“A puzzle,” Bob said.
We beat our way back to the bulldozed road, chugged to the spot we’d marked coming out of the birch scrub, scratched our heads, kept going. The road dipped down, and down a little more to where it crossed the watercress brook, which we found flowing with authority through its galvanized pipe under the road into cattails and ice knobs on sedges, sandy bottom, gold glints of mica, hearty flow, jubilant babble of rare languages, washed rocks cased in ice.
What if that little sprite really was the Temple?
Bob shook his head and said, “Wouldn’t that be something?” meaning that we needed to keep a healthy skepticism, although here before us as we investigated was a brook of about the right size, a brook flowing about the right direction and in about the right place to meet and so be the stream we’d left for a walk on a stone wall just an hour and a half and a good lunch before. All we had to do to test the hypothesis was follow this brook downhill.
The sun found an opening in the high, thin cirrus: solstice three o’clock. Spruce Mountain was a jagged blue ridge, the snow of Day Mountain suddenly lit rose gold. We had something less than a half hour till sunset, just an hour after that of adequate light to get out. We’d have to nearly run to get to the car by dark; I’d done something like that before and seen an ogre, didn’t want to see him again.
But our mission was clear.
We gestured politely for one another to go first, then plunged together into the scrub, pushed saplings from our faces, climbed over discarded limbs, crossed and recrossed the muscular little brook for advantage—the place we’d quit couldn’t be a third of a mile downstream. We crossed a property line into open old woods where the walking got easy. The brook was wider—not a brook you’d miss, fell into a rocky slot noisily, two steep banks, large trees. Suddenly; looking to the woods on the other side, Bob spotted our own footprints in wet snow. He pointed up the hill to a stone wall. We scram-bled up there on all fours in the bare wet snow, reached the wall, looked over the lip: Loretta, Marilla, Mehitable, Prudence, Asahel.
Incontrovertibly, the watercress brook was Temple Stream.
We beamed, turned without pause, and scrambled back down the slope to the water, stood in it ceremonially—waterproof boots—then followed our tortured path back up along its course to the bulldozed road. And there we posed for a long minute simply staring down into the watercress brook moving through its pipe under the road, cattails and glint of mica: Temple Stream.
The sun set fast over Spruce Mountain, leaving a pure pink in its wake, a bloody, deepening pink pulling at the dense clouds moving in from the south. East, a darkening periwinkle blue settled in behind Day Mountain. The first planets showed just beside her shoulder: Jupiter, Saturn. Along the northern horizon, around the edge of the bowl of the big sky up on that plateau, the delicate lavender of alpenglow rose, harbinger of night.
Still, we charged into the tangled raspberry brambles on the other side of the bulldozed road—thorns and needles—then into old scruff in a recovering cut, following the brook. Which made a sharp turn north immediately, paralleling the road for several hundred yards. At our feet and knees a mess of old branches draped in dead sensitive ferns hobbled us, but we wanted to have the water in sight. The brook steamed in the evening cold, our footprints in the snow made puddles. Bob remarked on all the green, a winter terrarium: Christmas ferns, equisetum, baby balsam trees making their way to sun, star mosses and staghorn mosses, brief glimpses of summer.
The brook got small, then smaller yet, meandering through the damp, damaged forest. Where old branches blocked our progress, we picked out a passable route that took us away from the flow, but fought our way back, found the stream, picked out another passable route, found ourselves on a rise. We worked our way back, but did not come to the stream. Ahead, the land got only drier, and we found ourselves on an old twitch road that had become a snowshoe-hare highway, bunny tracks thick up and down it in the snow.
To the north, the land fell away quickly. And down there in the failing light we could make out the alder bog at this end of the dried-up pond, the very alders we’d just avoided. We turned on heel, faced south. Bob pulled out the survey map. There was barely light to read it. The land fell away south, too, but more subtly: so subtly that no such topographical gradation was noted. But, in fact, the flattened ridge we stood upon marked a minor watershed.
“We’re there,” I said.
The slight snow cover made it easy for us to retrace our steps, and we did, both suddenly in a boyish hurry, tumbling over each other, making our way with difficulty back to the last place we had left the stream in all its diminutive insistence, a hundred yards only. We scrambled upstream, got separated by a few yards, then a few yards more, kept going, found the two sources of the Temple separately and simultaneously, gave shouts—two perfectly clear upwellings, two sweet fonts of water urging up out of the leaf litter, a spring with two mouths, the overflow beginning the long trip downhill in old skidder ruts nearly erased. Bob and I were thirty yards apart in the woods but hidden from each other by all the scrub and scruff. I looked into the depths of my urgent spring. Grains of sand danced in there, lavender-glinting mica.
“Walk it back down,” I called. Our elevation was above the dry pond. So: the spring was artesian; the source was Day Mountain; water flowing underground from high above found daylight here. Temple Stream flowed from a logger’s clear-cut at the head to a gravel pit at the mouth, from industry to industry, but it had flowed before industry, and when industry was gone it would flow on.
Bob and I both made our ways back downstream, making sure flow was evident at every step, called back and forth, de-lighted with the small discovery, these inch-wide brooks. Gradually, the course I worked on turned into a definite rivulet, two or three inches across. And Bob called that his had, too. Intently I followed mine. After a few focused minutes, Bob and I met, and our two brooklets met, and the trickles formed a brook, and the brook was Temple Stream, which would flow growing bigger and bigger past Bob’s house first, then past mine—that old wreck of a homestead where my new daughter was doubtless sleeping a long solstice nap with her mother, my Juliet—would flow down to the Sandy and then in confluence with the waters of a dozen streams like it to the Kennebec and from there, conjoined, to a quiet marriage with the Androscoggin River at Merrymeeting Bay and thence to the Gulf of Maine and the endless ocean blue.
Footnote
1. There was one more, in August of 2001: an open and empty envelope, contents lost in the mail—failed seal, all that time in a moist bottle—no postmark, no return address: mystery.
Appendix A
THE TOWN THAT ENDS THE ROAD
by Theodore Enslin
I.
Iti s this place
that you look for,
and you find it:
well-watered by
a brook called stream—
almost, but not quite,
a river.
The stream, then,
Is the pulse of the
town-
ship
including the village,
and certain outlying districts—
most of them
abandoned
except
for vicarious life
in the easier months.
The stream begins
above the town
lines
in a number of bog ponds,
carries down and out of it
a sediment
almost unseen
until the dam
at the mill
fouls it and
traps it,
and then releases its sludge
to another town
and a river.
It is the back
bone
of the place
now,
though it
is no longer
important
in the sense that it once was.
II.
There is the village
proper,
and a few fanning roads
which soon die
in the leaves—
overgrown
as the fields
of the old men
who left themselves there—
sweat dried on the rocks
that still might lick salt,
if you knew how to find it.
Following the stream of water,
a stream of houses,
decaying
in most cases—
the barns
fallen in,
and the chimneys
crooked
and faulty.
The men who live here
take to the woods
early,
or disappear.
They are
crabbed in their survival,
gnarl early,
carry
themselves to their graves
in poverty
and harshness.
III.
Above the town
lie its mountains—
ravaged by over-
cutting:
dark growth
and hard wood,
But the mountains are open
In their sleep and
aloofness
They heal better
than men.
They contain bits
of the life
that sticks to them—
wild—
and the tame remnants—
cellar holes,
walls,
an axe-head
or two,.
wagon-tires,
where deer
and other free lives
nose through them
for berries.
IV.
But the life of the men
casts a shadow
even
across the sun—
there is something
that bitters
even the best days.
It will not
rub out.
When you first come here
you will not notice it,
then time
drives it
home
like a nail
into bone.
There is sadness,
and desperate
hatred
In the close-in
of winter
It becomes
unbearable.
The wind is a scream—
a pain
that bears gossip—
that act
of those men
who have nothing to do
except curse that same nothing.
It will pass.
There is brightness,
But the ache of the land
comes up
time
and time again.
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.
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