A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  I did all the shooting on those trips, with a .22 Remington scarcely longer than my forearm today. At my uncle's instruction, I aimed scattershot not at the prey but as close to it as possible, so the concussion stunned the poor frog but the meat went unharmed.

  I'm sure I wouldn't take any child of mine to do what I so joyfully did on the Boquet. Times have changed—sensibilities too, my own along with the world's—and in our day there's the scary news that frogs are depopulating, the ones that endure frequently showing up deformed.

  What lingers anyhow is much less the shooting than the oddly woolen smell of the bog and, more important, the way that smell can re-summon the affection I felt for my uncle. In these few years after his death at ninety-five, I may be inclined to talk about that feeling more elaborately than I could have a lifetime ago, when it was enough just to be in a certain place with a man who knew that place and what to do in it, and who seemed as fascinated by its life as the kid standing in front of him with a tiny rifle. Yes, today I may more directly address my love for that great soul, but real explanation, to echo my dear Wordsworth again, doth often lie too deep for tears.

  In all honesty, another memory of the Boquet lingers too, even if this morning's ramble hasn't really jibed with it at all. I mean the recollection of swamp-dread, which descended upon the Adirondack evening as we reached the broad wetland at river's mouth. On the bank cross-stream, hard to see as the darkness lowered, we could make out the blackened remains of a shack, which had belonged to a woman named Evvie. It burned when I was seven, I think, its owner dying shortly afterward. I remembered nothing about Evvie except that she'd had a frightening face, which now would look more like a sad one, I'd bet.

  But where did this memory come from? I asked my uncle about it years later, and he told me there'd been no such burn site, no such person. How, then, can I so clearly picture that place and even name that woman? Those images of things apparently nonexistent are as compelling and strange as today's swamp-that-is-no-swamp.

  Does all this, as H. H. Munro once opined, derive from the fact that "the young have aspirations which never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened"? I can't make sense of that: the dread I felt in contemplating the charred house was never something I aspired to when young; nor is it something I reminisce upon for the sake of pleasure now.

  Or maybe it is, though pleasure is surely an inexact term. It's perhaps rather that image is the root of imagination, and, as fellow Romantics have noted for centuries now, imagination can create realities as palpable as Chicago or Paris—or as Evvie's sad camp.

  But how did I make the image of the blackened little building in the first place? I hadn't yet read any Hemingway in those days, hadn't read much at all besides the rotogravure Sunday comics that bled all over the kitchen table if I spilled my juice on them. Yet I'll claim, one's world moving strangely as it often does, that even if I obviously couldn't know it at the time, I was already looking ahead to "The Big Two-Hearted River," full itself of burned-over territory.

  Nick Adams, Hemingway's protagonist, having fished all day in the upper reaches of the eponymous stream, decides not to enter the conifer-shadowed swamp he reaches just at dusk. He's afraid "the fishing would be tragic in the swamp."

  My aborted scouting mission, along with the assorted memories it's kicking up, relates to Nick's situation and presentiment in the remotest way, of course, in part because, again, there's so little swamp in my own swamp this morning, and no tragedy whatever. Still I know what Nick meant, and I think—though who can be sure of such a matter?—I knew something about it a lifetime ago on the Boquet with my uncle, despite the fact that all those dear to me were alive and well, even our soon-to-be-gone cocker spaniel, Colonel. As far as I could see, God was in Heaven and all was right with the world.

  My sense is that any longtime bushwhacker, rambler, and minor explorer would stand a good chance of catching Hemingway's drift too, because—no matter if the truly tragic is as absent from his or her life as from mine on that long-ago, unhurried stream—that person has found a swamp or two, and so gets it.

  Gets what? What am I after here? Well, I suppose it's that I seem to care a lot less about what are called ideas in man, woman, landscape, or book than I care about indelible impressions like the one to which I've just referred, and I'm bold enough to suggest that the kindred spirits I've known share that inclination. And they may also find themselves struck by how, almost magically, one impression turns out to be a relative of all the others.

  Not that I wish to dwell solely on somber impressions. Even if every word I write here sounds in some measure like elegy, I scarcely want melancholy to carry the day. I have left the swampless swamp, and above me now, near the height of a steep-sided ridge, my hearty pointer Pete has found something. I can hear as much. Or rather, the opposite: his collar bell just went silent; he's pointing.

  It'll be a downright pleasure to see what that dog's up to, although he and I know the same thing today: it's not bird season yet, so he doesn't have to be anywhere near as single-minded as in a few weeks. No bird dog owns as much of that single-mindedness as a pointer. In October, Pete's sense of the target, to use boxers' parlance, makes even a flyweight look clumsy.

  I marvel while I climb, just thinking about all that.

  The whole way up the ledge-and-freestone slope is make-it-as-you-can, hands, knees, elbows, feet, and I keep telling myself I used to do this sort of thing more easily and vigorously. But my wife reminds me I've sung that tune all the decades she's known me. She claims it's why I'm such a sap for Wordsworth, who was already worried about physical and mental decline at twenty-eight!

  Wife's opinion or no, in my older age I have to pause now and then on this steepness, and while I do, I think about dead Belle, another of my gun dogs. Once, out of season too, she stopped and pointed into a blank clear-cut some quarter mile east of me here. She just wouldn't move. She kept holding that point, mind you, over old snow just crusting.

  She stood there, locked up, statuesque as a dog in some plutocrat's oil painting from a bygone quail-shooting era. I could yank her away, or I could walk past her and learn what turned out to be what, which I assumed would be nothing. Then, assuming nothing, I was embarrassed, even if no one but the dog herself was there to witness, as a sure-to-God something exploded out of that blankness. A grouse had been hiding under the snow, hoping it wouldn't ice up entirely and lock him in, but planning to stay as long as he could before showing himself to us.

  In one of the great Raymond Chandler's novels, some punk warns Philip Marlowe that he could make the detective need some new bridgework. Marlowe replies, "You could also play centerfield for the Yankees and hit a home run with a breadstick." Belle's point was that improbable. Another day, another quotation in the wild.

  I could recite other jaw-dropping examples of their behavior as I call to mind all the good dogs I've been lucky enough to be within woods or by water. But just now, on this ridge, I discover this particular one—and never mind his blue blood—digging like a terrier for a chipmunk. Or maybe, delusional, he imagines that the red squirrel scolding him from the lightning-halved white pine behind us is not up there at all but only a few inches deeper into the ground, just under the bottom of the crater he's carving.

  Whatever the case, I'm disproportionately amused, even overjoyed. Both of us are on a holiday, and not.

  I'm really talking about more than random impressions, you see. I want to get at the notion that everything comes together. It's a sort of woodsman's version of faith—or one woodsman's anyway. It's a sense of the shapeliness of things in the aggregate: the good and bad; the predictable and surprising; the phantom red squirrel or chipmunk of my pointer's fancy; the murky vision of travel through murky wetland; frog and grouse; ridge and dry swamp; today and decades ago; a screwdriver-sized .22 Remington and a burnt-over cabin.

  It all comes together. It must.

  Why should this theme of inclusiveness fall on me in cert
ain places, even or especially in unlikely ones like this? Who knows? There's no landmark to provoke it here, that's for certain; there's only that storm-punished pine, otherwise hardly different from hundreds of others on this hill, and that mound of earth flung up by a silly gun dog.

  Nothing, it seems, should inspire this grandiosity. I haven't crossed any Simplon Pass, nor failed to. For all of that, though I may be inexcusably vain to say so, this morning the jolt of recognition Wordsworth experienced in Switzerland—the zing of Imagination's "awful power"—seems available to me, a simple low-mountain prospector, as it has on many and many a hike.

  In imagination, anything can live next to anything else.

  Fall

  Daybook, Late September

  There was no reason for it, but I woke up yesterday with that copper penny taste on my tongue, purple brackets at vision's edge, legs unwilling to swing from bed—all the familiar signs of dejection.

  To force myself outside and into the northwester was instant cure. I smelled someone's woodsmoke as it raced by me on the blow, and a whiff of bacon from an open kitchen window. Or maybe not from a window. Maybe that someone was cooking breakfast on an outdoor fire, despite the weather. I didn't get within fifteen feet of the river, but I felt its spray on my face, the cleanest, dearest water I'll ever know.

  Perhaps it was the wild and scattered day that made my thoughts blow around too, as if on the northerly wind that roared down from the lake to checker the flow above my camp. The waves on the lake itself must have been taller than I am.

  At any rate, as so often, back inside I started thinking of Earl Bonness on a day like this. It was only middle summer, but the wind seemed to blow a taste of autumn our way. The two of us sat and talked for hours, because, in his words, "There's no doin's on the water today." We kept reminiscing about gone friends, including my father. Earl punctuated our recollections by repeating, almost like a chant, "Men we've known, Syd. Men we've known."

  Somehow I remembered walking outside to pee at one point, the two of us having drained a full pot of coffee. On the way back, I bent and plucked an unripe blueberry from a bush by the river. The gloss-green skin resisted my bite, but then came a sudden burst of tartness, which struck me as improbably perfect. I looked for one just like it yesterday morning, but of course the year's berries were long gone.

  As I went back indoors that morning, the screen door flapped. I forced it shut and latched it. The downriver corner where Earl sat was dim. I blinked my eyes a few times, adjusting the gloom until it wasn't gloom.

  For some reason I told Earl about Freddie Dunbar, who'd lately been killed back home as he walked along Route 10 at midnight, the poor fool, treading that road in the same black overcoat he wore in heat and cold alike. He held no light in his hand. I suspect he didn't own one.

  Freddie was one walking man. He often passed our house, headed for the old cellar hole on Skunk Hollow Road, where his family's house had stood a generation back, before it burned. I'd hear his incantation—Mama, Mama, Mama—full of terrible sadness at her death, at the loss of the home place.

  He was that anachronism, the village idiot, his speech always garbled, his look confused, but he was sweet-natured, harmless. His mission in life consisted of hiking from one town fair to another, July to Labor Day, sometimes as far as Newport, eighty miles north. He must simply have liked to behold those fairs in all their tinsel glory. He can't ever have had money for a ride or cotton candy or girlie tent.

  He went, he came back.

  Earl remembered his own town's village idiot, though I've forgotten his name by now. He'd died before my time here. Such people were merely taken for granted in the region. New England towns had Overseers of the Poor until not so long ago, and folks like Freddie got a pittance to spend, a local family a pittance to board them. So the death of Freddie marked the death of one more aspect—to be wondered at rather than sentimentalized—of the old-time north country.

  "Men we've known," Earl repeated, "men we've known." But he also cautioned, "You can't live in the past." I wonder if he meant that the effort to do so, which I've often overindulged, was a sort of suicide. Did Earl mean that striving to sustain oneself on reminiscence alone would literally starve him to death?

  I'm not sure. But I mean to take it that way just now. I mean to make Earl and all the revered elders a part of today, to feel them in this overbearing wind, with all its odors and other sensations, which has blown me back to my senses. I'm not sure what I mean by saying that's what I mean to do, but I do mean it. Whatever it means.

  Turned Around

  Such hours as I'd spent in the neighborhood of West Grand Lake by the time I was twenty were almost exclusively on the water. I hadn't yet learned much of the countryside surrounding the lakes. But I had an itch to go deer hunting over the 1963 Thanksgiving break, and—my long love affair with that territory and its citizenry already well launched— I could think of no better ground for the hunt.

  It seems odd that I remember nothing about how I ducked the obligation to go home for the holiday. My mother could be given to melodrama, or, more effective, to demonstrative, guilt-inducing resignation: sighs, frowns, slumped shoulders. It would not surprise me, though, if my father, more forbearing and more woodsy, had approved my plan and even lobbied for it.

  Be all that as it may, on Tuesday evening, after a meal in Topsfield, I settled into my room at Weatherby's Lodge. Before sleep, however, I studied a topographical map, having passed the afternoon of my first day hunting woods along the Big Lake Road, close to the village, with complete disbelief in my prospects. Things just didn't feel right. I concluded that tomorrow would change for the brighter; I'd be up on Little River Mountain.

  The choice was arbitrary. I'd never been on that hill, though I'd canoed several miles downstream from it on Little River itself, jump-shooting ducks with one of my life's great mentors, Creston MacArthur. So I couldn't have told you why its very name drew me like a magnet, except that there had already been times in my past when some unaccountable hunch ended up being on the money.

  Fish the heavier water today, I told myself at some point, for example, and came home with a creel's worth of trout.

  Hunt that patch of cedar, I thought some other time, and for no logical reason those woods held one grouse shy of a limit.

  When in doubt, I believed, count on inspiration.

  I got up and out the next morning before the kitchen crew arrived, and, nothing if not eager and reckless in those days, without telling anyone where I was headed. I just stuck the ham sandwich I'd made the night before into a pocket of my mackinaw, loaded my gun and pack into my dinged-up Volkswagen Beetle, and took off southwest from town.

  Five miles out, I parked and followed a northerly trail, which the map said would lead me to the mountain. That landmark was no more than a knoll, really, some seven hundred feet high, but that's an eminence in such flat country. Trusty inspiration had indicated I'd find good deer sign on her south-facing slope.

  In fact, I ran into considerable sign well before I got that far. The snow lay patchy, just ten to forty square feet here and there, interrupted by equal expanses of bare ground. But even the bare spots were wet enough to keep a track. I followed a big one west, off-trail, dreaming a monster buck the whole while. After a spell, though, I came to a maze of beaver-work and lost it.

  I never would become much good at following sign, deer hunting always a lesser passion for me than birds over a pointing dog, and I had even smaller skill then. I'd be no Dave Tobey, no Joey Olsen. The deer I shot as a younger boy had all lived in Pennsylvania farm country; you could set up at field's edge or near an orchard and reasonably expect an open shot if you'd done a little scouting. But I was after deep-woods prey that morning, not the grain-fed, pastoral variety.

  Back at the trail, I shocked myself on consulting my watch: I'd lost not only that impressive set of tracks but also nearly an hour and a half. It was already 8:30. I still had all day, of course, no one waiting for me
. I hadn't chosen a meal plan at Weatherby's; it'd be cheaper to drive up Route 1 to Chick Daggett's store for my suppers.

  But the money wasn't primary. I liked the scene at Chick's, the hub of tiny Topsfield, Maine. You could cut the stove-and-cigarette smoke in that lunchroom with your scabbard knife—a different era. Loggers and hunters gathered at all times of day, full of boasts and stories, a fair number true; and Chick had a way of hiring the best-looking young women in the county to work in his place. There were plenty of reasons, in short, to pass some time in his establishment.

  Maine didn't yet have the moose lottery that it does today, but the menu always included a "Mooseburger Special." I ordered it every time, assuming I'd be eating a Canadian animal or a poached one. I now suspect that Chick had come up with the whole business for local color, that what I chose, dinner after dinner, was in fact just cheap ground beef. No matter, I savored each chewy bite.

  Chick's smacked of old-time upper New England in every way. You didn't introduce yourself to anyone; you showed up often enough, as I'd done in a couple of fishing seasons, signed a check or two, and in due course the regulars would start to call you by name. They did, that is, once you proved yourself worthy of such personal address, which meant indicating some knowledge of game, of woods and waters, of hunting and fishing, though you had to do so in a way that didn't make you look like a braggart. That was pretty easy for me. I didn't have a hell of a lot to brag about.

  A relative beginner like me did better, anyhow, to say less than he listened. I particularly recall one man to whom all the others deferred; they called him Tippy, a strangely cute diminutive. Tippy's deer-hunting theory was simple: a good buck bedded on the opposite side of the ridge he fed on. You could intercept your deer on that line if you could make out how it ran.