A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Two years later, in the summer of 2003, the Bognudas came to the States, as they do almost annually, to visit Robin's widowed father in Boston. We urged them to extend their stay and join us at the island camp, six or seven hours to the north.

  They had less than a week to spend there, but happily, in a summer of pretty nasty weather otherwise all over upper New England, our days were fair ones. I found the evenings especially sweet, the kids playing board games in the cookhouse and the adults talking at fireside about what I can only and insufficiently describe as things that matter. Children and grandchildren, it seems, will bring that out in one man or one woman.

  On the first night, hearing the boys and girls laughing and fussing inside over Boggle or Taboo, Vermont Robin recounted something, precisely, about games. Her story made me look foolish, as well it should have.

  When our family was in Lugano, the two Sydneys would often play Blackjack, though we called it Pontoon, in the manner of my office mate, Christopher Matthews, a delightful Irish poet who became another fast friend.

  My wife remembered that she'd often bring the female Sydney along when she crossed the border to take advantage of the cheaper Italian grocery prices. Opposite the market stood a toy store, where our daughter loved to buy Legos. Before too long, she'd amassed a major collection. Ingenious plastic constructions crowded the small living room.

  Our Robin found it impressive that the girl had saved up so much of her paltry allowance and her birthday money. At length, however, she grew suspicious, and Sydney had to confess—or was it brag?—that she'd never once lost a game of Pontoon to me in our whole time abroad, and that each game had been played for stakes.

  I have always found compulsive gambling beyond my ken. Still, exactly like some problem gambler, I clung to the notion that luck was simply bound to turn my way if I kept playing. As things developed, though, my luck remained steadily awful, and I must have lost as much as a hundred dollars in Swiss francs during the semester.

  I laughed with the rest to hear Robin's tale, recalling how Sydney would look at me out of the corner of one slitted eye. "Pontoon?" she'd drawl like a gun moll, her lips barely parted, and down I'd sit at the dining room table, ripe for one more trouncing. I just didn't know how to play Pontoon, it appears. But there was a multitude of other things I didn't know during that Swiss sojourn, even if I can't be faulted for that. These are things I'd now pay a lot more than card money not to be obliged to know.

  I couldn't, for instance, have forecast the catastrophe that would erupt on the 11th of September in that year, shortly after our return to Vermont. If someone had shown me photographs of people leaping out of enormous buildings, I'd have imagined Hollywood-style special effects. Nor, however crude his thinking had already proved, would I have guessed that a sitting president would launch the intemperate, illogical folly he called Iraqi Freedom in response to the Trade Center disaster, a war that killed scores of thousands to avenge three thousand American deaths.

  Sitting there on our peaceable island, whenever I heard the distant drone of an airplane, I would discover myself brooding on the countless victims of conflict past and present. Would we ever learn? I'm afraid the realist in me said no, still does. There existed, and always will, enough suffering to go around on our gorgeous planet, but did that indelible misery make it more or less heartwarming for us all to see Sorn taking part in the other kids' entertainments?

  I believe it made it more so. Those hours after supper seemed a reprise of that moment in the Swiss meadow, with Sorn cavorting carefree over its deep green. I'd think what I thought back then: in a world as cruel as this one can be, the salvation of a single small soul must be disproportionately meaningful. And their parts in such a redemption made mother Robin, father Giulio, and sister Michelle all the more precious as human beings.

  Our little island struck me as a social paradise, however fragile and of course illusory, devoid not only of violence but also of the bigotry that so often engenders it. Shia and Sunni, Arab and Jew, Indian and Pakistani, Muslim and infidel, fundamentalist and agnostic, animist and janjaweed, Catholic and Protestant, black and white, gay and straight. The list seems endless.

  The little Thai boy had already encountered milder forms of such prejudice at home, had experienced the thoughtless remarks and stares of adult and schoolmate alike. Narrow-minded, unconsidered opinions, of course, know no national boundaries, but the Swiss, even certain of the Latinate Ticinesi—so famous at once for prosperity and for xenophobia, one perhaps relating to the other—may have a better claim to that behavior than most.

  Robin jokes that many Swiss view the Third World as beginning immediately on the far sides of their own borders. More seriously, Giulio recalls a neighbor's slur of an African woman who'd passed them in Lugano.

  "Putana!" the neighbor muttered. Whore.

  "How," Giulio marvels in disgust and disbelief, "can one man see one woman, only see her, and say this?" He shakes his head and breathes "porco cane," meaning literally "pig dog," but metaphorically commenting on the world's far-ranging idiocy.

  But as I say, the world didn't seem in the least idiotic during the Bognudas' days with us at the camp. On the last of these, my friend Dave Tobey and I mounted our fishing trip. We headed for Fourth Machias Lake, which seemed a pretty safe bet. Once you locate a school of white perch there, it's generally a matter of cranking up one after another until you have enough for a fry.

  Sorn sat on the thwart just ahead of me in the canoe's stern, Giulio in the bow; the pretty Robins, Sydney, and Michelle rode with Dave in a broad-beamed john boat he'd borrowed from his Uncle Junior.

  I baited Sorn's hook with a night crawler and threw it over the side, showing him how to lower the worm until his line went slack, then reel it up a few turns to keep the bait off the bottom, away from the eels and hornpout.

  There followed a very short interlude, during which I gazed at the tiny creature before me, backlit by a lazy blue sky, now and then briefly darkening as a cumulus ambled by overhead. A female merganser and her nearly grown clutch cruised at the mouth of Dead Stream in a long, long train; at my distance, I could have imagined some serpentine sea monster, but a friendly one.

  I was startled from my reverie when Sorn's rod jerked savagely. Then the biggest smallmouth bass I'd seen in years leapt from the water. I watched the boy's mouth gape, his eyes widened to behold Behemoth right at their level.

  He dropped the rod in his shock and alarm, but, fortunately enough, I was able to grab it just before the bass wrestled the whole rig over the gunwale. What had been a calm so deep, at least for me, that I could feel the tug of actual slumber became in the instant all high adventure, the brawny smallmouth towing my canoe from side to side at anchor, the fish's early runs so wild that I twice reached a hand to add a little heft to Sorn's rod, at which the boy—as he'd earlier done with his food—hunched, elbows out, and grimaced. Just as he'd warned against anyone's taking his supper two years before, he warned me now that the thing on that line was his, by God!

  In time, and quite a bit of it at that, I managed to net the brute.

  We released him, but not before we could snap a picture of Sorn holding up his bass by the lower lip. We still have the photograph of this handsome, copper-skinned boy and the bruiser, who stretches from the top of his head to his waist. The smallmouth looks to be about four pounds; Sorn can be little more than thirty. So our new angler's first fish turned out to be a creature weighing more than ten percent of what he did himself. I'd have had to tie into a bass of twenty pounds-plus to match him.

  The bronze of the bass and Sorn's pigment were almost identical; his quivering echoed the subtle tremor of the fish, immobilized though it was by that pinch on the lip; the patina of the venerable canoe's hull planks shone under sunlight and blended with the mahogany of the wetland lake's surface. In short, the whole world in and around that slip of a watercraft seemed somehow lit both from within and without.

  The poetry lover in me recalled
the close of Elizabeth Bishop's stunning poem, "The Fish." Though the one she portrays is unlike Sorn's, having put up no fight at all, and though we were blessedly far from the pollutants Bishop mentions in her narrative, nonetheless the author could be describing the effects of our own scene, at least on me:

  I stared and stared

  and victory filled up

  the little rented boat,

  from the pool of bilge

  where oil had spread a rainbow

  around the rusted engine

  to the bailer rusted orange,

  the sun-cracked thwarts,

  the oarlocks on their strings,

  the gunnels—until everything

  was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

  And I let the fish go.

  The universe was indeed as hopeful and auspicious as a rainbow, however momentarily. The smallmouth had arisen from the mysterious bottom layer of Fourth Lake, to which we returned it as quickly as we needed to. Sorn had arisen from a castaway's place in what was for us an exotic society; but he was not—no, never never never! —going to be put back.

  Such, more or less, was my later reverie, from which I was called again, this time by my little fisherman's piping voice.

  "Ooooh, Popcorns!" he cried, still quaking with adrenaline and delight at his catch. "Ooooh, Popcorns!"

  I laughed aloud at the nickname, which Sorn had pinned on me back in Europe. He'd heard our daughter Catherine refer to me as Pops, and had misconstrued the word in a way that still delights me. Though Sorn's a young man of fourteen now, I hope I'll forever remain his Popcorns.

  Addressed that way on Fourth Lake, I remembered the first time Sorn used the nickname. We were walking a cobbled street along the shores of Lake Lugano, the boy light as a leaf on my shoulders. As we passed some high roller's Ferrari Testa Rosa outside a restaurant, he cried, just as now, "Ooooh, Popcorns!" He'd come, in his short life as a Westerner, to love the mightiest automobiles he beheld; blending two of his languages, he called them "fortissimo cars."

  So things had started wonderfully with our bass, and they stayed that way. Everyone—all the kids, Other Robin, Vermont Robin, and Giulio—caught fat perch after perch, Dave and I busy the whole while baiting and re-baiting hooks. A pair of loons, aroused by the action, came within a boat's length and circled, cackling and moaning for half an hour. At one point, Dave, sharp-eyed as ever, noticed an eagle perched above the Fifth Lake Stream ridge. One of our gang had just caught a young pickerel, and Dave twisted its neck and threw it about thirty feet. We all watched the mighty bird coast straight at us, as if trained to do so, dipping at last to snatch up the fish, then flying back to his lookout white pine.

  The sun had begun lowering in the west, we had more than sufficient perch to cook in our big outdoor pan, and I didn't want to be cleaning fish in the dark. It had been a fine outing, all agreed. My one disappointment matched Giulio's. Whatever else he may have desired from his adventures in remote Maine, the most important thing was to see the animal he called alce, a word, needless to say, I hadn't needed in Italian. If I'd known the animal's Latin designation, alces alces, my friend would not have had to do his pantomime, hands cupped over his head to suggest palmated antlers.

  Now if I'm not trying to show a visitor a moose, it seems, I practically have to shoo the big things out of the road. The moment I want them to appear, though, they might as well have gone extinct. So if it would be wrong to say we got into our trucks with heavy hearts, I for one did at least share some of Giulio's dissatisfaction at not having seen the alce.

  When we took for home, however, I hadn't gone two hundred yards before a young bull trotted out onto the dirt logging road. Giulio was in Dave's truck behind me, so, after Sorn had had a good look, I pulled to the side to let the others pass. After Dave went by, our little caravan followed that animal as it cantered ahead for a quarter mile or so, before dropping a shoulder and clattering into a stand of alders.

  The bull was far from full grown, his rack pretty modest by moose standards. But I'd almost bet our whole crew felt what I felt after the end of such a day.

  Sometimes the small wonders are more than enough.

  I looked down at Sorn, whose eyes were once again like saucers.

  "Fortissimo alce," I remarked.

  "Si," he answered, his face in an earnest frown. "Si, Popcorns, fortissimo!"

  Daybook, August

  I lay last night on the camp's dock and fell into a light sleep. When a baleful-sounding loon answered by another woke me, it was as though I'd suddenly discovered my own eyesight, and had never known its capacities before.

  I gazed at the full moon, which lit up the shoreline, turning the mists along it into a great golden sash, seven or eight feet wide, which followed the island's contours. I almost believed I might walk the periphery to find that glowing band had enwrapped the whole mass like a Christmas ribbon.

  But again I turned my gaze upward, trying to concentrate on a single star among millions—and failing. How could I not?

  The poet Samuel Coleridge described awe as a condition in which you feel you are nothing. He felt that way in the great European cathedrals. I felt it just there where I reclined. I've felt so countless times. And yet such self-extinction seemed a balm.

  Everything Comes Together

  Late August, and cooler than it might be. Autumn impends, for which I will forevermore be a sucker, though I savor all the seasons.

  This morning I mean to explore a little portion of local wildness I've never studied properly except in winter, when, frozen over, it can't show its true nature. I mean the swamp on the west side of our property, bordering the rock-strewn Old County Road, which was thrown up by the town about the time of my birth.

  Why head to such a place? Because the day's itch has swamp in it. I can't explain myself better. Not yet. We shall see.

  Even when the ice-and snow-cover let me pass over the swamp's real swampiness, I often feel some disquiet there. Not that the place holds anything truly dangerous; I won't fall into quicksand, the idea of which thrilled me to the spine during those childhood afternoons with their radio westerns. Peanut butter sandwich in one hand, root beer in the other, I'd shut my eyes and tip my chair against the Philco's blond cabinet listening to "Sky King," "The B-Bar-B Ranch," "Sergeant Preston," and such. I can still feel the throb of the speaker against my upper back.

  No, there's no quicksand to make my gut clench, but like any swamp bigger than a quarter acre, this one does have its share of eeriness. Hard traveling too. I picture myself hopping from tussock to tussock, missing as often as I land, sinking to mid-shin or deeper.

  As it turns out, despite late summer's plentiful rains, the swamp has all but drained itself. I can't make a bit of sense of that, and the surprise is oddly disappointing. Traveling to the far side proves so much quicker than I expected that I blink for a moment, as if adjusting my eyes to light after darkness, a darkness that wasn't there.

  I'm suddenly and silently quoting from a poem. No, don't worry, I may be a poet, but I don't trip through wood and dell with verse dripping off my tongue. It's just that the passage that comes seems to fit this situation so exactly. And even better, the passage is one of the shamefully few I have by heart. Something called me to memorize it on my very first encounter.

  You can find the lines in The Prelude, at a point where the young William Wordsworth gets excited, to say the least, by the prospect of finally crossing the Alps through the Simplon Pass. However, after he asks for directions from a peasant (who may well have thought of the local wonders as pretty much everyday stuff) our traveler discovers that he's already made his crossing!

  Years later, in his reconstruction of the moment, Wordsworth says that, whether he knew it or not back then,

  Imagination—here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapor that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break th
rough; But to my conscious soul I now can say— "I recognize thy glory" . . .

  Now I don't want to overstate things here. To begin with, Wordsworth was traveling a well-worn path and I've been bushwhacking, following my nose and on the hunt for whatever rare openings in the under-story presented themselves. I've gotten where I am by choice, not, like Wordsworth, by mistake. I've sought improvisation, not stumbled into it. The distinction may seem petty, and in any case the real point is only that the great man and I revere imagination, as don't we all in some measure? For every person, however, no matter what he or she does or is, it's a matter of how that faculty gets stirred up.

  If Wordsworth failed to find his "high" in nature, he could find it in mind. If my swamp's gone dry, let me hope my imaginative faculties have not. If I can use subverted expectations to produce a certain tang in experience, then even a disappointment doesn't have to disappoint.

  And in fact, having missed the swampy quality of my swamp, I can still conjure or re-conjure other swampy episodes. Memory's a great aid to the imaginer—though it may also be an enemy, even direr than writing proves to anyone, bushwhacker or not, who dreams of witnessing things immediately as they occur. Not that either writing or memory lacks its benign aspects, as I hope I may have shown here and there in bumbling through these pages.

  Just now it's precisely memory that takes me back sixty years, to cherished summer days when I'd accompany my Uncle Peter in a skiff up the Boquet River, on the New York side of Champlain. We went there after frogs, which we'd cook come evening over an open fire; I recall watching pale legs as they twitched galvanically in the pan. Soon we'd eat those small drumsticks. Uncle Peter was the only man on earth who actually laughed with a yukyukyuk. That million-dollar sound brightened the night, as it had the day.