I bike to Middleton and withdraw two thousand dollars from my account, leaving little behind, and put the hundred-dollar bills in a Mason jar. I dig a shallow hole by my tent and bury the jar. Lina met someone named Jake who’s a dowser on a land co-op in East Margaretsville who said he would show us where to drill.
As we sit on the dry ground by the fire after gardening all day, we hear scratching in the grass under the trees. The porcupines have been snuffling around our campsite before and we assume they are back. But porcupines don’t meow. Into the light of the fire comes a small cat, black and white like a Holstein. She prances right up to us, meows again, and jumps into Lina’s lap.
“Hello, little one. Where’d you come from?”
She isn’t one of Jenifer’s. She trots after Lina into her tent that night and I am jealous of that cat. As I climb into bed alone I imagine curling up around Lina’s back, purring her to sleep.
*
The first cut, August 1992
It was my seventeenth birthday and, as it turned out, my last camping trip with my dad. We had been gabbing since Ellsworth because we were excited to be almost there. We were about to cross the bridge onto Mount Desert Island for the first time since I was ten and Dad asked me to guess whether the water rushing under the road meant the tide was going in or out.
“Out?”
The water was rushing off in the direction of the sea. Dad looked over at me across the front seat and smiled. I called him a sentimental old fart for remembering the last time we crossed that bridge, and when he laughed, it felt like we used to be, like things were all right.
We went to Allen’s Campground near Somes Sound. We put up our tent and spent the afternoon playing in the waves at the ocean beach and renting bikes to travel the carriage paths. Dad poured himself a gin and tonic and cooked spaghetti, which we ate in front of a campfire with plates on our laps. He had bought a cake in Bangor. Now he put candles in it and sang to me in his croaky, off-key voice. After we did the dishes, we listened to the ball game while Dad drank a can of beer and lit a cigar. He only smoked when we camped. The scent of burning tobacco mingled with the smoke of the fire and dissipated on the light breeze. It smelled exotic outdoors under the spruce trees.
The next morning before my father awoke I discovered a long chain of rickety wharves stretching from shore two hundred feet into the sheltered bay. A bald eagle perched atop a tall conifer across the narrow bay. Gulls dove at it, careful to keep distance between their white wings and its beak. Stepping from one bobbing section to the next, I walked to the end of the floating wharves. Beyond the end, well into Somes Sound, a large sailboat was anchored, its mast naked, a contained and solitary island. On my way back to shore a squid, blood red, swam ten feet from the wharves. Its tentacles flapped with the grace of wings in slow motion. Suddenly, there was another pair of wings above me. A gull, its grey wings folded, dropped from the blue sky and its beak pierced the surface. It rose up above the water. The squid released ink, making the water murky as it escaped into the deeper, protective water of the sound. The gull landed on the surface and floated.
I wobbled along the docks, then kneeled down to see what was in the water. The tide was low and the water so clear that the bottom was visible, rich with life. Seaweed, mussels alive and empty-shelled, schools of little fish, tiny crabs camouflaged until they moved. I dipped my arm into the frigid water to get a blue-black mussel. They lived together, communities clinging tenaciously to one another and to the rocks on the floor, as if an inseparable geological fact. Their striped shells were covered with barnacles. I yanked a clump of them from the rocks and twisted one away from the others; the tension and grating of the threads that bound them together felt like cranking the leg joint off raw chicken. I laid the mussel on the wharf and brought my shoe down on top of it, cracking its shell to expose its flesh. When I dropped it back into the water, the shattered shell fell back and forth to the seabed like a maple leaf floating to the ground on a still day. Small crabs scuttled silently across the floor, attracted to the scent of exposed flesh. One, two, then a dozen or more came to eat the destroyed mussel. I felt bad to have killed it, but my curiosity got the best of me.
A school of minnows, no longer than my first knuckle, swam in the shallows like a disparate cloud of life, facing different directions while they fed. All of a sudden they aligned their bodies in parallel and darted away, the cloud now a plume of smoke rushing out of a chimney. Behind them a dozen or more mackerel, their backs black and gold, bulleted into the shoal after the school. The minnows broke the surface, which was roiling now. I ran back to the campsite for my fishing rod.
I tied my red devil lure with its treble hook onto the nylon line, going over and under six or more times, making up for my inept knots with a profusion of them. I found a school of minnows by the edge of the dock and dangled the lure among them. Twice mackerel shot in to catch minnows but avoided my lure. I removed the treble hook from the red-and-white disk, tied it by itself to the fishing line, and suspended it below the minnows after the mackerel had gone. They moved away as it plunked and sank. Once they grew accustomed to the treble hook and crowded above it, I jerked the rod up, snagging a minnow. The impaled minnow writhed on the hook among its schoolmates, and when they darted away from the next rush of mackerel, it was the obvious laggard to be eaten. There was a tug on the line, then an intense pull. I reeled the line in and a silver belly glittered near the surface as I pulled the sleek muscle from the water, the mackerel’s silver turning to white in air. Holding the line with one hand, I slid the other over the fish’s head and down its body, grasping it firmly as my dad had once shown me. I dislodged the hook as carefully as I could, the fish’s one visible eye staring at its persecutor.
A motorboat pulled into the bay while I was doing this, cut its engine, and skimmed toward the dock. I knelt down to release the fish in the cold water, racing against the oil slick that floated toward me.
“Woo-hee! That’s a beaut.”
I cursed the approaching boat under my breath. Not only would it scare off the fish, but the noise and smell of diesel exhaust nauseated me. A few scales that had stuck to my fingers caught the light. I brought my hand to my face and smelled the fish. Sitting in the boat was a girl wearing frayed, cut-off jeans and a red shirt with “Marlboro” stencilled across it in white letters. Her blond hair hung below a Red Sox cap. She had a can of beer in her hand. I had never seen anything like her and I’m certain I was staring. She reached over the gunwale of the boat to hold on to the dock.
“No lure, huh? That’s illegal, you know. Like jacking deer. If you got caught they’d take everything you own. Your fishing gear, your car, everything.”
“I don’t have a car,” I said. “I’m only seventeen.”
“Seventeen or seventy, it’s still illegal. Don’t worry, I won’t tell the authorities.” She winked at me. “Why’d you throw it back? That was a decent size fish.”
“I don’t like fish.”
“Nothing like smoked mackerel. Ever had it?”
I shook my head.
“You should try it sometime.” She leaned over the Evinrude, pulled its cord, and shouted above the noise, “See you around, poacher.”
I made sure to be on the dock the same time the next day and, when she didn’t show up, the day after that. When she returned, she tied her boat to the dock and jumped out.
“I’m Katharine,” she said, thrusting her hand at me. “What’s with the hat?”
I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks and reached for the floppy brim of my sun hat.
“Sun protection,” I said.
“Take that silly thing off. You can wear this if you want.”
She lifted the cap from her head and tossed it to me. Her wavy hair brushed her shoulders. It was thick, the colour of sand, and made me think it had seen a summer’s worth of seawater and sun. My fingers wanted to bury themselves in her hair, to feel the tresses coated with salt.
We met each aft
ernoon after that, while my father stayed at the campsite reading the paper or drinking gin and tonics with the ball game on the radio. She was two years older and that intimidated me. She smoked and laughed a lot and was beautiful and all I wanted was to hang out with her, to sit on the docks or in her boat, and talk.
Katharine took me out into the sound and all the way across to the far shore to the General Store in Somesville, where we bought ice cream. She taught me to fish in deeper water for cod and ocean perch. We talked about what school was like for us — she hated it — and the differences between life on an island and mine in the city.
On our last night, I told my dad I was going to watch the stars by the water. Katharine’s boat was moored at the end of the docks. She met me at the shore and wrestled me to the ground before I knew what had happened. She sat on top of me, pinning my arms with her legs, and tickled me until I was finally able to throw her off. She flopped beside me, breathing heavily and we lay there, under some spruce, looking at the stars. As she talked I inched my hands closer to her head, as if trying to get comfortable on the stony ground. I rested the tips of my fingers against her hair, anxious that she would feel my touch, hoping, I suppose, that she might. At last, after what seemed like an hour of agony, I took a chance and rolled over to kiss her. It was by far the most electric kiss I’d ever had, but it confused both of us. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been having sex back home. But the feeling I had with Katharine, just from that one kiss, showed me how meaningless all that casual sex had been. For the first time I felt what I assumed was love.
When it got late enough that my father would begin worrying about me I said goodbye to her. All I wanted was to stay with her by the water, and as I drifted through the darkness back to our campsite, I plotted how to see her again. I lay with my feet on the now-lukewarm bottle Dad had tucked into my sleeping bag hours before, imagining anything was possible as I tried to make sense of the fluttering wings in my belly. This all sounds so innocent, but for me it was anything but simple.
Dad and I left the next morning and began the drive home. I began writing a letter to her as soon as we left the campground. Dad was quiet until we approached the bridge off the island.
“Tide going in or out?” he asked me.
I guessed without looking up from my letter. “Out.”
“You’re wrong.”
There was an edge in his voice I rarely heard. His face was rigid and his mouth set. As we crossed the bridge water was rushing in from the sea. I put my pen on the dashboard, pulled my feet up onto the seat, and huddled my knees into my chest.
“This was my vacation too,” he said.
“I know that, Dad.”
“I might as well be camping by myself.”
He banged his hands on the steering wheel. It was as if he had reached across the seat and slapped me. All the way to Bangor there was nothing between us but the wind whistling in my open window and blowing hair into my teary eyes. Dad broke the silence as we passed the life-sized statue of Paul Bunyan.
“I hardly saw you at all. We didn’t go up Cadillac Mountain. We went to the beach once. What’s gotten into you?”
I held my breath and waited.
“We used to have so much fun,” he continued, “and now all I do is sit at the campfire, listening to ball games and waiting for you to come back smelling like cigarettes and beer.”
“I wasn’t smoking.”
I finished the letter and mailed it to Katharine as soon as I got home, inviting her to come and visit me that fall. Her response came a few weeks later. It was short and had none of the warmth I had been expecting. I mailed two more letters after that one, but after a lot of silence and a long winter of heartache, I had to admit that what we shared meant more to me than to her.
*
This morning I hear meowing outside my tent. Lina and the cat are making breakfast. Her paws pound the path when she runs.
“Come on, Thunder!” Lina calls to her, and the cat has a name.
Our water situation is about to improve, though it will be expensive. This morning we’re having a well drilled. The rig is part of a heavy truck that makes two ruts we’ll have to fill. It takes out the corner of one of our carrot beds as it wends its way over the bumpy land to the place we’ve identified for drilling. Lina’s water-witching friend, Jake, came yesterday and dowsed an underground stream seventy feet below the surface. I show them where Jake said to drill and they begin cutting into the volcanic rock.
After they have gone through fifteen segments of pipe at ten feet per, I start pacing. They charge ten dollars per foot. I have heard stories of these rigs never hitting water and you still have to pay. I tell the boss he had better call it off as I won’t be able to pay for any more but he says he’s going to keep going and not to worry about the cost. They hit water at two hundred and ten feet, I give them the money I had buried, and Lina and I are left with a capped well. We both wonder what we are going to do with water that far down.
She suggests we measure where the water is now, and for some reason it’s only seventy feet down, just as Jake said it would be. We have no electricity, so I had hoped to be able to use a hand pump, which functions to a depth of thirty feet or so.
I buy a solar panel, a spool of eight-gauge wire, and a pump. We wrap the excess thirty feet of wire around the well casing. We connect the wire to the panel, aim it at the blazing sun, and wait. Nothing.
Lina goes to find Martin, figuring he may be able to troubleshoot. He takes a look at our setup, unhooks the wire from the panel leads, and unwinds it from the casing. He cuts the thirty feet of wire, telling us that we have inadvertently created a magnet that prevents the flow of electricity. When he reattaches the wires to the leads we can hear the pump, faint, and within a minute a steady flow of the best water I’ve ever tasted is pouring onto the ground. We whoop and dance. I even hug Martin, who is grinning. Lina grabs the pipe and sprays us.
On sunny days we flip a switch and have water, clear and beautiful, which we store in gallon pickle jars.
In early July our hard-necked rocambole garlic is more than two feet high. We snap off the curled tops so the bulbs will fatten up. We begin construction on my cabin. We work it out on graph paper first. It will be ten by sixteen feet. All my life I have been schooled from books. I have memorized, and forgotten, thousands of equations, names, dates. Little of that has prepared me to grow food, let alone build a cabin. When I came here I knew nothing about pumping water from a well, plumbing, mixing concrete, or how to frame a window. In the past year I have learned the extent of my ignorance.
We design the cabin with four windows and two doors. We buy the studs from the Reagh’s family mill down in Margaretsville. Like the people in this part of the world, the lumber is honest. A two-by-four is two inches by four inches, not one-and-a-half by three-and-a-half like they sell at the building supply store in Middleton.
“Good, sturdy lumber from good, sturdy Christians,” Lina says as we haul the lumber on our shoulders from the road, piece by piece. We build forms for the foundation posts and fill them with concrete we mix with a shovel in the wheelbarrow. We saw every board by hand, pound every nail with a hammer, and have the floor and four walls up by the end of July. It is magnificent to behold something we have built with our own hands.
I am satisfied staying at home, listening to Lina’s voice or nothing other than the wind or the chatter of red squirrels in the woods. From the start, however, Lina has wanted to be involved in the community. She makes friends with people I haven’t even met, folks who live down by the bay or a good bike ride away, along the dirt roads that traverse the top of the mountain. They are almost all Come From Aways like us: aging hippies, back-to-the-landers, young people escaping urban life for a summer of growing some of their own food, pot heads, and those escaping a world they can’t comprehend. Sometimes I go with her to a music jam or a kitchen party, but I get bored and want to be home where it is quiet.
One night we go to a campfi
re at the land co-op where she met Jake. It is a fifteen-minute bike ride past Art’s place, not far from the shore in East Margaretsville. I sit across the fire from her, pulling the label off the bottle of Keith’s that has gone warm in my hand. I feel a tight coil in my gut as I watch her laugh with a boy I met for the first time an hour ago. Charles has a ponytail and a hairy face. I try not to stare as he repeatedly reaches over to touch her arm while he talks. He puts his jacket across her shoulders when she mentions that she’s chilly. Though I’m not inclined to jealousy, I don’t trust this guy.
Our bicycle tires crunch the dirt as we head home in the dark along the ridge road. There are fields on both sides of us. She is singing ahead of me. We walk our bikes along the path to our garden then say goodnight as we go separate ways to our tents.
14
New York City
Benny’s feet rested on the windowsill and she had her back to the lab bench. A warm cup of coffee in a paper cup in her right hand, a tedious journal article in her left. Snowflakes rushed past the window, yellow-bright as they caught the streetlights. She was glad to be inside where it was warm. She yawned. Success in research meant long hours at the bench. She dropped her feet and went through the doorway to see Leroy. She stood by the window, looking down on the street.
“I hate it when it gets dark this early. The only thing I like about this time of year is skating.”
Leroy continued to mix reagents in Eppendorf tubes at his bench. The traffic crawled on the slushy street, taking people homeward or out for drinks and dinner.
“We should go out for dinner,” she said.
“Can’t,” he said, not looking at her. His lab coat had coffee stains down the front and journal references and phone numbers written in black Sharpie on its left sleeve. He reached to vortex a tube. “Where do you skate?”
The Rest is Silence Page 10
