by Sydney Lea
Houses belonging to a single family line through five generations are either gone or enormously altered. The ones that stand, once fortified against winter by hay bales at the sills, are now remodeled so thoroughly that they'd settle perfectly into Fairfield County, Connecticut. Dooryards that in mud-time saw hens and roosters parading over mired ruts are manicured in 2012. Trees from which, come November, slain bucks hung are now trimmed and skirted by perennials bought from self-described heritage seed purveyors. Fields of fallen farms, grown up in aspen and hardhack and gray birch, have been brush-hogged, tilled, and sown with fescue, eliminating acres of habitat for wildlife, which new residents, innocent of the wild things' ways, think they protect by tacking up their No Hunting posters. All these are the perplexing signs made by people concerned to transform what they fled to into what they lately fled from.
Not of course that I recall an idyll, except perhaps for me. For more than two centuries, it was more than merely hard for families to scratch livings out of that quarter; those deserted farmlands would not have been so game-rich, would not have gone to brush and joe-pye weed if it had been otherwise. And there were soreheads and backbiters and cheats among the north country natives. I knew them too. Still, I believe that "people neighbored better then," as one of the last from the old families lately put it to me. In my memory at least, the lunch counter at the hardware store rang with the buzz we'd just left behind at the Red Dog.
In those early years, I was among the slight minority of college-educated people in that hamlet. Members of this group tended to know one another, but if they knew a native, it was because he or she provided a service: car repair, plowing, carpentry, bread-making, child care, whatever. Hunting, and to a lesser degree fishing, provided me with another access to these famously terse and even suspicious people. Not that there were no alternate ways to bond with them. For instance, I have a close friend who, though a distinguished architect in later life, did a lot of hammer-swinging when he started, thereby gaining local respect. But hunting was my way.
And perhaps the main point of these meditations is this: I forged ties, very alive today, whether in fact or in my recollections of the departed, to people who have proved to be friends like no others.
I recall, say, standing stock-still one morning at the edge of the swamp near Trout Pond with the late Allie Pike, our road commissioner. The snow floated down, backlit by sun over Smart's Mountain. Allie's beagle and my own were running on scent, his Stony ball-mouthed, my Penny a chop. I can't remember whether we shot the hare they were ragging, but I remember feeling as though this tangle of alder, this bottomland of fresh snow, and this ten-degree day all constituted some quasi-Arctic Eden. I have, and always will have, that moment to refer to.
Back then, though in my better self I already knew as much, I learned that there were people who had never heard of Harvard or Princeton, and who were bright, even brilliant. And that is exactly what such places— whatever their PR folks and parlor-leftie faculties may claim—teach their students not to believe. At freshman convocation at Yale, the president greeted me and my classmates as "future leaders of the world," which could only mean that most of the people outside the hall were there to be led.
In short, one learns not only a certain attitude but also a certain encoded language at the so-called top-tier schools, and one must not so much unlearn that idiom as learn or relearn others if one wants a richer mix in life.
Hunting pervades every aspect of that life for me. Back when I decided I was more drawn to imaginative writing than to scholarship, for instance, it was the voices of my hunting mentors and their female partners that drove me primarily to poetry. I knew that I didn't have the genius of a Mark Twain or a Flannery O'Connor, or that I couldn't hope to celebrate the speech of upper New England by writing dialect, so damnably hard to construct without either condescension or embarrassing affectation. For better or worse, I thought that if I chose a poetic vehicle, I might capture the rhythms and cadences of local speech without having to imitate it.
Some of my local hunting friends have read my work in prose, but not many—indeed none, I surmise—have mounted anything like an exhaustive inspection of my poems. And yet, whenever I compose a lyric or, especially, a verse narrative, I imagine myself as addressing one or all of them. That is, I know, just an enabling strategy; it makes no earthly sense at all.
Small wonder I literally wept when Joey, the fellow beside me as we follow Jack's pickup out to this section land, decided a decade ago that he too would move ahead of "progress." But he chose Colorado, land of the mule deer and bull elk, for his refuge. Small wonder I've laughed with joy and amusement to catch up with him again here in Kansas, and why laughter has leavened the seriousness of our enterprise since we started the trip. Because of our collaborations, now and over countless days, I am as sure as I am writing this that, if I called out to Joey in some dire need, he'd be on a plane from Denver within a day. And I'd fly the other way for him in a heartbeat.
Joey has always called me Professor Woodcock, though we both quit shooting those little flyers years ago, dismayed by the great falling off of their numbers—who'd have guessed?—since the days when we'd kill more than a hundred in a season. Along with his Yankee peers, he's also always called my academic colleagues pinheads.
Something he said back at the Red Dog was right on the money, and right in keeping with what I'm after here: "The pinheads don't have no idea a scene like this exists, Professor Woodcock."
The concrete meaning of the pinhead epithet, if there is just one, as there doubtless is not, may remain obscure, but as a general notion it's clear. A pin is a small thing. Though angels may dance upon it, it is not large enough to contain Whitman's human multitudes, or any. I've confessed to containing only modest ones myself, but I do hope I'm not a pinhead, or at least not only that. I pray my human purview is not so severely confined.
If that's the case, then yes, God bless hunting anyhow. Again. And again.
Jack pulls into his farmyard. A sun-flaring ginger rooster, late to greet the forenoon, chants from a crippled weathervane on top of the barn. We all get down from our vehicles.
"Just walk past my silo to the other end. You'll want to hunt upwind," Jack advises.
Joey and I shake our benefactor's hand before he disappears into his corrugated tractor shed. We set out in the direction the farmer just indicated.
Twenty yards along the border of the milo piece, Joey commented, "That old boy's paw feels like braided cable."
Joey Olsen, builder extraordinaire and longtime beloved companion.
Daybook, December
I imagine taking another person to this corner of our home place, speaking of its restorative power, watching him or her frown in confusion. My companion beholds the four hop hornbeams, no thicker than forearms, that cling to a scrap of ledge on the west, looks at the clump of paltry hemlocks to eastward, at a depression to the north quilled with equally paltry cedar.
I've never encountered any remarkable game in this fifty-yard square, nor fall-splendid foliage, nor tinkling spring freshets, deep summer cool, fabulously sculpted ice on the granite shelves. But there's a sort of rock-seat there. Once I perch on it, as I do by habit, I always feel something regenerative blow into my soul like a real breeze. A cure for the blues, you could say, which has nothing to do with poetry, my stock in trade. I observe none of my region's tokens of human effort nullified: no stone wall spilling itself to rubble; no woodpile abandoned to shimmer in its moldering; no apple tree pocked by woodpeckers.
I've now and then tried to make sense of this ground's hold on me. Of course the place belongs to us, not in the sense that our family owns it except by law, but that no other creature seems its familiar. Even deer prints are anomalies; I'd see none, I bet, in this morning's fresh snow if I went out; the ground offers no cover for game bird or hare; but the place's exclusivity to all but me can't be a full explanation of its attraction either.
Is it the quiet? Is it that I
can be alone here with my silent thoughts, which are, in general, hardly thoughts at all? I don't sleep on my rock-seat but I'm not mentally active, either. A floret from one of the hornbeams may fall beside me, for instance, and I make nothing of it.
But I don't really believe the place's silence, apart from a wind now and then, explains its effect on me any more than our proprietorship does.
There's simply some energy in this patch of landscape that I can marshal against my grief over the death of relative or friend or bird dog; against some professional setback; against excruciations large and little. The nature of that energy is inscrutable. And I believe that its very indefiniteness (I sometimes "see" it, but only as one sees squiggles of heat off stone on a hot day) lies at the heart of its magic.
Natural magic, you may rightly say, is everywhere. We must do all we can to protect it in the contiguous great north woods; we must struggle against the cupidity and shortsightedness that would introduce nickel mines to the great Labrador wild, hew the rain forests of Brazil, strip the tops from West Virginia mountains, pollute the world's clear lakes, extinguish its wildlife.
But it occurs to me that we should do all this in part because those sublime domains include inconspicuous places like this one, which will never show on calendar or travel brochure. These are the places whose aura defies the simplistic slogans of the environmental absolutist, of the exploiter drunk on his own greed, and even of the solitary eccentric who breathes that magic in.
I guess I'll head to such a place right now.
Trust
"That's Annie's camp," I told my wife.
The little structure showed vaguely through the softwood. Beyond it, Lower Oxbrook Lake barely winked in the overcast October forenoon. The scene jolted me into the sort of recognition I've been having so often lately: Lord, I hadn't set foot on that ground since Annie Fitch and her husband Bill were much younger than I right now.
Robin and I had just hiked down and back along the redundantly named Oxbrook Brook, from the stream's mouth on West Grand Lake to where we stood now, a pretty jaunt but not vigorous. We weren't tired and were in no hurry.
"Let's go look," Robin urged, a not quite familiar expression on her face.
Closer to, I saw that the building and the camp yard had changed some. After Bill died, Annie passed the property on to her daughter Ginnie, whose husband Vinny had been a master electrician before he retired, working at the pulp mill in Woodland. But he was equally handy in every other way that went into construction and maintenance, so there wasn't a hair out of place anywhere you looked. The camp's roof was in good order, all the siding recently stained, the doors plumb. Shading our eyes and peering through a back window, we even saw a washing machine! It drew its water in summertime from Oxbrook's cool depths, a generator in the shed providing the juice. The old privy was gone.
The place looked a lot more comfortable in outward and visible ways, but I remembered another sort of comfort here. I could almost smell the trout we'd caught not far from the dock, wild squaretails sizzling in fat on a wood-fired cook-stove. At the same time, Annie was turning a mess of white perch, yanked from a different honey-hole across the water, into her glorious chowder.
We peeked through as many other windows as we could. Sleeping loft, tiny master bedroom, "settin' room," kitchen. That was about it. The place was locked, as it wouldn't have been in the Fitches' time. Some changes are good, others ambiguous.
Bill and his father Harley had put up the original cabin in 1961, a base for their market fur line, which followed the stream to the cove, as we'd just done. Harley had another, even more modest encampment down there on the lake. Either man could repair to either cabin, whichever was handier when he finished a day of checking and resetting traps.
In my mind, this muted sunlight glinted off Harley's wire-rimmed glasses. I could see that stubby pipe clenched between his teeth, as if it might fly away if he didn't keep it clamped in. And I remembered Bill even better, as clearly as if I'd greeted him that very morning. Lean, even slight, he was unprepossessing to the eye, but Annie recalled his walking to and fro on the timber road, hugging a hundred-pound cement bag like a baby every trip down to the cabin site, more than a mile. He was a famous strongman in his younger years, a finger-crimper of silver dollars, a bender of ten-penny nails, a hefter of nail kegs. And understated? As one of his cronies put it, "Bill was drier'n a popcorn fart."
I was once hunting whitetail out in the Getchel Pugs country. I came upon Bill and his party, a man I'll call Dr. Miles and his wife. A couple days before at the store, Bill had told me they were due, and he didn't seem to be looking forward particularly. He had guided these two for twenty years, and they were nice enough, all right, but they had the somewhat endearing and somewhat otherwise habit of moving off the stands at which Bill placed them and coming together to chat. That may have made for marital harmony, but not good deer strategy.
Bill and his clients were seated on a flat rock, eating sandwiches and waiting for the camp coffee to boil over the fire. I asked if they minded my joining them. There was plenty of room on that boulder, and they welcomed me.
Now Dr. Miles and his wife were fitted out with top-of-the-line equipment, from their suspiciously untattered Abercrombie clothing to their rifles. He was sporting a Weatherby Mark V, a relatively new piece in the early '60s, I think.
I had the same inherited deer rifle I'd always used and always would: a Winchester .32-.20 WCF, and Bill toted its more famous cousin, the .32 special. For whatever reason, Bill volunteered that he'd recently gotten interested in a Rueger .44 mag, and I informed him that a pal of mine was mightily pleased with his. The comment wasn't even true, but I liked being on Bill's side of things.
Our remarks set the good doctor off on a rant for some reason. "I wouldn't buy a Rueger anything," he spat. "Their rifles are worthless, their side arms too. Same for their shotguns!"
He proceeded to catalog all the defects of this line of weaponry, and never mind the fact that, Mark V or no, he had not even shot at a deer in two decades of hunting here. Bill had told me that too.
When Dr. Miles finally ran down, Bill looked bemusedly into the horizon, as was his manner, and whispered, "Well, ain't no use in buyin' one of them, then."
One of my sisters still refers to Bill's wife Annie as The Good Mother, a distinction I'm disinclined to dwell on in these pages. But all of us siblings regarded Annie that way, as did everyone in her little hamlet. People admired her competence, as much as they did her famous cooking; she served for years as the town treasurer, was a mainstay of its tiny Congregational church, and played counselor to those who needed help with all manner of problems.
This great woman spent the better part of our summer stay as a guest at our island camp after she retired, and so went on to become The Good Grandmother to my generation's offspring too. I'm beyond sorry that she didn't get to know our children's children, but that they didn't get to know her constitutes the greater sadness. They also, like our kids, would always have referred to the place as Annie's Island. She was someone you'd name things after, that's all; she was bigger than whatever she inhabited.
Rising early, she'd come into the cookhouse, carrying this or that romance novel, which she plowed through at a pace to embarrass a professional reader like me. Ordinarily the first out of bed, I'd have her usual odd breakfast waiting: a cup of hot water and a dry waffle.
Seated a few feet from the woodstove in the rocker that came, of course, to be called Annie's Chair, she would talk all day to whomever, not in some garrulous way, but filling her listeners in, the stories inexhaustible, on what life had been like for her and her neighbors from the time of her girlhood into middle age—which meant, to put it gently, hard.
Yet, as I said at an earlier point in these musings, she claimed to have savored every particle. "I don't have one thing to complain about." How many times did I hear those words pass Annie Fitch's lips?
I remember coming on a grade school picture that the p
rior owners, decades and decades before, had stashed away in the back of a cupboard. It wasn't a photograph of Annie's class, but of one or two before hers. Still she picked out every face, identified it, and went on to recount what had happened to each person she named. A very few were still in town, far more were dead, and a handful, some living, most gone, had spread out as far as western Canada. She was in touch with those still reachable; the lady had a great gift for loyalty.
After supper, Annie joined our family and friends in games, anything from cribbage, at which I never saw her lose, to the smallest child's favorites: Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, and others. Nothing was beneath her, and nothing much above. It might have surprised a stranger that she did so well at Trivial Pursuit, for example, this backwoods-woman who'd worked her way through high school down in Calais, housekeeping for a doctor and his wife, tending to their children, who, if any endures, surely remember The Good Mother too, or rather The Good Big Sister.
Her store of knowledge might have surprised us as well if we hadn't learned early on never to be taken aback by any prowess Annie showed. She was one whose eyes stayed wide open right through her last year, the ninetieth, with never any doddering or mental vagueness, and with that razor memory, so keen that people, neighbors and vacation folks alike, automatically consulted her whenever some issue of town history came up. I wouldn't be able to count how often I did so myself.
When her husband died, we all feared that Annie might go into a tail-spin. She and Bill had always sat like teenagers in their pickup truck as they cruised the few passable roads, the only difference being that she always had the wheel. Bill must have wanted her in charge. Most people did.