Temple Stream Read online

  Then a quick trot back and forth to the truck for the boat, which I flipped over the ramp railing and onto a flood-fresh mud bar. I loaded up quickly, standing in the cold stream, breathing hard, putting the wetbag in the bow as counter-weight. I want to say how commerce always ruins the beautiful places, but that dam was so old it looked like nature.

  The first fifty yards of stream below the dam were narrow and rocky and, that day at least, fast. I climbed a rock to have a look, spotted another mud bar down the way. Back in the boat, I pushed off and rode the torrent, knocking rocks. In seconds, puffing, I bow-jammed into the mud I’d targeted, perfect, and climbed out beside sixteen feet of devastated thirty-inch- diameter galvanized-steel ducting with little trapdoors built in—some kind of grain system from the last gristmill. Nothing but water could have placed it so. And water had dropped a dozen huge boulders delicately atop two massive chestnut timbers notched and pegged in olden times.

  I climbed another rock for a long look. Was the next stretch worse? Yes, it was. I gazed upstream once more, thinking about retreating. But I couldn’t retreat, because just then a striking couple in matching bicycling outfits came smooching down the ramp, clearly looking for solitude. What they got when they looked around was me, standing half hidden among boulders and mill wreckage in my tattered gym shorts. She, I noted, was nearly as tall as he and maybe a little older, dark hair cut to her shoulders and pressed down by bicycle helmet recently shucked, round face, palest skin. He was attractive, too, tall and muscular, sharp haircut.

  I pegged them for bankers: she middle management, well ensconced, he just getting started in the mortgage division, small-town branch, soon to move on. They had fallen in love in the previous six weeks or so, had bought bicycles together in the first flush of romance. All this nonsense the impression of seconds. All this and the fact that I didn’t think the relationship would last: there was some ineffable reserve in her gestures, something I could see even from fifty yards downstream.

  They saw me, too.

  I waved, friendly, moved out of their view, pushed the boat over the mud bar and into position to start my next run, held it in place in a sandy slot between a pair of force-blasted boulders. The water was full of detritus from the flooding: potsherds, stream glass, beavered branches. New-fallen leaves floated orderly past, a flotilla of curling, brilliant leaves drifting by on their backs with hands behind their heads, coming one by one in the order they dropped from the flaming maples upstream, stacking up on every rock and stick like love letters tied in ribbon. I studied them and especially the light on them for some time, losing some of my self-conscious trepidation.

  But not all, so I looked back upstream, ducking under branches to see my couple. In the short time since I’d looked away she’d already gotten her hands in the back of his bicycle shorts, which molded to her fingers as he pushed against her, and they were kissing. They’d decided I was gone, that strange ponytail man standing in ¡^m shorts on his boulder in the water. But then, Modigliani neck offered to his emotional kisses, she opened her eyes. Before I could look away, she found me down among the rocks and branches. And she held my eye as she pressed into her man, pulled his pants down a notch with the squeezing motion of her hands on his butt. She kissed his shoulder, even licked it, looking me square in the eye. Then she gave a little smile, acknowledged me in some way I couldn’t place (all this in two seconds), like, Too bad, sucker, or, This could be you if you weren’t scrabbling around the rocks, or, You’re almost fifty, pal, and married quite happily with sex suddenly all about procreation, whereas I’m not yet thirty and desperately want what you’ve already got, or just, Yes, watch—watch me. She smiled distinctly for me (this with dozens of yards of rushing stream and aurora light and waterfall song and every shadow of every tree in the air between us). His hands ... I didn’t know where they were, but his shoulders ducked and rolled with his project. The very forest seemed tumid suddenly, pent. The young woman smiled at me and pulled his hips down into hers and closed her eyes languorously.

  When she opened them again, I’d be gone. I shoved the canoe into the current and leapt in, crashed the next hundred yards through standing waves, boulders, and bubbling foam, kept the bow straight, scraping and cracking the whole way on assorted rocks the size of dogs and cows, thumped under the Morrison Hill Road bridge and down into the long, deep pool after, suddenly gliding. On the bank above me lurked the improbable hulk of an Edsel, another casualty of history, distinctive chrome radiator grille, a sturdy silver maple growing up out of the hole where the car’s windshield had been.

  Temple Stream carried me along briskly through the Edsel pool, then hard over the bump of a drowned beaver dam—jab paddle, jog left—and into a sudden, three-way rapids.

  Those lovers!

  I thought of a poem I knew by Denise Levertov, who had lived on our stream back in the sixties:

  EROS AT TEMPLE STREAM

  The river in its abundance

  many-voiced

  all about us as we stood

  on a warm rock to wash

  slowly

  smoothing in long

  sliding strokes

  our soapy hands along each other’s

  slippery cool bodies

  quiet and slow in the midst of

  the quick of the sounding river

  our hands were

  flames

  stealing upon quickened flesh until

  no part of us but was

  sleek and

  on fire

  And I thought of Phoebe, a girl I’d met when I was fifteen and spending two weeks at a rustic coed church camp in my uncle Bill’s wild Montana. She was fourteen. We locked eyes in the milling kid-throng right off the buses, and by the conclusion of evening mess (and strictly on her initiative) the two of us had conspired to skip our activity group the next morning to hike on our own. And that meant no one missed us at activity group for the duration. Love at first sight, we said. We made a ritual of sitting by the Boulder River each long morning, talking and kissing and touching experimentally, also pondering the big questions (What is the nature of love? Why shouldn’t a river flow uphill?). One day about a week into our deepening romance, we took the excuse of wading the awesome sandy-beach eddy we had found—a churning eye in the river’s storm—to strip out of our blue jeans. That callipygian cowgirl wore a pair of kid’s white underpants, a long rip opening up in the saddle-worn seat. She crossed the Boulder thigh-deep ahead of me singing the latest Crosby, Stills and Nash (“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”), perhaps not so oblivious of her effect on me as I thought at the time. Of course, on the other side of the river, the lack of pants changed the quality of our familiar making-out. The sand we lay on was silky, damp, warm. We stripped out of our camp T-shirts, too, couldn’t get enough of each other’s skin. The Boulder River tumbled through its rocks: rhapsody.

  I picked the center chute in the two seconds I had to make the call, went crashing into the rapids and around a slight bend. Ahead there was sweeper, a large balsam fir fallen in, dense branches. The only gap was six inches too narrow, but no choice, I pulled hard starboard to find the hole, bumped over the tree trunk full speed, leaned hard to tip the canoe so it would fit, shot through frisked by branches. At last I exhaled. But relief was brief: the pool below was full of rocks, the stiff current humping over them leaving holes downstream. The nose of the canoe caught a boulder before I could react and we spun backward into another rock, spun again sideways, tipped, took on water. I back-paddled with a shout, escaped the next big rock by inches, found the channel by luck, shot through to the head of the next pool, soaked and dripping, a brief hiatus before the next fall and field of rocks. After that, the trip was pool-fall, pool-fall, a quick descent through natural locks on seething water.

  At the far end of a long, fast straightaway I was startled to see an old railroad trestle high overhead—the massive thing had been completely hidden by its own rust and black-paint geometry amid the mass of changing leaves and expose
d branches around it. No time to admire the scene or read the graffiti—under the span was a small waterfall, the current tightened to a waist by the bridge’s bulwarks. We dove in, bow first. The boat flexed under me, slowed to a stop, took on more water, popped up out of the hole with a lurch. I steered hard to clear the next great boulder, but could not. The canoe reared up the face of the thing, dove back, spun clear around.

  I rode backward in a fury of spray between the next set of boulders and into Cyane’s pool, breathing hard in the sudden calm. I paddled to the cornstalk beaver dam, bumped the boat against it, drooped. I’d come a half mile in minutes. If I’d still smoked cigarettes, that would have been the time to light up.

  THE FIRST MILLER ON THE STREAM WAS MAJOR REUBEN Colburn, whose big moment came when he was asked to supply General Washington’s brilliant if only partially successful plan to take Quebec by surprise, an overland trek of heroic dimension headed up by Benedict Arnold, not yet famous. Colonel Arnold needed boats to take his army of fifteen hundred men up the Kennebec and thence to the many linked lakes that would bring him to Canada. Major Colburn took the contract, built two hundred bateaux, even accompanied the army on the impracticable trek.2

  After the war, Colburn helped form a speculative group called the Proprietors of a Township on the Sandy River, which was assigned supervision of a new town by the proprietors of the million-acre Kennebec Purchase. The township was surveyed in 1780, and the intervale land divided into large, narrow farming lots stretching a mile and a quarter back from the river, with even larger lots up on the hills.3

  The policy of Reuben Colburn and his fellow proprietors was to freely admit all applicants for settlement, subject to the condition that each man make specific improvements on his lot: a house at least twenty feet square and “seven foot in the stud,” five acres cleared within three years. Reuben Colburn alerted his hometown of Dunstable, Massachusetts, and a great many of the original settlers of the Farmington intervale were from that town, including one Samuel Butterfield, whose great-granddaughter and her ill-fated husband would build my and Juliet’s house many years hence. A steady influx of other settlers arrived from Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod—beautiful places, but to a farmer’s eye already crowded.

  Here is historian William Allen’s “settler formula,” as reported by Vincent York in “The Sandy River and Its Valley:

  [F]irst year, cut down trees on five or six acres, and burn ground over in preparation for planting; second year, after planting is done, build log house, cut more trees, move family in before the harvest; third year, build small barn, increase stock; fourth year, raise English hay, rye, wheat and corn and begin living more comfortably; fifth year, clear more land, increase flocks and herds; sixth year, start pulling stumps and preparing land for the plough; seventh year, build self a framed house if you can.

  According to the Allen formula, the seventh year is the crucial one in terms of mills. The family, if still on the ground, was prosperous enough to take the next step. In response to demand, sawmills began to appear around 1790 in the lower [Sandy River] valley and 1800 in the upper.

  The first mill was a sawmill on the Temple Stream.

  The town ceded the mill privilege to Major Colburn, and with the help of his new townsmen and their teams of oxen, the would-be war profiteer dammed Temple Stream at a small waterfall (the spot from which I’d launch my canoe a bicentennial later). The mill buildings were thrown together quickly, again with community help, and soon the mill was making a private profit that came in the form of a sixth share of the sawn boards. Another of the proprietors, a Mr. Pullen, built a gristmill on the other side of the stream, and earned grain.

  A few years later, Jacob and Joseph Eaton, brothers in from the coast, bought the already dilapidated mills from Colburn and Pullen and rebuilt them. But Jacob got the sea itch and built a boat called Lark, which he actually floated down the Sandy to the Kennebec, then sailed successfully to the ocean and clear up to the frigid Bay of Fundy, where he foundered on rocks and was drowned.

  The next miller was Captain Sylvanus Davis, a businessman who profitably combined the saw and grain operations. On early maps, Temple Stream is generally marked as Davis Stream, perhaps because of the captain’s untimely death.

  York explains:

  On Christmas Day 1831, Captain Davis down in the undercroft of his mill, failed to give this spur-wheel a wide enough berth. An oaken spur crashed on his head and shoulders and he died promptly.

  Davis’s son Ebenezer, a harness maker, perhaps would have taken over, and certainly would have had a lot of mill business savvy, growing up to it, but on December 30, 1831, just five days after his father’s accident, he leaned out through the railings on the covered Center Bridge between Farmington and West Farmington—on the site of the present Thought Bridge—and “slipped and fell to the ice below, and broke his neck.”

  Like all good historians, Vincent York has a theory: “We suspect retreating Abenakis placed a curse on the mill-site.”

  PHOEBE AND I WROTE LEITERS BACK AND FORTH ALMOST daily at first, but after a couple of seasons of long-distance mooning, the romance petered out painfully. I thought of her as I ate my lunch on a rock over Cyane’s pool, but trying so hard I could only vaguely picture her. So I thought of other things till a breeze rattled the leaves of a stand of young popples up on the bank behind me, and that sound and the movement of the air along with the fragrance of the stream called Phoebe’s laugh to mind perfectly, then something of her scent, that spot behind her ear. Perfect recall faded quickly to a pang, and the exact quality of the pang made me think of Marybell Walkingbird, who was my girl later on.

  Marybell and I fell in love during a Johnny Winter concert at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, New York, our first date. I recall a bottle of Mateus rosé wine, which I thought very classy. (Drinking age in New York State was eighteen back then—and I, at least, was close to that.) Marybell and I found most of our subsequent privacy in her car or in the deep climax forest behind my parents’ house, a steep hill descending to a swamp. In a fort of big rocks she and I could throw my old sleeping bag down after school on warm fall afternoons. The young lovers needed props to leave the house, so we brought our schoolbooks.

  This Temple Stream vision was brief again, and specific, a particular moment: her smiling above me in a ray of sunlight, leaves floating by—just that—her black hair falling in my face, me on my back in the crackling forest litter with her tweed skirt as a pillow under my head (thoughtful young woman). And I heard a certain song, one of the dumb ones of the era (“You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”), sung in a comical falsetto that accompanied me unshakably the rest of the Temple Stream day.

  The sharp, unbidden memory passed, and I was left with vaguer images from the voluntary-recall catalog as I ate: Marybell and I conspired to make love nearly every day, this way and that, trying everything we could think of, everything we’d heard of, positions from Japanese books (she collected these), and in nearly every imaginable place, but especially in the woods. There was a mossy rock under hemlock trees, a slab that caught a spot of sun. We practiced lover talk self-consciously, unaware of our essential selfishness. (What’s it like for you? What will we name our kids? You make me feel like me.) The words I love you required a response in kind and revealed in repetition our staggering insecurity, one of the sources of our bond. I remember her voice well. I remember her body, too. She was a field hockey star, liked to squeeze me with her legs. I had to leave her to go to college, and, of course, during the year apart we both found new steadies.

  Thirty years later under hemlocks I pine. But briefly: that boy in the woods with Marybell couldn’t conceive of the sort of love he’d later find, abiding love, and bedrock: Juliet.

  A kingfisher flew past, chattering, station to station and away, upstream. Good to know they stayed as late as October. Perhaps the heron and he were pals. In the warm sun on my mossy rock I ate my sandwich and felt such a wave of well-being that I laughed out lo
ud. Milkweed silks floated in the air, and I was reminded that what Americans call Indian summer was called goose summer in old England (also Saint Martin’s summer), the season of geese, that is, when down was in the air: gossamer.

  On my knee landeda glamorous red damselfly. I dug in the wetbag for my bug book, and for once the identification was definite: half-bandended toper. And then there was another. They seemed to take a liking to the skin of my leg. One actually let me touch its wings with a fingertip and stroke them lightly. When I touched the top of its head, it jumped back in the air, but hovered only briefly and returned, let me touch more. This, I wanted to explain, was dubious survival technique. The book said that topers are rare because of pollution and loss of habitat, that they need marshy land near deeper water, which, of course, the Temple afforded in that spot. Brightest red twig of a body, a living ruby pin, wings veined like leaves (dark spots at the front edges), orange hairs where wings met body, two white spots atop vermilion head, maroon eyes, the insistence on staying with me.

  A toper is a drunk, of course.

  Juliet and I met in a bar on Martha’s Vineyard. It took me weeks to persuade her to go out with me. Finally, I enticed her: a whole day on one of the nude beaches, then waterskiing with a maniacal acquaintance and his overpowered boat, then a cozy dinner of farm-stand vegetables and stolen lobsters. (Our brazen captain had pulled buoys and pilfered traps; this seemed like fun at the time, as did many other life-threatening behaviors. Now I can only cringe. Also, I owe some Menemsha salt five lobsters, size medium. Whoever you are, many thanks.) We ate it all cozily at home with my five roommates and a dozen other friends, then spent an affectionate night in bunkbeds (up and down the little ladder giggling)—I’d gotten the children’s room in the rented house. Juliet’s hair was sun-bleached nearly white. She had a tan all over. Her eyes were blue as sea-worn mussel shells.