A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Copyright © 2013 by Sydney Lea

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of the material herein. If there are any inadvertent omissions we apologize to those concerned and would be grateful if notified so that we can amend future reprints or editions of this book.

  Lines from the poem "Angina" are reprinted from Recounting the Seasons: Collected Poems, 1958—2003 (2005) by John Engels with permission of the University of Notre Dame Press.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lea, Sydney, 1942-

  A north country life : tales of woodsmen, waters, and wildlife / by Sydney Lea.

  p. cm.

  Summary: "A collection of essays, organized by the changing of the seasons, about the author's strong connection to his family, friends, and the northern outdoors'—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61608-863-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  eISBN 978-1-62087-956-6

  1. Outdoor life. I. Title.

  PS3562.E16N67 2013

  814'.54-dc23

  2012034517

  Printed in the United States of America

  For all the great old teachers of whom I speak here, as I will everywhere, all the days of my life, and for David Tobey, living heir.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PRELUDE

  COLD TIME

  Weathers and Places

  Daybook, February

  That Little Boy You're Holding

  Daybook, March

  SPRING

  Dirt and Blossom

  Daybook, Mid-April

  Now Look

  The Turkey Cure

  Daybook, May

  Ownership

  Daybook, June

  Appetite

  SUMMER

  The Crossing

  Brown, Gilbey's, Happy Ending

  Daybook, July

  Living with the Stories

  Small Wonders

  Daybook, August

  Everything Comes Together

  FALL

  Daybook, Late September

  Turned Around

  Refurbishment

  Daybook, October

  Eighty Percenters: Reflections on Grouse and Grouse Dogs

  Blessed

  Daybook, November

  God Bless Hunting

  Daybook, December

  Trust

  COLD TIME: REPRISE

  Daybook, January

  Wild Black Duck

  Snowdust

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Foreword

  "It's a changed world," says Earl Bonness, an eighty-eight-year-old former North Country lumberjack and guide. "We told stories. We lived with stories." Sydney Lea's wonderful new book is no idyll of a perfect past, but a vivid and enduring profile of a place and its people and a sure stay against the passing of that older New England world and its towering "barrel-chested, deep-voiced characters." His own stories and tales, journal or "Daybook" entries, poems and essays—full of wit, sharp images, and humanity—let us enter and live in that passing world. Some passages are directly addressed to those great figures, some are given to us in their own earthy words. There is a poignant letter to a father gone, a portrait of a particular bird dog on point, a stunning battle with an outsized trout. Throughout there is an incrementing of the author's rich character—through what he has learned and sees and through his nimble language—so that what may at first seem random builds inexorably to a full and textured story of a man's unique life.

  His is a life "addicted to the natural world"—and Lea has grown to know it intimately: the turkey coming out of the "hop horn-beam grove"; the ways of nighthawk, woodcock, grouse, and red-ringed blackbird; the unforgettable sound of two barred owls "yammering." The book is framed by seasons in the North Country, from one "Cold Time" through spring, summer, and fall to another winter. For each, he finds discrete words and emblems with his poet's shrewd eye—"Spring, with its tobacco-and-mushroom odor in the leaf mold," or fall marked by his flushing "a grouse from behind a rootball."

  Hunting pervades every aspect of Lea's life. It is the hinge that helps to blend the "natural and human worlds" for him, and his spirited celebration of hunting is marked everywhere by the humanity it breeds, from his love of his dogs to the solitude of the woods in their season; from the great life forces in his mentors and companions to the way in which the entire ritual encourages him to see and experience the natural world more deeply.

  Lea's ear, upon which little is lost, is always attuned to the pungent sounds of words, the names of things special to his North Country— places with names like Slewgundy Ridge, Big Musquash Stream, Freeze-to-Death Island, Slaughter Point. He is attached to each of his bird dogs, Hector, Gus, Sam, Bessie, Pete, and others, but mostly he treasures the great presences of his great teachers, many of them gone, to make them "a part of today." They are men and women educated by the earth and by their often hard lives, who knew forest and river, who had diverse and finely tuned skills, who never shied from their hardest work, who taught him woodcraft and how to fish and hunt wisely. Like a great wind, elders such as Creston MacArthur and his uncle George, Don Chambers, Mattie, Annie Fitch, Carter White, Bill White, and the irresistible Earl Bonness bring him "back to his senses." But while he savors memories of what has perished, and what remains that he wants to preserve, he refuses elegies, which feel to him "like posture, pretense, artifice."

  This book is instead a celebration—of affections, closeness to woods and waters, and images and people who will last. He cannot hold back what is slipping downstream but he can remember and cherish and embody. Always in A North Country Life, Sydney Lea looks hard and brilliantly at his unique world, looking for "specific meanings, cryptic but crucial."

  —Nick Lyons

  Woodstock, New York

  October 2012

  Acknowledgments

  Some of these chapters, frequently in quite different shape and/or under different titles, have appeared in the following periodicals or anthologies, whose editors I thank for their kindness:

  Gray's Sporting Journal, "Eighty Percenters: Reflections on Grouse and Grouse Dogs," "God Bless Hunting," "Turned Around," "Wild Black Duck"

  Northern Woodlands, "Prelude," "Daybook, December," "Daybook, March," "Daybook, May," "Dirt and Blossom"

  Rise Forms, "Brown, Gilbey's, Happy Ending" (online)

  Trout, "Daybook, June"

  Afield (eds. Dave Smith and Robert DeMott, 2010, Skyhorse Publishing), "Blessed"

  Numéro Cinq, "Weathers and Places"

  From Daughters & Sons to Fathers: What I've Never Said (ed. Constance Warloe, Story Line Press, 2001), "That Little Boy You're Holding"

  River Teeth, "Now Look"<
br />
  Prairie Schooner·, "Living with the Stories: Bonness Verbatim"

  The Southern Review, "The Turkey Cure"(also included in The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories, Jay Cassell, ed., Skyhorse Publishing, 2008)

  Ascent, "Ownership"

  The Georgia Review, "Appetite"

  Margie, "Daybook, July"

  Note:

  In the far greater portion of the pages that follow, despite a foray or two into the Mountain West and the pastoral Pennsylvania of my earliest years, I meditate on somewhat out-of-the-way parts of upper New England: places I've lived in, fished, hunted, and haunted.

  The essays chronicle a life, my own (though who has only one life?), in relation to its region and more crucially to a number of the region's inhabitants. I grieve that too many of those friends, who so blessed my life as man and writer, died before I could get to such a project. We shall never see their like again.

  I've always been intrigued by the blending of natural and human worlds—or rather by the dramatic illustration of that blending, which is after all an abiding one, however we may veil it in our technological era. I commemorate men and women for whom that blending was simply a given, something they never so much as considered. There could be no veil.

  I have given aliases to a couple of them, or in some cases made a composite character from several people I knew well. I take these liberties in the first instance because I have little right to explain other human beings' pains and passions for them, and in the latter because the strategy strikes me, paradoxically, as providing a surer way to truth than what passes these days for unvarnished memoir.

  In short, some of these accounts hover uncertainly between fiction and essay, as I hope I make clear in their presentation. Here and there, having small choice, I've taken a scrap of history passed on to me by this elder or that, and attempted to construct as plausible a story as I could from a mere clue. In such chapters, however, and everywhere, I seek above all the truthful flavor of a territory and people, rather than cut-and-dried factuality.

  I have models for such an approach among the folks whom I honor here. As the nonpareil lumberjack poet-raconteur George MacArthur once told me, The Gospel truth ain't the only truth.

  Prelude

  Hookum-snuffie. Almost no one knows what it means anymore, and few would care.

  Why should they?

  More and more, everything about me seems out of date, perhaps to an even greater degree than with most people of a certain age. Not much after dawn today, for instance, I took my ash paddle, fashioned by the late Hazen Bagley, and set out on the water in a sixteen-foot wood and canvas canoe, fabricated by the Old Town Company in 1950.

  I inherited the boat from my long-gone father's late brother. The men took their sons far north to this part of Maine in that canoe and its partner, my dad's eighteen-footer, which blew off a beach some years after in a storm, never to be recovered. A mystery, a vanishing, among many. I was nine years old on that first trip.

  Those guide model canoes were more than merely beautiful. The hull planks were feathered, not butted, for example, to keep sand and grit out of their seams. The fabled Grand Lake Stream canoe-maker, Lawrence "Pop" Moore, told me he considered them among the best such craft ever produced.

  An hour and some back, my canoe glided me, its progress as smooth as the lake itself, to the foot of the Machias River at Third Lake Dam.

  To one like me, of course, there is far more complex and inscrutable technology at work nowadays than ever went into a canoe, no matter how exquisitely made. What can it mean, even out here, to be such a paddler in an era of jet skis? Perhaps more daunting, at least to me, what is a writer in an age of Internet service even at the summit of Mt. Everest?

  Twitter. Google. Facebook. Skype.

  What does solitude signify anymore? What on earth is a poet, not to mention a poet-woodsman, poet-angler, poet-hunter? Will he have any readers at all? If so, this is for them, though it's even more for each of the men and women I'll be conjuring, masters of language themselves, one and all, one and all gone on.

  You cut a small branch of hardwood and then you fashion a hook by nipping it at a fork. With the hook, you can lift a seething pot by its bail when your spuds and onions get to boiling over, or whenever they're ready to taste. That's the hookum. If you know what you're doing, you can lift the lid and judge the readiness by smell. That's the snuffie.

  Hookum-snuffie. It's believed to derive from Passamaquoddy pidgin, and no, it can't mean anything now. Still I say it. There's something deep in the combination of words, and in many ancient others, that I always loved, and which I still want. That's why I now and then make a hookum-snuffie just to do it. And I never shape one without naming it aloud in the woods or on the shore. It helps me to see some of the last of the genuine woodsmen again, along with their strong wives, and in rare cases even one or both of their parents, all of whom had their special skills. Nineteenth-century figures, really—like me, though of course I'm speaking only of temperament. I'm not one of them, could never have been.

  I've come back and back to this corner of Maine for more than sixty years. Its hold on me grows even more powerful in the absence of those great characters I met in young life, more powerful too as, inevitably, the part of me weakens that busts through the puckerbrush for wild game, wades heavy water for trout, or portages more than a few hundred yards at a go.

  Every elation here—each bird pointed and flushed, each noble whitetail buck, each loon and moose and northwest wind, with its wild tattered apron of waves and its rushing clouds—is at least equally freighted with its opposite. I ask, in my vanity: how can I surrender all this to others, so few of whom can possibly know the region's history, as I do, by way of its old-time characters?

  I ache to see the foxfire glint again in Earl Bonness's eyes, say, as he tends his flame and his smutted cookware. He speaks of driving great evergreen logs out of Mopang Stream. I heard him tell about all that. I yearn to hear George MacArthur, who could throw a broad-blade sleeper axe and bury it, time after time, in some not-so-near tree's trunk. He told me how and when he learned that trick.

  The old ones told me and told me and told me.

  George and Earl always claimed they liked to work. Not many nowadays would truly savor their sort of labor, which would kill most modern humans, as it would have me, even when I was twenty. Paid by the back-breaking job, not the hour, and still, like as not, you were hunting or fishing or poaching for food, day or night, in the scant interludes.

  The male elders are barrel-chested, deep-voiced figures, who still seem mythic, despite the tempering irony of my older vision. Earl knew what it was to ride the long-logs clear to the ocean, where they'd be gathered into schooners and carried south under great sails to busier ports.

  George knew what it was to cut ties through the whole of a winter on White's Island without once seeing the camp in daylight—out by lantern before dawn, back the same way after dark.

  George's niece Annie knew what it was to use a canoe for a bedroom.

  And I—I know what they told me.

  They're all dead now. Everyone else in the world, or so it can seem in irrational moments, lies dead too.

  The lumber company blew up Third Lake Dam about forty years back, after moving timber by water was outlawed. Reaching its ghostly site, I heard an eagle scream uplake, but I couldn't find her. I started a fire and waited until the pot-lid danced. I hadn't brought anything to cook but coffee.

  Hookum-snuffie, I breathed, imagination transforming those pillars of mist out on the lake to river drivers riding their wood.

  2012. The new century isn't all that new anymore, though how recently it seemed so. Now it recedes into one before and one before that and words and phrases call to me: deer noise on the beach, are gone on the clean jump; a tin cup wants more coffee; there are bad doings on the lake; a rugged man is withy; a big chopped tree is quite a stick.

  Earl has a habit of slowly filling and tamping his pipe as he
starts to spin a story. George makes a certain wave of his hand when he does. Do you mind the time, George begins, the verb an old form of remember. . .

  It's as though I mind Earl scampering over the logs in the boom; soon they'll lift the dam-gates and sluice that mass into the Machias.

  George has swamped a spot where he'll drop the first tall cedar of the morning; he spits on his mitts, grabs the bucksaw.

  I've long considered myself a wordsmith, and though I do so in my late sixties with a satisfaction that dims as my sense of the literary arts' future does, I don't quite know how else to know things. I go on working at a magic return of what's perished, that old profusion of a beloved idiom, one that lies hidden and hurts me.

  Hookum-snuffie. I muttered this morning. Hookum-snuffie.

  Then I doused my fire, steam wasting itself into the heavens. I said it again, more slowly. It rose out of me on a column of air. I dreamed my old dream: that some word—fossilized, forgotten—could quell an old longing.

  George MacArthur with his old sleeper axe.

  Cold Time

  Weathers and Places

  —in memory of Creston MacArthur (1919-76)

  Wherever you may be, if you are capable of memory there, can you fetch back that dawn on Freeze-to-Death Island, the sleet jabbing at our faces like some archaic dentist's tool? A small flock of geese drops in among the duck decoys, and without so much as a word between us, we let them paddle around unharmed on the riddled surface. There aren't many geese in this part of the world, and there's something so elegant about these few that we just can't fire.

  At length you rise from behind the rock we use for cover and shout, unaccountably, "Off to Cuba, baby ducks!" You pronounce it Cuber, like JFK. October of '63. The big birds flush in a tumult of sound, and it soon occurs to us again how damned raw it is. As your best friend Earl would say, colder than a frog's mouth.

  What elegy can there be?

  As a young man, I had a real knack for remembering weather like that, or any. I can still tell you, say, that the winter of '81 brought virtually no snow to the north country. Several April days in '73 were unseasonable, to put it gently; they got hot as a flatiron. My son, your namesake, was not quite two, and I still see the chocolate Easter bunny liquefying in his hand as we stood together in the dooryard. That seems sad now, and did even then, which is curious. The boy wasn't fazed in the least himself.