Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  THE FARMINGTON PUBLIC LIBRARY IS HOUSED IN A HANDSOME if diminutive stone building graced with the only dome in town. Under the dome, armchairs and town fathers, ornate arches. The stacks are circular, too; the floor of the top story is made of glass to let light filter down to the shelves below. I like to sit in one of the armchairs in the Holman Reading Room—tall windows, high ceiling—put my feet up on the andirons of the large stone fireplace, read a rainy afternoon away.

  Spurred by the moose man’s anger, I went down to the library to learn what I could of the stream from books. Jean Oplinger, the cheerfully mordant town librarian, took an interest, and together we rifled the stacks for scant references. While I read, Jean kept coming by with more books and maps and tattered old tracts, slipped out of the room silently when there were no more to be found.

  According to Thomas Parker’s History of Farmington, Maine, from Its First Settlement to 1846, which I noted was written barely a half century after the events at hand, Stewart Foster and Ephraim Allen, a pair of trappers, were the first “whites” to spend a whole winter around here. They camped through the season on the Sandy River “200 rods” from what is now a deep, popular swimming hole under the Fairbanks Bridge just west of Farmington. Come spring, they hollowed a log to make a dugout canoe and returned home downstream via the Kennebec, rich with furs and full of news of an extended intervale (as it’s still called here), or interval land—what elsewhere is sometimes called bottomland—a flat valley stretch of excellent crop soil where the Sandy River widens in its own floodplain, leaving rich, rocky New England earth already stripped of trees by constant flooding and icing, and where Indians had farmed for generations. They noted mill seats, too, places where they thought the power of water might successfully be harnessed to run a grain- or sawmill: Temple Stream had a number of quality sites.

  And a man named Pierpole was said to have kept a secret lead mine on Day Mountain, up at the top of Temple Stream, a lode of pure ore from which he fashioned his bullets. Tradition has it that Pierpole was the last Indian in these parts (after the devastation of the many tribes in the hundred years of so-called Indian Wars before the American Revolution, and by smallpox). But he wasn’t last: the 2000 census for Franklin County (of which Farmington is the county seat) records a Native American population of some eighty-six souls. Maybe what’s meant is that he was the last wilderness Indian here. In any case, the man had settled to cultivate the land in what is now Farmington Falls, east of town. His departure was used by historian and poetaster alike as a convenient marker for the end of an era of romantic burbling over the state of the “savage” in New England. He stayed till about 1800, was last seen floating out of sight on the Sandy, which he called the Mussul Unsquit.2

  As Francis Butler reports in his 1885 A History of Farmington, Maine:

  Pierpole is described by those who have seen him, as of medium height, broad in the shoulders, straight, strong and lithe. His features were comely, his eyes black and glowing. He always wore the dress of the aborigines—a blanket and silver medal. Many attempts were made to induce him to adopt a European costume, but in vain. Once he progressed so far as to put on a pair of buckskin breeches, at the earnest solicitation of his friends, but the restraint was too great. ’Too much fix urn,” said Pierpole.

  The first Europeans, whom the Indians called sun-men and red-beards and fire-builders and liars and worse, also depended on the rivers and the streams for simple transportation and reliable guidance through unmarked forest, at least at first, later depending on them for the movement of logs and fibers and grains to mills downstream, and when mills finally got built here, for moving the milled goods straight to market. Over the course of the nineteenth century dozens of mills bloomed and fell on diminutive Temple Stream, all of them gone now, utterly gone, washed away, or neglected and lost.

  The earliest was a rudimentary sawmill making boards for houses, barns, and fences: first things. Quickly thereafter a gristmill, ground grain being infinitely more valuable than whole, which rots in storage.3 Fulling mills did better on the Sandy, exactly at the site of Pierpole’s last camp in fact, turning out fulled wool cloths (meaning cleansed and thickened), but washing away in twenty-year floods, washing away almost predictably, their owners salvaging what could be rescued from downstream and trying again, or giving up and heading downstream themselves, to gentler civilizations. Further up the Temple, very near our house, another sawmill saw fifty years’ use; near that, an oddity: a clover mill, in which the difficult seeds of the European import were separated from their hulls for planting to grow dairy feed and bee flowers. All that clover in my lawn is the work of people intent on milk and honey.

  The goods made by mills or processed by mills at the onset of our town were meant for local consumption. But as the stagecoach roads developed, a growing amount of product could be sent downstream. Upstream came the wealth the products represented: manufactured goods; fresh-strain livestock; exotic foodstuffs (oranges, bananas); new settlers; minted, then printed, monies. Growth benefited everyone. More people meant more production, which meant more surplus, which meant more trips for the four-horse stagecoach to Hallowell. And then the railroad came—about 1850, abandoned now—and raw mill stuffs could be shipped economically and in huge bulk by central buyers to central mills supplying central manufacturers who could afford centralized sales forces: gently down the stream (merrily, merrily, merrily), the true down-trickle of economics, like the sap of a thousand Day Mountain sugar maples ending up in one tank, there to be boiled and further condensed for its sweetness.

  Our streams and rivers bequeathed their pervasive metaphor of flow to the discussion of economies, but the actual streams and rivers are no longer engines of commerce. In this way they are abandoned, but this is no bad thing. In being abandoned they are saved. The millstreams, once the prized locus of all things human, have turned invisible.

  JULIET AND I SPENT THE FIRST YEAR OF OUR MARRIAGE IN Montana, a kind of extended honeymoon during which we hiked a great deal and went broke. On the way back to our cramped rental in Helena from a day in Yellowstone country we stopped at the Bozeman animal shelter—we’d been looking for a puppy—and fell for a funny little fellow who seemed to pick us out too. He was part of a bizarre litter whose mother was a full-bred Boston terrier, father a full-bred Border collie. Two of the seven pups could have passed for Boston terriers, two could have passed for Border collies, but the three in the middle had found their own original ways to mix the legacy. Desmond, as we called him, was one of these, a handsome and sensitive soul, black and white with expressive ears and good posture. He had a terrier’s wide jaw but a Border collie’s long snout. He claimed us by coming to lean on my leg while his siblings rumbled. We took him home and felt a family.

  A year later we moved him to New Sharon—me with my new job—and a year after that to Temple Stream. Desi liked the water, but needed canine company, we thought, so once the winter was done Juliet went in search of ...Wally. Who turned out to be another curious mix, his mother half Border collie, half basset hound, his wayward dad a springer spaniel, I’m afraid. From the spaniel come the freckles and the webbed paws. From the basset hound come the mighty chest and expressive howling. From the Border collie come the long fur—black and white—and the great flag of a tail. Despite the odds, he was a handsome puppy and a good match for Desi, and the two of them played for hours on end, racing with teeth clamped at each end of a long stick, for example, or splashing endlessly in the stream in a game of chase the minnows, and wrestling, always wrestling.

  Wally was much bigger than Desi at a year and a quarter, solstice 1994, exactly one year after I met the moose man. By then it was the kitchen I was remodeling. The first morning of summer found me sweating pipe, bringing water to the new sink and to the house’s first-ever dishwasher: copper elbows and tees and sleeves, shut-off valves and faucet set, solder and flux, tape dope and trap nuts, my favorite kind of work. About noon, the dogs began to bark, and then barked loude
r and whined and ran in circles, pandemonium as a loud knock came at our disused front door. I wiped my hands, turned off my torch, waded through the dogs to the door, eyed the hunched figure out there—a tall fellow in an ironed white shirt and bolo tie, mouth set, an altogether formal demeanor, the sort who’d have been a tax collector in the old days, or a funeral man. This dour presence and I gazed at each other through the bubbly old windows until I pointed at the porch door, where I met him, holding Desi and Wally by their collars as they clamored sniffing and snorting, Desi with his back up, theatrical growling.

  Our visitor was unimpressed: “Earl Pomeroy says you have a ’36 Ford coupe down here and I wondered what you wanted for it.”

  He’d taken me by surprise. I’d expected a message about God’s angry love (or abiding love, depending on the sect). I said, “I don’t know. What’s it worth, do you think?”

  “Well, it’s worth what someone will pay for it.”

  We just stood there. He kept his face perfectly blank. If he was friends with the moose man—Earl Pomeroy, a name I was happy to have learned—he’d get no quarter from me: “Well, just hypothetically, what do you think someone would pay for it?”

  “Maybe a couple hundred if it’s usable at all, but that’s just maybe.”

  After a long silence I asked his name and he told me: Fred Ouellette. He said he liked a close-to-the-road house like ours, meaning that he didn’t, just a little convoluted Yankee small talk. Then the dogs and I led him at an amble down the yard to the old junk pile.

  Mr. Ouellette brightened at the sight of the coupe. “Jeezum,” he said. ’This is fine, this is. See, I can use these spurs, and this latch here—and I need this glove-compartment door, and here you’ve got the original gutta-percha knob. Oh, this is something!” He wasn’t going to resell the thing, but was going to use it to finish the restoration of a beloved car of his own, same year, same make, a project he’d been on ten years. He showed me where the convertible top would have gone, and showed me a pair of cleats he was missing, two of the many chrome bits I’d seen shining through the undergrowth from as far away as the house.

  I said, “The last great car made in America.”

  And he said, “Oh, you sound just like that oddball Earl. The last great American car, sir, is the ’65 Mustang, preferably in blue, or possibly the ’66 Shelby GT, yessuh.”

  We stood over the derelict coupe a long time, talking. Mr. Ouellette lived in Auburn, an hour away. He just shrugged when I asked how he knew Earl, seeming to say, How does anyone know Earl? In the end, I gave the car to him for the towing, gave it away on impulse, since it didn’t really feel like mine to sell. He was neither grateful nor ungrateful, but said he’d come by to pick it up “terrectly.” The dogs were abject when he just simply left: they’d expected at the very least a swim in the stream and a long walk. That’s what visitors were for.

  A few weeks later, Mr. Ouellette pulled up in a sleek wrecker, brand-new—one of those long, tilting, stainless-steel flatbeds, equipped with a big cable winch. On the door was a professionally painted sign in black, red, and gold:

  FRED OUELLETTE

  VINTAGE CARS AND TRUCKS

  BOUGHT—SOLD—SWAPPED

  Well, I still felt good about finding the old hulk of a car a life, whether or not Mr. Fred had skinned me, and howsoever he believed the word swap to be spelled. He backed past the house and down the yard in an expert flurry, never mind the grass and brush and barking dogs, hooked his chain onto the old frame in an uncannily exact place, started the winch (wench, he said). The carcass turned and skidded on bare, rust-frozen wheels right to the ramp the truck bed made, slid perfectly into place as the dogs marked the truck’s big tires. Fred secured the car with nylon web straps, cinched these down. The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Protocol required that we talk a little after, so we leaned on the truck bed and admired the coupe. He showed me its one best feature—a fender with plenty of metal left. “Even still got some paint,” he said.

  I said, “Well, I’m happy you’ll be able to use it.”

  He said, ’I’ll have to thank Earl Pomeroy,” which was as close as he got to thanking me.

  I said, “Will you see him?”

  “Oh, sure. I suppose so.”

  “Where does Mr. Pomeroy live, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know, I find him at the diner.”

  And then he just drove off. It was up to me to take Desi and Wally swimming, and so I did, down to the stream, all of us carrying sticks.

  BY THE TIME OF THE NEXT SOLSTICE, 1995, I’D BEEN RECRUITED away from the University of Maine at Farmington by Ohio State: double the pay, half the classes. Juliet, meanwhile, had been accepted by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for an MFA in painting, her longtime dream. While we people took a crash trip to search for separate housing in two new cities, longest days of the year, the lucky dogs got to stay in Farmington with friends. Two apartments arranged, Juliet and I came back to enjoy the rest of the summer near the stream: soon enough we’d be moving.

  For the next several years, summer solstices came rich with meaning: we were home again after a school year away, having survived a maelstrom of housesitters and landlords, grad students and city parks, homesick dogs on leashes. But no matter what wiles the Midwest used to ensnare us, we always extricated ourselves when the school year was done and made our way home to Maine by the first day of summer.

  ... Summer solstice 1999, and I’m down by our bend in the stream, sitting on the big rock (a glacier-tumbled and farmer-dragged chunk of layered Pleistocene-era metamudstone, as I’ll later learn), thinking what to do with the block of grant time I’ve got coming: we’ve got the fall in Maine. I’ve been here on the rock all morning alone—bird watching, plant watching, bug watching, streamside omphaloskepsis—after an early quarrel with Juliet. She wants me to quit Ohio State altogether so we can move back here. Quit a tenured position? No other job in sight? Impossible. I’ve had a swim. I’m shirtless, barefoot. There’s an unaccountable smell of grapes in the air, wine on the breath of the stream.

  I know this stretch intimately. Over the years I’ve waded and swum and explored extensively, skied or skirted the changing ice, canoed in high water, tried a little fishing, spotted moose and deer and fisher and mink. I know the fast water directly upstream, too, boulders and white water, deep hemlock glades. I know the narrow beaver pond downstream, fifteen feet deep, steep woods on one side, wide flats cultivated to hay on the other, a wonderful swimming hole, deep water from bank to bank, the spot where wading stops and skinny-dipping begins: Shangri-la.

  Suddenly, in a thundering flash of huffing, black-on-white ecstasy, big dog Wally is there, then Desi. Juliet can’t be far behind, and isn’t. She shuffles along in the leaves, thinking hard, sits right beside me, pushes me with her hip, upsets my balance.

  “Sorry about this morning,” she says, still truculent.

  “No, it was me. I was wrong,” I say, no better.

  She puts an arm around my shoulders, connubial silence in the forest bedlam: kingfisher, chipmunks, chickadees, blue jay, ravens overhead, the stream rumbling over the rocks of the washed-out beaver dam below us. A rust-killed balsam is dropping its needles, filling the air with that citrus scent; we hear each needle hit every branchlet on its way to the ground, an infinitesimally quiet proceeding, but a racket nonetheless. The dogs lay themselves down in the leaves behind us like library lions, play lookout.

  At once we say the same phrase: “I’ve been thinking.”

  “You first,” Juliet says, following a mosquito with her eyes.

  “Well,” I say slowly. “I’ve got the whole summer and fall coming here, and I would really like to finally explore this stream.”

  Just then, exactly then, there’s a frantic scrabbling in the grapevines in the dead elm across the water. It’s a gray squirrel, working the remains of last year’s grapes. The dogs leap to action, hurtle down the high stream bank, plunge into the water. Alarmed, the little
creature gives a curious leap. The grapevines shake. Our squirrel races up the trunk to the highest branches, then races down, then back up, then down again, all the way to the ground and right into the dogs’ frantic faces, scrambles in front of them through the leaves, makes two big, screaming loops all the way around the dogs like its brain is on fire, then turnbles down the embankment and crosses the stream, leaping athletically rock to rock where the beaver dam’s been washed away. But he misses the longest leap—a squirrel!—misses and lands in the water with a splash, frantically swims in the current to the gnawed point of a beaver stick, climbs upon it in a hurry, leaps again, grasps a slippery rock with his long-claw forepaws, tail in the water, finally scrambles rock to rock and out of there, dripping. Is the little monkey drunk?

  The dogs are way behind, still sniffing at the dead roots of the elm.

  “Okay, it’s my turn,” Juliet says, oblivious.

  “Squirrels don’t swim.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  And suddenly I know just what she’s been thinking—it’s nothing new, but something has changed—and in my mind sperm meets egg and cells divide and fetus takes shape and babe is born and grows in elapsed time from child to teen to parent itself to old age.

  “I’m thirty-seven,” Juliet says.

  Footnotes

  1. Popple is the common name for white poplar, or eastern aspen.

  2. Vincent York in Sandy River and Its Valley says this means Great Carry Stream and that the name refers back to the presettlement use of the river as a major carry and float between the Kennebec and what would later be Montreal.

  3. In fact, at a time when very little cash was in use, ground grain was money. The first bridge across the Temple was built by one Moses Starling for the price of 150 bushels, circa 1790.