Autumn Imago

by Bryan Wiggins

  I’ve always been good with my hands. They’re my father’s. I remember watching his, studying them as he’d saw a freestanding board at a perfect ninety-degree angle without using a square. Or the curious way he’d pinch a nail punch just before he sank the head—so delicate, like it was the finest needle poised over some thin piece of silk. Then the hammer would come down so hard I’d jump, and he’d laugh and get ready to set the next brad. In the years before this job, it had been ages since I’d done that. Or held a shovel, or an ax, or lifted anything heavier than my laptop bag. But out here there are things I haul and hold and force myself against that push back at me, things that don’t give way so easily, and I like that.

  If you had asked me ten years ago, I would’ve told you that I would never set foot in this place again. None of the others has, and I don’t blame them. But I started drifting—finding my way from my old life to this one. It didn’t happen fast. Not many people like change, least of all those whose lives change in an instant—those who divide the story of their days into “before” and “after.” I never made a conscious decision to return. Like I said, it was a drift. San Francisco, Houston, Tampa, Atlanta. I had plenty of offers in the Northeast too—DC, Boston, and of course, the city every suburban street of my childhood led to: Philly. But I wasn’t ready to come home. It wasn’t really there anymore, anyway.

  Everywhere I did go was exactly the same. When you spend twelve hours a day writing code, it doesn’t matter what’s outside your door. That screen is your window—the portal you see everything through. And no matter how you string the ones and zeroes, the view’s always the same. I started taking long lunches. I’d look for the closest patch of green I could find. Sometimes it was only a little public plaza by a strip mall with a row of fenced-in trees. But by the time I reached Atlanta, I was looking for more than that. I found it in Jones Bridge Park. I could leave my desk at MattaByte at five and be landing a twelve-inch rainbow in the Chattahoochee an hour later.

  Pretty soon lunches weren’t enough. I skipped a Friday or two to spend more time on the river, walking farther and farther to find the lies where the big fish hid. I kept following the Chattahoochee north, and one day while I was looking at the map, I saw the big green swatch of the national forest that bears its name. Nestled just inside its southern border was the landmark Dad had told me about: Springer Mountain. We’d talked so often about the trip we’d take from that starting point that I never thought of doing it without him. But by the time I found the place, I didn’t have any other choice.

  I do my best to skirt the space he left. If I get too close to it, I can feel just how big it is. Big enough to swallow me whole.

  So I put my attention on the little things—the tasks at hand. Like that door. I planed it, played it, worked it till it closed soft and sure, knowing that everyone who came into that cabin would have a stay that was just a little bit better. Easier. A small thing, maybe, for the two or three days or week they spend here, but when you add it all up—all those little moments of ease—it equals something so much bigger than the hour it took me to do the chore.

  I know the programs I wrote helped people. A lot of people. The fat paychecks I pocketed were proof of that. But it’s different when the work you do is for someone you know, even if you’ve only just met. By my third summer, there were some I knew better, the ones who offered me smiles of recognition that I gladly returned.

  Those are the people I’m really working for—people like me who have no choice but to return to this place. A place where the wind carries the perfume of balsam and wood smoke. A place where you can still hear the whisper of your own breath. A place where the trees part to reveal the kind of raw and savage beauty that can make a strong man cry, and a weak one find his strength. Every time I see one of those people coming through my door, I stand up to offer my hand and my name.

  “Paul Strand,” I tell them. “Welcome back to Kidney Pond.”

  2

  To Preserve and Protect

  “Hey, buddy, can you tell me the easiest trail to take up Katahdin?”

  I looked up from my desk and tried not to laugh. The squat, sixtyish guy asking me that question had to be close to 250 pounds. And the woman in the huge Gucci sunglasses, gold earrings, and fire-engine-red lipstick standing next to him may have been heavier. Both wore thin cotton T-shirts, jeans, and spotless white running shoes. Whatever provisions they had must’ve been tucked into the single daypack the guy clutched in one hand. I waited a beat before I replied.

  “Well, none of them is easy, and you’re too late to start a full climb today.”

  “I told you, Cal,” the woman said. Cal didn’t look pleased.

  “Come on, Tina, it’s not even noon.”

  I stood up and placed the small, laminated map I keep in my top drawer on the center of the desk. It was only a section of the larger one that covered the park’s entire 209,501 acres, but it was the one most folks were after. Cal was a member of that strange breed that equates biggest with best. He was an American, by God, and if he was going to climb anything around here it was going to be the highest mountain in Maine. I turned the map toward them and began tracing my finger along the routes to the summit as I spoke.

  “There are five trails up the mountain, one from the north, two from the east, and two from our side here on the west.”

  Cal gave a grunt.

  “Those are the Abol and Hunt trails.” I glanced at my watch. “By the time you drive over to Katahdin Stream to hit the closer one, the Hunt, it’ll be 12:30. Book time to the peak’s three hours and forty minutes.”

  “But it’d be faster coming down,” said Cal.

  “It would,” I said, straightening up. “But it’s still a seven-hour day. If you’re in shape.”

  Cal and Tina traded a glance.

  “On the Hunt, you’ll need to scramble up a couple of miles of twisting trails and rocky ravines just to get to tree line. After that you’ll be pulling yourself around truck-size boulders on a long, exposed ridge under open sky for at least an hour, maybe two. There’s a lot that can go wrong up there: dehydration, hypothermia, lightning strikes, compound fractures . . .”

  Halfway through my list of recommended gear to prepare for them all, Cal finally got the message.

  “Say, Paul,” he said, glancing at the name tag on my chest, “is there another hike you could recommend around here? Maybe something not quite so, uh, high?”

  “There’s a beautiful waterfall close by, perfect place for a picnic on a hot day like this.”

  “How far?” Tina asked.

  “If you take the trail around the pond, it’s only six miles round trip, and it’s flat. Or take a canoe and shave some time by starting with a paddle across Kidney. Of course, if you drove over to Daicey Pond, it’s only a mile from the lot.”

  I saw them pulling out of the parking lot in their silver Lexus twenty minutes later. After my little speech, I guess even a walk through the forest over level ground felt like too much adventure for Tina and Cal. Maybe I went too far, but I’ve shepherded more than my share of the lost and wounded off the flanks of these mountains. Better for the ones who have no business up high to be caught before they even think of shouldering a pack. I had to give old Cal credit, though. At least he stopped by to ask advice from a ranger and had the good sense to take it. He might have missed his chance to boast to his buddies down south about summiting Baxter Peak, but he’d be alive to share whatever other stories he brought back from the Maine wilderness.

  ***

  I made my way to the outhouse with my bucket of rags and bottle of disinfectant. As I started to wipe it down, I shook my head at the thought of how many times I had been called on to save people from the biggest threat that waited for them in the wilderness: their own ignorance. But it comes with the job. At ninety-six acres, Kidney Pond is a big draw for these parts, the largest in the chain of twenty ponds that lies between Nesowadnehunk Stream to the north and the west branch of the mighty Pe
nobscot River to the south. And its position just off the dirt tote road that runs around most of the park means I get plenty of company—at least by Baxter standards.

  But I appreciated the pull that drew almost everyone—even the greenest city slickers—to the park. They came for the same reason I did: to experience the kind of peace you can’t find anywhere else on the East Coast. And if they’re looking for drama, it’s usually the quieter kind—like the chance to see a mother loon with chicks on her back gliding away from some threat on the shore, maybe watching the black flash of a swallow chasing a jay away from her nest. And some are here to engage in my favorite backwoods battle—the tension that builds between the tips of your fingers and whatever you’ve hooked on the end of your line.

  Visitors to Baxter come looking for what this world has lost. They search for the things that live outside the boxes that rule the civilized world. And the only reason they can find it is because the man the place is named for spent his life and fortune to secure a place that feels like Eden to me. Like every ranger here, I work to honor his legacy, guided by the mission stitched on the cap I wear here every day: “To Preserve and Protect.”

  Anyone who’s ever lost something precious knows just what those words mean.

  3

  Catch and Release

  I’m up early. It’s not just the job. I’ve never been able to sleep in. Even as a child, I’d wake hours before most of my family, wondering how anyone could stand to sleep through the very best part of the day. Only my mother rose earlier, but at an early age I learned to find my own corner of the house to squirrel away in. There, during the day’s first hour, I fed upon that fragile power birthed by the dawn, which is best claimed alone.

  Around here, there are other benefits to rising with the sun. I opened my door the next morning to find an old friend I would have missed if I were still in the sack. He was quiet, but at eight feet tall and maybe 1,500 pounds, he was still kinda hard to miss.

  I’d seen the Broken Bull wading on the far side of the pond a few times earlier in the summer. I named the moose the first time I paddled by him. His head came up from below, and as the water rained from his antlers, I saw he was missing a good portion; the broad palmated portion of the right side of his rack was sheared off in a nearly straight line at its base. It was too early in the season for the rut, but something had got him. As I watched him munching his breakfast of lily pad roots, I wondered about the fight or fall or other force of nature that had cost him half his crown.

  But despite what happened up top, when I saw his entire body standing firm-footed on dry land for the first time that morning, I could see that he sure as hell looked healthy down below. I stood and sipped my coffee as I watched him from my cabin’s perch on the far side of the field. The rising sun across the pond fired the edges of his still form, illuminating the hump of his broad back, the tips of his ears, and each bony tine topping the mismatched halves of his rack.

  When the outhouse door near him gave a soft bang, I saw the big beast’s head finally turn. The young boy who’d checked into cabin 5 with his dad the day before started walking back to his bed, but stopped when he saw me and turned to see where my gaze pointed. His small body froze, and though I couldn’t see his face from that far away, I knew what expression it wore: the same open look of amazement that was mirrored on my own.

  The three of us stood there in silence, the only sound the falling two-tone tweet of a chickadee that drifted to us from somewhere above. The boy had the good sense that so many seem to abandon when they see a creature in the wild. He didn’t run back into the cabin for a camera. He didn’t yell to trumpet his discovery to his dad. He didn’t try to get closer or yodel his version of some wild call. He simply stood there silently and watched, with the good grace of one wise enough to accept an unexpected gift.

  ***

  It felt good to be moving, even if I was only going a mile. Twenty minutes after bringing Tyler up to speed on our campground guests, I traded the bang of doors and shriek of swimmers for the echo of birdcalls on the trail. I don’t resent my guests at Kidney, not even those who seem indifferent to the secrets Baxter has to offer. I feel a duty to help them find the park’s hidden beauty, a responsibility that comes from a place much deeper than my job description. There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing a kid’s eyes light up as she watches a rabbit bounce across the field or hearing her gasp at the sight of a bald eagle diving for his dinner. But the only company I’m usually interested in when my workweek’s done is my own.

  I came out of the woods and scanned the still waters before me. There wasn’t much action. It was the last day of August, and the cooler weather that would get the fish moving again was still several weeks away. They were down there, of course, but not near the surface. In warm weather like this they drifted in their preferred thermocline: the middle layer of the water column, which was cooler than the surface but still warm enough to support their tiny subaquatic prey. And with the sun still high, there was even less chance that I could tempt them to rise.

  I pulled the canoe from the bank, paddled to the center of the pond, and began the ritual. It was the wrong time of day in the wrong time of year, and I didn’t give a damn. I cast a few dries first, throwing everything from a Caddis to a Royal Coachman. Nothing. I switched to an attractor, taking my time to let my fingers work the line to tie on a Royal Wuff. I used to rush through the knots, figuring faster ties meant more time for my flies to sit on the surface. The math works, but it doesn’t add up to a good day on the water. The thing I’m really fishing for is never found on the end of my line.

  To catch a fish on a dry fly in the great outdoors, you need to go very, very small. Your eyes must inspect every nuance of color and size to pick just the right pattern of fly from your wallet. Your ears need to listen for the tiniest telltale splash that points to the spot where your prey might rise. And your fingertips have to be ready to tie filament three-thousandths of inch thick to a speck of thread and feathers that you’ll cast a hundred feet away.

  I have the patience for that kind of concentration. Writing, testing, debugging code—it took the same discipline to search for the details that stood between failure and success. But the only thing I ever got from staring at a screen for hours was tired. It’s different on the water.

  The tiny tasks of fly-fishing break the world wide open. As I drifted in my canoe in the middle of Celia Pond, the day flooded in through the edges. The periphery’s the key—the third eye that opens when the pair you’re born with are trained on something else. It would only be later, walking back on the trail, that the day’s details would take center stage in my mind: the wink of white light on water, the chatter of the squirrel working the shoreline, the trace of breeze that cooled the sun-warmed skin on the back of my neck. And every one of those moments remains cached someplace inside reserved for things other than the words and worries that skip through my thoughts at other times.

  After a couple of hours of slack line, I reeled it in and just drifted. The memory took me to the day I did the same with a southern girl. Texas was the worst part of my migration from the West Coast back east. My firm was in downtown Houston—the other end of the world from Baxter in so many ways. I started making excuses to drop by accounting to see Tina, and we spent a few long lunches together. She took me to a park where they stocked rainbows for “place and take” during the winter months. There was something perverse about trying to catch fish that would all be dead by the time the water warmed up in April, but we spent a few good hours there together just the same. She knew how to be quiet while we fished, with no need to fill good clean air with a lot of empty words. I cut it short, though, long before the first questions could come about where we were headed. She was pissed, and I didn’t blame her. But I liked her too much to put her through all that. Better to have her leave angry and confused than take advantage of her for a few more weeks before we got to where I knew we’d end up.

  I didn’t date at all
after that. I was lonely sometimes, but it felt better than the kind of lonely that comes just before that last goodbye—when the only thing you have left to share is the knowledge that it’s over.

  Maybe that’s why I like fishing; it’s the good kind of lonely out there. I may not control the world I put my line in, but I control what I do in it, and if I come home hungry, it’s no one’s fault but my own. And if I don’t, I know of no sweeter meal than an eastern brook trout caught with my own hand and cooked over a fire under an open sky.

  ***

  I didn’t eat well that night, though. My dinner was the sleeve of crackers I wolfed on the trail back to camp. They went down fine just the same. I’d already gotten the kind of nourishment I really needed in those long, still hours on Celia. They’d made me fit for human company again, and I found my favorite kind sitting on top of a picnic table in the field at Kidney.

  Cassie’s face was half hidden by the crown of her Smokey Bear hat as she looked down at something she was working on in her hands. As I got closer, her head tipped up. There was still enough light to see the face peering at me from under the wide brim. It flashed the expression I’d seen surprise so many campers meeting someone wearing a uniform, badge, and sidearm: a smile. The way it was framed by Cassie’s light brown eyes, slightly pointed nose, and short chestnut hair always made me think of some mischievous woodland pixie.