Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  Earl wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, inspected his beard for food. His hands were like blocks, monstrously wide, but he used them tenderly, wiping the table, stacking his plates. He said, ’You’re one to talk about ripping people off.”

  Jocular: “What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Pomeroy?”

  Dead serious: “Oh, you know what I’m talking about. You think I don’t read the paper? We all know the professor scam. Pretend to teach what can’t be taught. Set your sails to the prevailing wind. Let your graduate students do all the heavy lifting while you sit around home in your gym shorts, mowing the lawn and fatting when the rest of us are working!”

  Under sudden attack, I grinned fiercely, said, “That’s not fair, Earl. And it’s not true. We don’t even have grad students at UMF.”

  “Oh, you can’t tell me that! And you can’t tell me you’ve been to work one day this summah!”

  “In summer I study! I write! That’s my job!”

  His eyes glittered, but not with humor. He said, “That’s not a job. That’s grinding your stump.”

  Zimbabwe arrived just then to pick up plates. Kidding, she said, ’You fellas take it outside, you.”

  “This one’s a professor,” Earl said.

  “That’s what I hear,” Zimbabwe said wryly. “Now you keep your voices down, you two, or I’ll have to take you over my knee!”

  I laughed, picturing Earl in that position.

  Earl did not laugh. He struggled out of the booth, rose to his full height, looked down upon me, shook his head in elaborate disgust, turned and lumbered to the door, emphatically leaving the check.

  MUSKRAT. HE DIDN’T SEE ME RIGHT AWAY, DIDN’T HEAR ME with all the bridge-traffic white noise up ahead; he just calmly swam in front of me carrying a big leaf and stem from a weed I recognized from my childhood bog adventures but couldn’t name—swamp smartweed, as it turns out. He paddled calmly, trailed his food, became aware of me only slowly, perhaps because of the telegraphing ripples of my bow. And casually he turned his head, made frank eye contact with me, held it a second, then simply picked up his pace.

  My speed was slightly greater than Muskrat’s (Musquash, the Abenaki called him, and so Thoreau), and I gained on him. Bridge brat. What’s a canoe to he who’s seen a hundred eighteen-wheelers an hour his whole life? When I got too close, he dropped his leaf and hurried faster—still no panic, no dive—and twenty feet further ducked easily into the mud bank.

  I pulled up at the next riffle, which flowed under a fallen oak, sat poised a minute holding a dead branch to keep me steady against the bole. At the fat end of the oak a gravel bar had formed. And right there I spied two baby muskrats, about one-third adult size, clearly new in the world, darling. They saw me at the same moment I saw them, bumped into each other in surprise, then rushed headlong toward me along the gravel bar, only to duck suddenly under the oak trunk, where at last they were hidden. I thought hiding had been the plan, but soon here they came a-swimming, screwing their tails, matter-of-fact glances back at me. They paddled tandem across the stream and under the overhang of earth, rock, and root carved out by the current.

  As I climbed out of the canoe at their gravel bar, one curious little face peered out from the lair across the stream and investigated. I ought to have thrown something or hissed or even howled like a monster to teach him about the danger of people, but couldn’t bring myself to be the bad example. Instead I went about pulling the canoe over the log, making as much noise as possible. Even so, when I got to the upstream side I looked back to the cut bank, and there was that little head peering out, and then his sidekick next to him, gawping.

  It is nice to be of interest.

  Sunset was upon me. The Thoughtless Bridge was just ahead, one more comer, my portal to a new world. I could see it through the leaves and, of course, hear the traffic. It’s a relatively new structure, functional, hundreds of tons of concrete, steel railings, four lanes (one in honor of each horse of the old coaches, I suppose), its job to carry traffic over the Temple to the commercial strip, a mile of Burger King, Wal-Mart, movie rentals, donuts, and doctors.2

  I knew I ought to be turning around, but the world on the upstream side of the bridge beckoned: the noncommercial strip. And anyway, the gravel bars were spotted white and red and orange with crockery and brick, and suddenly bright green: a telegraph insulator, circa 1850. This I picked up for the collection in our barn window. In the exposed roots of a yellow birch I spotted a bottle, intact, lovely light green with a pleasing, pregnant shape to fit in the hand, thick lip for cork or stopper, delicate seam up to the edge of the neck, the whole somewhat sandblasted by life in the stream. The raised lettering said Julius Lieber, Petersburg, VA (a seltzer bottle, according to later research, made in a mold, with the top blob added by the breath of a glassblower, mid-eighteenth century).

  These treasures at my feet, night coming down, I paddled sharply and reached the Thoughtless Bridge. And though a reasonable voice claiming good sense told me to turn around right there, I passed under the span in dark shadow. Pigeons clucked from their roosts in the I beams. Cars, logging trucks, UPS vans, RVs, motorcycles, that whole other world zipped overhead, drivers intent on the forward. Dozens of people a minute rushed twenty feet above—weird to contemplate—more people than I’d been that near in weeks. Still, I had the feeling of isolation. I was sitting in an old place that lived on like a troll under the new place, growing happier by the second: I would leave the hurly-burly behind. I emerged into the numinous twilight as from a cave, paddled into the deep pool I’d gazed down on for so many years driving above, such a smooth, long pool that I couldn’t resist, night or no. The other side of the bridge: that’s where the answers are.

  And on the other side, caught up against the logjam-breaking steel prow of the structure, I found this: a beaver stick. I have always loved a stick. This one was a popple sapling twelve feet long as measured against the canoe, gnawed sharp at both ends, tapered from two inches at the butt, blanched and ghostly pale, almost glowing in the dusk, perfectly stripped, almost polished, the bare wood tooled subtly by long teeth.

  I knew that beavers like the chlorophyllous bark of the poplars—aspens, cottonwoods, popples—it’s sweet and nutritious.3 My popple stick had been stripped for its food value. I thought of something I’d witnessed once in Montana, a week deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, spying out of a tent flap (having awakened in alarm to the sound of carefree splashing): a fat beaver felling a thick-holed, moonlit aspen, start to finish. Only a hundred feet from my vantage point, and perhaps fifty from the bank of a small meltwater pond, the animal shrugged and peered and sniffed cautiously my way for two or three minutes, then hugged the tree, turned its head almost upside down, bit methodically all the way around the trunk with its specialized equipment (front teeth protruding through the upper lip such that the animal could attack the tree with its mouth closed, keeping dirt and wood chips and water out of the throat), always attentive to my position—frequent pauses to sniff—but utterly careless of the probable direction of fall, chewed and ripped, froze as the tree gave a crack, then hustled comically to the water and dove. When the tree hit the ground, the beaver surfaced and circled in the quiet water, peering at his work. Back on dry land, it waddled in a hurry to the upper branches of the fallen giant and began to eat, stripping bark contentedly, pausing to chew. Presently the first beaver was joined by two more, who, keeping their distance from their benefactor (and wary of me in my tent), methodically trimmed their own branches and dragged them down to the water. despite my interest I fell back asleep. In the morning the tree trunk was all that was left, barked and limbed, ready for a new life as a campfire bench.4

  I leaned from the boat and snagged my trophy. The next thing I knew, I was on my feet poling. The stream bottom was good for pushing, and my control of the boat actually improved. The noise of cars and trucks behind me faded, caught up in the leaves of the trees, and faded from my consciousness in any case, caught up in
the leaves of my brain, those crucial mechanisms that filter out continuous noise. My pole thumped the rocks, the stream rippled on my prow. I heard my own breathing, the evensong of peepers, the chittering of a score of swallows, the beeping of bats.

  At the middle of the long pool I encountered what I can only call a brick bar—thousands of red-orange bricks making their own red-orange gravel, legacy of the West Farmington Brickyard, a goodly nineteenth-century operation located on the bluff just above the cornfield adjacent to the pool: densewalled beehive kilns producing bricks and gutter pipe and roofing tiles for the area, every project local, every economy your neighbor’s.

  My pole tapped along a brick-bottomed stream, detritus hardly counting for pollution: the stream’s clay had merely been baked. Veins of it would be there always, at least in human terms. But the bricks the clay had made possible were moving downstream like any old throwing rock, moving a millimeter here, a foot in flood, giving up molecule after atom to the flow, getting polished round, in a thousand years to be completely disassembled and rolled to the Gulf of Maine as reddish sand, rolled to the sea and pounded and washed and ground and digested, broken down to raw materials for some scruffy hunk of life.

  The pool ended abruptly ahead at a broken beaver dam that backed up a higher pool. A continuous mount of water poured smooth through a slot not five feet wide, too fast for the boat. By paddling hard I managed to hold the nose of the canoe in the fast water, bounced there puzzling at the clean edges left in the gap. Someone, a devoted beaver adversary, had been at work with a chain saw. But it looked as though the beavers had been at work since, a gentle insurgency. A few new alder branches, leaves attached, had been laid in, and these were held in the gap by the strong current itself, a bare beginning at repairs. Fiddled into interstices, linking new and old, was something odd, which in the dusk looked like rope. I fell off the current, backed the boat up against the structure to have a closer look: the ropy stuff might be Japanese knotweed, an alien that people around here call bamboo. I used my beaver stick to dislodge a little, and noticed cobs. The mystery material was cornstalks, and lots of them. And now that I looked, I could see that a path had been beaten into the adjacent cornfield, a prodigious swath of corn pulled down.

  Stick it to the man!

  The pool beyond was still but for the quiet rising of a single fish to invisible insects. I thought of Cyane, the Sicilian nymph in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who “rose from the ripples I That circled at her waist” to cry: “No farther shall you go!”

  A veery, that eerie songbird, sang descending, fuzzy notes: turn-around-go-back-fix-dinner-like-you-promised. Not wanting to cross Cyane, I began to turn, meaning to paddle hard, fly back to my truck, but in the water in orange light—and indeed because of the light—something caught my eye: caddisfly nets, silken, finger-size tubes blowing full in the current, attached to the bricks by caddisfly nymphs to strain the water for nutritious plant matter.

  I’d seen these nets before—true of so many things in the stream—in fact, I’d studied them closely when I was a boy, named them windsocks. Forty years had passed, and here those windsocks blew again. And here was the boy again, late for dinner, all alone in his canoe, drifting homeward.

  Footnotes

  1. And home to a nice post-office branch and a few fringe businesses: video rental, convenience store with gas, tack shop, beautician and tanning, performance car parts, chain saws.

  2. And from there to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on, three thousand miles across the country. Route 2 is the old road from Maine to Oregon, a kind of northern Route 66.

  3. Along the stream the animals had made do with many other species, as well: apple, ash, willow, silver maple, black cherry, white and yellow birch, buckthorn, alder.

  4. One thinks of termites when it comes to the digestion of wood, but beavers can do it too, and some researchers think it happens in the same way: through the use of friendly microorganisms in the stomach that help digest cellulose. In the end there’s beaver shit, which is wooden too, coarse chips bonded into balls that one sees deposited on sweepers and stream rocks or sometimes floating in the water of a quiet morning, the original composition board.

  Autumnal Equinox

  BEAVERS IN SUMMER AREN’T BUSY. THEY SLEEP THROUGH THE day to avoid predators and nuisance humans, come out after sundown, groom and goof around, invent swimming games, enjoy wrestling matches, mark territory. Yearlings, especially those in more crowded colonies, or where food has gotten scarce, may make adventurous forays further and further from home looking for mates, but until fall all this activity is desultory, playful.

  In September, beavers get to work, primarily night shift, with three goals: shelter, enough food for winter, and deep enough water to keep their swimways open under ice. Colony beavers work to repair and expand lodges and dams and build food caches, swimming far upstream and sometimes waddling into the woods (but not out of their home watershed) to cut and carry endless loads of popple branches.

  Unmated yearlings often leave home altogether at this time, intent on sexual fulfillment. When potential mates meet, a rough courtship ritual takes place, the female trying for dominance over the male, much pushing and shoving (always short of injury), sometimes involving several rematches, until an agreement is reached and the bond is secure. Beavers mate for life, or at least until death do they part.

  Out in the world, some young beaver couples find derelict beaver works to restore. The old lodge will be covered with weeds, the old dam will be gapped and broken, rotted, overgrown. The old flowage, perhaps abandoned when food got low, perhaps trapped out, will have seen its vegetation renewed, and the fur men looking elsewhere.

  Nothing against trappers—I’ve done some trapping myself, years back, pocket money during my Nebraska sojourn—but I’ve grown fond of beavers, and know how trusting and gentle they are. I also know that the beaver was extinguished in Europe during the eighteenth-century craze for its fur and oil, and extirpated in most of its range in prerevolutionary America, sought out and killed colony by colony till the animal was simply gone. After that, farmers and hunters and fishing people missed beavers—water retention, flood control, wetlands. So, late in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, a prodigious effort was mounted to restore the beaver to its habitat using stocks from remote ponds in Wisconsin. This effort has been successful, especially with beaver hats and castoreum perfumes out of vogue: the beaver is back.

  Water means safety and life itself in winter, so the first fall project is the dam. Where there is no abandoned beaver works to rebuild, the young couple must start from scratch. After finding a suitable territory, the pair will scout it for several days, looking for the best spot, usually at a place in the brook or stream that already constricts the flow of water.

  Sometimes animals work side by side (if not in particular concert), more often singly. In addition to the usual stripped sticks, almost any material will do: rocks and fallen branches and waterlogged chunks of wood, even the milled lumber that so often turns up after flood, usually bristling with nails (once in Upstate New York, I even spotted a toilet seat embedded among the sticks in a tall dam). It’s theoretically possible that the beavers could block the whole Temple Stream valley at Russell’s Mill and make a lake for us to live on: the record length for a beaver dam is almost a mile. Some much shorter dams have record heights of fifteen feet or more.

  Once the dam is built and the water level regulated, the new beaver couple builds its lodge, either the familiar pond-centered mound or the less visible bank lodge. The mound lodge starts with the beavers piling the sticks and branches until there’s an enormous heap standing in water. When this is big enough, the beavers gnaw tunnels into it from the very bottom of the pond, and then chew out a modest chamber, leaving a raised platform inside for sleeping, this about six inches off the water surface, and a lower, wetter platform, for eating and grooming. The excess wood is pulled out through the tunnels, which are built with
no sharp, snagging bends. Mud carried against beaver chests from the pond or stream bottom is daubed inside the chamber until the walls are plastered and every gap in the roof well filled, except for air vents. The tunnels become the household plunge holes, the only access to the lodge, all but predator-proof.

  Beavers are rodents, and they are as good at tunnels as squirrels or mice, their cousins. In the woods around active ponds one often steps into a plunge hole, a tunnel entrance as far as a hundred feet back from shore. Beavers are clumsy on land and could never outrun, say, a coyote, were they caught at work on trees far from the water’s edge. But they’re never far from a plunge hole and instant escape. (Native Americans used to trap beavers by blocking off such tunnels at the water, then breaking through the tunnel roof till they found their quarry, which was gentle enough to be caught by hand.)

  All rodents have just two incisors, and wide gaps called diastemata between the incisors and the molars. A squirrel could probably beaver a small tree down if he put his mind to it; certainly squirrels gnaw through plenty of lumber to gain entry to attics and basements and wood sheds. (One of my homesteading neighbors had flying squirrels soaring onto her bed at night from a hole they’d gnawed through a fourteen-inch beam.) A gray squirrel’s nest is sticks piled high in a tree and dressed with leaves, insulated chamber inside: a tree-fort beaver lodge. The chipmunk and red squirrel both nest in the ground, digging long beaver tunnels. Mice, rats, gophers, groundhogs, the jaculiferous porcupine: they’re all more or less miniature beavers—just add water. Musquash is the closest beaver relative, and has been known to share a beaver lodge in winter, odd bedfellows.

  Beavers are the biggest rodents outside South America. They can reach the size of large dogs—forty to sixty pounds is about average for an adult, from Desi’s size to almost Wally’s. Bigger than that, the old trappers call a “blanket beaver.” The record blanket beaver is one hundred ten pounds. The Pleistocene beaver was a true giant: fossil bones have been found that show the animal was about the same as now in the details, but eight feet long, with incisors to match. The Indian tribes of New England and the Great Lakes regions tell stories of enormous beavers—beavers as big as islands—some, in fact, that became islands, and are still there to see in almost any lake, hundreds of yards or even many miles long.