A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  And I often hiked with my younger son in the same pack, or one like it, to another place. I'd take him there when he was three or four to shoot with his play bow at imagined game, which he somehow imagined as caribou. The spot was just an old log landing, but we named it Caribou Country.

  After he'd taken a score or so of shots, some pretty good at that, I hefted him again, turned onto the downhill route homeward, and began jogging, in a way knees and back would prohibit today, singing a song that began, "I bought a mule, he's such a fool/ That he never paid no heed." I'd learned the song from one of the Maine woodsmen who've so shaped my life.

  As I write this, I see Creston MacArthur inside his Third Lake camp, having swallowed a belt or two of something amber, veins pushing out in his neck as he chants the refrain:

  Go 'long mule,

  Don't you roll them eyes!

  You can change a fool

  But a goldang mule

  Am a mule until he dies.

  The lake is buckling outdoors; it's getting on mid-March, like today. The stove glows crimson, warming the place so that ice dams thaw and drip from the eaves. There's that smell of must and man and woodfire I'll always treasure. I'd be the fool to wish myself anywhere else.

  On the later day I recalled, my second son sang Creston's tune with me for a hundred feet or so. Then he stopped mid-breath, even before we got to the refrain. I slowed to a walk, recognizing that he was deep in slumber, which likely meant he'd dropped the small plastic bow behind us. Without checking, I hiked back up the trail a short distance, and sure enough, there it lay, glowing red as an exhausted star in the snow.

  I stooped and fetched the puny weapon, then looked out across the valley from Stonehouse Mountain. Everything so beautiful. Why hadn't I been noticing this right along? Same snow, same peace, same sense of possibility and gratitude.

  I couldn't stop now. I thought back to the middle daughter as we descended another flank of the same mountain, her warmth piercing through the pack and my two layers of clothing. She had been sleeping almost from the moment we left the house, yet all along had been so profoundly there. Below me, under a gnarled and woodpecker-ravaged beech tree, my bird dog Bessie stood stock still, as if she pointed some phantom woodcock. But no: she was merely gazing at her master, who stood stock still himself in that long moment, mumbling something related to hosanna, amazed not least that so noble an animal was thus concerned with him of all people!

  And finally, twenty years gone now, the last child, my namesake, removing her glove and waving her pudgy fist through the same peaceful, frigid flurry, chanting a little nonce ditty whose words I've forgotten. But words weren't the main thing here. Sometimes they aren't. I stooped to pluck the mitten from a drift and slipped it back on.

  Finally—and all this, I suspect, in less than a minute—I went back even farther in time to a solo descent of Dougherty Ridge in Maine, where snowshoe hare, white as flakes themselves, kept flitting back and forth across the ancient logging road I followed. That they should keep bursting out of the brush like that, displaying themselves to a man who in those days killed fifty or so a season . . . well, it seemed apparitional, as by God it was.

  Hosanna indeed.

  My self-preoccupation, whenever it rears its head, is unforgivable, and, if I think matters through, I know that. It will forevermore be a mystery to me why I must feel my way out of such funk, or more specifically, remember my way out. At too long last, not merely the benisons of my present life but older ones as well will at length prevail over sorrow at natural loss.

  That the last of our children was out of the house now must surely have had something to do with that vague inner sorrow I took into the woods yesterday. And yet surely the most important aspect of my part in raising all five involved their capacity to distract me from—me.

  So I hoped it would be with my children's children. And so it has been. Not that I'd begin to claim I have continuously been so distracted. I will forever regret any moments I lived in unwitting disregard of the children's cravings and passions and fears, of those of their mothers, of anyone's beyond that fetid thing, my puling self.

  For all that, if I ever complained (and what parent doesn't?) about the frequent chorishness of parenthood, even at my worst I knew deep inside that the end validated the busywork, that in fact it wasn't busywork at all. And the moments I'd recalled, in winter, in snow, children on my back both literally and metaphorically, would sustain me if nothing else did, if I could only be moved, despite myself, to summon them, just as I'd lately done on Barnet Knoll.

  All it took was a little snow.

  Standing there a day ago, I knew that a warm house awaited, but I lingered, looking up now, willy-nilly, to see Earl Bonness ahead of me, wearing the elegant snowshoes he'd wrought in that little red shop. Earl was a man who knew pain much more than most of us ever do, and certainly more than I.

  There was the sudden, incomprehensible death of his daughter at sixteen, dropped to the floor in the middle of a basketball game. His courageous younger son Alan, cursed with cystic fibrosis, worked himself literally off his feet, determined to do a job right, tumbling behind a push lawnmower or collapsing under an armful of stove wood, until he finally fell for good in his early forties. There was the catastrophic death by gunshot of his grandson Tommy, which Earl insisted until his own death was no suicide but was after all still death, a boy whom, for family reasons, he and his wife Tecky had raised.

  Earl wore pain on his face and in his matchless basso voice, but he never went further in my company than to say, "Memories can bear down on you."

  Indeed they can. But they can buoy as well. As in mind I scanned from Earl to Donald, from Donald to George, from George to Creston, from Creston to Carter, from Carter to Annie, from Annie to Ada, and on and on, beholding their faces with an inner eye, a kind of enlightenment fell on me like the snow I'd lately jostled.

  What was it I'd so treasured in each and all? The capacity, precisely, to joy in how and where and what they lived. Most had known hard times and hard work that I couldn't conceive, but they were sturdy, often even jolly, which was to say they valued their lives on life's terms.

  I heard the voice of George just then, after I asked him how he'd stood the crushing labor of his young manhood: piecework, out by lantern in the morning, back the same way at night. You took pride in your work, he told me. And if you couldn't fix something, you let it be.

  My principal labor was a luxury, even an embarrassment, compared. It was no more than the ongoing effort truly to reckon what a bounty this life, both active and reflective, had offered, and then to write as much of it down as I could.

  I thought, you'd better hope you can change a fool.

  All this from a small, bright dust of snow.

  I'd had to hike a little more strenuously than I'd forecast, breaking trail to where I stood in reminiscence; even I knew it might be more than I'd bargain for to pursue the route I originally intended. To hell with pride, I decided, swinging south, homeward, snaking through the woods as best I could, helped on my way by the long decline.

  In a quarter of an hour or so, I stepped onto a white space that stretched west to east out of sight. I gaped, having thought in decades of searching through these three hundred-odd acres I knew their every inch. Yet here I was on an old tote road I'd never seen! Had I missed it in the warm months because vegetation grew thick across it? I didn't think so. Years of bushwhacking had made me adept at tracing trails that most might never notice.

  I knew which way the house lay. I was not lost, not even, as those old woodsmen said, turned around. But everything in every direction looked brand new to me, the untouched belt of snow a palette for memory and imagination both. And was that a tiny dash of olive-gray in my eye's corner in the almost equally tiny gap between two tall spruces? Had my kinglets come?

  Had I been here before or not, and what did here mean anymore?

  This surely seemed a new path, and its untouched whiteness provided the
old inducement to walk it in one direction or the other. If there were literal, geographical places in my own back woods that I hadn't explored, what other sorts of exploration had I failed to make?

  Yes, I could head either way and see what was what. Neither way pointing home, though, I'd mark the ghost road in mind, and save it for a later day.

  Don Chambers (right) and hunting companion Hazen Bagley.

  About the Author

  Sydney Lea is an American poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, who is currently the Poet Laureate of Vermont. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Yale University, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin College, and the National Hungarian University. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many others, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont.