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Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to Erick Apland, John Atwood, Drew Barton, Meghan Bitterauf, Ms. Bollocks, Henry Braun, Elizabeth Colleen Callahan, Theodore Enslin, John Hodgkins, Juliet Karelsen, Roger “Sky” Kay, Bob Kimber, Rita Kimber, Pit Marcus, Elysia Morgan Martin, Wes McNair, Connie Nosalli, Fred Ouellette, Earl and Dunya Pomeroy, Nancy Prentiss, Gwilym Roberts, Elysia Roorbach, Tom Weddle, and Monica Wood, for their help and support in the making of this book.
To protect the privacy of some of the people in this book, I’ve taken the liberty of changing a few names and otherwise creating disguises that I mean to be impenetrable, including the construction of composite characters like Earl Pomeroy and Ms. Bollocks.
Many thanks, too, to the librarians of the Ohio State University science libraries, the Butler Library at Ohio State, the Maine State Library, the Bates College Library, the Camden Library, the Portland Public Library, the Colby College Library, and dozens of other libraries by way of interlibrary loan. And deep thanks to Jean Oplinger and her staff at the Farmington Public Library, and to the librarians of the Mantor Library at the University of Maine at Farmington, retired or not: Janet Brackett, Shelley Davis, Laurie MacWhinnie, Diane McNair, Sarah Otley, Frank Roberts, Joan Small, and Moira Wolohan. Special thanks to Zip Kellogg of the University of Southern Maine Library, and to the historians of Farmington, Temple, and Avon, Maine.
I received crucial financial help in the form of grants during the making of this book from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Furthermore: A program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, also instrumental logistical help from Sarah Cecil and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.
Warmest thanks to Susan Kamil, my editor at Dial, and to her assistant, Noah Eake . And thanks to my editors at Harper’s, where sections of this book first appeared.—Colin Harrison, John Sullivan, Lewis Lapham, and Mary Lamott. Finally, endless love to Betsy Lerner, my agent.
If you have remarked errors in me, your superior wisdom must pardon them. Who errs not while perambulating the domain of nature? Who can observe everything with accuracy? Correct me as a friend, and I as a friend will requite with kindness.
—Carolus Linnaeus
About the Author
BILL ROORBACH, recent winner of an O. Henry Award, is the author of Big Bend, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award; a novel, The Smallest Color; and a memoir, Summers with Juliet, among other books of nonfiction. His short work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Granta, and the New York Times Magazine, and has been widely anthologized. Currently he holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. Temple Stream flows from an article that first appeared in Harper’s Magazine.
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