on the Earl phenomenon. We shook our heads and laughed and marched, a couple of professors in fancy hiking shoes, passing judgment. Was she a mail-order bride? Or had Earl conjured her from so much pine tar and birch bark, night fantasies? I told Drew about the poached beavers, found I still hadn’t forgiven Earl, not just for killing them young, or for killing them out of season, but also for ex-posing my own hypocrisy: I’d always been a fan of civil disobedience. Drew pointed out that there were any number of brutal places that civil disobedience might lead. We wondered if Thoreau had thought of that.

  Quickly, Drew and I came to an old crossing, now nothing more than a snowmobile bridge, three tall spruce logs dropped over the cut and paved with planks but spanning two formidable, ox-built, granite-block buttresses over two hundred years old, built by settlers in payment of taxes. Once, according to town records, there had been a covered bridge here. This was the road to Theodore Enslin’s house, nothing that day but a grassy trail kept open by the occasional hike, hunt, or snowmobile ride.