A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  But we wanted to come back home and did, even if we was all the next summer working our way. Into Canada we crossed again, finding a job here and there, till we finally boarded a grain boat over at Fort William, New Brunswick.

  The second day out I got seasick. Was you ever seasick? Oh dear God, it's awful. Think you're going to die . . . and then you want to! And Raymond laughed at me; then by the Jesus within three days he took sick too. I laughed at him then, because I'd got over it.

  We came into St. John and then found a train which brought us down to St. Stephen.

  When I crossed back into Maine, I said, "I'm never going to leave this state again." Oh, I don't mean it weren't good country out there, and full of game. One old Indian told me that his people never called it Milk River. They said "River That Flows Geese," and by golly he was right about that. You couldn't see the water for the birds when they'd molt their feathers and couldn't fly.

  We had Indians too, the Passamaquoddy people, which is of the Algonquins. More of them then, maybe. Different, anyhow. Did I ever show you the paddle made by Joe Mell? He was of the tribe, but part French too, as many were of their time. He was a character, old Joe. I bought that paddle from him for fifteen dollars, which was a week's pay, or pretty near. But listen: that blade was so thin you could spit right through it, still can; yet it's held up, straight as a die. You could lay a plumb line on it right now. What Joe said was to have your wood dry, real dry. And that remains the secret of a first class paddle. You learn these things. Better to learn them from a friend than a harder way . . . which I've also done, plenty.

  When I think of Joe, I can't help thinking about old Belding Yates too. He ran a company steamboat called the Robert H. I have a picture of her over home. Belding used her when he handled the log drives from Wabassus into Compass and then through the Thoroughfare and on down. That crew out there would work all day and all night driving logs. They had a bateau as well, with a little old outboard on her. The Robert H. towed a shanty scow, and there was a cook aboard. But that cook became very ill off Coffin Point and they carried him downlake. So Belding had to cook himself. He didn't want to, but the boss said, "You cook or you go downlake too."

  Well, the first thing he makes is a batch of cream of tartar biscuits, and he told me you couldn't break one, not with a hammer. So what's he do? He told me he just hid them. When the men asked him at lunchtime, he said there wasn't any, kept them out of sight.

  When everyone went back out on the boom, by golly, along came a lone wolf in a canoe. Joe Mell. He said, "Belgian, you got cookie?" Belding said yes he did, and while Joe was eating of the cookies and drinking tea, Belding took and put that box of biscuits in his canoe. When Joe started away, he thanked Belding, but then he looked in this wooden box. He paddled back. "Belgian," he said, "what you want me to do with breads?" Belding told him, "Just get them the hell out of here."

  You see, some will tell you otherwise, but it's my opinion we got along pretty well, white and Passamaquoddy together. When I was on that Old Stream drive, Newell Francis and I tended a station. We checked to see there was no cross logs; we kept things moving. He and I stayed in a little hunting camp, and we were making out good; every day one of the cookees would bring us our victuals, but we were pretty much on our own. We spent a lot of time as partners, you can bet, Newell and I did.

  There was an unusual incident about twenty years later. I cut my foot with an axe and I had to go down to Calais Hospital. I didn't want an infection. This Indian lady came in while I was waiting. I spoke to her when she sat down, and I asked if she lived out on Dana Point. She told me no, she was from Pleasant Point. "Then you must know Newell Francis," I said. "Know him?" She had a big smile on her; I can see it now. Turned out to be Newell's sister! I mentioned working alongside him, and I asked whatever happened to him. She told me he was gone. Sad thing, I had to say. I mean we got on so. I enjoyed that man. Makes me sorry right now just to think of it. I told that woman I liked her brother very much.

  That was the old Machias Lumber Company days, when I learned a little of the Indians' language. I can understand a lot more than I can say. Only the old ones speak the language anyhow among the Indians. The young ones aren't learning it, and it's not written down, I don't believe. So everything changes, good times and bad alike. You don't get anything much without losing something too, and lots of times when you guess you lost something you come up with something you didn't have before.

  But I'd imagine the best times was when I got my first guide's license. Plenty of guiding then, even if wages didn't amount to much. I'd climb that highest ridge over Whitney Cove, and you could count eighteen lakes on a clear day. I'm a lucky man that I ever could take in a sight like that. A lot of water.

  In wintertime I'd go back to the woods. Plenty of woods work too. Timber was king. All machines now. There's a verse:

  The screech owl haunts the camp at dawn

  Where the cook's tin pan woke men of brawn.

  So you can see it's nothing compared to what it was. Nothing. I went to work one time for that old Machias Lumber Company, on Second Mopang Lake. Seven of us was hired in Calais, but we traveled to Machias by train, then set out from there with two teams. There was a fella in Wesley named Wilbur Day, and at the time he and his chum George McGoon were the most notorious poachers in the state of Maine. They'd put a dog on an island till the deer went to water for salvation, which the law never allowed at all.

  Wilbur Day's mother and my grandmother were sisters. My granny's buried up here in the cemetery. Her name was very old-fashioned too— Vicey. Anyhow, we traveled on till we got to Wilbur's. He and his wife Millie ran an inn in that country. They had a barn too, so we put up overnight. In the morning, Millie made a wonderful breakfast, and we ate it, you bet your life, pancakes and biscuits and sausages and eggs and all.

  The teams were hooking up when someone drove in the yard. You could hunt till the fifteenth day of December in those days. Legally. Wilbur and Millie had a few sportsmen staying in with them, and there was several deer hung up around the place. Along came this solitary man, driving a buggy.

  Now Wilbur had one old hound named Sorry Face, saddest looking thing you ever saw, too old to harass the deer anymore. But that dog was wandering around this fella's wagon, and he was growling. Wilbur came over and said, "Get out, old Sorry Face! You et up all the deer and now you want to eat the warden." And it was the warden too, come in to check things over, because it's just as I say, Wilbur and that McGoon were notorious. "Get out, old Sorry Face!" Wilbur said. Then we went on ahead to Mopang.

  And even the mills are changed. I did some millwork too, as I explained. One time I signed on with the St. Croix Paper Company to work in the sorting gap. You see, all these companies had their own mark on their logs; you'd make it with a stamping axe. I've done that as well in my life. We'd sort the logs as they came through, because they were all together there. And once a week we'd sluice them, according to which mill they were going to.

  Yes, a lot of mills back then. I done well in that sorting gap, because I'd been a driver many times. You work on floating logs when you're young and you get so you can go wherever you want on one. I could swim, but most of those old-timers couldn't swim a stroke to save themselves.

  A man had to travel some, so I bought a car back around those days, after Tecky and I were married a year or so. I'd been working in the woods or the mills or on the rivers and I was guiding too. So we got a Model A, which was quite a car of its time. No heater, though. You had to heat up a soapstone and wrap it and lay it on the floor.

  Those were other days. But then again, we made out. I think we were more thankful for what we had than people today. They will grasp for more, but we were grateful for what we did have, even a soapstone when it was wintertime.

  But I liked all the seasons. We took them as they came along. Fall was hunting, by God, you said it. Old George Bagley lived on Tough End next door to me. Quite a man, turned his hand to anything, had that s
hop right by his house. Well, deer was plentiful, and it was the autumn, so George came over and sat on a bench in my yard. He said, "Let's go get a deer in the burn. Lots of apples down there." I told him, "We'll do it."

  On the way we jumped a few, but nobody got a shot till we separated and I moved a pair. I couldn't get a look, but they went over by George and he killed a spikehorn. We dressed him very careful, paunched him, wiped away all the blood we could with dry leaves.

  I said, "I'll lug him," and I did. By and by we got abreast of Big Falls, and I needed a breather. This wasn't a heavy deer, but the walking wasn't easy in that old burn; a good charge of young brush, you see. So we sat down for a smoke. George's hearing was a little impaired, but I heard a dog after we stopped. It was Bobby Gardner's. God bless him, he just wouldn't keep them dogs at home.

  Pretty soon a deer came by, but we didn't need him, and we never lifted a barrel. But when the dog came on his trail, he waited a moment looking at us, and George said, "That's no good." So I put a bead on him. We both did. I had a .44-40 rifle from my uncle; George had a .45-70. The dog started down the road and we both stood up and fired. George turned to me and said, "Either I'm as good a shot as I ever was or you're getting better."

  People might not like that story. I don't like it. But you know, we counted on the deer, and dogs in the woods was a great menace. We told Bobby so many times and he paid it all no mind. No one knew what George and I done that day; we just buried the poor hound right there. I didn't mind people dogging deer for food, but they wanted to keep their dogs home when they wasn't using them.

  It was a time of these stories, when they all got started and when we told them. Us fellas did that back then, so we had a very large assortment of them. I remember a comical incident. It was when George MacArthur and I were sitting by the company store. A big car came in that day, and by the Jesus out jumped a chauffeur, suit and all. He started asking where he could find a mechanic.

  "How about you?" he asked George. "You aren't a mechanic?"

  "No, sir," said George, "I'm a MacArthur."

  I remember Earl Brown was there too, and him and I took to laughing! "No, sir, I'm a MacArthur, not a mechanic." That was George, all right, quick-witted.

  The other fella, Earl Brown, he was a great big rugged cuss. Nice man, too. I guided with him and worked together with him in the woods. Once we came back from Princeton, Earl and I and Glenn MacArthur, George's brother. There was a beer room down there, just to be sociable, because that woman's beer was something terrific; I can't tell you how bad it tasted. So this particular evening we happened to purchase a small jar of something better, you see. On the way home we pulled over and had a tap or two.

  Now Glenn was quite a boxer from his days in the service, where he was one of the best, I guess. He said, "You boys get out and I'll show you some pointers about boxing." Earl Brown said, "I'm not much of a hand at boxing." But Glenn squared away with him anyhow and slapped him two or three times on the face. Very quick hands, you want to believe. Thing about Earl Brown, though, he was quick too, especially for a man of an awful size. He goes sideways and makes one lunge. He throws Glenn down and puts a foot on him. "That's the pointer I learned," he tells him.

  But you can hear what you like about us getting into all kinds of fights; this, I believe, is mostly from people who never knew the real stories. About every fight was in good fun like the one I just spoke of, if they happened at all. Oh, a squabble over a card game maybe, but even

  then nothing to matter much. Folks was sweet-natured and had to be. You don't go on a river drive or anything else and work so hard and then have time or ambition for feuding with your own gang.

  Spring of the year, I'd start in guiding, which was what I looked forward to. I did a lot of trapping in the bargain. We still set a few, Jack McElvey and I. One fall we caught twenty-seven mink, covered a lot of territory. You stand a better show to catch a mink in the little brooks than in one big river somewhere. I made a good scent; learned it from a gunsmithing man. And I have a very unusual shotgun myself, a .44. You can shoot a .44 bullet with it, but then you can buy fine shot to fit it too. Or you could once anyway. Some have often tried to buy that gun off me, but I still got her.

  A gun's no way to end anything, and I know it; but you best turn your machine off, I suppose. I'm about talked out. For now, I mean.

  Earl Bonness feeding a white perch to a loon on West Grand Lake.

  Small Wonders

  When I watched Sorn eating, I conjured a small but fierce animal. The boy hunched over the table, head low, arms encircling his plate, as if for fear that someone might try to steal his food. I had no doubt he'd snarl, lunge, bite if I reached a hand toward him. He looked cute as a button— and volatile as a cornered mink.

  About two years later, when I introduced him to fishing on a Maine lake, I'd remember that earlier version of Sorn. The outing is nearly a decade past now, yet I can still feel the mesmeric rocking of my canoe among the waves of a July afternoon, can still picture the joy and mischief in his dark eyes.

  We'd come to know the boy while my wife and I and three of the children—a son of sixteen, daughters of thirteen and nine—lived for half a year near Lugano, in Switzerland's only Italian-speaking canton, Ticino. For the spring semester I'd joined the faculty of a small American-administered college there with an international student body. That time in our careers was a delight, not least because of Sorn and his family.

  My wife had met his adoptive mother at a luncheon put on by an expatriate women's group. The two had a first name in common. "Other Robin," or "Swiss Robin," as our family sometimes came to call her, was a comely American married to Giulio, a Ticino native. Their daughter Michelle matched up well in age and temperament with our youngest, my namesake daughter Sydney.

  The two Robins soon met up again, having arranged a play date for Michelle and Sydney, who would go skating at a nearby rink. Europe being Europe, their mothers could chat over cappuccini at the rink's attractive café.

  The girls circled the ice, and the two Robins soon recognized soul-mates in one another. This led to our families' meeting for supper at Other Robin's home in the hamlet of San Antonino, forty kilometers north of our rented house near the college campus and the American academy that the two older kids attended. (Stalwart Sydney went to a nearby Montessori School, picking up Italian there by mere exposure, as children uncannily do.)

  A visitor could hear three idioms in the Bognuda household: English, Italian and the local dialect, parts of which, when spoken slowly, I could understand. Its primary elements were evidently Italian but also included—along with some from Romansch, Ladino, and who-knows-what-else—a fair number from French. For instance, I recall the Antoninese word for cherry, perhaps because the fruit hung so copiously from one of their backyard trees. It's cerese, more like the French cerise than the Italian cigliegie.

  Giulio proved charming, kind, and hilariously funny. His English was fluent, though unpolished, which contributed greatly to the comic effect. He told us that once he won Robin's heart years back, he gave up on learning her language grammatically; he could make himself perfectly clear on any subject, but couldn't grasp, say, the indefinite article: a man would always be one man to him, for instance, as in, "I was at work and one man told me this joke . . . "

  Giulio also proved a fine cook, particularly at the hearth he'd wrought on their patio, complete with elegant stone chimney and a clever suspension device to lower or raise his grill as he chose. The Bognudas, like most Ticinesi, had a grotto too, a simple basement eating place, in which Giulio had installed a similar system.

  I wonder whether his outdoor cooking paraphernalia represented European refinement as compared to our cruder American version at the Maine camp, a basic fireplace against which we prop archaic metal broilers. I could enjoy both methods almost equally, and it may have been no more than mere sentiment on my part—the recollection of so many family and friendly gatherings around our own blaze—that inc
lined me even slightly toward our more primitive approach.

  As I say, however, the pleasures of that Swiss interlude owed a lot to the hours we spent by fires on the Bognudas' patio and in their grotto, and elsewhere in one another's company. We became close friends, and so, like them, if of course to a lesser degree, we anticipated with a mixture of apprehension, delight, and curiosity the Bognudas' trip to Thailand halfway through our sojourn. They'd be traveling to meet Sorn and, all being well, to bring him back from an orphanage in Bangkok.

  Giulio, Robin and Michelle came to learn the boy was one of three hundred children at that facility, which had a staff of only four. No wonder the child protected his plate! Food had obviously been hard to come by in the years since his obscure birth. Sorn at four years old didn't weigh a lot more than a boy half his age; he was severely malnourished and had significant medical problems, chiefly respiratory, when he reached San Antonino.

  And he had, in effect, no language, not even Thai.

  Still, during the two weeks when his prospective parents and sister stayed with him in a Bangkok hotel, they all formed a sufficient bond for the new son to come home.

  Home. I can't help but wonder what that concept may have meant to Sorn. He must have needed to learn it, as thoroughly as the languages he'd come to speak, but perhaps at greater effort.

  After he'd been in Switzerland for a short time, however, I watched Sorn running, jumping, and somersaulting all over a certain lush meadow near the Bellinzona Castle, and I thought the whole while that I beheld a miracle even more wondrous than the emergence of some gorgeous butterfly from winter chrysalis. How quickly and improbably this energetic protégé had flown up and out of that swarmed orphanage!

  From the start, of course, we would all now and then contemplate the fates of children who hadn't been so blessed, the parentless ones still there in Bangkok and indeed all over the globe, inarticulate, hungry, ill, and neglected, the ones who hadn't flown and might never. Yet here at least was this precious creature who'd rapidly transformed himself from feral guardian of his food to someone who could frolic like that—and could later savor, still avid but nonchalant now, one of Giulio's risotti or a chicken prepared by Swiss Robin or a simple sandwich, and do it all, yes, at home. You won't consider it sentimental if I tell you that Vermont Robin and I could get emotional over such a spectacle.