Potato Hill grew before us as we walked, seemed a mountain. Bronzed oak leaves showered us in a breeze, the big trees letting go sooner than those down in the intervale. Even the portion of the road that the skidder men had used was growing back to grasses, healing.
A new-looking camp road leading off to the left was posted in free verse:
TRAIL CLOSED
CABLED OFF
AT OTHER END
DUE TO THEFT
Those hunting camps are vulnerable—but many are still left unlocked and open: safety for winter roamers, enough canned food cached for a meal, enough kindling to save your life after a snowmobile accident, say, or a broken ankle skiing, or any of the softer ways hypothermia can kill when the temperature falls below zero. The vandals take more than the odd orange jacket or camp chair or shotgun—they take trust itself. Only the very strong can rescue it then, refuse to submit, leave things unlocked despite all. Or so Drew and I said as we walked.
At the top of a long incline in strong sun, before I was quite ready for it (my memory of its whereabouts having been somewhat faulty), we came upon Enslin’s house, a ruin. As I had when Bob Kimber first pointed the place out to me, I caught my breath: the place was the very essence of the poem I’d memorized so long before, verse come to life somehow, the essence of decrepitude, too, of entropy. What was left of the house looked like a hermit’s cottage, tilted, exposed. Young trees leaned into the airspace over the violated roof. One whole outside wall—lathe and plaster—was papered in flower baskets, had been the interior of a nice room once, moldy now. The other side was simply a collapse, beams and lathe piled on rocks and bricks.
The section that remained standing had been the kitchen. Drew and I leaned at the doorway, squinting to see inside. The door frames were skewed, the chimney cracked and falling, floorboards hanging broken into a half-filled basement, porcupine shit everywhere. Drew stepped inside gingerly, then I, testing what was left of the floor with the toes of our boots. In the corner, a trashed Glenwood stove lurked. Drew picked up a Scotch tape dispenser. ’That really gets me,” he said. “Anomalous.”
The Homasote paneling had come down in stained, fibrous shreds, exposing fresh furring strips. Under a litter of leaves was a Nescafé label. The rear corner had rotted down into the earth a couple of feet. The back door was squashed to three-quarters height. Galvanized bucket, plastic trash can, homemade kitchen table upside down (its cedar legs rough and kicking at the air). Bottles and jars all a-tumble, a section of mirror that once had held the poet’s image.
In the dooryard, such as it was, we studied a horseshoe-shaped basement, rotted floorboards fallen into it. Under the leaves and fallen branches we found wooden beams and the remains of an extensive stone foundation. Down the hill, Drew spotted three thick-holed and twisted yellow birches, eccentric. “hos e weren’t always in such dense woods,” he said, forest detective. “That was a field down there, or a barnyard.”
I took another long look into the remains of the house. One hoped for books. One hoped for volumes of poetry, notepads, sharpened pencils. But this was a considered flight, not Pompeii.
DAYLIGHT WAS SHORT, AND THEN SHORTER. WHILE JULIET rested upstairs, I’d sit in the kitchen and hold the baby, feeling my complicated feelings—love and dread, love and responsibility, love and anger (self-abnegation resented), purest love, joy. I listened to the radio till I couldn’t bear it: we had a new president. And I read a great deal, changing diapers at chapter heads. I read master’s theses. And in the warm cone of light from the standing lamp over the armchair by the wood stove, I read TheThen and Naw, which is a retrospective of Theodore Enslin’s work over six decades, newly published at the time. Looking up from the page, I thought of his house over the stream: that desolation had made me feel in some inscrutable way that I’d touched his life, whereas his poetry made me feel I’d touched his mind, a clatter of image and order and broken thoughts, wordplay unto roughhousing, all of it underlaid with a quality of somber judgment, a sense of futility inside plea-sure, each poem a mannerly painting.
Then one evening in the dark kitchen, with the baby happy on my shoulder, I got up my nerve and called him: he was part of Temple Stream history, after all, and with that connection I might start a conversation. I’d gotten his phone number from a mutual Temple friend, the artist Jeanne Bruce. Ted’s wife, Alison, quizzed me, vetting the call, then Ted himself got on the line, voluble and kind, nearly eighty. He was easy to picture—I had a clear memory of his face from our one meeting—thick beard, broad shoulders, high forehead, thin hair combed over the dome of his head, strong nose, eyes warm, lively, and a little intimidating, flannel shirt, wide hands, half-frame glasses: “Oh, yes,” he said, “I lived up on Wood’s Hill, in what I called the mountain house, there on the Natty Brook, as I called it. The house was built by Nathaniel Staples in 1792. I bought the place in 1950. The land was still more or less open, laid out pasture-orchard-pasture-orchard up the hill, with stone walls between each, all the way to the top. I simply spotted the place from the top of Potato Hill on a hike with a friend, inquired in town and was able to buy it immediately from Mark Mitchell—eighty-five or ninety acres for seven hundred dollars.”
He visited sporadically until 1961, when he moved into the house full-time. He had no vehicle: “I got to town by shank’s mare, year round. Snowshoes in the winter to the end of the plowed road, which is at the other house, the Oakes house. Then walk to town. I’d be up there weeks at a time—pretty much of a recluse for several years. One time I spent forty-three days straight up there. Someone in the village got worried and sent a boy up to see what was going on. And I saw this boy coming and yelled, ‘Who is that!’ Because I hadn’t seen anyone for so long. I left that night. Went straight down to the Lower East Side of New York for three months. Never lived quite so reclusively as that, after. The idea of all the isolation was that I wanted to know if I was as good as I thought I was professionally. I had made all these claims for myself as a poet—1 thought I better put myself where my mouth was. And I learned things about myself I didn’t want to know.”
We talked an hour or more, and when we were done I knew I had to see the place again.
Juliet and I had a babysitter two days a week, and on one of those days—Juliet on her first solo mission since the birth, a belated baby shower with friends in town (and then a luxurious nap alone )—I made lunch, filled a water bottle, collected the dogs, brought Then and Now up to the end of the pavement, carried it into the woods along the stream, past the year-round people, past the hunting camps, past the We-Bite dogs (Wally and Desi, with eyes cast down, allowed themselves to be sniffed, stayed out of trouble by way of submission, then hurried along behind me), past the quiet man’s destroyed house, and to the turnoff where once a covered bridge had been. I inspected the bedrock down under the current bridge and found the bored holes Ted had mentioned in our phone call, anchor sockets for a portable shingle mill, he’d said, a machine the last wave of settlers had brought with them.
I don’t know what I hoped to achieve, but I carried Ted Enslin’s new book, his life of poems, to his old dooryard that perfect sunshine day. Potato Hill seemed taller and craggier than it really was, rose in spruce slopes from the high Temple valley to its bare top. I noticed a tin cup hanging on a peg jammed into a thick old tree near the ruin, took it down to the little feeder brook (Jessie Brook, issuing from Jessie Pond, Ted’s Natty Brook), washed it out. Back at the remains of the house, the dogs sniffed and whined after porcupine scent, thankfully without result. I stopped at the door, knocked ceremonially, listened bemused for a greeting. What a mess the old place had come to, what a shipwreck! I’d thought to sit and read in there, but it was too chilly, damp. So I dragged the homemade old kitchen table outside and set it up in sunlight, placed the dented drinking cup at my spot. A settler’s beam across stones made a bench. I sat down, put my elbows on the table, poured a little water, and read poems aloud, starting with “The Town That Ends the Road”: “It
is this place / that you look for, / and you find it: / well-watered by / a brook called stream—/ almost, hut not quite, / a river.”
The dogs wandered off, rooted in leaf litter down by the old yellow birches Drew had pointed out. Ted had told me he’d asked the logger he’d hired to leave them standing—they’d been at the side of the original barn, which he said had fallen in 1955. I could hear the stream as I read, lost track of the words on the page, heard Ted’s voice, our phone call: ’Yes, we bathed in the Temple, washed clothes in it. Later, down at the other house, we’d swim at a camp Chester Orem owned. Great swimming. The locals, you know, there was word out that Ted and his girl, Alison, skinny-dipped.”
I’d asked him if he’d considered himself part of the back-to-the-land movement, and he’d bristled: “I came to Temple a generation earlier than the back-to-the-land people. I moved because I didn’t want to live the way most people lived, the usual cubbyhole. I wasn’t part of a movement; it was just something I wanted to do. I didn’t like city living. I simply hacked out a life for myself, learned how to do things for my-self. At first, when the back-to-the-land types started coming, I was delighted to see it. But some of the parts of that movement, the socializing, the mouthing of big themes, I couldn’t take. I just wanted to write.
“Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman—I brought them to Temple. I was the only one of my persuasion up there. I knew them down in New York. They pushed me about finding them a camp, and I did, a place called the red camp.” Dramatic pause. “It was painted red.” I laughed: the good jokes are simple. “An old logging camp, abandoned, but in pretty good shape. I found the owner, an ancient old soul named Charles John Prescomb, fellow had a lot of land. Asked him if he would rent the camp. So I called Denise and told her I’d found them a camp. And she said how much. I said, well, it’s pretty cheap: two dollars a week. And of course they came.
“Denise Levertov also washed clothes in the stream. They spent the summer in the red camp, then found their house down on Mitchell Brook there. Carruth came later, George Dennison, Bob Kimber, Jeanne Bruce, any number of writers and artists and musicians. The locals were fine with us, I think. I had some very close friends among them. I was purposefully quiet about what I did. To them I was just the guy up in the old house. The poet. And it got around that I was writing. ’Oh, yeah, he’s up there writing dirty books, making a mint a money!’ These stories would get back to me. I heard that Slim Hodgkins—he ran the store—said I was ’Peculiar as hell, but a pleasant man to talk to.’”
I sipped water at Ted’s table and read one more poem in my loudest voice—“The Glass Harmonica”—letting the words echo through the intimate valley: “It snowed in far country / North and / beyond the trees. /As I went through the mirror I My breath froze / clouding it, / and they saw me no longer / in the villages of spring.”
The dogs heard me calling out and assumed it was time to go, trotted back to my side. But I only ate my lunch and read out loud till a bank of clouds came in and the air grew cold around me. So I closed the book and tucked it in my rucksack and put the table back in the kitchen havoc, upside-down as I’d found it, hung the cup on its peg, walked away from the fallen place, and down the old trail to Temple Stream.
Footnotes
1. During those college years and for a few years after in New York City, I played keyboards with no great distinction in a number of raging bar bands.
2. You will find the whole poem reproduced in Appendix A, page 275.
3. Aldo Leopold was a forester and college professor who roamed the country doing various kinds of science during the first half of the twentieth century. He is the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a collection of poetical yet incisive essays and journal entries about his life in the wild, about the importance of nature, about the imminence and sadness of its loss.
Upstream Nine
Poet’s House to Schoolhouse Pond
THE BABY CURLED IN THE REED-WOVEN BASSINET A FRIEND had loaned us, then on my shoulder as she woke and fussed. I couldn’t settle her, and soon she wailed. Dog Desmond skulked and moped, glowering: he did not like the new presence in the house. Wally, more philosophical, chewed on the one Beanie Baby that he hadn’t stolen and buried in the woods. Juliet slept upstairs. I remembered the mail, took Baby Girl in her blanket outside into the brisk evening, and the air quieted her. Leaves blew down the road, forlorn. No sound of a car. No sound but wind. I’d been writing letters to friends and acquaintances and distant relatives, announcing our daughter’s birth, and had enjoyed the mail coming back, all the humorous suggestions for names. One of the notes I’d written was to Connie Nosalli, whom I hadn’t seen for several years, care of her post office box in Belgrade Lakes, the only address she had ever deigned to give me.
And here in a mountain of mail was a letter back from her, postmarked Baltimore, of all places. In the kitchen I lit a candle for atmosphere and rocked the child and opened the letter, which was not from Connie at all but from a stranger also named Nosalli who turned out to be Connie’s husband’s younger brother. He offered his personal congratulations on the birth of our baby, then blunt news: Connie had died back in June after suffering a year from the effects of a serious stroke.
Shaken, I read the note again, patted the baby’s back, held the stiff paper in my hands. The child didn’t care for my emotion; she kicked and squalled. I rocked her, held her. When she’d settled down, I read the note a third time. Connie’s mischievous laugh, the scent of her dusty perfume, a brief glimpse of her face fading irretrievably as I tore open envelopes in candlelight. A note from a graduate student suggesting we name the girl Derrida, ha-ha. I’d meant to write Connie back in the spring. Junk mail, galley proofs, magazines, a note from Juliet’s mom, three or four bills, brochures. What had I expected? Connie was in her nineties. I should have known it was serious from her postcard of dunes: it was her nature to play things down. I kept at the mail.
Low in the pile was a ruined envelope—I recognized it immediately: one of my bottles. I’d forgotten that dreamish project utterly. The baby stirred, burped, knocked her little head against my chin, knocked again, settled back to kisses against my shoulder. The envelope was as mold-spotted as the last one had been, as curly, the flap carefully taped closed. What strange coincidences the mail carrier brings! It was as if I’d opened the box and found the stream itself flowing there, as if Connie had brought the bottle home.
Inside the envelope was my form, of course, filled out in a shaky, feminine, old-school script:
1. As exactly as you can: where did you find your bottle?
ON THE BEACH AT FORT POPHAM, MOUTH OF MERRYMEETING BAY, SEQUIN ISLAND LIGHT DIRECTLY AHEAD, THE FIRST HARBOR BELL-BUOY DIRECTLY LEFT. FOUND BOTTLE AND NOTE IN THE SAND EXACTLY THERE.
2. On what date?
LAST DAY OF SUMMER.
3. In what circumstances? That is, what were you doing when you happened on your bottle?
BEACHCOMBING.
4. Who are you? Your name and address are optional, but I’d love to talk to you.
I AM ELYSIA MORGAN MARTIN
5. Add any note or information or anything at all you’d like.
I AM EIGHTY-EIGHT.
The last day of summer would have been September twenty-first, the day our girl was born: fresh, bright, jewel-clear, crisp and windy. I patted baby’s tiny back and read the questionnaire again, picturing this Elysia Morgan Martin kicking at a shard of beach glass, realizing it was a bottle, seeing the note inside. I stopped over her name. I liked the picture it evoked of the Elysian Fields, all those Greek shades communing there, lyres and robes, paradise.
Ms. Morgan Martin had not provided a return address. The postmark was not heaven but Rhode Island, faint ink, town obscured, zip-code partial. I examined every detail minutely: one of my bottles had made it all the way to the ocean, a miracle.
I blew out the candle.
“What is it?” Juliet said when eventually, in the dark, she came down, and I told her. Sh
e hadn’t known Connie Nosalli. She patted my back as I patted the baby’s and we drifted into our separate thoughts in the dark.
After a time, the baby woke and squalled. Juliet put on the light, took the girl from me squinting. I got to work in the kitchen, made a few halfhearted attempts at cooking something fancier, but settled on the previous night’s good bean soup and bread, and we quietly ate.
“Okay?” Juliet said.
“I’m okay,” I told her. “Just a lot to think about.”
So she was surprised a little later when I laughed in the midst of silence. She eyed me warily. The baby eyed me too, had learned to focus. I held the moment for several beats, then announced: “I have her name.” And I said it, and spelled it, then said it again, adding the middle name (which we already knew), then adding the last name. Juliet thought about it while we ate, unconvinced at first, but then she began to nod. I tried the name again. After a short silence, Juliet tried it too. We said it together a couple of times, then addressed the infant, and suddenly the child had a name.
Cleaning up later, I arrived at the idea for another note in a bottle—just one more foolish float-note to mix sorrow with joy the way Connie had always done. Later, past midnight, I’d walk down to the stream in moonlight and toss it in—a fragile blue old bottle I’d found in the settler dump upstream, stopped with a cork—watch it turn on the eddy and come back twice before a breeze would catch it and set it into the strong current past the autumn-busy beavers, farewell. I found a good piece of paper in Juliet’s desk, retrieved my timeworn fountain pen, seldom used, ink that would just wash away when the bottle broke, however many miles downstream. I don’t recall the words I used, but I remember what I wanted to tell my old friend: how sad I was about her death, of course, how guilty not to have answered her card. But I had news for her, too, news that had come to me forcefully as I’d searched the shed for the proper bottle: I was going to quit my job at Ohio State, tenure or no. And finally—almost an afterthought before I folded the note and stuffed it in—I let Connie be the first to know the new girl’s name, wrote it out for the first time. I liked the look of it so much I wrote it twice:
Temple Stream Page 20
