Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

Upstream One

  Temple Mouth to Cyane’s Pool

  THE FOURTH OF JULY CAME AND WENT BEFORE I MANAGED TO start my exploration of the Temple. I’d been studying various maps and knew where to find its mouth: on the Sandy River just east of town, where blue lines meet. I intended to start there and work my way uphill, section by section, till I found the stream’s source, the beginning of everything. Finally, after a day of hopelessly trying to meet a deadline for a magazine article, I threw my beat-up canoe on my truck and made my break, drove toward town, every curve in the road reflecting a bend in Temple Stream. That is, until asphalt abandoned water for a straight shortcut to West Farmington, once a little mill town in its own right, now something of a student ghetto for the kids who don’t want to live on campus at UMF.1

  I crossed what used to be called Middle Bridge but what is now known—at least in some circles—as the Thought Bridge, named by an ardent fellow who changed his last name to Bridges when the state condemned part of his property to build the span in question. This Joel Bridges also installed a billboard-sized letter-sign on the front of his house—free speech in foot-high letters—which that day held a message for me, two meanings:

  CHANGE YOUR MIND

  With that as inspiration I drove down onto a rough dirt road (paved now), bounced past the agreeably ragtag Mother’s Pizza (gone now, replaced by the new Department of Human Services building), and parked on what was a mud track (parking lot now, picnic tables) high on the bank of the Sandy River (still the same, always the same).

  Quickly, I unloaded the boat, a Mad River Explorer, that workhorse of canoes. I bought mine in Montana. It’s built for streams, good for expeditions, handles heavy loads, almost no keel (it’s terrible in the wind), very slow, very stable, cane seats, ash gunwales, dark green ABS plastic of the sort that molds over rocks and obstructions: no dents, only scratches, lots of scratches.

  I was breathless, felt like an interloper about to be caught in a net by some gruff caretaker from the past, one of Earl’s forebears: the mud track was on the site of an old steam sawmill that failed in its bid to beat waterpower, later the location of a “corn shop,” where cow cobs were husked and hulled by hand and in season by phalanxes of local women and schoolboys.

  Canoe poised over my head, I minced barefoot down a raccoon path through thick poison ivy. Another squirmy trip for paddles and gear, a pause to rinse feet and calves in the cold river, and I was off in search of the mouth of Temple Stream, a sweet ride down the Sandy, just enough current in that particularly dry July to get my displaced weight through the riffles, those shallow stretches of white water between pools. The late-afternoon sunshine slanted bright into the flow and illuminated the bottom: waterlogged tree trunks, insistent veins of clay, ten thousand rocks in every conceivable size and shape, swaying riparian grasses, a school of white-lipped suckers, one large brown trout holding behind a boulder, the fish revealed despite perfect camouflage by his own treacherous shadow.

  Thinking of Pierpole, I made the next riffle standing—good fun, though my paddle wasn’t long enough to actually pole, and there were plenty of rocks to land on headfirst if the boat flipped. Back to my knees. Over the lip of the high, eroded bank to port, the newly tassled tops of corn slid past. Tree swallows joined cliff swallows and wheeled above the high mud banks. Crows called and chattered, diving, playing. They didn’t think about how different they were from crows two hundred years ago: they weren’t different, not a feather. A hidden bird sang an imperious short song, repeated it: chestnutsided warbler. A single spotted sandpiper flew ahead of me. The canoe could have been a log, for all he was worried.

  Lines on a map don’t translate into anything in nature: I watched the starboard shore intently, looking for a nicely inked and labeled confluence in all the tangled vegetation. Which opened suddenly into an enormous sandbar printed sinuously with machinery treads and the runtier ruts of ATVs—a giant sandbox, someone’s gravel pit, backing up a long series of puddles. Suddenly, I was struck by rare intuition: this was the Temple, if only a flood fork. And all the sand and gravel was the delta of the Temple, much bigger than I would have thought, if I’d thought of it at all.

  Mussul Unsquit made a wide turn to skirt the. Temple’s delta, so I followed it, paddling into a small stench. A little investigation turned up the Farmington sewage-treatment plant, hidden up in the trees to port, doing a disagreeable task well, its outflow pipe drooling into the river, faint redolence of chlorine, the town anus perfumed.

  But where was our stream? Evening was upon me, the light growing golden. What if the flood fork I’d passed was the only fork? But no, after another hundred yards or so, I spotted an opening in the forest. The Temple entered at a turn before a stretch of real white water, entered flat and deep, a lost lagoon stained golden black with leaf tannins, strong current.

  Mussul Unsquit drank this Temple Stream as nothing, a cup of blood, and rushed onward. I was tempted to ride on down, make my way to the sea. Instead, with two long sweep strokes, I turned into our stream, paddled over fallen tree trunks into quietude, switched from downstream (that is, downhill) on the Sandy to upstream on the Temple, working against the stream’s flow. The feeling came over me of visiting an ancestor’s hometown, the portentous and melancholy feeling I associate with reading lichened gravestones bearing familiar names in cemeteries far away, a stream’s debouchment being last things too. I was inordinately excited by this meeting of the end. This was our Temple Stream, all right, but a stranger, as well, and no stream of its own as it flowed on after that spot, absorbed by the Sandy.

  Pierpole had been here.

  I pulled the boat over a submerged breakwater, huge cut blocks of granite that protected the gravel-pit ford, and carried on. Suddenly, the stream looked like the stream I knew: dense vegetation, clearest water coming in a succession of lovely pools and shallow riffles. The paddle around the delta and gravel pit had taken up a· full half hour of my evening light. I hurried, wanting at least to get as far as the next Routes 2 and 4 crossing, a no-name bridge one barely noticed when driving on it, but which, from my perspective down on the stream, had begun to assume the proportions of a gateway to sublime knowledge. Call it the Thoughtless Bridge. It couldn’t be far. Already, I was close to the road, paddling parallel to it behind Subway, a chain sandwich shop where I’d bought at least a dozen grinders over the years. And I could smell egg rolls frying: Jade Palace, a Chinese restaurant just down the road from Subway.

  Around the next bend appeared the bole of an enormous fallen maple, nicely propped on its own thick branches in the streambed, furniture-smooth above from rushing flood-time baths in sand-laden water, bristling below with broken branches. A tree like this is called a sweeper and would catch you in its arms and drown you fast if you were shooting downstream in high water. I climbed onto it in a gap between branches, balanced awkwardly, pulled the boat over in a clean sliding motion, then onward.

  A delivery man from Jade Palace passed silently in a leaky bateau, poling his way along under a handsome rice-paddy hat: an order of General Tso’s chicken for folks living on a sandbar downstream. No, not true. No one passed.

  I was alone down there.

  Except for old car parts, which I suddenly noticed studded the banks—radiators, axles, headlights, transmissions, and then a group of outsized truck parts standing up like sculptures. Squashed under a boulder was one entire car the exact cerulean blue of heaven, so damaged I couldn’t identify the make. No matter, it was riprap now. And farm stuff: harrowing disks, plow frames, grader bars, plenty of other items I’d seen in my brief career as a Nebraska farmhand nearly thirty years back.

  Despite the junk and the propinquity of Subway and the sure knowledge that farmers and hunters and loggers and tomboys had preceded me, I got the feeling of being where no one had gone before. The water was dark, the shade was deep, the basswood trees and the silver maples and the lone butternut were thick in the trunk, misshapen, leaning. The road was right there, loud. But I w
as invisible, private, alone, even paddling just below Ryan’s, a sports bar in a sheet-steel box building, so close I could have exchanged one wild place for the other, expending no more effort than a minute’s scramble up the steep bank.

  In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau writes: “by one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.” He means you’ll find something living wherever you look. But it’s hard now to look at, say, a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in its strip mall and realize that something about nature (or “Nature”) has allured it there: roads have always followed streams, and commerce requires traffic.

  A robin, bless him, poked the gravel bar, no lawn bird he. Rusty blackbirds probed the mud, bright yellow eyes focused on their feed, then heads cocked to check me out: benign, boys, so back to work. Pretty hubcaps lay in deep sand, smooth-edged bricks too, bull-broken china, beer bottles of more recent vintage. Wild-cucumber vines climbed and wound through a copse of red osier dogwood, last year’s spiny fruit dangling and dry.

  Where was that miserable Thoughtless Bridge? I didn’t really want to find myself paddling upstream back on the Sandy in the dark, paddling hungry among Mussul Unsquit shades to my takeout at the Thought Bridge .

  Catbird in sumac.

  Black-eyed Susans.

  I thought, I will build a sandbox if Juliet and I make a child. I’ll dig away the sod in the dog yard, make a nice rectangle, excavate a pit a foot deep, treat four heavy boards for walls, spike them together nicely, fill the thing with a couple of pickup loads of Sandy River sand. The girl, the boy, whoever it is who comes, will play in there once she’s two, and play in there with friends at three and four and five, and older too, more elaborate games and castles and bigger ideas as the wood gives in and the grass reclaims the sand, and one day she’ll walk back there or he will and point to the spot and say to some special visitor: that’s where my sandbox was. And then walk down through the woods to show that person something that hasn’t changed much at all: the stream.

  FARMINGTON, MAINE, POPULATION SEVEN THOUSAND, IS AN isolated place in some ways. There’s been no public transportation since the demise of the narrow-gauge railroad (not even bus service anymore). Of a quiet night sometimes I think of the Metropolitan Opera, Yankee Stadium, Central Park, Indian food, people of color, Film Forums I and II, our many city friends, my old haunts in SoHo and the Village, and I want to scream. And deep winter nights Juliet thinks of hip galleries, the Santa Monica promenade, outdoor swimming pools, funky clothing stores, yoga classes, movie stars, and admits she’s ready to kill me, burn down the house, and drive nonstop to Los Angeles, where her lucky sister lives.

  Still, much has changed since the early nineties, when we first landed in Farmington. The New York Times, formerly three days late, gets to stores here daily by nine A.M., thanks to digital-remote printing. The twice-weekly Franklin Journal, formerly an echo chamber for town government, has become a lively reporter and interpreter of local events and attitudes. (Its offices, coincidentally, are on Routes 2 and 4 just beyond the Thoughtless Bridge—there’s even a regular column called “Across Temple Stream.”) The one fuzzy television station available when we first arrived is now pretty clear most of the time, and there are three fuzzy new ones to be had by means of our ancient roof antenna. The cable truck has yet to come down our road, but frequent kind letters remind us that for mere dollars a day we could get DirecTV, which apparently comes from outer space really cheap. And suddenly there’s the Internet—the world’s with us, even here.

  The owner of the old one-screen theater in the former Elks Lodge downtown took a chance and a big loan a few years ago and built a seven-screen theater, also downtown—a continuing success. The Elks Lodge has been sold to a famous Boston stage company, who will use it to put on summer plays mixing inner-city kids with locals. For grown-up theater, there’s the Sandy River Players. The University of Maine at Farmington, part of the Maine university system but a top liberal-arts college in its own right, brings music to town, and dance and lectures and poetry readings, gives us contact with scholars across the disciplines, provides access to a good library (excellent now that millions of volumes are available through the Internet), and offers a swimming pool and gym, not to mention the almost unbearable vigor of two thousand college kids.

  The hospital has been expanding, both physical plant and staff (and a lot of our friends are doctors). For aid in our work there is FedEx, as well as cell phones, faxes, and e-mail, none of which were available when Juliet and I first arrived (and we have much better cars now, in which we can get to New York in seven hours, Boston in four, Portland in two. The Portland International Jetport gets us to anywhere at all). Wal-Mart has appeared and metastasized in only a few years to a Superstore, but for all its possible negatives (sprawl, unseen owners, cheap goods, unfair competition, ugly labor practices), Superness saves a trip to Augusta or Waterville when I’ve been made to want something no one else in Farmington sells. And our downtown is healthy, every storefront occupied, churches well attended, all the bars you’d need, bookstores, clothing stores, doctors and lawyers, pets, hardware, music, money, coffee, art, pleasantly dowdy department store, on and on. Every trip you see twenty acquaintances, a dozen friends.

  There’s the Farmington Diner, too, its parking lot always full of pickup trucks and big American cars from the seventies. The place is a classic, magnificent in stainless steel and broken signage, a holdout against standardization, not a hundred yards east of the Sandy River (and often flooded by her), not a hundred yards west of its own slow assassin: McDonald’s. Inside, there’s a constant, whirling social scene that affords a look into the heart of Farmington’s humanity, a cross section of appetite and style (absent, perhaps, a good many vegetarians).

  In the weeks after Fred Ouellette drove off with our inherited ’36 Ford coupe, I kept thinking about him—had he taken me? I leafed through Uncle Henry’s, which is a voluminous weekly compendium of classified ads, and searched out vintage car bodies. The going price was “You tow.” So my heart softened. Still, I wondered about Fred’s relationship to the moose man, Earl Pomeroy. Were they a team?

  Earl had assumed mountainous proportions in my psychic landscape: I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Somehow, I had gotten the idea—not fully formulated—that Earl had something useful for me, some bit of knowledge to impart, some sort of wisdom, perhaps even a backwoods version of something like grace. This was a mistake, of course, yet true in its own way, in the way of delusions: Earl did have something to offer, just not what I thought.

  One morning late in July of 1994, a flicker woke me at twenty till five, banging on the tin roof exactly over our bedroom to announce his territory in the rosy-fingered dawn. I got up and ran outside naked—this bird with his handsome speckled breast and red bib had been torturing us for some weeks—and flung pebbles at the roof around him till he flew off. Fully awake, I decided to get dressed and take advantage of the early hour to go dry-flying for a couple of brown trout. Of course, the diner was on the way to the Sandy River, where I meant to wet my line.

  I walked in the door at five-thirty, and there was Earl, taking up a whole booth, the table pushed all the way to the further bench to accommodate his enormity. I was weirdly excited to see him, still angry with him in some dark corner of my heart. But I walked right up to his table: take him by surprise, ha. Earl looked up and, not the least bit startled, said, “Hello, Professor.”

  “Hello, Mr. Pomeroy.” If he was puzzled as to how I might know his name, he didn’t let it show, not at all.

  I said, “Mind if I join?”

  Coolly he said, “Buy my breakfast?”

  Trying for jocular, I said, “Well, why not?”

  I found a loose chair, sat at the head of his booth. Pretty soon my favorite waitress, Zimbabwe (who had modeled for a painting by Juliet and who—don’t ask her where the name came from—was not from devastated Africa but from Starks, Maine, auburn hair to her waist, hurt bro
wn eyes), brought his food: one western omelet with home fries, toast and sausage, one stack blueberry pancakes with bacon, one double-hamburger platter mounded with french fries and onion rings, a triple-sized fruit salad, and four large glasses of orange juice.

  “Buy mine?" I said.

  “Nup,” said Earl.

  Zimbabwe took my order, disappeared.

  My oversized companion ate with the utmost delicacy, started with a little fruit salad, picked out the half grapes one at a time with his fork, chewed each one, nodded his head with private pleasure. He picked up the ketchup dispenser then and made the laciest, prettiest webbing of red across his omelet, used knife and fork to carve off a modest bite. He held his beard down below the table, carefully pulled to one side. He didn’t look up at me but worked his plates, a bite from each item in turn. He’d barely dented his breakfast when Zimbabwe dropped mine in front of me, huge platter: eggs over, home fries, toast. It looked like a snack.

  I ate. Earl ate. But we weren’t exactly eating together.

  When every bite was done—and Earl was not fast about it—he finally cast his cold blue eyes upon me. ’You’re out and about powerful early,” he said.

  Suddenly I felt exhausted.

  He said, “Did Fred get his car?”

  “Fred did.”

  “What’d he pay for it?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. I told him he could have it. I mean, that’s good work he’s doing, recycling old wrecks.”

  “So he’ll tell you. The noble work of salvage. He’s a sharp one, that Fred. You might have got some ready cash there.”

  “I could have used it to buy your breakfast!”

  No response at all to the joke. Just this, in the same bemused tone: “You might have got five hundred bucks for that cah.”

  “Nah.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Defensively: “Well, I feel good about it. He’s got his car. I’ve got it off my property. There’ll be a nicely restored coupe to look at one day. I can’t sit here and worry about whether I got ripped off by Fred Ouellette.”