Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  I had the idea that Earl would reconsider with the baby coming, and our staying through the fall. And, having put word out at the diner, I waited, reasonably sure he’d turn up to talk turkey. So I knew exactly who was calling at five-thirty on a Monday morning in July when Juliet and I were awakened by the savage blast of an air horn not thirty feet from our bedroom window.

  Earl made use of an enormous borrowed dump truck for his firewood deliveries, had to make his rounds before the trucker’s day started. I leapt into pants and a T-shirt, raced out into the yard, confirmed my hunch: there was Earl, up high in the cab of the truck, his size undiminished by its dimensions; only Earl could make a dump-truck cab looked cramped. “Got your three-cord,” he said, his only greeting, though we hadn’t seen one another for nearly a year.

  Well, good man, he’d figured out on his own that he should halve my order. I said, “Good morning, Earl.” I was genuinely happy to see him, felt a surge of friendship, a sense that we’d come some distance together despite our differences. The sky lightened by the minute, deep blue to azure then pink, great streaks of light rising in the east ahead of the sun, the rosy fingers of dawn, as Homer had it.

  Earl said, “Must be nice sleeping in while the rest of us work!”

  I patted my hair down, squeezed it into a rough ponytail, gave him a welcoming smile. “How’ve you been?” I said.

  “Now, that’s an intellectual’s query!” No sense of comrade-ship, even after nearly a decade of interaction.

  “You’ve been fine. Now, Earl. Listen to this. Two of our bottles have come back.”

  Quick: “You could have got ten cents for those.”

  “One from the Twin Bridges—not too impressive, I admit—the other from all the way down at Shawmut Dam. Now, how about that?”

  He looked at me a long time. His eyes were distant-mountain blue in the pink light, and I could not see into them. He said, “Could you move these cars?”

  “Let me get my keys,” I said.

  “Make hay,” he said. “I’ve only got the truck an hour more. No time for gollynosters.” The sun broke the ridge to the east, lit him as if he were a player arriving onstage.

  Upstairs in our bedroom, Juliet was already back asleep in her nest of pillows. I pat-searched my dresser, found my keys, looked out the window at the load of wood, pleased it had gotten here in whatever fashion. But something looked funny. The load was nearly glowing in the dawn light, none of the familiar hard gray of maple bark. Wait a minute—most of the visible wood was white birch. Birch smells good and burns hot, but it burns quickly. And what else was in that load? Strips of bark seemed to hang on some of the darker logs. Was that cedar? Cedar won’t season timely, burns like a torch once it does: truly horrible firewood. And from the view above I thought I saw an awful lot of small sticks.

  Back outside, I said, “Earl, let me get a look at this load before you dump it, okay?”

  “Not okay,” said Earl. “I’ve got another load to do up the hill here. You move those cars for me.”

  “I smell pine,” I said.

  “Maybe a stick or two,” said Earl, squinting into the new sunlight.

  “I see birch,” I said.

  “Good autumn firewood, Professor, and you won’t be around further, from what I gather, so not to moan.”

  A decorative chrome ladder was bolted to the side of the truck’s cab and I climbed it so I could look at the load. This put Earl and me nearly face-to-face. He scowled as I craned to see the firewood, which was an even worse load than I’d thought, generously shot through with cut pine branches and hunks of slab wood.

  I said, “Earl, it’s all birch and softwood. There’s still needles on some of those branches!”

  “You get down off there and move those caz, Professor.” His face, already pink with the dawn, surged red.

  I said, “I won’t pay for this, Earl.”

  He spun such that I thought he was reaching for something to hit me with, but he only put the truck in gear. It leapt back-ward with a sigh of hydraulics, then forward up the street with a lurch and roar. I fell down the ladder a couple of rungs and bailed out, hopping off into the roadside ditch as the truck gathered speed. Earl pulled it up short, the brakes hissing and squealing, threw it in reverse, and squeezed the truck expertly into the narrow opening of our second little driveway. I heard his door slam, prepared myself for a loud negotiation. But then there was another great sigh of hydraulics. Suddenly, the dump body was tilting. Before I could shout, before I could gather my thoughts, and with a sound like a herd of panicked hooves, my load of wood plummeted out of the dumper, right in the face of my pickup. Earl, not a word, got back in his cab and pulled it forward, jolting the brakes a couple of times to get the last portion of the cordage to fall, and then just kept going, dump body raised, roared up the road and over the rise toward Temple Village.

  Upstream Six

  Our Place to Temple Village

  YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT THE TEMPLE WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT rock. Our stream is eons younger than its bed, which was once mud on the ocean floor. The scoops and whorls and screws and potholes carved into the slumped, folded, compressed, and lifted mudstone—our local bedrock—are the handiwork not of the stream, but of a down-spiraling, corrosive slurry of meltwater and rock flour pouring under pressure from crevices in the receding glacier, the same rough beast that left us our landscape a mere twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. Soil filled in the scraped rock only slowly as lichens and erosive rains did their work. When there was enough, plants took hold, creating yet more soil from carbon in the air and from plain sunlight, and eventually the forests took hold. Hard to imagine, but the glacial ocean made its most inland incursion right at our doorstep. If we’d been living here twenty thousand years ago, the top of the glacier would have been a mile over our heads. And a mere twelve thousand years ago, not long before the arrival of the first humans, our land would have been beachfront property.

  In the Temple section upstream from our house the forest is dense, the bedrock—exposed by the stream—well carved. Juliet and I had walked or skied that stretch often, and on a hot morning in early August 2000, eight months pregnant and full of new energy, she got a notion to take a dip up there in one of our favorite potholes. The stream was low after a period of rainless weather and I wondered if there’d be enough water for more than a foot bath, but was happy for the walk with my girl. We crossed our neighbor’s first field in roasting sun, found the stream a mere brook, walked through it like nothing where just that past spring it would have carried us away and drowned us, then swished sweatily in tall grass through the second field and along the stream on that side till we reached the forest. At the margin, beavers had toppled two large black cherries (the bigger one twenty-two inches in diameter at the bole) and abandoned them, perhaps because they hadn’t fallen in the water, perhaps because black cherry wood is bitter. The stumps had been so overworked that they were sculptures, busts with blank, chewed faces and points on their heads. The dogs sniffed them abundantly as we caught up.

  And into the woods, where an unkempt snowmobile trail follows the stream, climbing incrementally through hillocks and ridges and humps left by the glaciers: cool and dark and open understory, mossy glades, tiny brooks and rivulets heading to the stream from springs. That morning there was much birdsong, hermit thrush foremost. Juliet plodded along steadily, all-terrain momma, belly first, a pair of my jeans slung low on her butt. The sunlight fell crashing into the cut the stream made, underlit the heavy canopy of beech and red oak, bass-wood and sugar maple, bigtooth aspen and wizened yellow birch, canopy specimens that climbed the hill there, shading bracken and New York ferns, Jack-in-the-pulpit, tall meadow rue, false Solomon’s seal, all of it rising from the thick leaf litter amid a few scraggly, sun-starved saplings, interspersed balsam nurseries, an occasional hophornbeam tree, and boulders, boulders strewn everywhere, covered in mosses and lichens, glacier-broken and glacier-tumbled examples of the local metamorphic rock: sc
hist and mudstone. Every tenth boulder or so looked different, yellow and round. These were erratics, rocks that the glaciers carried in from distant places that geologists can determine with minute accuracy.1

  The stream flows through a tumble of rocks, the same mixture of large and small and infinitesimal that I recognized from the layer under the topsoil in my gardens, a near-sterile matrix called glacial till.

  Juliet and I passed great old trees that had fallen and become host to bright fungi. Along the trail, streamside, shadeside, all was humid, damp, bursting, even in the midst of drought. The switch across our neighbor’s property line into a dense pine forest was from light to dark, from broadleaf to needle, the result of an old cut and purposeful tree-farm planting.

  We made our way to a small, man-made clearing filled with bracken, then into a dense hemlock glade over the stream, dark, atmospheric old trees clinging untouched to a large rock formation above a diminutive gorge. Among the drooping branches someone had set up a living room en plein air—nice wicker furniture, bright white, two chairs and a couch, smart little tea table, the lot rescued, no doubt, from consignment to the dump. The effect was uncanny, as if elves had visited the place since our last trip. We made like it was no big surprise, just in case the little people were watching—best not to let them see us puzzled. Juliet, in fact, sat in one of the chairs, put her feet up on the table.

  I wanted to keep going, though I knew the path would leave the stream soon, wanted to bushwhack along the water and show Juliet the old field where once I’d come upon a marijuana patch among high weeds—I’d scrammed, scared of a sudden meeting with either cops or grower. And past that, almost to Temple Village, the dogs and I had crossed the stream on a pretty little dam, climbed a steep bank that crunched underfoot with what turned out to be tin cans, most of them mere webs of rust. But then there was a Pabst Blue Ribbon can with church-key holes. And an enameled pot, spotted by rust, but still a pleasing blue. Below the metal layer were the heavier items: wine bottles, old dishes, car windshields, broken crockery, broken china, parts of bottles, the deeper the older, no doubt the source of all the potsherds the stream coughs up down by my place, all the beach glass, all the rusty fragments and leather shoe soles, porcelain doll arms, billiard balls, and bottles (Johnson’s American Anodyne Liniment, Kerry’s Balsam, Dr. Miles Remedy for the Heart).

  You can’t push someone who’s about to give birth. I took the elfin couch, stretched out.

  “I feel this kid waking up,” Juliet said. She bent with some difficulty to untie her hiking boots, pulled them off, stripped her socks off too. I did the same. The moss there was deep and thick and preternaturally cool, sprouted pixie rings of brown boletes like catchers’ mitts propped on stems. Juliet dropped her pants, her underwear, pulled her shirt and bra over her head, stepped out of the pile of clothes as from a chrysalis, lumbered calmly to the rocks, climbed down to the stream, waded in, her skin fairly glowing in the sun. When had her hair gotten so thick and lustrous?

  I followed, stripping as fast as I could manage. Together, we waded upstream to our tub, a double pothole, something of a figure-eight open on the upstream end, the Temple current slow but still overflowing a dam of trapped rocks on the down-stream end, room for two, serendipitous glacial sculpting, the product of merely tens of years—not hundreds or thousands, as I had once thought. These tubs would have been the bottom of a particularly fierce vortex spiraling down through nearly a mile of ice. The ripples on the bedrock all around were like marks on a beach at low tide, and, in fact, that’s what they were: beach ripples frozen in time four hundred million years back. The glaciers of several ice ages had worked on that blank page, leaving long gouges made by dragged pebbles.

  Plenty of history, all written on a Seboomook pavement above Temple Stream, four hundred million years of rock, two million years of ice, then the ocean receding, polar bears and walruses moving along north, then the first people arriving from continents far away, then more from other continents, then wars and disasters and love and peace, now us.

  Juliet took my hand and stepped into her tub ladylike, if ponderously, lay back in the water in hard sunlight. I sank in, too, and we let the cool current wash over us, our goodly twin bellies looming out of the water like islands, our toes meeting at the waist of the pothole eight.

  EARL’S LOAD OF FIREWOOD LOOMED IN OUR SECOND DRIVE way, blocking my truck. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, but it wasn’t wonderful, either. Still, what was there would see us through the fall. I began to feel bad about my part in this latest pas de deux with Earl. To get it off my mind, I put the full cash price of three cords in an envelope (no bills bigger than a ten, as was his rule) and left it for him at the diner without a note.

  So opening our dented mailbox to post some outgoing letters one morning just a week later I was surprised to find a package in there, neatly wrapped in grocery-bag kraft paper and old-fashioned string, no stamp (Earl refused tape and other plastic products and all government relationships, so he said). On the face of it was my name in teacher’s-pet handwriting that I recognized as Earl’s. I turned my face away as I unwrapped the Grape-Nuts box inside, just in case it might explode (such was the state of my feelings about Earl). In the Grape-Nuts box was no bomb but a balled pair of socks, Nike swoosh showing, the very pair I’d loaned Earl some years before to warm his foot after his accident. The socks had been well worn but were freshly cleaned, Laundromat fragrant, and inside was a surprise: cash, exactly half the amount I’d left for him.

  THE AMERICAN STORY FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY FORWARD is one of abandoned farmsteads. The life of the small farm is so precarious, so vulnerable to accidents of weather or economies, so conducive to illness, injury, or madness, so susceptible to cold hearts and greed, that it’s amazing we have ever had food to eat. Where the farming was easy—Ohio, for example, and further west and south—every falter was met with foreclosure, every foreclosure by a sale, every sale by consolidators and developers, finally reaching the corporate fellow who sees no profit in sentiment and burns down the old house and barns to make room for the center-pivot irrigation. The town dies next, asphyxiated. Where the farming was difficult, as in most of New England (you don’t often see large-scale rolling irrigation equipment here—the land’s too lumpy), the end of individual farms came more slowly, because no one was waiting in line to prey on the desperate.

  Early photos around Temple Village show a nearly treeless place. The intervale is in crops straight to the alder-lined stream, with a single grand old elm presiding. Temple Stream cuts and fills and meanders its way through two nearly unshaded miles of bottomland. The village is bare too, except for big maples in the dooryards of well-kept houses. The surrounding hills have been cleared of forest and cultivated, too; the fields rise to the steeps, mostly hay, a little corn. Enormous stray erratics stand exposed. Smaller rocks are piled everywhere, or built into handsome walls at property lines. In the distance, farm fields and farmhouses and large barns and even storage silos appear in neat relation to one another, all of them gone now, detectable on side-hill bushwhacking missions through thick forest as rock-lined holes in the woods, as phantom apple groves in the midst of maple and oak, as lonely blooms of lilac or roses or lilies where once a front door opened onto gardens: gone, gone. The photos show Temple life and Temple culture: cider press, sawmill, icehouse, church and store, busy adults and eager children.

  Temple, Maine, was first settled by Europeans in 1796, after life in Farmington was well under way. The town was named Abbottsville, after its founder, Jacob Abbott, and the stream that ran through it, Abbott’s Stream. As quickly as 1803, the settlement had grown to thirty-eight families. The town was incorporated at that time as Temple, named after the town of Temple, New Hampshire, where many of the settlers had come from.

  From the start, Temple Stream powered mills, and in fact Temple Village was often referred to as Temple Mills. Eventually there were at least four grist and sawmills, with at least one operating continuo
usly for 130 years, most in the village. Also along the stream was a clay pit, a brick kiln, a tannery, a bark mill (which produced tannin for the tannery), a potash house, a shingle mill, a spool-stock factory, a stave maker’s shop, a cider press, and a slate quarry.

  Oxen were indispensable, and skiing or orienteering in the hills around the village, one still encounters amazing feats of down-home engineering, a great double stone wall, for one ex-ample, that today runs a mysterious mile through plain forest.

  The first exodus from Maine and from Temple Village was in 1816, the year without a summer. Late in 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora exploded, expelling fifty cubic miles of material and creating an enormous column of fine ash (the noise of the explosion was reportedly heard nine hundred miles distant, which would be like hearing something in Maine that had happened in Ohio). The ash spread around the globe and shaded the sun over North America for months. Some fifteen thousand farming people left Maine for the Western Reserve under the influence of Ohio Fever: flat, rich farmland, no rocks.

  Maine had been the New England frontier, and the belief in the future of that frontier kept people tied to their farms. But by the mid-nineteenth century, faith had faltered. In a second great exodus, people left in droves, the young particularly, this time for the burgeoning cities, a movement coincident with the rise of industry, and, for better or worse, a phenomenon one can observe today in “developing” countries around the world.

  By the end of World War II, there was really little left in Temple to call a town. The dwindling population was aging—was, in fact and on average, elderly. Enter Richard Donald Pierce, newly graduated from the Andover Theological Seminary down in Massachusetts, who took on the job as pastor to the two surviving churches of Temple, churches that could afford him for summers only, and occasional autumn weekends. One, the Congregational Church, had erected its meetinghouse on the banks of Temple Stream in 1832. While in Temple, Pierce worked assiduously on the Boston College doctorate that would get him out of there. His dissertation, “A History of Temple, Maine: Its Rise and Decline,” is an uneven, ponderous work, but thorough and impressive in its research and notable for its prickly opinions of Temple people and prospects. The chapter titles from the second half of the manuscript give a sense of the tone: “Economic Decline,” “Population Decline,” “Agricultural and Industrial Failure,” “Institutional Failure,” “Sociological Decline.” In the last chapter, “Future Prospect,” he uses the word disaster to sum things up.