Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  Just at that spot, the beavers had dug a ramp into the bank. The old clay mine across the road, brook fed, would make an appropriate site for a beaver lodge. But there wasn’t the slightest spot of dried mud on the road and there would have to be if beavers were crossing regularly. I climbed out of the boat and laid myself in the weeds under the lip of the pavement, reached down into the water, and felt out an upward-rising tunnel. Beavers know how to prevent roadkill: go underground.

  Amazed, bemused, I fell back into the boat and chopped my way stiffly upstream, my head surrounded by gnats that arrived one by one till I was hosting a cloud, bugs landing five by five on my face and walking unswervingly to my eyes—I could actually kill them with hard blinks—hundreds of them taking flight with every swat of my hand, landing again, crawling into my collar, my ears, my armpits, intimate creatures. A clap in front of my face caused a dozen deaths, black spots on my palms to mark them. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the gnats were gone. The resulting peace was a portal: suddenly I was right there on the water, and the water was under me.

  I made it to the beaver dam I’d seen so often from the road, pulled the boat over it. Upstream, sands and silt and gravel had built up against the dam over the years, forming a gentle incline that slowed the stream as surely as the sticks and logs of the blunter dam face, but which would last through ice and flood and resist the implacable farmer and the wantonness of little boys. So: part of the function of the wooden portion of the beaver dam is to collect alluvium and form a more permanent streambed structure.

  Minnows and darters scooted away from my shadow as I paddled. At last I lost sight of the road. Every few yards on both sides of the stream a beaver ramp was cut into the muddy banks, and every third ramp looked to be a major route, well and freshly used. I paddled as noiselessly as I could, backed around each bend as it came, hoping for a daytime glimpse, a beaver sunning on his dam or carrying sticks. A phoebe perching on a dead branch twitched its tail, dove after an in-sect, returned. A robin lurked streamside, head cocked, looking for some other little life to end. The alders were so thick on both sides that I felt I was entering a tunnel. I was in a beaver place, made accessible to me by beaver work. A catbird mewled in the alders, a breeze rattled through all those heart-shaped leaves, a Lincoln’s sparrow hopped noisily through the branches.

  I whistled a ship-ship-ship, something my mother had taught me when I was very little, almost no sound, and waited, then whistled again. Suddenly, out of the deep thick of the alders, twig to twig, hopped a male yellowthroat, a tiny banana of a bird, black mask, black beak, bright yellow throat. He finished at a perch not two feet from my nose, not even arm’s length. In his own good time he broke off the meeting, hopped branch to branch back into the brush and disappeared. I paddled on, hearing his insistent call all the way to the next beaver dam, which I gave a name: Dam Three.

  Dam Three was completely submerged. In fact, I was able to paddle right over it, bumping my long green keel only slightly. This was a robust dam in deep water, heavy branches tangled together. The new work on Dam Two, below, must have drowned it. I peered down, trying to see bottom, dunked my paddle to its full length, dunked my arm too, some seven feet of paddle and arm without touching bottom. The banks were different here, made of rock in sheer walls like a swimming pool, cut too square for nature. I realized only slowly that this was the slate quarry of settler days. The beavers had built their dam on the very upstream edge of the quarrymen’s pit.

  Further along, I paddled past an enormous stump tilted into the water off the high bank, sawn through in tiers with a two-man crosscut saw, hard work across the (easily) six-foot diameter. This was the lone elm of the old intervale photos, cut down long since. The beavers had all but drowned the grand stump and built a bank lodge entrance in among its roots.

  Dam Four, Dam Five, Dam Six. Pools, meanders and bogs, drowned logs, no riffles. In one deep hole I spied a ghostly tractor tire, air pocket keeping it upright under water. Potato Hill (anthill shaped) came into view, then Day Mountain (a tapered loaf). Seeing the mountains come one by one like that, stuck as I was in the stream bottom, was like our seeing the major planets come by in succession, stuck as we are in our spot in the universe.

  Hurrying a little—I couldn’t seem to help hurrying—I reached the first riffle in the intervale, the first place in that stretch the beavers had let water flow. On both sides of the stream were old fields and several rotting round bales of hay. I realized with a start that I was just behind a house I’d visited often—Bob and Rita Kimber’s place—but hadn’t even known it, had lost track utterly of road sense, of distance covered. I stood in the canoe, saw my friends’ roof, let the canoe ground itself on the gravel there, leapt out amid tall Joe Pye weed, climbed the high bank. Well: it was an odd way to come visiting, an odd feeling of trespass, too, informal arrival being as antiquated as straw hats in summer.

  I stood looking fondly at the house—I love the Kimbers—when suddenly the porch door opened and out popped Bob. Fit and youthful at nearly seventy, he’d spent the early part of the summer on a canoe expedition in northern Labrador. He held the door for Rita, and she came out carrying something—a salad bowl—and they were talking, and then laughing, Bob guffawing hard and audibly, throwing his head back, and Rita stepping carefully down the stairs with a smile, and the two of them climbing into their car and pulling out. I could hear the laugh and hear the car doors shut (a small delay as the sound caught up with the image), hear the engine and hear the driveway gravel crunch; these good friends would not know till later that I’d been on their stretch of stream watching them.

  The Kimbers exemplify the saner corner of the so-called back-to-the-land movement that would repopulate and redefine dying rural towns all over the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. And as an integral part of the new history of Temple, Bob and Rita could pick up where Richard Donald Pierce had had to leave off in despair, with a tale of the town’s (at least partial) resurrection.

  They bought this farm in the early 1970s, grew their own meat and vegetables, raised chickens, churned their own butter. No phone, of course. The first two years, they lived in the one finished room. Their son, Greg, now grown, was born the next spring, and spent his first years living in the kitchen, baths in a big washtub till the stream got warm in summer.

  Bob himself had grown up in New Jersey but spent summers and hunting seasons in remote Eustis Township, Maine, working at his father’s hunting and fishing camp. He attended Princeton University. Drafted in December 1957, he was suddenly a soldier in Berlin. After his honorable discharge, he applied to the graduate German program at Princeton.

  Rita Kimber grew up in Thalwil, Switzerland, spent summers on the extended family’s farm. She came to the U.S. in 1955 as an au pair, took a degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, won an academic scholarship for graduate work at Harvard, taught a year at Smith, then went back to Harvard, where she completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature. Her dissertation was on Alfred Döblin and Feodor Dostoyevsky. Her first job out of Harvard was a three-year position at Wellesley College.

  At Princeton, Bob did his course work, then went back to Berlin to work on his dissertation: “Alfred Döblin’s Godless Mysticism.” He came home in 1968, roamed the woods of Maine until he landed a one-year replacement stint as an assistant professor of German at Wellesley College.

  Where, of course, he met Rita (one imagines the first conversations: two mutually attractive Döblin scholars in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts). Their courtship was brief, and they married in the fall of 1970. They didn’t want to teach, didn’t want to be part of what was called “the System.” They weren’t hippies—they were too old for that—but together they dreamed of homesteading in Maine. To earn what little money they needed, they could translate books.

  And now here it was, thirty years later.

  I pulled the boat through their riffle, climbed in, and continued upstream. A kind of Kimber sense pervaded th
e next several hundred yards—their kindness, their intelligence, their appealing orneriness, their backward-looking ambition, all of that seemed to imbue the land. I crossed Bob’s tractor ford, dragging the boat. Under a pine tree just there I spotted the most beautiful odd mushroom, a fairy trumpet standing four inches high, ridged yellow outside, bright orange inside, with flecks of white like sparse scales. Later I’d look in the book and find that it was called a scaly vase chanterelle.

  Always something new in the world.

  Ahead, there was a commotion. I looked up and in an instant saw the eye, the rack, the tail, the legs from the side, the legs from the rear, as if all at once, cubist form—that’s how fast the buck was moving in fear of me. I watched where he had been as if his shape were still discernible in the atmosphere there, as if the space he had occupied were him, watched it a long time, stream time, paddled on.

  Dam Seven looked new. I flopped the canoe up and over it. The stream immediately behind the dam was very nearly as deep as the dam—no ramp of alluvium, no generations of the accumulation of stream-borne solids, just stick butts and fresh mud and a few rocks here and there to anchor things. The mud had come from the stream bottom, and recently: further from the dam, the water was still murky, the streambed considerably deeper than natural—my paddle dipped clear to the handle before hitting a firm bottom, the beavers having made a channel in anticipation of low water, and after that, winter ice. The hillside through the scrub to starboard was all popple—beaver food, beaver paradise. And the new project was no doubt the work of a new pair striking out on its own, beavers in their second year pushed out of the home place by the presence of two litters’ worth of younger siblings.

  They’d incidentally given me about a hundred fifty deep yards of paddling, up toward a white-pine wood. The new inundation clarified as I proceeded, and I paddled over swaying grasses, drowned anthills, vole holes, squirrel stashes. A log had been floated, and on it squatted a formidable, oblivious bullfrog taking advantage of the new surroundings, a fat little Buddha sitting in meditation, content, serene, green on top, pale below, eyeballs shining. The prow of the boat eased right past him, one foot away, then the whole side of the canoe. I couldn’t help the impulse, reached out my hand. The frog didn’t flinch, not even when I tapped his head lightly with a forefinger, counting coup. He was so deep in frog world, fly world, stream world, and I so foreign, that he didn’t know I was there. I floated past him, feeling he had touched me, too. A muscle in my neck unknotted. A blue butterfly glided carelessly overhead. My heart rate slowed to match the pulse of the breeze, the surge of the water, the indolent beat of that butterfly’s wings.

  Abruptly I had the sense of being watched. I told myself not to have that feeling, but it was so sure and dense that I couldn’t shake it. I thought, Bear. I stopped paddling, stopped breathing really, hoping for a bear (it would be a black, and not particularly dangerous to me if I didn’t surprise it), peered into the dense weeds there in the hot sun—blooming asters, tattered false hellebore, stalky goldenrod, bees hard at work, spider strands shining in the light. The canoe glided upstream against the current, slowing and veering starboard. And there on the bank was a broken-stem trail into the weeds, plain as could be, still wet from something leaving the stream. I sniffed, found a strong animal scent, pointed the canoe into the bank right there, listened.

  How full the silent world is with noises! I heard a chain saw somewhere far away, heard a dragonfly’s wings click close by, heard a screen door slam in between. Downstream, there was the sound of water filtering through Dam Seven. Upstream, a pine-needle breeze in high trees. Near me in the weeds, a snapping, creaking unfolding, as recently trampled vegetation rose back as best it could. Birdcalls all around: kingfisher, distant crows, enamored song sparrow, scolding chickadee, all at once, all the time. But all that noise was silence, too, in a way, and in it I thought I could hear hard breathing.

  Stupidly—I knew it was stupid, but I wanted to see—carefully, I threw the bow line up into the weeds and climbed out of the boat. The trail was very clear, threading into the high stand of Joe Pye weed. I took cautious, slow-motion steps. The track turned once, turned again quickly, and suddenly, right there on the ground in front of me, were two dead beavers. I froze, stared. They were the same size, not large, belly up, one dark brown, one a little lighter, the fur sleek and glistening, almost combed. The beavers didn’t look bitten or chewed, no blood. I stood over them. Those tails! Scaly, paddlelike. The little front paws were charming and doll-like yet wicked-looking—leathery and dark with long black claws drawn up to the still chests. The hind feet were disproportionately large, webbed, as if borrowed from oversize geese. The weeds ahead rustled. I backed away. The weeds ahead shook. I leapt back-ward with a shout as the beast appeared:

  Earl Pomeroy, holding loops of what looked to be stainless-steel wire, the sourest expression on his face. “These yours?” he cried, shaking the traps over the dead animals.

  “No, no!” I tried to calm my breathing, surprised and somehow heartened to note that Earl was affected by our meeting too, puffing mightily. He looked bigger than ever, more used up, his face sunburned beyond belief, the usual overalls bibbed taut across his massive chest, the usual flannel shirt thick under there, long johns showing at the collar under the ends of his beard: daily wear, summer or winter. I never forgot how big he was, but always forgot how tall until he was there in front of me, looming. The traps were snares, heavy wire loops, blank metal tabs where an honest trapper writes his name.

  He barked, “Well, I should hope not, out of season!”

  I said, “I’m in my boat,” as if that explained anything.

  “Hell if I didn’t see you coming o’er the dam! All those badges!” ... The tourist stickers on my boat. “I thought you were Fish and Game!” He shook the traps.

  “Fish and Game?”

  “Woulda been the first time I ever saw ’em, too!” And he laughed, a big chuckle entirely for himself, since the joke would have to be translated for the likes of me. In the gray space where our separate worlds met, we stood over the beavers and studied them intently, which surely beat trying to talk or maintain eye contact, two guys who’d been in parallel but probably not-very-similar states of deep privacy, thinking their private thoughts in what amounted to two languages, suddenly finding themselves in awkward company.

  I settled down. “Hi, Earl.”

  Earl settled down too. “Professor.”

  “I got the socks. Thanks.” I knew the money best go unmentioned. The beavers were between us. I decided to take an interest. Anything else might seem an accusation, and I was not in a position to accuse Earl of anything. I said, “These two look pretty small.”

  He said, “Well, yes, sure, oui, but now that’s a pair of house shoes, right there.”

  “House shoes?”

  “How do you call ’em? Slippers. The early plew is softer leather, see, if you treat it correct.” He dropped onto a massive knee among the weeds, drew a finger down one of the dead beaver bellies. “Boy or girl?”

  I looked in the obvious place, saw nothing, reluctantly guessed: “Girl?”

  “Possibly, voyageur, but you cannot tell without looking in-side.”

  “Great,” I said, with the growing sense that I was at a murder scene. Not that I hadn’t seen plenty of dead animals. I’d even trapped muskrats and sometimes raccoons for spare cash during that sojourn out west when I worked for room and board on my uncle’s farm after college, had vivid memories of the fur shed, the squalid little operation that bought my animals and skinned, stretched, scraped, and dried them, sold them to tanners.

  Earl flipped the first beaver over, clearly proud of it. The coat was nice, but not what it would be in winter, which was trapping season. That much I knew.

  I made my accusation into a disingenuous question: “Someone poaching?”

  Earl flipped the second beaver over, stretched out the tail, stretched out the legs. The animal hadn’t stiffened yet,
smelled richly of what we’d called beaver butter, a scent I knew from the fur shed too. So much for the young beaver couple starting out.

  “Well, merde,” he said thoughtfully. “Poaching is in the eye of the beholder.” He checked my eye very briefly, looking up from kneeling. I turned away. He had sawn his beard off square under his chin, trimmed his mustache so I could see his mouth. He smiled and I saw his straight, perfect teeth. He said, “The castor is just a big rat with a nice coat on—look at the mess they’re making here. They’ll have the log yard back there under water quick like that.” He snapped his fingers, flipped his thumb over his shoulder. I had no idea what log yard he was talking about, though months later I’d ski back up in there and see that there was a scraggly logging road that ended in a rough clearing where logs would have been put up on trucks. Peering through the brush and weeds, I could just make out Earl’s orange pickup parked there.

  I turned my gaze back on the beavers. I wanted to be safe in my boat, but I wanted to look, too. I said, “I think they’re so .. . interesting.” I was going to say beautiful, or something stronger like exalted, but didn’t want to be teased.

  “They are big rats.”

  “When is the beaver-trapping season?”

  “When is the canoe-sinking season?”

  “Look at those tails!”