Sagadahoc Story #63: 10/25/98

For an instant, as the seasons change, each deciduous plant in the understory stands out, illuminated by an inner fire. Where there was a sea of greens, a colored sequence of individual habits unfolds. A beech sapling goes yellow, then rattles into sienna. An ash empurples and turns to umber. The bracken yellows, whitens, shrivels into brown. A young maple does a scarlet dance edged in orange, and fades. The leaves drift down.

Young hardwoods tend to spread bigger leaves than their mature kin, and a fall display on the woodland floor is like a romp of puppies with big paws. Juveniles reaching for a greater share of the light. As the canopy opens, and the days shorten, each least sun grabber has a moment of glory.

The droughted woods didn't put on as riotous a party this Fall, which made the subtleties more remarkable. Usually maples steal the show with their gaudy, but this year the teasing glances were from beeches and oaks and sumacs. The oaks slowly saturated to a dusky carmine orange, more crimson than the scarlet glory of the maples, then blurred into the carpet of browns.

Now a naked eloquence of silver branches patterns the view. And it's animal time. Flocks of migrant birds twitter through. A woodlot full of robins seems upside down somehow, all those red breasts up in the trees. Fat cardinals flashing. Bluejays bullying. Gamebirds shaking the air. And all the furry tribes are on the move, visible among the open branches.

Harvey couldn't find his car keys the other morning. Thrashed about, turning the house upside down, until it was getting late for his morning schoolbus run. Finally gave up and took the old Chevy pickup. The cream-colored beauty he restored this year.

Still dark, and the headlights on those old jewels were never too bright, so Harvey took it slow down the bay road. One of those frosty mornings, and he didn't expect much wildlife to be on the go. But first there was mother fox crossing the road by the airfield. Then three whitetails on the curve past the cemetery. A coon headed after a night's foraging. Then four more deer just before the straightaway by Hansen's dairy farm. Lastly a flock of turkeys by the Cathance Road junction. Harvey said he was doing about 20 mph as he rolled into Mt. A to get his bus. (Later Linda found his car keys in the BACK pocket of his jeans. "O yeah," he said, "now I remember.")

Harvey's Truck

The two-leggeds are scuttling about, too. Earl is running his dull chainsaw most afternoons, gnawing at the 8 footers his dealer dropped in the yard. The young couple across the road are raking up leaves, bagging them, and banking their house with the bags. Russell is mowing Annie's leaves into mulch, while the rest of us have put away the mower, and are thinking about storing the ornaments. Fowler keeps stacking up salvage firewood he trucked home from the base. Must have three years worth out back. And Chico brought up his camera with a new long lens, for me to make a gunstock to mount them on. Time for some serious critter spotting.

Max says the herd of deer that have been feasting in his clover are getting more wary. He's had two good chances at the big buck from his treestand, but got outsmarted each time. Local Fall is a funny mix of frost-nipped haste and slow stalking. Neither pace seems to mesh with the industrial time out there on the interstate, and I try to avoid it.

Thursday morning there was a dead Owl in our dooryard, though. He's been cranky about starting, and had a flat battery more frequently of late. Needed the WD-40 treatment at the least humidity. This time he seemed to have juice in the battery, but no crank. Peggy had an early meeting, so I pumped the gas and wound up Ebba. Tried to jump the Owl into joy, but no luck, so we scraped the ice off the big wagon, and headed for Freeport. My first time on the highway with her. Pretty exciting to get up over 50 mph, but geez there's a lot more traffic on the highroad these days. Eb ran just dandy all the way to the high school, and didn't mind the lesser machines flying by in the passing lane. I'd have felt better about the whole adventure, if I didn't notice that the emergency brake was still on when I got to Freeport. Maybe I should leave the keys in MY back pocket.

My pace is more stalk than scurry, most days. But it's only out back in the gullies with CC that I approach animal time. The TIMEOUT of a Lab with her nose in a hole. The absolute patience of a fox laying for a bird. The slow turning of a hawk. Maybe it's only in watching an animal's complete absorption in now that we can give up pasts and futures. Sometimes I'll spend a whole minute watching a bug on a leaf. Imagine the timelessness of dragonflies. Even the chittering squirrel burying acorns doesn't seem driven, to me. Just delightfully excited by all those nuts. Sort of the way I feel on the four-lane.

Fall Plowing

Speaking of nuts, Mitch got all 60 yards of manure spread. His fields dried out enough for him to get on them with his horses, and he's been plowing it under all week. He says the Amish calculate plowing an acre per team per day. Their horses must be a lot harder. The best Mitch can do is 2/3 an acre, and that's pushing it, even on ground that was plowed last Spring. Max is plowing land with his pair that has lain fallow for a generation, at least, and he says it sounds like ripping canvas. He'd be lucky to get half an acre turned in a long day. You can see why horse farming went out.

And all the barns are falling down. I finally did a painting of the big tin-roofed one that's collapsing on the Ridge Road, before it keels. But didn't get Frank's in time. Miles managed to pry the last of the third floor loose on that barn last week, so it all came tumbling. That didn't stop Frank from falling in the pile and breaking a couple of ribs yesterday, though. Of course he fell off the new town outhouse he's building at the landing, too. Maybe you saw the cult movie, MAN WITH A PLAN, about the old dairyman, Fred Tuttle, running for congress over in Vermont. There's a scene in it where he gets the smut-sniffing tabloid reporter to hold up a sagging barn wall, and walks away from it. A scene you could stage anywhere in the North Country. Too bad we can't lure the Special Pornocutor to investigate in Maine.

I've been grinding an ax this week, myself. Or at least doing some sawing and nailing. We have houseguests coming next week, and Peggy wanted the front room finished for them. All that was left to do was window casings and baseboards, so I borrowed Brent's compressor and nailgun for a day, and cut and thunked it together. Part salvaged trim, part fresh lumber. The new sheetrock wasn't as thick as the original plaster that came out, so I had to shim the trim to fit. Meanwhile a host of ladybugs was parading through the tiniest openings, crawling up the walls, and huddling in clusters in the upper corners of the room. They look like miniature gypsy encampments on a stark white desert. It's a twist to use beetles to debug your infiltration problems.

It was mild all weekend, and I'd left the shop open, to and fro-ing the cut trim. Now Seven Eagles might be called Gazillion Ladybugs. Watching the clusters of colored beetles do nothing all winter is bound to improve my sense of time.