A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Mean-spirited as my letter did intend to be, I hope with all my heart I didn't put matters quite so savagely, not to mention pretentiously, but I know such was the gist of the thing, and I wince at all this today, though I didn't in those woods.

  Or I didn't at first. That hard mix started to fall from the black sky again, rattling my tenuous cover of boughs, and I thought perhaps I'd been dead wrong not to try winning back Margot's affections. Time passing, I more and more remembered her as the lovely and decent girl she was. What on earth had I done—or not done? I could see her pretty smile in the shimmering coals at my feet, could recall a magic night at the old Sunnybrook Ballroom, where one of the big bands—all crumbling by then in the new rock 'n' roll era—played songs from my parents' generation. The fire's warmth on my face brought to mind her cheek, warm on mine as we danced to the slower numbers.

  Goddamn, I thought, I'm lonely.

  At least gloom had replaced the boredom. I now began to think that the apparent receptiveness of my new love interest at Smith College was actually mere politeness. I wouldn't win her affections, or anyone else's. Now I rued the rancorous split from Margot, falling more deeply in love with her by my campfire than I'd ever been when we were together. Without her, I was certain, I couldn't live.

  Of course I've lived for ages since. Back then, though, as I'd never done before, I studied some of the profundities involved, precisely, in living: the meanings of existence, of death, of love, of my each and every action, which struck me now as deeply misguided, even immoral— enough so to land me in this fix.

  I'd never get out.

  Not that I was back in Jack London territory. I didn't mean I'd physically perish in these slushy woods. I was thinking in a more metaphorical way, a tendency that has been both a blessing and a curse ever since. I supposed, instead, that I'd come to a permanent spiritual place, utter solitude its defining feature.

  Once again, some saner part of my brain must have scoffed at such melodrama even as fancy played it out. Still I did wonder if Carter's claim, that a man needed at least one lost night outdoors to know what he had to know, signified something far different from what I'd inferred. I assumed the old man was talking about a lesson in resourceful woodcraft, but he may have meant something about facing up to the grander issues. Of which I saw that I knew nothing. I only knew that I was companionless, my literal solitude nothing compared to my permanent mental one.

  Did that one night crack open a door, however slightly, to a metaphorical path (there I go again) toward something exactly opposite, away from nihilism and, at least in time, toward a greater engagement with those I cared about, especially wife and blood kin, but also friends and even strangers?

  I could say so, but I'd mistrust, as ever, my capacity to make coherent narrative of jumbled experience. If I've turned out to be a teller of stories, on the page and otherwise, old-fashioned ones with beginning, middle, and end, down in my soul I still know that life doesn't proceed in so orderly a fashion. I know, in other words, that my instinct to the verbal, nearly catastrophic at times, may actually be my substitute for a coherent vision of life, not the vision itself.

  And yet again, it's the dream of coherence that keeps me from the nihilist's despair.

  Round and round I go.

  No, I'm not sure whether or not that dark sojourn near Little River Mountain had a thing to do with my later opinions and feelings, baffled and illogical as these would sometimes become in later life. It had taken me half the night and more to consider anything at all besides my own comfort—the fire, the poncho, the ham sandwich, which at last I remembered and devoured—and my plan, if I could call it so, to escape this fastness at earliest light.

  As it happened, I didn't have to wait that long. I'd just flopped another piece of wood on my fire, and seen, as the log caught, that it was two in the morning, when I heard the far rumble of an engine, faint at first, but growing less so by the moment.

  By God, that was a log truck!

  The driver must have been hauling a late—or maybe an early—load from somewhere to my west along the Little River Road. Even back then, the paper companies were at it twenty-four hours a day. I traced the sound's progress for a minute, and it told me exactly how the road lay. I likely stood no more than two hundred yards from it! My sense of direction had not been far off; I must have walked fewer than fifteen degrees east of south those hours before.

  I crashed out to the road before the truck could reach me there. The driver slowed. He didn't stop. Rifle in one hand, I hopped onto his running board and held on as best I could with the other to his wing mirror. When the man rolled down his window, I asked if he'd seen my car, his big rig still rolling as I spoke.

  Short and wiry, he looked at me inquisitively at first, then muttered something I scarcely heard. I knew in the instant he was a French speaker, perhaps over from the St. John valley. His joile dialect confounded me, but he could understand me when I repeated the question in schoolboy French.

  Vous avez remarqué ma voiture?

  He smiled, then jerked his thumb behind him. My wheels lay that way.

  Merci beaucoup! I whooped, hopping off.

  In a quarter mile I came on the trail-worn Beetle.

  I decided I'd return for an hour or so of sleep at the lodge, drive to Topsfield for breakfast, then head back to the Little River Mountain trail by ten, my buck still out there, at least in my imagination.

  It was Thanksgiving, but I still figured Chick's would be open. I could buy a compass there.

  Carter White, legendary guide, deerslayer, trapper, and guide.

  Refurbishment

  I'm all geared up to go after grouse with my local Maine pal Dave. In the dooryard, my truck has idled a minute, its windshield defrosting. Seven a.m. Time to head out, but before I do, I glance at the mirror over the rough pine dresser given me by Creston MacArthur more than forty years back.

  Is it something about the mirror itself, full of ripples and scratches, or perhaps that the damned thing hangs just here, in the river camp my ex-brother-in-law and I bought for a song all this lifetime ago? A lot of water over the dam. The platitude seems irresistible. I hear the river rushing over Big Falls, and when I turn, I see a small salmon leap, as if in simple exuberance. A flash and gone. A lot of water indeed, and my own leaping days well gone too.

  This place had stood abandoned for years. Fishing the river from foot to mouth, as I did almost every summer's day as a very young man, I'd notice the little structure, built in the neighborhood manner: half-round logs on the vertical for siding. Working alone, a man would have found it harder to keep those timbers on the horizontal as he placed them. I'd later learn that Red Yates put the cabin up in the '30s. Today I can imagine him, however accurately. Autumn looming, he braces a log with a forearm and a knee, hammering eight-penny spikes with the free hand, the nose of a vanilla flask peeking out his back pocket.

  Red and his wife raised a family in this tiny shelter, which stood a hundred yards east, up on the Big Lake road. Then, in the middle '50s, a doctor from upstate New York bought it and hired a crew to move the whole show to river's edge.

  Sadly, the doctor's wife soon lapsed into mental illness, often severe enough to require institutionalization. Her husband, preoccupied with this harrowing course of events, rarely found time to visit his Maine camp. He mailed a check to Paul Hoar, the savvy owner of the general store, to see to its boarding up.

  That poor woman. That poor doctor. They were probably not yet forty. A slew of years stretched ahead, too many of them blighted. So I muse just now. I didn't have many such thoughts whenever I passed their Big Falls cabin in those days. As I say, I did occasionally glance at it, but I don't remember pondering—at least not for some spell—how wonderful a place it would be to own. This indifference might have seemed strange to a tourist even then (how many have commented on my good fortune since?), but as a youngster utterly intent on fish, I was hard to distract, and disinclined to think past the day in which I
found myself.

  Standing by the falls, I'd be looking for a rise above them, or else swinging a streamer or bouncing a nymph below. The camp yard was no more than a space to cross on my way up- or downriver. No salmon swam through the ledge or the rough grass, after all. And my parents had a camp uplake on an island. What did I need?

  In those days, my brother-in-law and college classmate was an aide to Governor Ken Curtis, and he was looking for a spot, not impossibly far from where he lived in Wiscasset, to wet a line for wild fish. He and I were wading the stream one day, and he did notice the cabin. I told him I'd ask Paul about it; he knew everything to be known about town affairs.

  The storekeeper told me the unhappy story of the physician and his wife. "Doc would likely sell it," he mused. "I'll get you his address. You'd ought to write him and offer him . . . oh, five hundred dollars." I suspect now that Paul had a stake in the sale. He always seemed clever enough to see the main chance, and I've never thought to fault him simply for being so bright.

  I did write the doctor, he asked a thousand, and we settled at $750. My brother-in-law and I both went in on the deal, and we have co-owned the place ever since, despite the fact that his sister and I divorced some thirteen years later along.

  The cabin needed a great lot of work, but I took a novice's pleasure in seeing to much of that. I was a teacher, one of whose principal privileges has always been a long summer recess. My wife and I had no children in the early years, so, unlike my co-proprietor, I could spend a full three months by the river if I chose. And I did choose.

  The table and the cabinetry in the camp are not of a sort to be found in a high-end catalog, but they remain serviceable. We bought an old woodstove from someone at the Passamaquoddy reservation, and got a pitcher pump from someone else to draw water out of the river. Creston installed a sink he'd found, God knows where, and built the counter to house it, a task beyond my meager capabilities; the counter was made moisture-resistant by means of yellow vinyl from the top of a junked Pontiac convertible. The fabric has lasted a lot longer than the car ever did. The first big upriver window we put in came from a hen coop.

  So there were means of drinking, basic cooking, washing, and brushing our teeth; we had wood heat for chilly nights; we had crude beds and furniture; and we had an outhouse, which my former brother-in-law and I have always joked was the other one's share of our common ownership. The privy was Peter's camp or Syd's camp, depending on whether Syd or Peter spoke of it.

  Things changed, of course, as things do with time's passage. Two children arrived, and the quick river and falls were persistent hazards for them. To worry about life-threatening accidents was to forfeit the very relaxation that those long academic vacations could otherwise foster.

  If I feel a bit of the blues creeping in on me just now, I suppose that must have at least partly to do with the wreckage of that first marriage and the toll it was bound to have taken on those children, who were nine and four at the time of their parents' divorce. I'd showed myself far from a model father or husband, and I know it. My ex-wife was and remains a fine, courageous, and caring woman, and has been an extraordinary mother to the children she bore.

  There's no wriggling out of accountability, but sometimes it seems to me that some law should have stopped me from making any marital commitment at twenty-three. I was a restless, hunting-and-fishing fool, not a grownup by anyone's standards.

  I can't, however, make myself unwish that commitment, flimsy as it turned out to be, because that would be to unwish my wondrous oldest son and oldest daughter, who were already more adult in their teens than I in my late twenties; and it would also be to unwish the two children apiece they themselves now have, all of which is impossible to contemplate.

  And I can't dismiss the fact, either, that—despite my post-adolescent turmoil of mind and heart—we experienced a fair share of joy in those early years, much of it having to do, precisely, with the ground on which I stand this morning. The children still have a relation to that ground, though my ex-wife's to a place she also deeply loved got sundered by our own sundering.

  As I say, my parents already had a camp out in the lake that feeds this river, one far more commodious, far less perilous, especially as the kids grew ambulatory and then of course wildly active. The island increasingly became our own little family's refuge come summer. I used the river camp for the most part now as a studio. I'd go down early in the morning, write until noon, and return uplake at lunchtime, then down again after supper to fish whatever hatch might occur. In those days, you could skid on the bridge for the mayflies resting on the warm tar.

  By the middle '70s—too soon, too soon—the river that for so long I'd shared with few others had become a destination for hordes of anglers. The extension of Interstate 95 all the way to Houlton had much to do with this. The river runs for a mere three and a half miles, and only about half of that, given the steep drop in its middle section, is really fishable. Idiot regulations (for decades you could kill an aggregate seven and a half pounds of landlocked salmon per day!), combined with growing pressure, conspired to decimate the electrifying wild fish. The prey would now be all but exclusively stocked.

  Not that those stocked salmon couldn't grow big and feisty after a season or two, leaving the river for one of the lakes at either end in the hot months, fattening on smelt, returning the next spring. It was only that for me something had been taken out of the river forever. Of course there had always been stocked fish in that watershed, but now they almost completely crowded out the other kind.

  Mainly, though, I just didn't like the idea of jostling for position amid a throng of people. I could get that sort of snarl, as if I'd ever want to, in some other place; I wouldn't look for it in remote Maine.

  Needless to say, I'd been supremely spoiled. There were a lot of evenings when I sat in one of our Adirondack chairs beside the camp-yard fireplace, at which I'd just broiled a supper, and watched for rises.

  "That looks like a good one," I'd mumble, and, setting my beer on a wooden arm, down I'd amble to flick a dry.

  Those days were irretrievably gone, like so much else, and although there was no profit in lamenting them, I naturally did. I still do. At all events, apart from my writing hours, I now spent a week or so each year in the cabin, when I came north to pursue grouse and woodcock. Even in these later Junes, on fishing trips to the back lakes for smallmouth, to which I turned by default, I've stayed on the island, away from the mainland's vicious spring black flies.

  And suddenly I'm here, ready to quit my teaching career, the last of five children—to my nagging pain, like a toothache's—having left our house. The four grandchildren have arrived, a great consolation, to be sure, but because we can't be with one or another son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter every day of the year, however we might want to be, it lately occurred to my wife and me that we might now visit the camp in off seasons, including the winter months. I hadn't done that in countless years. We'd explore on snowshoes or ski the lakes or just have time to ourselves in a hidden place.

  I am, however, less and less enthusiastic as I age about staggering to an outdoor toilet in the middle of a sub-freezing night, even in October. January would, I knew, be out of the question for both of us. So, with permission from my co-owner, who, other commitments and allegiances interfering, hadn't set foot on the property for years anyhow, I decided to spruce things up.

  There's a well now, and indoor plumbing, along with a bigger woodstove and even a propane space heater, God save me, to keep the bathroom toasty if the fire should die. I hired a local builder for the whole job.

  I stare upriver. Robin has been with me for a few days, but at noontime yesterday she headed back to work in Vermont. I already miss her, but I don't think her absence alone accounts for the wave of melancholy that has flooded my soul.

  Aging beats the alternative. My poor father, who adored this territory about as much as I do, died of a massive coronary at fifty-six, Creston at the same age, and
my immediately younger brother was felled by a brain aneurysm in his thirties. I have been more than comparatively lucky, no doubt about it—and yes, as I have often admitted and will again, even a spoiled one.

  It's not the conceivable imminence of my own death or debilitation, however, that occasions this wistfulness. Or not exactly. Rather it's that, at sixty-eight, I believe at long last I know how to be a decent father, husband, friend, and now grandparent, at least most of the time. My chief regret is that, even if I live to a ripe age, I'll have had so little time to exercise what in my case must pass for wisdom.

  It's obvious too how often I worry over never having adequately expressed my love for people now dead, the ones who occupy much of my attention in all these meditations. I even wonder if, filled with a young person's faith in worldly permanence, I properly loved this physical cabin, in all its crudeness, as I know how to do today—now that the crudeness has essentially vanished. Part of the definition of a camp, after all, is that it has no running water; so the place is not properly even a camp anymore, though I'm sure I'll persist in calling it so.

  Too soon old, too late smart. That was a favorite saying of my grandmother, who lived well into her nineties. I paid no more attention to it back then than would any other red-blooded, self-serving punk of a kid. Today I understand, all too stingingly, what she meant.

  By dint of will, I make myself think of the pleasures that await me and my wife in this tiny building and in the countryside around it. I see us paddling up Musquash Stream in late September, skiing out to Oxbrook Lake on one of those February days when the sky's blue is so deep it's almost navy, trekking up Wabassus Mountain and looking down on Third Lake in brilliant October.

  No, I haven't yet adjusted to our empty nest, but I force thoughts of how downright cozy it will be, one of us sitting in that rocker, which I remember buying at a yard sale in Topsfield, the other in the armchair— all rodent-ravaged then—that I found and clumsily re-upholstered. The woodstove will be radiant, the night wind scattering snowflakes or stars, and that dear familiar, the river, humming under the ice in the flat, then vaulting out when it reaches Big Falls.