Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  Upstream Three

  Lover’s Dam to the Twin Bridges

  IN DEEP WINTER, TEMPLE STREAM IS A RIBBON OF ROCK-STUDDED ice, liquid only in the deepest parts of its deepest pools, where fish hold and frogs burrow. The beavers have retreated to their lodges, never hibernating. They swim daily under the ice in deep pools of their own creation, eat the bark from stashes of poplar branches, groom one another mewling happily. The fast water behind their dams has closed as slowly as a wound, leaving black ice as textured as scar tissue. There’s a gurgling to be heard, no more than that, but it’s a welcome sign of life, the stream running cold-thickened through frost pipes and ice tunnels. The rest of the free water is underground as always, flowing through the stream’s own accretions of sand and gravel, and through layers of porous rock: the stream never stops. The changing ice makes so much noise that it’s possible to surprise the most cautious animals—minks, coyotes, foxes—even watch them at their work for long minutes before scent or some subtler emanation makes them jump.

  After a thaw, perhaps a rain, free water overflows the ice in a metastream with its own topography and an icy bed. When the cold returns, the overpools freeze smooth, trapping bubbles and encasing and preserving old footprints and ski trails like dinosaur tracks in lava. Riffles freeze at dozens of incremental levels as the flow diminishes, leaving multistory ice ceilings of varying thicknesses made of the most delicate geometries—triangles, rhomboids, wands of hoarfrost attached to diaphanous rays of lace by means of crystalline spiderwebs. Your boot falls two inches, breaking through six floors or so with an echoing crunch, no splash at the bottom. You stand there thankful at having not fallen further, then break through the thicker floor below that with a shout and fall six inches more to the old ice. You hesitate—it’s like walking on stained glass—the sound is vandal-loud in the streambed silence.

  After a snowfall, all goes dark for the beavers. Now they must swim in their pools and canals by scent—and in fact, February is their mating time, when lifelong couples leave the communal warmth of the family lodge for a connubial swim and embrace, coitus under ice and on the move. Above, the streamscape for humans is soft and beautiful as a woodcut, inviting but not always safe for walking or skiing: the snow insulates the ice below, and the warmth of whatever water is flowing beneath that is enough to carve the ceiling away completely in certain spots, leaving only a crust of snow over the current, a trapdoor for bad acts to fall through.

  WHEN JULIET AND THE DOGS AND I ARRIVED IN COLUMBUS, the yard in our rented house was still green. In fact, late December looked like autumn. The evenings lasted longer too, because we were so far west in the same time zone, and considerably south. It was as if we’d gone back in a time machine to October. I missed the ice.

  In Schiller Park, walking the dogs on retractable leashes like garrotes, I spotted a familiar face, a fellow walking his chocolate Lab, said hello as our dogs sniffed at each other and started in with the usual raucous play. And the man—tall, groomed, strong jaw, big grin, booming voice—said hello back, as if he knew me, too.

  “I love these uncivilized dogs!” he boomed.

  “They do better off-leash,” I boomed back.

  “Country dogs! Am I right? They just don’t translate to town, do they!”

  No, they did not.

  Very familiar person. Looking for clues, I noted that he was dressed as I was in a mere down vest, while the dog-walking crowd all around us wore heavy parkas and mittens and hats as if the day were cold.

  “You’re not from here!” he boomed.

  And just like that, I placed him: Kyle Karlinski, the K-man, the weather anchor on a prominent Maine channel. “You’re not either,” I said. I started to laugh at the double disjunction of having my favorite Maine weatherman in front of me, and Kyle started to laugh too, a kind of happy thunder. People around us smiled uncertainly, enjoying the good cheer. I told Kyle I was from Farmington, and he roared louder: that’s where he’d gone to college!

  We talked that morning, and many subsequent mornings, dogs being creatures of habit. I learned that he’d moved “upmarket” to an extremely high-paying job at one of the big Columbus stations. He wouldn’t say if he was happy or unhappy with the move, had no interest in my complaints about my own change. From our conversations, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you one thing about the man. It was as if, short of the big brown dog, he had no personal life at all. What Kyle Karlinski talked, no matter what subject I broached, was weather. I learned, in fact, to ask him weather questions solely, and we became weather friends over our daily meetings with dogs, plastic bags of poop in hand, a mild winter coming down around us. We both missed ‘Winter-winter, so winter was our weather subject, day in, day out.

  From Kyle I learned that snow, like rain, is conceived when adequate water vapor in the atmosphere is cooled enough to condense and form clouds, that snow is born when enough ice particles clump together around a handy piece of dust or ash or sea salt—“The atmosphere is crawling with stuff like that!”—to make flakes heavy enough to fall.

  During a mild storm, Kyle told me that Johannes Kepler thought the six-sided snowflake was proof of the existence of God, and suddenly he spread his arms and thrust his head back, a kind of prayer like a kid eating snowflakes. On the eleven o’clock news that night, he did the same, but the flakes were just digital. He was great on the small screen, sunny and cheerful, full of stories (often about his time in Maine), stories that always ended with his viewer knowing another small thing about the weather.

  One cold day, he made me guess how many snowflakes would fill a shovel. By way of a useless clue, he let me in on the fact that each crystal of snow is made up of something on the order of a hundred million water molecules.

  I can’t remember my guess. Just that he scoffed: too low.

  “A million flakes of snow,” he said, “will blanket an area about ten inches by twenty to a depth of twelve inches.” Roughly a snow-shovel scoop, in other words. “A million flakes, a hundred million-million molecules: you get to big figures quickly, clearing the walks!” He repeated the same information on the that night, same phrasing exactly.

  To impress him I memorized the names of the seven basic types of falling snow as identified by the International Snow Classification, which I found in one of the science libraries at OSU. I waited for a snowfall during dog hour and recited while the stuff fell on our shoulders: star, plate, needle, column, column with a cap at each end, spatial dentrite, and irregular crystal. Karlinski pulled himself up to his full height, looked down on me, let me know there was a more detailed classification scheme developed by Japanese scientists, which included eighty shapes, all with names, including the seven above in various permutations, and—he knew them all—cups, sheaths, pyramids, bullets, scrolls, ferns, branches, scales, lumps, cones, and skeletons, along with scores of malformations and combinations, which he recited too. “The colder the temperature, the lighter the flake.”

  That night on the eleven o’clock news, the subject was the seven types of falling snow.

  And there were more snow words, “As many in English as in Inuit,” said Kyle, looking at me as into a camera, one word a day: graupel is ice crystals coated with rime and looking like dusty grains of rice. Firn is packed snow, also called névé. Firnspiegel, or firn mirror, is that thin sheet of ice that forms over old snow in certain conditions. Old snow is snow that has been on the ground more than a couple of hours, the flakes starting to meld and metamorphose into different, evolved crystalline forms. Snowpack is the accumulated snow of a given winter. Sastrugi are ridges of drifted snow, as in a field (the singular is sastruga). Frazil is ice crystals formed in turbulent water, as in the sea. Depth hoar is ice that forms under the snowpack, metamorphosed from snowflakes into unstable cups that build a fragile crystalline cavern.

  I knew depth hoar: stalwart Wally had suddenly disappeared one afternoon years past during a long ski adventure on the other side of the stream—I had to help him out of what loo
ked to be a nicely decorated igloo basement.

  Kyle Karlinski substituted his own dog, old Brownie, and told the exact story on the eleven o’clock news that night, with a special sly smile that I imagined was just for me.

  I COLLECT HARD WINTERS. THE ULTIMATE TO DATE HAS TO have been our second on Temple Stream. The daily high temperature was zero degrees for weeks on end, night temperatures as low as thirty below, no wind chill factored in. I’d always been a downhill skier, but that was the winter I finally got comfortable with cross-country skis, since the snow was perfection and I could simply whistle up the dogs, step out the barn door, and go. Still, one morning in February I got the idea to ski the millpond—ice you could depend on.

  I dressed at home, Labonville snowmobile bib over blue jeans over laundry-pink long johns, three layers of shirts and sweaters, hat with earflaps, down vest, silken socks under woolen socks inside oversized ski shoes under gaiters, heavy mittens, neck-up, and finally a little rucksack to put clothes in a piece at a time as I heated up while skiing. I also brought field guides and safety items like matches, space blanket, and rope (now I’d bring a cell phone). I added a dry T-shirt and a pair of socks to change into at the end of the run so as not to get the chills driving home or lying hurt. The temperature, announced in red on the window thermometer off the porch, was eleven degrees below zero. No wind, thankfully.

  . . . Wallace and Desmond sit up straight in the truck and watch the road, swaying in perfect synchronization around every curve as the pavement follows the stream on the way to the milldam. If I put my arm around Wally he leans into me, lays his head on my chest. Desi gazes steadfastly out the window. They are young, Desmond just turned three, Wally not even one, and I am young too, only forty, all muscle and beer belly and ambition, reading glasses still in the future.

  At Walton’s Mill Park, I ram the truck into a snowbank, climb out slowly, bid the dogs wait, survey the ice below the dam, a crystal palace, kingly curtains of ice, stately columns of ice, a preternatural pipe organ, all in ruins. I say, “Okay, boys,” and the dogs leap out, investigate every hump and knob of snow, piss amply on a pair of spectral snowmen—the ghosts of millers, no doubt—while I retrieve my skis from the back of the truck, get them attached to my boots in a rush of bare fingers, painful.

  We’re off. But not far. The problem is getting on the ice above the dam without going through the ice above the dam, which at this temperature would likely be fatal. But the ice looks strong and thick until very close to the lip, where a black curtain of pond urges out from under, spills over. The dogs bound down through cattails and frozen wands of marsh grass to solid pond. I follow their intuition, and we’re off. The dogs skitter ahead. I lean into my poles, pushing hard. There’s been an overflow, then a freeze, then a light dusting of snow, and the ice is smooth as glass. Wally falls with his hind end, but his front end keeps going. The back end finds its feet again, pushes the front end along. Then his front end falls so his ear is on the ice, speeding. He looks like a theater animal—two people are inside. Desi tippy-tips along on his dependable claws, never falling. My skis threaten to fly out from under me—it’s all I can do to make headway straight, pushing with my poles.

  Up on the banks of the millpond there are houses to notice—just a few, with columns of smoke moving straight into the sky. I leap past them, my skis squealing now on a layer of drifted snow. My breath freezes my neck-up to my mustache and face. Back to the left, when I look, there’s a sudden view of Titcomb Hill, a dozen skiers discernible as black dots weaving down the face of the little mountain. I can’t look long, such is my speed. Good-bye lift lines, lift tickets, lift talk. My trail today is called leeway. It’s an emotional double diamond: DANGER—YOU WILL BE ALONE.

  Up ahead to the left there’s a great hayfield covered a couple of yards deep with unblemished, grass-caught snowdrifts, bright in the sun. The air I gaze through is full of glinting crystals, magical. There’s the sound of a chain saw somewhere far ahead. And the call of a raven, still at work in the depths of winter. This is a classic impenetrable red-winged blackbird bog, frozen to silence. I think of the breezes in the reeds in summer, the hundred raucous birds dive-bombing my canoe.

  I could ski that bog. Winter means easy access to all the secret places. But the stream-shaped pond ahead is a racetrack and I lean into it, pumping legs and arms, picking up speed, flying to a bend, keeping control, making the sweeping turn skating till I’m out of sight of the houses, out of sight of the world, down under high banks and thick alder cover. Warming, I pull my mask off, tuck it into the top of my skier’s bib.

  There’s a split in the stream-pond ahead, what looks like an island, though it could just be blocks of ice stacked. I pick the left fork and go. Up on the high bank there’s a summer shanty encased in drifts, only the wind chimes free, steel tubes hanging silent in the stillness over a great stack of firewood. Through an occluded window I get a glimpse of gingham curtains. I want to go in, build a fire, bake bread, grill millpond perch, read Middlemamarch again, read it by candlelight. Well, if ever I did go through the ice, this would be the place to race to, save my life with matches.

  Hand-lettered sign on tree:

  NO TRESPASSING

  The dogs can’t read—they’re all over the porch. Wally stands to look in the window, whining. Visiting? Are we visiting? Visiting? Whom?

  No, we’re moving on. Shortly, the pond seems to end—I’m among blown cattails and tumbled reeds. I plow over snow humps and lovely, weird drift patterns, sastrugi and firn. The dogs dolphin-leap through deeper and deeper snow. The wind has packed the stuff hard enough that I can stay on top of it—mostly. Where the bog grass has bent down under the snow there are voids; I lose my balance when a ski sinks and tumble backward into one of them, sit there as in an icy armchair, enjoying the sun. I’ve got to take my skis off to escape. When I finally stand on them again I realize how warm I’ve gotten—ten degrees below zero after a mile of all-engines-full and a struggle to stand feels like summah. I pull down the suspenders of my bib, take off my vest and sweater and stuff them in my rucksack. I even roll my neck-up down off my chin, roll up the sleeves of the top flannel shirt. It’s no day to show skin, however warm I get. My hat stays on, flaps down. There’s ice in my eyelashes; my mustache is a winter milldam; the fringe of hair I can’t keep under my cap is an ice penumbra at the edges of my vision.

  I ski. The dog-dolphins leap through the drifts in bursts of snow. They’re panting, well-heated too, bite snow for moisture. Deep in the bog there’s a high mound. I ski over to have a look, am mystified by a slight cloud of steam rising as from a street vent in New York, but rising here from a denuded latticework of rimy sticks. Then I know: this is a buried beaver lodge. The steaming is the heat and breath and drying fur of the family of beavers hunkering within. The whole is covered with coyote prints; more than one has been here looking for a warm meal in tough conditions, has dug down through the snow and torn at the structure—but clearly they haven’t gotten far: think of the strength of the frozen mud holding this whole mess together! My own failed coyotes sniff frantically, mark the site with parsimonious squirts of yellow. I listen at the vent and hear mewling, can’t get enough of the sound. The breath of the vent is faintly urinous.

  Too cold to linger.

  Somewhere up ahead there’s the deep roar of a big diesel engine laboring. It seems in the wrong direction to be on the road; there’s only woods that way. I remember the chain-saw whine—must be loggers. Always in the silence an engine.

  The deep bog is hard and then harder going—it’s all grass humped down by the snow, no more windblown patches of clear ice. So I turn back, follow my tracks the way I came, back to the narrow pond. Past the endrifted camp I take a left onto the fork not taken, and zoom, I’m back on clear pond again, which gradually narrows further and takes more and more the shape of our familiar stream. The dogs dance ahead.

  I slide to a stop at a place where the snow has been blown off the ice. Inertia counte
red by no friction keeps me sliding till I bump the bog edge, where I find a set of animal tracks poking along the margins in the drifted snow, then find that thin layer disturbed in such a way as to suggest the animals had also been sliding. The footprints are round, and come in a consistent pattern, one-two-three, round-round-oblate. I throw off my mittens, pull off my rucksack, dig in there for the tracking guide. Flipping pages with stiff hands, I find the exact set: these are the prints of a mink patrolling the edge of the bog for voles and looking among the reeds for any sign of access to a muskrat house, muskrat being their favorite food. The slide marks have been made by mink at play. I stick a finger in one of the footprints—you can tell fresh tracks by how hard they are. These are old.

  I’m glad the dogs have gone on far ahead. They ruin animal tracks and have been known to ruin animals as well. Now I notice the clear, familiar trail of a fox, neat steps at walking speed. And the squat-and-leap trail of a squirrel. Then a meandering line of indistinct round tracks: domestic cat. The fox tracks continue along the pond edge in my direction, then detour up the bank and into the rushes just where multiple hare prints have made a well-trampled highway. I ski slowly, push myself along with poles, searching for more prints, feeling the cold. That diesel engine working up ahead is louder and louder. Somehow, I’m not annoyed—all the exercise I’m getting, perhaps. And maybe some hint of the compassion I’m trying to learn in life: the poor guy has to work in this cold while I play at exercise.

  Around the last bend of the pond I’m surprised to see high-voltage lines crossing, bare steel strands on tall double poles, high-voltage lines I’ve somehow never noticed up where they cross Temple Road. And I’m coming under a familiar dwelling, the Asahel Paine homestead, a Cape Cod house that always has a semitrailer parked out front, the house itself wrapped entirely in plastic this winter, giving a kind of energy-crunch Christo effect. By the stream there’s the top of a folding chaise lounge showing through the snow and a worn beach towel hung on a cedar trunk, nicely frosted—somebody’s summer swimming hole.