Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  Seventeen years later and we were getting ready to make a kid.

  Back on the stream, I paddled up the length of Cyane’s pool, a half-banded toper on each knee. Under the railroad bridge (TRUMAN SUCKS BIG DICK), sheer cement bulwarks rose to a height of forty feet. I had to get out and bash my way through alders, line the boat like a dog on a leash through the rocky white water to the next pool. And onward, upstream. One of my half-banded toper pals sat up on the prow of the canoe unmoving, a diminutive figurehead.

  The butt of a drowned log floated toward us. I made a couple of strong paddle strokes to avoid it before I realized the object was a beaver swimming calmly. Fifteen feet from our prow it dove. Beaver breath bubbled up under the canoe as the invisible creature slipped beneath us. A minute passed, no sign of the animal upstream or down, then another minute, then the bubbles were back, first on one side of the boat, then the other.4

  I skulled in the stiff current, waited. Eventually my strategy paid off: two beavers, one to starboard, one to port, surfaced to have a look, audibly taking breaths. The second animal was smaller than the first, and more cautious, watched me closely, made myopic eye contact, paddle-paced back and forth. It inched closer, got to within ten feet, staring, sniffing. The bigger creature sank, disappeared momentarily, then came up right alongside. My surprise must have sent shock waves: the beavers slapped their tails—a single sharp report—and dove as if into the noise they’d made. I hung on, chilled in the shade of the high hillside there. Those brown eyes! Those wet-log faces! I saw my dogs in them, dogs without affection.

  The next riffle was very strong, with no firm footing to line from, just knobs of grasses and sedges—so I paddled as hard as I could, putting a burn in my once-mighty biceps, letting my prow nudge and bump along the plentiful rocks to keep us straight. Those beaver faces stayed in my mind, a kind of beaver energy propelled me. Toper One urged me forward, the two of us making about three feet per minute, minute momentum. I puffed and sweated and lost my chill, made my way over the back of someone’s drowned and broken Adirondack chair, made the top of the riffle in about the time the entire ride down had taken, then a pool’s worth of easy paddling before I reached the three-split rapids, where—nothing for it—I was forced to climb out thigh-deep and pull the canoe, anything for progress back to the dam. I picked the left fork this time, avoiding the sweeper that had almost grabbed me on the way down, forged ahead on the slippery rocks, lost my footing halfway up the course and ... fell in, dropping first to my knees and grabbing at the canoe to keep from falling the rest of the way, but missing the gunwale and dunking myself face-first. I felt my heart seize, gasped for breath, leapt up out of the cold, slipped again, fell in once more.

  Sputtering, I lurched to my feet, pulled the canoe up into the next pond, leapt into it all gooseflesh, doused and dripping, paddled ferociously to warm myself, paddled as far as the riffle below the Morrison Hill Road Bridge, which was as far as I was going to get. The rest of the way to the dam was a torrent. But the explorer must try! I put the paddle to the water, making the fastest strokes I could manage, began to sweat, stabbed at the receding flood till I was under the Morrison Hill Road Bridge once again (there is a large iron mill-gear submerged just there), paddled till Temple Stream and my strength reached stasis, a perfection of stalled canoe and paddler frenzy atop the purest urging flow, and that was as far as our spunky little spermatozoon was going to get.

  AT LENGTH, I STOPPED THE FIGHT AND JUST LET THE BOAT flow backward downstream through all the rocks I had passed so laboriously, drifted backward into the head of the cold, black pool. I skulled there in the waning afternoon, soaked to my skin, and felt a terrible chill coming on, wishing for fur (lucky beavers have two kinds of fur, forming insulating and waterproof layers: beaver skin stays dry). That night there’d be a hard frost, and so much for goose summer.

  I nudged the boat up into the weeds and dragged it on a fishing path up to Route 43, Temple Road—only a matter of a dozen yards, the familiar road that close to an effective wilderness—flipped it onto my shoulders and walked the road’s edge. Just before the mill park, a kid came shredding down the hill on his skateboard, warp speed. I tipped the canoe back to get a look at him, gave a nod that he returned: Guy with canoe on Route 4 3, nothing out of the ordinary. Once the boat was safely in its rack on the truck, I shuffled back for the wetbag and paddles, growing chilly again. Standing in the weeds, I dug out my dry clothes and towel, dressed happily, packed up, strapped the heavy wetbag over my shoulders like a backpack, and, eschewing the road, scrabbled through weeds and alders and over treacherous boulders along the banks of the stream, crossing back and forth twice through the scant and overwashed remains of a dozen destroyed mills—all I could do to keep from falling—and finished my day’s adventure next to water.

  Near the dam I found myself looking ahead for the kissing couple, though of course by that hour they would have long come and gone. On the ramp, instead, four teenage boys, looking like they’d just said yes to drugs. One of them was the skateboard kid—so light and high he’d apparently been able to roll back uphill. The dam was dark in the evening light, had none of the permanence it had assumed at noon. Trudging exhausted up the wooden ramp, I tried to imagine the water pressure above and behind those stones in a flood. Unbidden, my bottles came bobbing to mind. A blue jay darted into the brush beside the wooden access ramp, drew my eye six or seven feet down into the darkness below, where a pair of silken panties had draped themselves over a mossy stone. They were black, piped with pink, had been expensive, lay lost. I thought to climb down and get them, but that’s just not the kind of thing a man can bring home. And in any case, they were now the property of Temple Stream.

  Footnotes

  1. As I write there’s a proposal before the town to rebuild the dam (at an estimated cost of $160,000) before it gives way. This could be seen as a sentimental gesture, since the dam serves no commercial function anymore. Then again, dam repairs could be seen as the crucial preservation of a well-established pond habitat. Of course, sooner or later, ten years from now or ten thousand, repairs or no, that dam is going to come down and the stream find its way again.

  2. Robert P. Tristram Coffin tells it in Kennebec, Cradle of Americans (circa 1937): “Arnold put up at Major Colburn’s. The major had been building two hundred bateaux on order for Arnold. He had them ready. Each would carry six or seven men. They were propelled by four paddles and two poles. They were made of pine, ribbed with oak. But the pine was green, and the ‘crazy things’ were a great disappointment to the men later on. They were heavy as sin to tote, and they went to pieces with astounding ease. Major Colburn came along with his boats. Everybody cursed them. But it was looking a gift horse in the mouth, for the major never got a red cent for building them.”

  3. One lot was left for the state, another for a school (and a school is on the lot to this day), two lots for a minister they hoped to attract (one is now a graveyard and the site of the sewage-treatment plant), and one lot for the town itself, this called the Town Farm, where debtors and indigents and orphans could work for their keep.

  4. Beavers can stay alive underwater as long as fifteen minutes in an emergency (or doomed in a trap). Eight minutes is just a normal dive. By comparison, four minutes with no breathing and the human brain begins to die. But beavers have disproportionately large lungs. The beaver liver is also huge, to process toxins as the breath is held. And in a final adaptation, the beaver heartbeat slows down so that less oxygen gets consumed.

  Winter Solstice

  STARTING AS EARLY AS OCTOBER, BUT MORE LIKELY NOVEMBER in a given year, and certainly by December, Temple Stream begins to freeze. Every day the ice changes, grows, shrinks back, advances.

  And every morning, as my research leave from Ohio State counted down to its conclusion, I hiked down there to have a look, and hiked down again each evening, just to see what had changed. Ice paved the way: the muddy parts of the path were thrown up in frost castles, delicate k
eeps and crenellations of dirt and ice that collapsed with a satisfying crunch underfoot. The kingfisher was quietly gone, no more red-eyed vireo’s song—all the late stayers had quietly moved on, no fanfare, only absence.

  In the stream, pellucid lace formed up around rocks and alder roots, around the branches of sweepers. Alder tips that had dipped into the water with the weight of summer collected balls of ice that grew to knobs, crystal as fine as Victorian chandelier glass. In the extended cold snap we’d just suffered—a week or so with nighttime temperatures in the single digits—the knobs morphed into globes and rare platters, nymphs on dolphins, grew until they touched, the edge lace spreading till the filigree and figurines and beadwork of one branch or rock met that of the next, thinnest sheets of ice growing out into the quiet parts of the stream like etched panes.

  Wally, his winter coat coming in sleek and long, his bull’s chest thrust forward, his tail wagging high, was first to try the ice. He rushed down, saw that the stream had hardened, balked. After some expressive barking, he put a mighty paw down, tapping his claws where water had been. The offending ice didn’t break immediately, so he scraped and scratched in outrage until it did, flipping up chunks that turned out to be textured underneath, intricate relief sculptures carved by hydraulic friction and the water’s slight heat. Path cleared, heedless of the chill, exultant Wally splashed in among his own floating shards till he was up to his chin, drank as from a smashed chalice.

  Desi was next. With his senior citizen’s hard-won disdain for lesser minds, he found a place Wally hadn’t sullied, tried the ice gingerly. Finding it suitable, he proceeded, mincing toward free water on tippy-tippy claws untrimmed. The ice sighed and he pulled up short, listened a long minute before his next brief steps right to the fine edge at the flow, where he took a cautious drink. The ice out there popped and his ears flew up in alarm. He retreated, slow steps in reverse. The ice crackled and broke along miniature fault lines, and the good dog looked back to me for courage, straining every muscle skyward in an effort to make himself lighter.

  Night by cold night, the ice sheet thickened. Breezy conditions would have made a rippled surface, but we’d had days of cathedral stillness: window glass. And no snow: the ice was gemstone black, a portal to the bottom, stream grasses still flowing under there, the familiar rocks and sands of summer arranged as in a display case or aquarium, one torpid minnow finning past, then another. I stared into that world daily and lingered, thinking of the time long since that I’d had the luck of seeing a muskrat cruising under the ice. I was thinking, too, that soon I’d have to leave, wouldn’t get to see how the story of winter turned out.

  By mid-December the stream was nothing but a channel, the thickening ice sheet closing in from both sides. I ventured out upon it behind the test dogs, sliding one foot then the other, listening like Desi for any sound of cracking, lingering over an ice-trapped oak leaf encrypted by the warmth of the sun in a perfect oak-leaf-shaped jewelry case, oak-leaf-shaped lid on top, oak leaf itself nestled several inches down, where it would sunbathe itself clear to the water, leaving just its shadow in ice.

  THE SOLSTICE WAS UPON US, ALMOST TIME TO HEAD BACK TO Columbus, a thousand highway miles west and south. The previous spring I’d been awarded tenure—a pale prize, I was beginning to understand, since it had come in the wrong part of the country. Juliet had long since finished her program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and would be teaching a drawing class at Ohio State. That we’d be colleagues after a fashion was no consolation: we had to leave Maine, and six months had been enough time for our roots to sink down again, take hold.

  Ms. Bollocks, our long-term housesitter (the only one we’d ever been able to find, despite repeated attempts to replace her), would arrive in the morning. Juliet and I packed the house and put our essential belongings in the old Subaru wagon, leaving just enough space near the ceiling in back for the dogs, who we knew would ride like agreeable suitcases no matter how cramped their space. Juliet glowered at me, carrying boxes; I snapped at her. This living in two places was better than living in three, but it wasn’t working out as the jolly toggle we’d pictured. Our efforts at pregnancy weren’t working either, and we were up against our last chance for a conception in Maine. At least that was the rueful joke—last chance—which we didn’t find the right moment to act upon. Outside, the wind blew, frosty night. A great pile of firewood lay in the yard, had been drawing wry commentary from the neighbors (“Will you burn it right they-uh?”). Ms. Bollocks had had it delivered, four cords to add to my three.

  I hated her woodpile. This kept me from hating her. Because I had to admit, she was awfully good at taking care of the house and grounds. And I knew somewhere in me that if anything, she ought to be the object of my compassion. She was age indeterminate, somewhere between thirty and fifty, shaved-head bald, five foot one, sunken-chested, affable till questioned or held to her word, devious in all things, the only person who’d answered our ad in the Franklin Journal that first year of the great commute. But we had to keep her: who else could accommodate moving in and out at our whim, year after year, always with a cheerful insult?

  Overnight, the temperature had fallen to three degrees, a crystal-sharp solstice dawn.1 I couldn’t sleep, so got out of bed. Downstairs, I built up the fire to take the chill off the house, ate a little, dressed warmly, and slipped out into the cold, leaving even the dogs snoring. As always on a last walk, I looked for omens. A male hairy woodpecker, flash of red, landed hard on the bole of a dead popple tree not five feet from my face and knocked at the dead bark for grubs: not an omen. Continuing on, I was joined by a familiar mixed flock of chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches. A kind of tinkling like tiny bells in the height of the flock alerted me to the busy presence of golden-crowned kinglets, good cheerful company, but no omen.

  At the stream, a thin sheet of new ice reached out from the thicker veil at the edges, bloomed toward closure of the channel. I contemplated the transformation for a while, still caught up in the night’s tossing discontent, tried to lose myself in looking.

  And looking, of course, is when one sees: at the bottom of the steepest of the defunct beaver ramps, the ice had been disturbed, broken up, then thinly refrozen. I thought the breakage might have been caused by a coyote or fox searching out a drink, or even by Wally. But as I looked and puzzled, the thin ice creaked—a strange sound—not the usual popping or groaning. Then it creaked again and visibly bulged, crackling then breaking with a splash around the inquisitive head of ... a large beaver.

  The animal sniffed a few times, looked vaguely in my direction, tipped its nose up, and, perhaps noting that I was there (smells of wool, wood smoke, bread and banana, stress), slipped back under. In a moment, the ice shield bulged again and cracked. The beaver, it became clear, was standing on the bottom and pushing up with its shoulders. It continued to break ice using that method till a hole the size of a car door had been opened, then stood higher in the water to gnaw at the ragged edge, all the while using its forepaws to push down and break off further chunks, working its way clear out to the newer, thinner ice in the channel. Methodically, then, the creature waded all around the hole, pushing the broken pieces under the remaining ice cover and out of the way.

  The result of all this effort was a good, clear exit to the mud ramp, which was not defunct after all, an exit that wouldn’t refreeze during the relative warmth of the day, and that would be easy to open again the next morning, and perhaps for a few mornings hence as the beaver and his colony mates brought little popple trees down to the water to add to their food cache, a great pile of sticks carefully sunk near their lodge.2

  Finished with its project, the beaver turned and swam out toward the center of the stream, breaking the thin shelf of newer ice, head held high, tail turned bladewise, then proceeded downstream in the narrow open channel, sank in a dive, and was gone.

  Beavers are gentle, I thought, continuing my game. So the omen before me must be gentle too. And a beaver co
ming up through ice to look around? That must presage some sort of freedom.

  Footnotes

  1. On the day of the winter solstice, sunrise at our house comes at 8:07. Sunset over the Varnum Pond Hills (as viewed from our kitchen window) comes at 3:41, painfully early, and leaving something less than eight hours of insolation and a long night. The deepest cold, however, doesn’t come until the end of January or beginning of February: the face of the planet only slowly gives up the heat of summer After solstice, daylight gains a minute a day, then incrementally more till mid-January, when it’s two minutes a day, then more again till it’s three minutes a day at the beginning of February, the most of the year, a noticeable lengthening of afternoons that lifts a certain psychic weight, the weight of darkness. Winter, in contrast to fall, should be called rise.

  2. To eat in winter, a beaver slips out of the lodge through plunge holes that exit deep underwater and under ice, swims to the feed bed, and retrieves a preserved stick. Back in the lodge, the animal eats the bark, then shreds the shiny-bare stick for bedding, or adds it to the structure of the dwelling. Winter trips aren’t limited to the feed bed, and aren’t always brief—danger, sex, supplemental food, voiding, just plain exercise—all may send a beaver swimming far under the ice. To breathe on these long, roofed forays, beavers make use of naturally trapped air bubbles, which the water continually oxygenates. It’s also possible to rebreathe an initial breath. The animal blows it out, waits as the bubbles climb in the water, reoxygenating, then breathes it in again where it pools under the ice. A more drastic tactic is to drop the water level of a whole pond a few inches by biting a spillway through the top of a dam. The ice stays high, leaving breathing and swimming room beneath it.