trail winding to a fire tower. From there a view of fifteen lakes rewards the climber, says the guide. A shade less than two-and-a-half miles upslope, it’s a two-hour climb (or so the book says). Briefly we consider it, but Allen, a contractor’s electrician, is exhausted from climbing around on the jungle-gyms of the Papermakers in 110 degree industrial heat. All week. And I—a student currently studying old fashioned apple varieties among other Maine subjects—am just plain lazy in the heat.
We opt to stop at the old concrete dam. Steel-blue conduit a few feet in diameter runs out from it, following the rock-choked stream southward. Allen says it funnels water to a generator downstream. Aziscohos is a contrived lake, the valley being logged and dammed in 1911 to make certain that paper companies on the Androscoggin had enough water to generate electricity and drive logs down to the mill; to process their products and flush away wastes. Before Aziscohos was flooded, this beautiful lap full of water with hills now underwater contained two smaller lakes. Perhaps 11,500 years ago Paleo Indians lay waiting in the breach between for caribou migrating north or south. They got their food by means of fluted chert clovis points, fitted to reloadable shafts.
Our own quarry here in the Western Mountains, now that our physical being is cared for, is more intellectual, emotional; particularly it is spiritually nourishing. With this journal, writing and rewriting, of natural life here, I hope to surround, if not capture, the quarry. For one is always writing around one’s subject, theme, experience: never tackling it directly. Spiritual nourishment, I find, is a living quarry consumed while still afoot. Here we are already swallowing the water as it turns into wine. Here at the dam the large lake lies shimmering before us, trailing away into the north. This coolness, blowing off the chop, is why we’ve come, as well. We’d like to escape the heat of this week and the highway; to travel alongside this body of refreshment, Aziscohos Lake.
Allen and I return to the car and two-lane twisting highway, in search of a lakeside road. Coming, we see a deer—long-legged doe—cautiously crossing pavement. Is your fawn in the woods, I wonder, staring at the green tangle as we pass. But a fawn would not move, by instinct; and I would not recognize a pile of still spots on still, thin legs.
And we discover that the only lake view available to non-owners or their leaseholders is from the dam. The paper company has a private, guarded road along its western shore; private individuals lease campsites on this eastern side where we drive through the dust—all equipped with no trespassing signs. The jobs of fifty thousand Mainers depend directly or indirectly on these vast corporately owned forests, Allen’s job with the contractor being one. At this writing in 1988, almost half of Maine’s woods are owned by absentee owners; some as far away as Japan. (And I am wondering—how can they care?) All this about Maine I am learning, even as I write.
Resigned to this viewless gravel road, I get out the wildflower guide to key out a few specimens seen here—determined to learn, through repetitious study, what flowers refresh the cathedral:
A tall flowering spike, magenta, a raceme, called fireweed. This is the edible wild asparagus. Tender young shoots may be cooked as greens, leaves for spinach—all with the possibility of bitterness, unpalatable as the plant ages. Ah, but yet, mature leaves are best as tea. These are the tips you will find in another guide, one to edible wild plants. With care, we may be nurtured from first to last with this plant. When seen in banks, how fireweed grips my gaze!
I am in Maine, I followed my spouse here; it was where he wanted to be. He wanted to be alive in Maine. For me it is enough, and will become more, although it has disturbed me, this move. And Allen must pay for his dream with work in regional paper mills where views are concrete and steel, where sounds enter as feeling into one’s body. Sometimes it drives him to fantasy: driving back down the dusty road, we talk about what we want to do yet in life . . . two middle-aged long-married folk. Should we go to graduate school, do Northern Studies? We want to see and know the north, perhaps Labrador? We could camp; fly in, land on pontoons, do a feasibility study for growing hydroponic vegetables. Hydroponic—without soil—for glaciers pushed Labrador’s soil (as they pushed Maine’s soil) into the Atlantic; clean into the sea, all that fat vegetable potential. The inhabitants of Labrador eat their vegetables in the form of fishes. Our talk is based on book gleanings, feeding this fall into fantasy.
A list of things identified: jewelweed (a regular orange flower with curled spur, such as I knew in Pennsylvania), Cynthia (small dainty daisy-like disc and pedals), rough cinquefoil (perfect yellow flower with toothed palmate leaves), yellow hop clover, yarrow, common evening primrose (tightly closed in sun). Cow vetch. One brown rabbit.
On our way back we stop at the isolated Trading Post Restaurant & Tackle Shop above the hidden green-tangled river bank, possibly the cleanest eating house we’ve ever seen. Dianne and Sonny Littlehale’s home cooking, beer on tap, hunting and fishing licenses, tackle and custom-tied flies, gas, T-shirts. Their pumpkin pie is too rich, sweet with whipped cream, but umm the iced coffee. Sonny, quietly washing dishes, answers Dianne’s question. He can remember when this low house was built. He went to school here, long before Dianne moved to the area from away and bought the place. Sonny is fifty-six, had always worked in the woods until that triple by-pass last fall. There’d been the winter to rest up, says Dianne, who keeps an eye on rosy two-year-old Brian. These two, living on the far rim of middle-age, are the experience. The living experience of northern New England.
What with the talk, the human exchange, we almost leave without paying our bill. Out in the parking lot Allen comments that it’s good to go to a new place like this and visit. There’s scarcely connection in a mere “What’ll your order be?”
We travel back down the scenic highway through the deep notch, rocky, tree-banked. Grafton Notch says the sign: the glacially carved gap in the Appalachian Mountains, connecting Maine’s geography with that of New Hampshire. There’s little to show that the lumber village of Grafton thrived here during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, home and workplace to one hundred hardy souls.
I once saw a towering humped-backed moose, with white antlers, day-dreaming, chewing his cud here beside this roadway. There are other wonders to be seen along this route (in order when descending from Upton): Old Spec, third highest mountain, Table Rock (we’ve climbed this overhang on a precipitous path), moose cave, Mother Walker Falls, all followed by Screw Augur Falls, not the least of these geological gazing-stocks.
Here at the falls we stop. Water feels cool, revitalizing as it runs over hot bare feet. On rocks grow bright green moss, of varying species, wet with this coursing stream. Below me the water-carved cleft, true to shape-name. Its steep, curved and resistant sides are igneous—a twisted funnel, full of foam and force, the experience of living water cutting and smoothing. Here are round smoothed bubbles of rock; much of it bare-bleached above the normal flowline of Bear River.
Signs on this trip reveal. We look up to see the text for the week emblazoned on wood: Glaciers, receding thousands of years ago, spawned vast erosive runoffs. A glacier blocked the northern end of Grafton Notch, channeling meltwater southward. Bloated with sand and gravel, cobbles and ice, it cut metamorphosed granite, producing this deep contorted gorge that the notch’s hardy settlers called Screw Auger. The land we now live in has experienced much, is still experiencing, and has become what it is, at the moment, in consequence.
Vast, ponderous geological work has been done all along our route. The work of humans with their dams, saws, and tableware has coupled with that of forces cold and hot, but greatly natural. They combine to make valleys of toil. Places of hard beauty and ritual: rituals of working, eating, resting, playing. Here grew wood for the mill, pulp for the paper, here emerged water for power. Here’s rest from the week, recreation for kayakers, a funnel for daydreams. A place of soft magical plants, lighted by insects and sun. They tower from ditches on sturdy purple fibrous stocks. We’ve entered the great green-and-blue household, desiring to gather nectar. It won’t be easy, for the glaciers of finance have scraped off the soil of our middle-class
