Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  When Maggie was still in her mother’s womb, Sam, a renowned expert in the field of electromagnetics, had while traveling the world for ITT begun collecting stuffed animals from every place he visited—some new but most old and dusty—and nicknamed this ragtag collection of worldly castoffs the Stardust Fan Club. It was strangely sentimental behavior for a self-professed agnostic and man of science. Maggie was Stardust and the only one of his eight grandchildren Sam ever got to hold because he died of throat cancer fourteen months after her birth. Something had clearly passed between them, though, I’m convinced, something only the two of them knew about. I once caught him showing her a photograph of a trout.

  I went into the water, wading in nearly to my waist before making my first cast. I was using a four-weight Scott rod with a Hardy Brothers reel that belonged to my oldest friend, Pat McDaid. It was nine feet long but light and had splendid action and more than a little sentimental value. Pat bought the rod when he was poor—it was sheer extravagance, he said. As success came, he’d accumulated more expensive rods but always came back to his first fly rod, and I was honored that he’d offered to lend it to me, saying it was a regular trout harvester.

  The water was the color of just-steeped tea. I could feel its coldness compressing the neoprene waders against my bare legs. The air was warm and calm, the surface of Indian Lake mirror-still. Small clouds of pale-winged bugs skittered over the surface. I made a clumsy first cast, dropping my Hare’s Ear nymph on the surface just a few yards ahead of me. I stripped several feet of line from the reel and flicked my wrist and the rod lifted to one o’clock. The woods are lovely, dark and deep….I flicked it and the line arced forward and sent the fly twenty yards farther into the cove. But I have miles to go before I sleep. That was better. Not a bad presentation, all things considered. Perhaps even Saint Cecil would have approved.

  Fly casting in still water is sometimes disdained by purists because trout aren’t nature’s smartest fish, but neither are they the dumbest, and perhaps they’re the most practical. In still water they carve out territories and follow familiar feeding routes, and the rule of thumb is if you can see them they can see you and you might as well plan on hamburger for supper.

  This late in summer, the trout would be swimming low, feeding around the large boulders, the tops of which were visible five or six feet down. Practical anglers would have been using sinking nymphs, but this was a dry-fly expedition in search of a proper salvation, and though it would have been nice to catch our supper on a fly, it really wasn’t mandatory. I had chicken breast marinating in white wine and cumin seed back at camp, guarded by Sirius the sleeping dog. Even so, as we’d had no luck on the Green earlier that morning, catching a trout or decent black bass would be a nice start to the expedition.

  I flicked again and watched my fly settle. Maggie’s line whisked softly through the air.

  “Keep that rod tip low,” I commented, my voice carrying easily across the cove.

  I’d forgotten how relaxing fly angling could be. I’d quit doing it the year I met my wife—life happens, someone said, while you’re waiting to go fishing. That was fine, but now, being brought back to something so peacemaking by my own daughter had a nice touch of cosmic irony and neat circularity I’m certain the electrician Sam Bennie would have appreciated. His favorite expression to me—which I always took as a kind of personal manifesto—was entirely true to his scientific nature, but tinged with the ambiguity of the spiritual empiricist: Keep the faith, Jimmy. It’ll all evolve.

  A kingfisher flew past and vanished in the hemlocks. The air smelled moist and piney from them, rearing up around the small cove. They made me think of the druids of Celtic mythology, ancient stories in which large trees were considered the wisest elders, the true giants of the earth. Disney appropriated this same myth in the recent film Pocahontas, by making the heroine’s “grandmother” a willow, and Merlin the Magician of the Arthurian legends I so dearly loved as a boy used the deep forest as his classroom, often assuming the form of an oak tree himself. Oaks were the central figures of the ancient Druidic cults that swept across Europe before the fifth century and legend holds that St. Patrick himself was educated by a Druid. Some Scots to this day believe a feminine presence inhabits trees, perhaps a holdover from medieval times when virgin brides took to the forest to pray for decent husbands.

  Maggie must have been having similar pagan thoughts because she suddenly commented, “This is really cool. Check out those trees, Dad.”

  She wondered if they were a thousand years old. I said they were probably less than a hundred because the forests around these lakes were the first to go when lumbermen pushed to the heart of the Adirondacks. At one time, though, I pointed out, before European colonists came to North America, a red squirrel could climb a hemlock here on the shore of Indian Lake and travel all the way to Minnesota before coming down again. I remembered reading this somewhere in a serious-minded book, though it may have been a complete load of romantic rubbish.

  I told her about a Native American origin myth in which the world’s first couple were trees; snakes freed their roots and when they toppled over people were permitted to crawl out and inhabit the earth at the Great Spirit’s direction.

  “That sounds like Adam and Eve.”

  “It does. Every group of people has its own stories, and if you examine them you’ll find they are, for the most part, remarkably similar. We have the same yearnings and desires. Same hopes. Same fears and failures. That’s why you should always respect somebody else’s religious traditions. These stories are the same in every land because they are linked by the same human spirit.”

  Nice speech, Dad, I thought; now shut your cake hole and just fish. But then I heard my mouth open and begin yakking again. I told her a wise philosopher named Plato believed that the presence of God was manifest in groves of trees and that another man called Buddha, who founded a great Eastern religion, discovered enlightenment—truth, wisdom, awareness of sorrow—while sitting beneath one. The fruit of forbidden knowledge that got Adam and Eve into such hot water with their Maker came from a tree, and in the fairy tales she and her brother loved woods always held mysteries, divinities, sprites, and nymphs. Thieves were always hanged from the stoutest oaks in ancient times, and the Song of Songs records that Christ’s face was fairer than the cedars of Lebanon. The legend of the dogwood tells how Christ perished upon, and ascended to Heaven from, a tree.

  “Why did they cut down the trees here?”

  “They thought it wouldn’t harm things, I guess. They needed the lumber for houses. But some people took it too far.”

  I explained that in other places in the world, rain forests were still being systematically removed, possibly creating a worrisome process called global warming, which prompted her to interrupt me and explain she already knew about this subject. She gave me a vigorous impromptu site lecture on the critical need to preserve South American rain forests for their impact on global air quality and medicine and I just listened with great pleasure, thinking, again, that Sam Bennie, wherever he was, must have been pleased to see how Stardust was evolving.

  “Cool,” I said when she was finished.

  “Do you know any more old stuff about trees?”

  I smiled and admitted that pretty much was the extent of my tree lore. But I had once met a man in a Shropshire pub who had been arrested forty-three times for trespassing on construction sites where old forests were being systematically removed. He was one of Britain’s most celebrated tree activists and nothing like the tree-hugging crackpot he’d been depicted as in the tabloids. He was a no-nonsense corporate accountant by trade and his argument was surprisingly practical, more geographical than spiritual: To say nothing of the incalculable loss of valuable topsoil that accompanied removal of ancient tree roots, if we cut down all the old trees our physical identity as a people, the necessary sense of who and where we are as a species, would be invalidated in the process.

  “What’s that mean?”

>   “Never cut down a tree unless you have to.”

  “You built our house of trees,” she reminded me, as always able to spot the log in her neighbor’s eye.

  “True. I did.” Ours was a post-and-beam house whose beams had come from a great Canadian hemlock forest. “But I built it on a hill in the center of a great woods and I’ve never removed a tree without planting something to replace it—at the very least a nice rosebush.” I sometimes sat in my den and studied the thousands of knots and meadering rings of life in the beams overhead, wondering what wonders they’d witnessed. When my house creaked and groaned with the north wind, it almost seemed to speak.

  “Dad.”

  “What?” My head was still in the trees.

  “I caught one.”

  She had indeed; a small trout was flipping around at the end of her line. She reeled it in and we got it to the net. A pretty little trout with black spotting and iridescent lines below the gills. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to debarb our hooks and had to use my artery forceps to remove the hook. The damage wasn’t too severe, though. I passed the little fish from my wet hand to hers.

  “Our first trout,” I said, and almost made a joke about how much that little critter had cost to land. The wife of a trout-crazy buddy of mine named Bill once calculated that the salmon he brought home from his annual fishing trip out West cost $375 a pound. You could buy fifty pounds of salmon at the grocery store for that, Paige had pointed out. “True,” Bill had calmly retorted, “but they weren’t caught on a dry fly.”

  “Do you think he has a name in the fish world?”

  “I don’t know.” Did fish name, or even know, their progeny? “We could give him one, if you like.” I explained that her great-great-grandmother Emma taught her grandfather that Indians always named things as they saw them—people, animals, even places. They believed everything you saw had a spirit and a life force and deserved to be given a name, a transcendental view that crept through the side door of American theology via people like Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Naming was important, I said, so let’s name everything we see as we go. Captains named their ships, aviators their planes. I didn’t see why we couldn’t name this little fish, too.

  We named him Ishy—short for Ishmael—and let him go, wished him a long life, then headed for the canoe.

  “While we’re at it,” I said, “let’s name our canoe, too. She’s a sturdy craft. Even if some of us have had a problem staying in her.”

  “How about Norumbega?” Maggie suggested.

  “How about Norumbega Girl?” I countered, hoping I wasn’t too transparent.

  A nice smile.

  “Cinchy.”

  —

  Amos was dozing on the bank above the cove where we’d left him, though as he lifted his head at our approach I had the distinct impression he’d been nosing around a bit, a fear that was immediately confirmed by the appearance of the old man from the adjacent campsite, who marched up as we made landfall and scolded me for leaving a dog untied and unattended in a state park.

  “It’s against the rules,” he fumed. “You can get fined, you know. It’s not my business but I don’t want that dog around my property.”

  “I’m sorry if he bothered you,” I said mildly, thinking how I must finally be maturing because part of me really wanted to tell him to stick his snout in a tree stump.

  “Oh, he didn’t bother us,” the elderly woman said, suddenly appearing and smiling a little embarrassedly. She’d come over to hand her husband his vomit-green windbreaker. I heard rather loud accordion music playing from their camp radio and was reminded of the old saying that a true gentleman is somebody who can play the accordion, but doesn’t. “He seems like a very friendly dog.” She bent over and scratched Amos’s head for a moment and her husband stalked back to their camp. The polka music stopped, the woman straightened up and said good night, and a few minutes later their red pickup truck sped away. I could imagine the sharp lecture he was giving her on the way to supper for undermining his civic duty to God, country, and the State of New York.

  “What’s for dinner?” Maggie asked.

  “Something from the Approved Foods List,” I assured her. “Green peas, applesauce, and Chicken Norumbega.”

  “What’s Chicken Norumbega?” She sounded as if she thought it might be raw baby yak meat served on a bed of poison ivy greens.

  “Grilled chicken breast with cumin.”

  “What’s cumin?”

  “An herb. The Indians believed it gave you the gift of second sight.”

  “What’s second sight?”

  “An ability to see through things to their hidden meaning. Lots of saints and mystics had it. So does the IRS. It’s also very useful if you ever decide to go on Jeopardy!”

  I built a fire and Maggie sat on a log to write in her Pocahontas journal, no doubt recording everything that had been said in the past couple hours, including the swimmers au naturel and my exchange with our bossy neighbor. She had her mother’s extraordinary memory and talent for recall and, with all due respect to Professor Wordsworth, once told me she could actually remember the moment of her birth. When I questioned this, she sighed and said matter-of-factly: “Okay. Here’s what happened. Mom handed me to you and you carried me into that little room where they weighed me on that little scale. It was, like, really cold.” “Oh really? How did you know it was actually me?” “Because,” she answered, as if I’d been born yesterday, “who else could you be?” I was forced to concede the point.

  I watched her take her first bite of my exquisite Chicken Norumbega.

  “Well?” I said, hovering like Pascal the chef.

  She chewed and nodded, forced a taut little smile. “It’s really good, Dad,” she said, and then spit lightly. “Except mine’s got some dirt on it.”

  “That’s the cumin.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  At least she ate the applesauce and a few peas. Amos ate the remains of her Chicken Norumbega uncomplainingly and we finished with a nice warm cup of Swiss Miss by the fire as the first sprinkles of rain fell from the darkness. Out on the lake I’d seen mares’ tails in the northwest sky, a sure sign back in Maine of approaching weather, and I knew from the radio earlier in the day that a series of large and violent rainstorms was sliding toward us from the Great Lakes. I feared we’d seen all of Indian Lake we were going to see this trip. My hope was to make a motel somewhere near Buffalo by the next evening, ride out the storm, and maybe leave early enough to go see Niagara Falls before slipping across into Canada and heading for Michigan. I’d never driven to the West and part of me couldn’t wait to actually be there.

  While I cleaned up the dishes, Maggie hooked Amos up to the lead and took him for a walk. The red pickup truck came back and the elderly couple disappeared into their camper, shutting the little door firmly. The old man bugled his impressive nose again and then it grew remarkably quiet save for the pleasing croak of bullfrogs. A frog’s croak is essentially an amphibian equivalent of foreplay and an impressive barbershop chorus of lonely male frogs was searching for mates that night. Back home in Maine, on what’s popularly called Big Night, which comes in the early spring, another buddy of mine named Earl and others like him loved to don waders and slog into marshlands with flashlights, looking for giant singing frogs. Down South where I came from, people loved to “gig” frogs and eat them fried in butter, but Earl, an unromantic lobsterman by trade, only loved to search for them, find them in their habitat, and briefly revel in their deafening love song, an act of mobile poetry that connected him in ways he couldn’t have imagined with the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians considered bullfrogs sacred symbols of fertility, a symbol of the fetus, associated with the goddess Hecate, Queen of Heavenly Midwives, and the song of the frog in ancient times meant something was about to be resurrected. It was a great wake-up call.

  Dog and girl returned. Girl yawned, dog sprawled by the fire. I’d planned to read some of Ohiyesa’s writings to her from the Medicine
Bag—what better setting than Indian Lake?—but the fatigue of the day had caught up to us all again. So we toasted a few marshmallows, I fed Amos his evening aspirin wrapped in a piece of cheese, and we watched the fire sputter down.

  “Dad, did you know Aunt Emma?”

  No, I said. She died half a century before I was born. My father had been around fourteen.

  “How did she die?”

  I said she possibly died in the great influenza epidemic that claimed twenty million lives in the 1920s. There’s one way life had changed, I said. People rarely died from the flu these days.

  “Did she have a husband?”

  I said of course—Uncle Jimmy. His picture hung in the entrance foyer of our house, remember? The old dapper gent in the blue suit shiny with age, with the carnation flower in his lapel and bowler on his head. The photo was taken when he was a very old man, shortly before his death.

  She nodded. “Do you think he loved her a lot?”

  I said I was certain he did. They were pioneer people. There were no airplanes, no TVs, no electricity when they were children. Love took a different shape, too. After she died, he never finished building his house. He lived in the old homeplace till it came down around him. The story was, he had an old bull who kept him company and occasionally attempted to gore him. Uncle Jimmy died before the bull.