Sagadahoc Stories #74: 1/10/99

Last week's snow storm went out as frozen rain, leaving a thick crust of glaze everywhere. The slop quit after midnight, and I got up with the light to survey the damage. Not a patch on last year's big ice, but slick and glittering enough to get your attention. Evergreens bowed in supplication. I chopped the Owl out and got him shuddering in time to head off to court. Jury duty. It never snows but it rains. And freezes.

The world was spectacular in the morning light, bare trees all illuminated, fields asparkle. I was glad to have been rousted out, but hoped I might get home before the plunging temps made our dooryard a concrete installation. Faint hope. I made the cut, and didn't get released until after dark. Mercury out of sight.

Worse yet I'd promised to milk the Torberts' goat, but the Yard traffic was so bad in Bath that I sat in a stalled line of yardbirds downtown for half an hour, trying to get across the bridge. Pretty exciting for a country boy. I finally gave up, hung a U-ey, and went the long way round to Whitefield.

This was my first time ever milking anything, and I approached Helena cautiously, speaking calm words with false assurance. She looked as dubious as I felt, but pretended I knew what I was doing. Got up on her milking stand and submitted to my ignorance. I couldn't get her to let down at first, and had panicked visions of infected udders, miserable hours of goat angst, desperate phone calls to Oklahoma. But she started to squirt, and before long I was thinking about striped overalls and straw hats. Farmer Bryce. I like it.

Next morning I was hooked. The long drive across an icy predawn, the wakeup slap of subzero air, the comfortable sense of mutual aid, exchanging udder relief for a quart of fresh milk. Lying your head against rough fur and hearing a goat's belly grumble. I can feel the pull of ritual husbandry. I'm not sure how many of those things I'd want to pull each day, though.

I was back on the road to Bowdoinham at dawn, cranked up and camera loaded. I was determined to get at least one picture of backlit ice, and roamed the eastern districts as the sun lifted. Tough trick. I filled a chip with images, only to find later they were mostly throw-aways. In the process I encountered other rogues enjoying the spectacle.

Piers was sipping on some java when I pulled into his dooryard, hoping to get a shot of Chops across the bay from his windswept perch. He waved me in and opened up another way of seeing the town. He's been arrowhead hunting the past couple years, and brought out his flaked finds to show me.

There's a tribe of pothunters around here, and the evidence of Indian settlement is thick on the ground. It wasn't called Merrymeeting Bay for nothing. A seasonal hunting resort for many tribes at the time of contact, the estuary had been a favored spot down through the archeological record. Only the PaleoIndians are under-represented, and that may be because sea level was considerably lower then, and the sites are now drowned. Ten thousand years ago Chops was a waterfall.

By the 18th century many of the villages had been decimated by European diseases, but there was still a large Abnaki town on the tip of Swan Island. (Kenneth Roberts in his novel Arundel has Aaron Burr fall in love with its lady sachem.) Now the island, splitting the Kennebec's entrance into the bay, is a state reserve, and frequent resort of amateur archeologists.

Talking to Piers my view of the bay is transformed. An imagined map of Indian towns springs up, and the waters are teeming with sturgeon and ducks. Outside the harsh sun bounces on glare ice, but next to a warm stove we're back a couple of eons holding a flaked scraper in a summer camp. Some of the artifacts have a charge when I touch them. I get a distinct sense of heavy hands and mute intentions. Voices strangled in dirt. As though a broken spear point was trying to speak into my holding. I put it down carefully.

There are as many towns here as ways of seeing it. Since I've been drawing this place, it's been the skeletal forms of things that have been my town. The habits of trees, the frame of buildings, the opening of lines of sight. Writing about it, the town fills up with personalities, half-told tales. Now the thought of shards and flakes gives the place a depth of time that's vertiginous. I staggered out of Piers' uncertain of my footing.

The boys on the Abby were into the fish, and I helped Dr. Bob work his lines for a spell. He's using double-ganged lines, and when the smelt are hitting it gets too busy to talk in his camp. Almost spoils the fun. Next door Sam the Restaurateur was fishing with Brent, and we all commiserated on the wages of sin. How we'd all stumbled out of the 70s onto non-institutional roads, lived hand-to-mouth, and now, in our 50s, were surprised to have bank accounts. Sam, in fact, has made a spectacular success of his Portland restaurant, and is arguably this state's foremost chef. He carried off their catch to serve that evening.

Chubby on Ice

I made it to Brooklyn after noon, still charged up, downloaded my pictures, and managed to salvage one good shot for a painting. Spent the rest of the day in The Eagles sketching and carving as the light poured into the big windows. Peggy cozy in the house, ashwood burning in the cookstove, fresh fish for dinner. One of those perfect days.

Jim's hadn't been so good. His daughter's wedding in Tulsa had been an emotional event, and the flight back to Manchester was on time, but Jim had left his car at the airport with an almost empty gas tank, and the sub-zeros had seized its filler pipe. When he tried to put gas in, only a dribble would go. He went from station to station doling in a cupful at a time, until he got to Yarmouth, where it wouldn't take any more. Our phone rang at midnight.

It felt just right to take the energy of such a day and pass it along. I retrieved Jim, drove home, and gave him the Owl until we figured out the next step. When he got to Whitefield the message was waiting that his mother had died. About the time his car broke down. A very hard season. Weddings and funerals. Hospices and recovery rooms. The backsides of gas stations. This winter has been full of transformations, and new roads.

(Next day we returned to the dead car. Jim ran on fumes to a nearby carwash, thawed the fillpipe with hot water, gassed up and was back on the highway. Punchy, but automotive.)

Amazing how quick the ice makes. A few nights in the deep freeze, and the ice is booming. A bit disconcerting how quickly you adjust to the ice roads, too. One day you're poking around the edges, spooked by every clunk and crackle, the next you're out gliding down the channel as though it were asphalt. The shanty boys all report 8 inches of ice or better, but that doesn't say anything about the thin spots, and with a snow skin over all who knows where they are.

Thursday I buckled on the big webs and tromped out into the woods. CC skittering along on the crust, breaking though up to her belly every dozen steps. In the still air the noise of snowshoes crunching through glaze is jarring. Maybe that's why they were called rackets. On river ice the flutter of the shoe behind you starts a shuffle rhythm, and I find I'm dancing to the beat.

Ideal shoeing. Absolutely miserable for anything else, this kind of surface makes everywhere accessible by snowshoe. It's all road, and I gallop off in all directions. A biting norther is lifting what little powder got dropped in the night, and I shape my course to stay in the lees. Suddenly there's another map for this terrain.

The Indian settlements followed rivers, because they were the roads. The primeval forest was called "trackless", and "impenetrable", by the "discoverers." My notion of old woods as open stands of soaring trees is typically European, where centuries of gleaning kept down the undergrowth. Even though the Indians set deer fires to open the woods, the descriptions of early travelers suggests that the American wilderness was more like the strangled woods of Maine islands than the groomed parks of Great Britain. The choked third growth out back here may be more like the original woods than the imagined cathedral forest. It was in the winter that the Indians went upcountry, when they could travel the snowroads on rackets.

Post contact settlement moved up out of the swamps and lowlands, then away from the rivers, as highroads were opened and waterpower lost its edge. Hard to believe there were only a few Indian paths and buffalo trails at contact. Reading Colonial history it's almost impossible to imagine how a few forts on the rare roads, or at the crucial water narrows and crossings, could command North America. The idea of universal mobility is now so ingrained that a time when there was only one way to Pittsburgh seems impossible. But when you put on snowshoes, and discover you've been confined to familiar ways in your own neighborhood, you realize how much our mental maps are the creatures of habit, and conditioned by environment. Riding the crust out of the wind I discovered that a bend of the river is only a stones-throw from one of my haunts, and I never knew it. The drowned jungle in between barred that knowledge. The old road went around.

Snowmobiles have transformed the winter landscape, of course, changing land use patterns faster than you can say "comp planning." Thursday I got hailed by a neighbor I've never spoken to because my shoepath crossed a ridge opposite her window. All the angles were different. Sudden changes in weather rearrange our mental maps. The roads we know don't work as well, or new ways of seeing the world change our direction. Now we've had another storm, culminating in a day of rain. If it stays cold, we may break out the skates. The rivers will be the best roads again

Meanwhile the local convalescents are stepping cautiously on ice. Peggy is making a short peregrination along Wallentine's road each day, and Annie is out checking on her tractors. She and Russell set off Christmas week in her tractor-trailer to haul a load to Texas, but she keeled over in the cab somewhere in Pennsylvania. Russell thought she was a goner. Couldn't find a pulse. Grabbed the cell and dialed 911. The ambulance was there in minutes. Says it was the wildest ride he ever had, and he used to race stocks.

Annie's Ford

"Must have done something to the suspension of those converted one tons," he asserted. "They corner like nothing you'd believe. If she'd've been up front she'd've had a heart attack." As it was Annie'd had a stroke, but you can't keep her down. Chico drove to the hospital and brought her home. No paralysis. No slurring. Annie has a tongue like a rasp, and it can still tear a stripe off you. Glad to hear it. Ought to be declared a town treasure.

Fowler, who lives next door, says it was snowing when they set off, and she was wearing her usual T-shirt, shorts, and flipflops. Once she takes up residence in the rig, she doesn't stir until they're back. She was wearing peddle-pushers the day I dropped in, though, and was full of plans. Talked about selling the trucks and buying a mobile home. Maybe one with two bedrooms, and a vanity plate says "WHOREHOUSE." Always get good parking in the truck stops.

"How old ARE you," I asked. "78 and never been kissed," she said, standing up with her lips puckered. I obliged. "There," she sighed. "Finally been kissed." This morning Annie was out in her shorts, again, in the sub-freezing, poking at the tractor with a cane. "What are you doing out half naked," I yelled. "I got my underwear on," she defended herself.

BFI