talking about medical geography and Legionnaires Disease. At the counter Amos tells me about Young Author’s Day at school—how he felt sorry for a Maine author and publisher who tried to get the uncooperative kids to write a poem. Conversations begin crisscrossing throughout the living space, lines of talk about flyfishing, microbiology and card games. At last a game of euchre is decided upon for the middle-aged hippies.
I finish the sauce and go to a corner shelf to take down the deck of cards. Beside the orange plastic couch (from a dental office), on the red square coffee-table (made out of an old window shutter), I begin pulling out face cards, nines and tens, for use in the game.
Aroma of deep-frying fish fills the house. I plead for a plate for Lucy. She has been wrestling the rototiller six hours today and should have first crack at ‘em.
Soon all are eating crispy fried fish of one sort or another, baked tater-tots, and Lucy’s tossed salad. I start with smelts, try trout, and finish with hornpout—light-tasting flaky flesh. With two exceptions, trout have the most protein of fish listed in bulletin 72, Nutritive Value of Foods, put out by the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. At 21%, it’s tied with shrimp, and lags a bit behind canned tuna. Protein, as central muscle cell builder, is composed of busy polypeptide chains, conferring strength for us to move both our own bones and the bones of birchwood or rototillers.
It’s all here, the food of fishermen—crisp, tawny, finned, light. As much as each can eat. We fill our plates, drink homebrew or apple juice sparklers. As cook keeps cranking out deep-fried fish, bubbling and sizzling in the oil-filled pan, we refill our plates.
For dessert I pile shortcakes was strawberries and fresh whipped cream. Upstairs, J.D. and a recent arrival, Rick, eat shortcake and talk; they prepare to depart for the evening. At some point Phoebe shows up, Paul and Lucy’s daughter. She has been managing the local high school baseball team, but now she’s here for shortcake. Then the young people drift out, heading next-door to watch video comedies.
Outside darkness settles. Allen, Paul, Lucy and I settle down to play euchre. At my request we hear again the story of Paul’s first winter in Maine, the winter of the Bucksfield bungalow, which he spent trying to keep warm with only the green popple he could cut from the land. He was house-sitting for absentee owners.
“Poplar gives a bitter smoke,
Fills your eyes and makes you choke.”
It’s not known for warmth, either, producing the lowest BTUs (British thermal units) of any Maine tree. And the bungalow was insulated with rags. But Paul also had his own land—sixty acres—over the hills in a remote township. And it was waiting for him, a place of his own to work, to plant and build upon. To develop with his hands. He would meet Lucy and together they would build two wooden houses on the land, one of which would burn to the ground, leaving only scorched stone.
It was a place where a Jewish kid, raised and educated in the suburbs of New York—a kid who never went camping, never tinkered with cars or made anything with wood—could learn to feed and shelter himself, to fix rototillers, and power his home from the sun.
So the dozed drive was eroding. And a truckload of four-foot boltwood was loaded, unloaded, and reloaded for nothing. A waste of fleeting middle-aged strength. So . . . a son of Abraham is celebrating with fry-fish protein, friends and homebrew. He traces his lineage back that far.
Iron-eater
I’m interested in eating. . . a subject of much of this narrative.
Drove to the town beach last night to learn what I could about the origin of rust stains there. Allen had mentioned the water at the bottom of our road, running from a ditch red with rust/oil. The submerged leaves were coated with this rusty substance. Was it naturally occurring, or toxic result of nonpoint pollution—or something else beyond the reach of my personal knowledge?
The town’s recreation committee was meeting at the beach to assess its condition and make plans for refurbishment. From their talk now it seemed the beach would really come together this year. The Department of Environmental Protection was being consulted as to whether sand could be added to deposits already laid by the stream. I followed the five townspeople to the irregular waterline. A bearded man, apparently not of our group, was tramping the stream-shore bordering one side of the beach. Where pond and sand met it was evident that storms of this past week had eroded the beach. And water was lying across the scraggly surface in pools. Waves rippled in where shoreline had been but days before.
On some gravel deposits in a higher corner of the beach an oily coating was present. It was dark blue and sheeny. My own road rust-stains, though readily evident, were now under water—water for the most part seeming clear.
I asked the recreation committee what it was, and the majority thought it rust from road run-off. But one member said that these iron-like deposits are all over the town: lots of iron in the soil, in water, even in his own well. I remembered then that when we lived on a pond north of here water poured from our tap smelling of rotting vegetation, sulfurous, leaving rust stains on everything. Instead we drank water collected from a roadside spring three miles away.
The recreation committee didn’t seem concerned about the origin of the stain, because being natives they were used to seeing it. Nevertheless, seeing my concern, someone suggested checking with the Lakes Association to see if it had plans to take soil samples. A name was tossed out. Later I went home and got out the phone book.
The phone conversation led to more names and numbers; finally I spoke with Jim Chandler. Mr. Chandler is the education coordinator for the county Soil and Water Conservation District. He’s also on the board of directors of the Lakes Association. And it turned out that he was the lone bearded tramper I had noticed on the beach earlier. He cautioned that my inquiry was outside his field of expertise.
He thought the stain was an iron stain produced by iron-eating bacteria. They feed off iron in the environment. The mineral is a source of oxygen energy to these organisms. In multiplying they coat everything with decomposed material, iron in solution suitable for absorption by plants. Thus, when we eat plants our blood is enriched with its iron constituent, thanks to this process. And thanks to the lowly bacteria which we may tread underfoot daily.
Mr. Chandler compared the oily film caused by growth of the bacteria to foaming tea leaves in iced tea. People sometimes think stream water in undeveloped woodlands is polluted when they see this foam gathering in some nook. But if it smells like perfume then it is detergent or soap. If it smells like gasoline it is gasoline. But if it smells like decaying vegetation then it’s the humble iron-eater at work, part of the puzzle of our formation and feeding. The smell will tell.
Mr. Chandler suggested filling in the low spots where the rusty water collects. I thanked him for the information and hung up . . . more satisfied than ever with earth’s careful provision, but almost sorry that the mystery of rust pools on the road and town beach was now solved.
Dust on the Face of the Atmosphere
Here’s a rocky perch high on an open ledge beneath hemlock and white pine. But I am bereft of shade: a southern sun pumps down, the glasses on my nose intensifying its heat. Sitting below the great boles and below even the roots of the conifers above me, I stare out on the tops of other trees, stare at emerging leaves in crowns of nearby saplings. I look down and see hardwoods dwarfed by distance. Yet more remotely, down in the valley on ponds’ edge, and lining the causeway, march tiny conifers. Firs are pointed and dispersed among light-greening hardwoods; white pines are martial and strong, doming. Each plays its part in keeping the atmosphere temperate, breathable, bearable.
The
