Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  IN LATE AUGUST, MORE EMPHATICALLY IN SEPTEMBER, OUR gardens begin to die. First frost in our valley location is generally within a week or two of Labor Day, and follows the olden wisdom: beware the full moon. The first hard freeze (a full night at twenty degrees or lower—as opposed to mere frost) might wait till the next full moon, but then again, it might come any night at all, starting late August. One looks to the evening sky after a perfect, clear day as the stars emerge and can almost see the heat flying up and up and gone. The cold drops in. I throw old sheets over the tomatoes the way my elderly neighbor Isabel Hammond showed me before she died, pull a tarp over the basil and over the cucurbits (cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins). If there’s been no rain, I turn the sprinkler on, something I learned from an orange-growing acquaintance down in Florida: above freezing by definition, the water warms a circular area, leaves a horizon of wilted leaves where the spray can’t reach. Some years I do nothing but mourn: you can’t stop winter.

  One laments the hundred tomato blossoms—too late for them to fulfill themselves—trims them back cruelly. One develops a love of green tomatoes: deep-fried, sautéed, pickled as chutney, built into pasta sauces (they melt in the pan, making a lovely, silken medium). I make pickles and dilly beans, admiring how thoroughly Isabel’s heirloom recipes use the garden’s most shocking abundance: cukes, peppers, onions, coriander seed, garlic, dill. It’s all waiting out there, all ready at once, most of it in danger. I always like the look of our kitchen counters at that time, a cornucopia of tumbled vegetables overflowing a dozen mismatched baskets: squashes, carrots, grabbed bouquets of herbs, three kinds of potatoes, a head or two of broccoli, the last ears of corn, edamame soybeans, red cabbage, piles of wax beans, a nosegay of nasturtiums, twenty gourds, the first little pumpkins to turn orange, mounds of lettuce: food to process, food to store, food to give away, food to eat fresh.

  Tomato sauce, tomato soup, tomatoes sliced on plates, tomatoes falling on the kitchen floor, crunching and squirting underfoot. I love a big old heirloom sliced thick and spread with mayonnaise or layered with basil leaves and the neighbor’s fresh goat cheese. I love to stand in the garden in the lowering sun and eat a handful of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, then another and another till my lips burn with the acid of them. I love the fragrance of tomato plants, carry a leaf around just to crush at odd moments and sniff.

  Apples! Our trees are rangy, but the fruits, no matter how distorted, are sweet and make good cider or apple butter. In town, the McIntosh man parks his truck at Gifford’s, our beloved ice cream place (soon to close for winter). “Had and tat,” he intones, offering a sample, “had and tat,” and fills you up a half-peck bag, hard and tart indeed. Year to year, I develop different pyrian enthusiasms: apple pie, apple crisp, apple bread, baked apples, applesauce.

  Cherries! I love our little suffering Montmorency, which I planted the fall we moved in, absolutely the wrong spot, middle of the field, edge of the garden, windy, lonely. Its partner died in its first winter, chewed and girdled at the ground by starved subnivean mice, tiny beavers. The survivor is now a lovely, shapely tree, bent away from the wind, a spot of shade for summer lettuce. Two dozen cherries in its record year, sour as venom but when cooked in a pot with a little sugar, heavenly.

  Plums! Again I planted a pair of young trees, again one died, though I’d learned and had planted them out of the wind in a warm spot near the barn with metal sleeves at the base against mice. For nine years the widowed tree grew bigger and bigger, but no plums. I thought the problem was frost during the bloom, but then learned that plums need pollinating partners close by, preferably of a different species. I duly bought two Japanese breeds, planted them to interbranch with my champion. The taller of the two, nothing but a whip and a twig, produced three blooms its first year. I played bee, buzzed as I stuck my finger in each blossom’s face. There was no frost that spring, no big blow, and the fruit set, a plum for every flower. I made jam by the pint, filled the basement with jars. At our equinox party a dozen kids crouched under the laden branches as I shook the tree’s trunk and plums rained down to little waiting hands.

  And in our woods grow oyster mushrooms and king boletes (also known as porcini, which my Quebecois neighbors call cèpe). Sautéed in a little butter, the oysters really are like shellfish, rich and labial on the tongue. The porcinis are crisp and flavorful, divine, though few but Juliet and my mother will eat them with me. My old morel patch gave out: someone cut down the apple trees they grew among. A friend brings two grocery bags of chanterelles from a secret spot she knows: she’ll share the bounty but not the location.

  Steve at the hardware store gives an appraising look, asks the ritual question: “Got your wood in?” Orion creeps into view after midnight. Old sweaters migrate out of the closets. The sky has never been so blue. The hummingbird goes missing, but the college kids are back, a thousand beats per minute.

  RAIN FELL EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1999. The Temple watershed, already full from previous storms, backed up into its drainage, then overflowed the drainage, too. In our soggy woods fungi burgeoned: fly agaric, irregular earth tongue, lobster claw, puffball, sulphur shelf, turkey tail, bleeding milk cap, some poison, some delicious. Soaked song sparrows perched on twigs, seemed to watch the sky in desolation. The changing leaves, barely into fall color, matted on the forest floor unheralded. Fire newts lurked under every rock and rotting log, wriggling when exposed. Our sump pump bumped in our stone basement, coughed water in gouts into the dog yard. The porch roof leaked, filled joint-compound buckets fast. My rain gauge filled daily—nine inches in six days, and more coming. The radio warned of flood: our big rivers were expected to crest sometime Saturday night. Temple Stream would crest earlier, of course.

  I splashed down there first thing, dogs puddle-jumping cheerfully ahead of me. Desi heeled when we got close. Wally pulled up short as we rounded the corner: our bluff was under a foot of water. He splashed to where the edge would be, but even he knew not to go in. The stream, normally a brook at that time of year, was flowing ten feet deep. Desi pressed against my legs in fear as we waded to the lookout rock, usually high and dry, now an island. Temple Stream had left its bed, was coursing across my neighbor’s wide hayfields, still rising in whirlpools and eddies, carrying all that would float. The familiar streamside trees—basswood, yellow birch, popple, silver maple—stood tall in the torrent, breaking the water. The thick alders were part of the flow, plucked by fast eddies. A whole black-cherry tree, size large, arrived from somewhere upstream and blocked the channel as I watched, then became a filter for detritus: two wooden pallets, a little blue wading pool, a tractor tire, two coolers, a dozen odd boards and branches.1

  I was thrilled.

  I’d had the idea to send messages in bottles during the previous major flood, a whim I’d not followed up, with the idea simply to see how far a bottle could get, and who, if anyone, might find it. At times of normal flow, I knew, a bottle might get to the millpond dam and no further, even if it missed every snag along the way. In water like this, though, it was not impossible that a bottle could make it all the way to the sea. Excited, I raced upstairs to my office under the eaves and typed the following note on my most formal letterhead, added an eye-catching title in large font:

  HELP (ME STUDY RIVER DYNAMICS AND POETRY).

  To the Finder of this Note:

  Greetings. You are part of an experiment in flood dynamics. And also the poetry of streams, particularly the Temple Stream, originating in Avon, Maine. This bottle was tossed in the water below my house in Farmington, just at the Temple line on the above date. What I’m hoping is that you will return a copy of this note with your information. Even if you’re only a hundred yards downstream, and even if the date is just tomorrow.

  The bottom half of the note comprised a questionnaire:

  1. As exactly as you can: where did you find your bottle?

  2. On what date?

  3. In what circumstances? That is, what were you doing when you happe
ned on your bottle?

  4. Who are you? Your name and address and phone are optional.

  5. Add any notes or information or anything at all you’d like.

  I self-addressed ten envelopes, put stamps on them in a flurry. In the loft of the barn, with the dogs milling and whining at the foot of the ladder, I dug out my beer-making equipment (beer-making a hobby that had run its course, and good riddance: far too much temptation, daily). I folded each of ten notes in half lengthwise, added the envelopes, rolled each packet tight as a Greenwich Village street reefer and such that the phrase “HELP (ME STUDY RIVER DYNAMICS AND POETRY)” showed on the outside of each roll. I secured the rolls with ten colorful hair ties, stuffed the packets into ten Newcastle Brown Ale bottles (clear glass), and capped each bottle nicely with my abandoned capping tool, efficient as a brewmaster. The top shopping bag on the hook happened to be pink and from Victoria’s Secret (a shopping trip had been just one of Juliet’s many steps toward the goal of pregnancy). The bottles fit tightly in there.

  Just then I heard the horrendous roar of Earl Pomeroy’s orange GMC pickup truck. And my heart sank. Somehow he always knew when I was up to something embarrassing. Last time I’d seen him I’d ordered a couple cords of seasoned firewood to cover me through the fall ... so that would be the purpose of his visit. The dogs barked until they saw who it was and stopped abruptly (they don’t bark at coyotes or bears, either). Earl slogged right back to the barn, a wet giant covered in mud. I wasn’t unhappy to see him, exactly—we’d become less wary of each other in the six years since I’d first met him over my junked cars, and had had considerable coincidental contact—but here I was stuffing English beer bottles with quixotic notes. He was dressed exactly the same as ever, gave me his most serious look.

  I said, “Hi, Earl.”

  “Could not work in this deluge,” he said. “Puddles in the woods neck-deep on a tall hippie)!”

  I gave him a laugh, though I’d heard all his insulting gags before.

  “And here you are making bee-uh.”

  “Not exactly, Earl.”

  He pulled his beard. “Uh-oh.”

  I pulled a bottle out of the shopping bag preemptively, showed him what was inside.

  “You are putting notes in bottles, Professor!”

  “Quite so.”

  “You are putting the bottles in an underwear bag, Professor!”

  “This is a hell of a time to deliver cordwood, Mr. Pomeroy.”

  “I knew you’d be up to something or other on the taxpayer’s ticket.”

  “And I’m in a hurry, too. I have to catch the flood just right.”

  “Notes in bottles,” he said to himself, shaking his head: something to tell the raccoons, as if I hadn’t offered enough over the years. The rain was still coming hard, pounding the barn roof. Earl and I stood in the wide doorway side by side, filling it.

  He said, “Wet enough to bog a snipe.” He said, “The Lord has surely pulled the cork.” He said, ’You’ll be a-paddling back to Ohio!” And: “Well, at least those rich folks out there in the promised land will steam-heat some plush towels for you while you suck the cash outta their butts!”

  “So, Earl, what do you think? Maybe just drop my firewood when it’s a little drier out?”

  “That product is one hundred percent waterproof,” he said. “And I see you have a blue tarp sitting right there on the garbage cans.”

  “I just don’t want ruts in the yard, you know?” Yad, I said, unconscious imitation.

  “Oh, that’s right, you got your grass farm here.”

  My personal ogre wasn’t going anyplace, so I left him standing there in the doorway. I clutched my Victoria’s Secret bag and clinked and splashed down through the streaming woods to the center of the flood. Earl, laced up to his high, thick knees in some kind of medieval footgear, was already ankledeep at the bluff when I got there: shortcut. He wouldn’t miss this for all the rock maple in Rumford.

  “I will now toss the bottles,” I said ceremoniously. I climbed up on the tall rock, which made me the same height as Earl.

  His eyes narrowed, but he surprised me: no jab, no quip. In fact, he grew solemn. I felt I had to give him a role in the exercise, but planned a quick exit when it was over (maybe even get in the car and head downtown, let him dump the firewood on his own), wanting to avoid any of his angry lectures about the wasteful habits of professors or the multitudinous ways my yuppie associates had ruined the world. I said, “Hold this, Monsieur Pomeroy.”

  “Gladly, Herr Doktor,” he said.

  And I presented him with the pinkly feminine shopping bag. He held it open by the handles (these looked tiny in his fingers), offered the bottles to me in earnest, as if we had planned all this together, as if we were friends on a mission. I drew the first bottle out, suddenly glad that Earl was there as witness, lifted that clear, sleek vessel by its fragile neck, gave it a delicate toss end-over-end into the center of the raging current.

  “Bam dia, Portugal,” Earl said without the slightest trace of a smile. I felt sober, too. The bottle chugged fast downstream, staying to the center nicely, rounded the bend hundreds of yards away and out of sight. We waited thirty seconds, threw the next, then thirty seconds again, bottle by bottle till the bag was empty.

  Earl called out formal imprecations and advice for each, getting into it, all irony and judgment and fury suspended, his head tilted back, his voice even and strong, almost loving, barely audible under the roar of the torrent: “Float, float, little boat, till ye cain’t float no more!” and, “Bring us news from the place you go!” When the bottles were all under way, we watched the stream together, arms folded over our chests, eyes on the far bend, an unmistakable, warm surge of comradeship between us.

  That, as it turned out, was the closest I would ever feel to Earl Pomeroy.

  Footnote

  1. Farmington has had floods in the hundreds since settlement, a surprising number coming in early autumn and not only in spring. In September 1784, all the local mills were lost, including those on our stream. In October 1859, a Sandy River flood got a name—the Pumpkin Freshet—because the fields were flooded before the last crop could come in. Downstream, good neighbors salvaged floating pumpkins by the thousands for the farmers to divide. In 1987, the Farmington Diner—along with three gas stations and Gifford’s Ice Cream and McDonald’s—found itself eight feet deep in the waters of the Mussul Unsquit.

  Upstream Two

  Cyane’s Pool to the Lover’s Dam

  THE MILLDAM AT WALTON’S MILL PARK (A HALF MILE BY WATER from the Temple’s mouth, less than two by road from my house) was all black with mosses and molds, the great granite blocks of it set on a natural stone waterfall: one builds a dam where nature has already started the job.1 October light: a clear, warm morning of long shadows. I watched the water slipping over the dam’s rock lip, just the top layer of the old millpond roaring out over the sudden void and falling. I have always found the site spooky, lonely: men worked here, died here. Ground grain flowed like water into the beds of wooden wagons pulled by oxen and horses. Elaborate buildings filled with powerful machinery stood here once (well, no, the stream was powerful—without it, all the machinery would be inert). Dozens of buildings had been washed away, the remains scavenged or abandoned, rotted and rusted down to nothing, disappeared for good along with the people who’d built them. Of what had once been, there was little to see—only a few stones like grave markers, a crushed millrace, the block foundation of the gristmill itself filled in and neatly graded over, the faint remains on the other side of the stream where a series of sawmills had rough-ripped the boards for nearly all the barns around here and many of the houses—surely my own—for more than two centuries. My friend Bob Kimber remembers mountains of sawdust here as recently as the early 1970s, but those were gone too, not a trace. A wide stone monolith, lone remnant of the original Morrison Hill Road Bridge, loomed midstream, sixteen feet high, monument to a lost way of life, holding up nothing that after
noon but a squirrel on break pressing its belly to the warm rock.

  The red maples were explosive that fall, woodpecker-head red, red cut from sunsets, and orange from forest fires, dynamite bright against all the trees still caught up in summer and green. The general bird chorus had been modified by recent migration. No more songs of summer visitors—now it was mostly blue jays complaining, businesslike chickadees, crows somewhere distant, the low hooting of the mourning dove’s plaintive paean to fall. The stream water pounding on the rocks below the dam filled the air with the biotic, somewhat chthonic smell of pond and freed oxygen—a rich breath like that of its parent rain, the redolence of lost summer. In the tight gravel parking lot I quickly took off my pants and put on my old gym shorts and a worn-out pair of hiking shoes, quickly stuffed the long pants and a warm shirt into my wetbag (a rubber backpack with an opening sealed by multiple folds) just in case. Finally ready, tense as a trespasser, I closed up the truck, grabbed paddles and life vest, hefted the wetbag (heavy with field guides, extra clothes, emergency rope, water bottles, and lunch), crossed the park’s well-kept lawn, and quietly slipped down the stout ramp to the roiling stream.

  Down there, life was gorgeous. Water squirted between dam blocks. The sun caught the margins of the spray in a psychedelic aurora refracted along the edge of the sheet of falling water. The riverbed stone was sinuously carved, scooped, and pocked. Huge boulders stood where they had since the days of the glaciers. Atop the least of these, in the shadows, a great blue heron posed, October surprise. He picked himself up at eye contact and flew effortfully toward the leaking dam, building speed, adding just enough lift so that his feet, still dangling, grazed the lip of the waterfall.