Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  BY THE LAKE

  Jeff Hecht

  “How do you keep your little lake so peaceful and quiet, Rachel?” Jennifer asked, as the younger woman opened a bottle of California red wine. The vintage was drinkable, but nothing Jennifer would serve to guests.

  “It’s taken a lot of work over the last few years,” Rachel replied, setting the bottle on a tray with two wine glasses, brie, and crackers. “Nothing like setting up the company, of course, but it does have a connection. We stock it with our own fish.”

  “I hadn’t realized that.” Jennifer’s investment firm had taken Aquatic Genosynthesis public, and she thought she knew all the company’s major projects.

  “It’s under research and development on the balance sheet,” Rachel said, sliding open a wide glass door and leading the way onto the deck.

  “It sounds like a nice little tax dodge,” Jennifer said. She had to keep alert for CEOs siphoning too much cash out of their companies; it might depress the stock value.

  “No, it’s one of Ron’s projects. He thinks recreational fishing could become quite a large market. He’s working quite hard on it; he takes his father out on the lake almost every weekend to evaluate the results, like he took your husband.”

  That had amused Jennifer. Her husband was an accountant, and after her twenty-five years in investment banking, he normally didn’t set foot on anything smaller than a yacht. “Do you think Ron can help him catch something? The poor dear hasn’t been fishing since his eighth birthday.” She could see their boat near the shore, moving slowly, although she couldn’t hear a sound from its little engine.

  Rachel set the tray down on a glass-topped table between two chairs. “I’m sure Ron can help him, but Ron’s father was really the one who had the idea. Ron’s dad was a biologist at the state fish hatchery for forty years before he retired last year. He knows an amazing amount about the feeding instincts of various fish, and what sort of lures can attract what sort of fish.”

  Jennifer settled into a lounge chair. “What does that have to do with genetically modified fish?”

  “Ron’s dad thought the feeding cues were genetically controlled, so when Ron was at the university he had his grad students look for genes that control what the fish respond to. They found several genes for specific responses, like striking at something that moved in a certain way, or generated specific noises.”

  Jennifer got the idea. “Is that how the fish recognizes its dinner?”

  “Exactly. For fish farming we engineer in fast growth and limit breeding outside of the environment we control, to protect our investment. For recreational fishing, we modify other genes to modify feeding response.”

  “How does that make them more attractive for fishing?”

  “Ron designed an artificial lure—a kind of high-tech fly—that creates a pattern the fish are programmed to strike at. We’ve tested it and the fish go for it every time. At the company we were able to step up their growth rate, and our latest trick is to adjust this behavior so the fish don’t start striking at the lures until they are large enough to impress the fishermen. We stocked them in this lake last year, and they’re already big enough to start striking. A few of the old-time purists don’t like it, but it attracts the casual fisherman.”

  “And how big a market is this?” Jennifer asked. A big market could justify a secondary offering, which could earn her a fat commission.

  “Billions,” replied Rachel, then paused and looked onto the water, evidently distracted.

  Jennifer’s eyes followed and saw a wake far down the lake. Her ears picked up the whine of a jet ski motor.

  “Damned moron!” Rachel said. “We had the public boat ramp blocked, but they still manage to get in.”

  “The noise is annoying,” Jennifer said, glad to see that Rachel’s lake wasn’t perfect. “Our lake association keeps lobbying our state legislators to ban jet skis, but they want more campaign contributions before they introduce a bill.”

  “This isn’t just an aesthetic issue, Jennifer. The wakes damage the delicate shore ecology, and the noise chases off birds and frogs, and upsets the fish.”

  “Can you use your genetic technology to make the fish less sensitive, so it wouldn’t bother them?”

  “I suppose that’s possible, but we’re going in a different direction.” Rachel picked up a pair of Zeiss binoculars from the table to look more closely at the water. “We have a new experiment with pike, and if it works, you might see something in a minute.”

  “Why pike?” Jennifer knew only the fish that came on plates.

  “They are voracious predators. We’ve speeded up their growth rate, and now are fine-tuning their instinctive striking response to just the right noise level. Watch over there,” she said, pointing.

  The jet ski sped uncomfortably close to a small child on a raft as it changed course, turning back up the lake. Jennifer followed Rachel’s gesture and saw a dark shape moving from the middle of the lake. Suddenly it broke the surface and a huge mouth gaped open in front of the jet ski. There was a huge splash, with water spraying in all directions and blocking their view. Then the giant mouth, the jet ski, and the kid riding it were gone. Waves spread silently outward from the spot.

  “The response threshold is perfect. That should show the bastards,” Rachel said, putting down her binoculars.

  Jennifer picked her glass of wine from the table and sipped. It was a much better vintage than she had realized. She had underestimated Rachel. “I can see a very big market. I’m sure our lake association will be interested.”

  AWSKONOMUK

  Gregory Feeley

  From the footpath above Overlook he could imagine them entering the harbor, envision the island and its mountain in their wondering eyes. Even the bow would rise just above the water line, and their low perspective (he had studied pictures of longships for years before he finally got to the museum at Oslo) would disclose Cadillac first, and then, only after they had made for it, the curve of the bay beyond and the astonishing greenery. They would know fjords, so not be surprised at a peak abutting the sea, whose nakedness—he remembered Champlain’s observation that the island summits were bare of vegetation when seen from the sea—would likelier shock with familiarity. But the mountain (they would have their own name for it, now lost) would prove unique, and the densely forested interior, with its meadows, berries, and game, would draw them in.

  The undisputed Viking site is northeast in Newfoundland; the “Maine Penny” was found farther down, on Penobscot Bay. They could have come here. Exploring south, the longships would have hugged the coast, bringing them into the gulf and sight of the island—perhaps more plainly an island then, for the Medieval Warm Period was in force, and the narrow strait that prevents Mount Desert Island from being a peninsula may have been wider. The Wabanaki Indians would have scattered the remains of any encampment, and the elements had centuries to destroy the rest, wash them into the sea, bury them in the silt that slowly turned lakes to meadows.

  Even if L’Anse aux Meadows was the true Vinland, they would have quickly discovered the nearby mainland and ventured farther, beguiled by the inviting coastline that led them westward as well as south. How far, in the absence of seafaring resistance, would they have continued? Enough to assure themselves that no threat existed, no marauding powers beyond the Skræling settlements they raided at will. The coast of Maine is long; they may well have turned back before reaching Portsmouth. But until they had satisfied themselves that Nova Scotia was not another island—until they had touched the continent that Leif, who had traveled to Norway, knew lay beyond every large øf but his own—the Norsemen would have sailed on. They really could have come here.

  He had bought a timetable in Bar Harbor and was on the beach by seven, walking the sodden strip just uncovered by low tide and soon to be submerged once more. Best was the lip of clear water as it receded before curling into the next wave: in that final quarter second, Jay could see declivities of sand and rock no beachcom
ber would glimpse. He had long since relinquished the hope that the tides would cast up anything heavy enough to have survived a millennium in the bay, but their clawing at the sands might conceivably uncover something washed away in storms and shallowly buried.

  He tied his shoelaces together and hung them round his neck, then waded up to his shins in the ever-cold water. Parts of the Denbigh had been visible for decades at extreme low tide in Galveston Bay, and the Amsterdam, buried in English mud for more than a century longer, was discovered during an exceptional tide only in 1969, the year of his birth. Though he knew better, Jay found himself looking not for the gleam of metal at his feet, but—shielding his eyes—farther out, to the edge of refractivity, for the foreshortened outlines of a just-uncovered ship.

  Breakfast a few miles outside the park, and when the visitors’ center opened he was inside looking at the maps. A thousand years is nothing, and save perhaps for the shoreline, the contours of the topographical models displayed at ping-pong table height showed the island as the Norsemen would have found it. Jay wanted to know where the Indians had settled, so he knew where the Norsemen hadn’t. He was browsing the book section for new information on pre-Wabanaki settlements when he noticed a woman holding a copy of Vikings in America.

  “That isn’t very good,” he said, nodding at the familiar cover.

  She flipped it over and looked at it, as though he was speaking of someone in the illustration. “What, this?”

  “It’s not a great book. I mean, I like the theory, but he can’t tell good evidence from bad; he just accepts everything.”

  The woman frowned, and Jay realized with a stab of dismay that she wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “But they came before Columbus, didn’t they?”

  “Centuries before Columbus, but the only site that has ever been found is up in Canada. If they ventured down this far, nobody knows where.”

  “He says they’ve found things, coins and stone carvings.”

  Jay made a face. “It’s hard to date runes scratched in a rock, and you can’t tell who dropped a coin, or when.” The woman looked surprised, and he added, “No, I think he’s right: the Vikings must have come down here. But we won’t prove it until a settlement is found.”

  She opened the book again, to the middle pages where the photo section was. A ring on each finger, but neither a diamond: he noted these things automatically, realizing it only when a voice reminded him that he was two hundred miles from home. She looked perhaps thirty-five, and he liked her intelligent, inquiring expression as she scanned a photograph, then looked down to read the caption. The captions, he knew, oversold every point.

  “Hm,” she said. “Too bad.” And she put back the book in a manner that did not particularly invite further discussion. Jay saw two more copies on the shelf, but nothing better. He returned to his perusal of the Indian section, which contained (like last fall) no new information on the island’s prehistoric inhabitants.

  The afternoon was spent south of town, where he would pull off the road every few miles to compare a site that had looked good on the topo map with the real thing. He knew enough not to bother tramping over the grounds, let alone trying to dig, but the experience of standing off the turnout and looking down on a coastal flatland or an especially hospitable cove and imagining how it might have looked a millennium earlier held its own complex pleasures, which he had long since given up trying to analyze.

  He was on Route 3 heading north when his cell phone trilled, evidence that he was back within range of the watchtowers that stood at the borders of empire. He glanced down to see two messages waiting, blinks between pauses on a unit he knew better than to open here. One of the messages would be work, maybe both. Jay wasn’t about to answer questions on the road, and let the phone content itself with having announced their arrival.

  The Vikings showed no desire to “colonize” the new land, evidently seeing it simply as a source of lumber and other resources for its Greenland settlements. Jay pondered the logistics of sailing a thousand miles in order to collect as many planks as a longship would carry. Total costs are hard to calculate, a reflection that brought him back to work, where questions of drainage, soil mechanics, thin drift, and winter transport danced like arcade Whac-a-Moles.

  He was pondering coffee in Ellsworth, a bad town for foundations but notable for the Agassiz Outcrop, which he remembered from college geology. Jay wondered what the Indians had made of its striations, like the claw marks (he remembered then thinking) of a giant bear. The Norsemen had no mythology of giant animals, though Fenrir would eventually grow large enough to touch the sky and berserks, of course, became bears. If they noticed the signs of ice carving and wondered at their cause, it didn’t show up in the Eddas.

  The cell phone rang again, a third summons that, as in folk tales, must this time be answered. Without taking his eyes from the road, Jay found the unit and one-handedly flipped it open. Holding it up, he said, “I’m driving; can’t really talk.”

  “I’ll send you e-mail,” the device replied in a fair approximation of Lynn’s voice.

  “Fine.” Jay dropped it beside him and looked out at the businesses on High Street, brooding over base flood elevation and the growing popularity of manufactured homes. He ate at a diner that advertised homemade pie, persuaded the waitress to put on a fresh pot, and read a trade paperback about the Vinland map while he waited. A thatch of business cards covered a bulletin board next to the cash register, though he didn’t see any for foundation contractors.

  Continuing north, he passed the street of a house he had tested for radon two winters back, when the seasonal slowdown was straining his cash flow. He remembered the basement, whose owner had to be told how the collector worked, and who then stood on the stairs, squeezing her hands in distress at what the world was coming to. Jay had explained how radon accumulation had nothing to do with pollution or any human activity: that the Passamaquoddy would have suffered increased rates of lung cancer had they built underground chambers like the Pueblos or Plains Indians. The memory usually triggered an annoyed reflection on people who don’t understand their business, but this time he found himself thinking about Nidavellr, the subterranean realm of mines and dwarves. Was the stone they dug somehow deadly, or was that a detail from Age of Mythology or some other game? Once matters left the tangible world of artifacts that could be excavated and handled, it was difficult for him to keep their categories apart.

  It would be too late to call Janice when he got home, but he imagined telling her about his day, looking down from Overlook onto wheeling gulls and wading in shallows uncovered only certain days of the year. Didn’t some Indiana Jones film use that device? Real archeologists, even amateurs, had nothing but disdain for the treasure-hunting celebrated in such movies, as he remembered telling her once and reminded himself not to say again.

  The only artifact he owned was an iron trivet with a leg missing, which he had bought in Norway. He had been able to afford it (and take it out of the country) because it could not be confidently dated to the Viking era, meaning that it did have the look. Its homeliness had bemused his wife, but Jay merely shifted it from the coffee table to his study, hefting it lightly in his palm during phone conversations, its mottled surface ugly and reassuringly real.

  An empty toolbox sat on a bench near the service shed door, where employees tossed odd bits that had come up during ground excavations. Every few weeks Lynn asked Jay to go through them, and he would line up the potsherds, rusted hinges, and glass beads and gauge their provenance for whoever was interested.

  “This is ceramic,” he said as he rolled an item between his fingers. “What does it look like?”

  “A spool for thread?” asked a secretary.

  “It’s part of an old fuse, probably from the 1920s.” It was dispiriting how much of the crap buried several feet underground dated from the early twentieth century, even in areas that had been sparsely settled. Jay had found a few century-old implements over the years, but only o
ne of plausibly Indian origin and nothing truly old. “Does your sister still have that old green bottle?”

  “She keeps flowers in it.” Handmade nails were uncommon, but when you found one there would be more: the site where a building once stood.

  Contractors work long days through early autumn, so the late Saturday afternoons after the end of mosquito season are prized, a last chance for swim parties and cookouts. Jay was holding a beer and watching patties sizzle when he heard his host’s wife mention his interest in Vinland.

  “Really?” exclaimed her next-door neighbor, a young bank executive with a Black Bears logo on his polo shirt. “I thought they had proved that Leif Ericson reached America.”

  “North America,” said Jay, “but nobody knows where. The only settlement anyone has found is in Canada.”

  “Wasn’t there a map?” someone asked.

  “A map that included the New World, but with no settlements marked.” By now Jay knew all the usual questions.

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Jay was in Bar Harbor for the July low tides, looking for artifacts along the shore,” Stacy said helpfully. That sounded faintly inane, and to stave off questions about metal detectors, he shrugged and made a deprecating remark about the lowest tides being in January, when he had too much sense to go out.

  The subject came up again a few hours later, when most of the guests had retreated indoors and were sitting with their drinks in the TV room. Jay, who had a fifty-minute drive ahead, was restricting himself to coffee and feeling pleasantly tired, and was only half listening to the conversation when it swerved his way. Some women had been talking about antiques and collectibles, the Maine topic that interested him least, and one mentioned the recent case of a rare map dealer who had been arrested stealing from the Yale Library. A man asked, with woozy irrelevance, whether Yale was where they had the map showing that Norsemen had discovered America, and another replied he thought that map had been proven a forgery. Then someone said, “Jay knows about this.”