says. “Please remember that you are on private property.”
I glance up the secretive path. Trees are parted; there’s a sense of running water beyond. The path dips down just a bit, enticingly. And the sense of water draws thirst in me. Following, I soon see a railroad track bordered by trees with a wall of rock and earth opposite. Beside this cut is a secluded spring, piped, pouring freshly fourth.
From atop the wall I hear the whoosh of occasional traffic. Am straddling the pool, drinking with cupped hands. Refreshed, I pause indecisively. Might find the road above, walk from there toward town center? Why am I so drawn? Is all this exploring just a pleasant way to kill time (while Allen works over the pit)? That thought there?—it rattles me.
Having scrambled back to the highway, I’m arrested by sight of a granite outcropping opposite. Gray granite is cracked and fissured in natural blocks, but its pink granite intrusions are nudging, angling for my attention. Traffic whizzing by off my shoulder, I stop to stare at the crystalline mass; stand and study, imprint it in memory for future book reference. Young birches with sweet green leaves stick out above it. Below are tansies among a tangle of goldenrod, purple cow vetch and a panicled flowering shrub. Foliage frames this arresting rock.
Tansy Town is tansies and the miasma of papermaking. But it is also granite. Granite in its foundations. Granite is in the neat houses, in the stone basements and beneath its streets. Granite holds its trees by their roots and it also yields to them, cracking a little in a frost.
I notice the obvious great pluton every time I come to Tansy Town, but there are times when I almost don’t. Times when I virtually forget to see it soaring there. A day may come when I’ll forget it’s here. The residents, the neat-housed residents, do they ever forget? Is it possible to become so used to a silent great being in our midst that we forget its presence?
And, do the inhabitants become so inured to the pervading papermaking atmosphere on these dim stench-struck days—inured to what smells like vulcanized pulp soup—that they forget they’re smelling it?
I finally got my peak at the Pluton from side streets of the neighborhood. It rose steeply in chinks between houses. Then I realized what I was looking for, why I was wandering here, why I like exploring Tansy Town. I had been climbing the feet of the pluton ever since leaving my car at A gate. As I neared the town center it overshadowed brick Bartlett school, the shops and post office, the onion-dome Orthodox Church. Its steep rock face, somber, bare and substantial, was here before the city, before people arrived. And it will be here after Tansy Town and the corporation are gone.
The Pluton
Sour thoughts and careless deeds accumulate slowly, inadvertently, over time. This process tends to erode our spiritual heritage. It snowed glaciers in northern New England. Monstrous glaciers, ten thousand feet high. A slow accretion of tiny individual snow flakes. Glaciers, forgetful of places they covered. But underneath they ground away; breaking, crushing, abrading.
D. B. Wight, on the history of the upper Androscoggin, says that the town (pronounced BUR-lun by everyone here) was named for Germany’s capital. New Hampshire’s neighboring state—to the east—is full of international names: China, Peru, Lisbon, Rome, Lebanon, Madrid, Norway, Sweden, Mexico . . . Mexico, Maine?
Wight wrote that Tansy Town was originally called Maynesborough, after Sir Maynes, an English grant owner. First settled by Bethel Mainers, as time went on, its people became disgruntled with things colonial and English. So, when the town was incorporated, its settlers chose the German capital—something for the disgruntlement of their descendants, around the time of the First World War.
The valley along the Androscoggin, in that part becoming Maynesborough, then Berlin, was first inhabited by Abenakis. Their village street was lined with castoff jasper, mined from a nearby jasper cave and worked into points. This jasper was lustrous, brindled with brown and red. In this type of crystal the structure is so well hidden it can’t be detected with a regular microscope. This ecologically harmonious Abenaki communal society was agrarian—hunter-gatherer, able to survive graciously by picking up and utilizing what was needed from forest, river, rock. The first meat of each seasonal hunt was given away entirely. This was how they cared for their infirm, needy, those widowed, without family. They entertained and taught their generations with stories of their mythic hero, Gluskap. White settlers who supplanted them discovered that captive white women would not be sexually molested.
Eventually the valley of the Androscoggin, where the town hunkers, became a “city” of the wilderness. As logging center, its river transported hundreds of thousands of acres-full, northward, cut to supply hungry new mills. Trees fell like snowflakes; large farms were installed to feed loggers and their draft teams. In the late eighteen hundreds one mill ground thirty million log feet to pulp each year; 86,400,000 square feet of newsprint were produced every day. Each spring a bristling river of logs, the Androscoggin gorged with whole spruce forests, ground its way southward through the valley. Eastward the village of Grafton, Maine sent its logs and pulpwood via the railroad through Success Township to those pulp grinders and all-consuming paper machines. Whole villages—with sewers, electricity, phones, stores and homes—villages such as Hastings on the Wild River over the border in Maine, were bought and sold on the basis of timber. Not since the glaciers had the land known such voracious use.
One morning while in the Eastern Depot (doing laundry and already in a sweat) I realized I did not know the name of the Pluton. I asked the first customer who walked in. She was from away, didn’t know, but thought maybe the owner—a French woman—would know. I walked into the restaurant to ask. I wanted to know how high it was too. There followed a quest for information that led me to waitresses, kitchen help, blue collar workers, the librarian, and finally the fire department.
Along with a clatter of tableware from the kitchen came some names, Mt. Forest and Mt. Jasper. I remembered then the smaller mountain across the narrow valley from the pluton. Wasn’t Cates Hill fledging off this mountain? At the counter of the Depot restaurant there was momentary confusion as to which was which. Finally it was determined that my pluton was Mt. Forest. But no one knew its elevation.
Later, on the other side of the river, the librarian, alerted to my search by a phone call from the Depot kitchen, turned out to be helpful and pregnant. She checked the town’s history booklets without success, then to my surprise she called the fire department. While she was talking, a friendly sort who had recently moved from the Catskills suggested checking the Appalachian mountain guide. This had not occurred to me—possibly because I thought of Mt. Forest as a city fixture? Yet now the fire department came through, the librarian writing down the elevation, along with that of neighboring Mt. Jasper: Mt. Forest 2,046 feet, Mt. Jasper 1,621. And yes, the latter communed with Cates Hill and the terraced neighborhood I had first collected—where homeowners were diligently painting their trim.
The Pluton now had a wonderful grip on me: each new tidbit of knowledge made me hope for more. I now wanted to know if a trail ascended it. The librarian knew but vaguely of one. Something about going to the head of a street, one of many dead-ending on the feet of the Rock. She was unsure which street; pointed out a couple possibilities from a yellowing map on the wall.
On my way to the car I determined to find that trail, even if I could do nothing with it. There was yet the wondering if anyone in Tansy Town knew much about the most striking piece of geology I had ever seen in such a setting. (Imagine looking down on the toy-filled world at some lost gemstone—crusted in lichen—in a box of children’s play jewels.)
But was today the day to begin exploration? With mounds of work still to do on the old apples, my day was already stoked with heat. The image of Allen . . . faithfully working away beneath paper machines in industrial 120 F. heat . . .
Would
