I went, spreading humble lowbush blueberries—tiny, pale and blue—invited. I bent down and plucked a meager handful. So good and sweet, so wild. I pulled the bike out of young saplings and turned onto the road.
Gliding down the steep hill past Kaplan’s, I felt my hat slipping off by degrees as the wind of my flight tore it. Off it flew, a wild white thing. I reached for it with my right hand. The left pulled impulsively at the brake. The bike stopped dead and I tumbled over its handlebars, careening into the dirt and pain of my fall.
I was scraped and banged—stung! Caked in dirt, I climbed unsteadily to my feet and, shaking, brushed off my jeans, my blouse and arms. I picked up the bike, straightened the brake holds and handlebars.
Peddling down, then once again back along the flat, I saw tall thickets of brown bitterdock that I had not noticed on the way up. They spired like drought-burnt flame: their leaves drying red from lack of moisture and seasonal lessening of light. Nearing the big house of the Scot, I looked out toward the mountains, now heavily shrouded.
It would have to be another day—to approximate the Glory of God.
Future Maine
I’m in the bedroom upstairs, sitting at the old oak kitchen table, now my desk. It’s where I write words of warning. I am a writer, and that is what writers do. They comment on life. (It’s no longer called moralizing—old-fashioned word.) Comment: there is a bridge out—midway—on the route along which we roar.
But I’m not really thinking of that at the moment because my fingers are sifting through thistle seeds. My eyes stare unseeing out the window into the backyard and beyond, into the logged-over woods. Unseeing, because I’m concentrating on messages tactile, not visual.
The seeds feel minute. They feel the size of salt grains, but I know they’re larger because I looked at them. Rubbing the grains between my thumb and fingers or just covering my palms with them, sifting, I feel natural oils from these seeds.
I found the seeds when we were on our way back from Portland, where Allen had been doing genealogical research at the library. Wedged between the car door and passenger seat where I rode—a genuine thistle with three blossoms in different stages, budding, blooming, and gone-by. We found them below the Eastern Promenade. Something big had squashed a four-feet thicket of them, leaving pale canes radiating a spiny green-and-lavender crown of leaves and blooms. I continued to think of it, trying to guess what felled them (as though some large body had flown through the night willy-nilly and landed thus unhappily). We remained mystified. It did however remind us of the Scottish heritage of the thistle. Thistles that once alerted the Scots to the presence of enemies. The motto which goes with the emblem: Nemo me impune laccessit. No one provokes me with impunity.
Our plucked thistles rode with us in an aluminum can full of water where I had tucked them out-of-the-way so they wouldn’t pierce my skin with their fierce spines. (Why, by the way, do we fuss with plastic and aluminum containers? Do we know how much energy it takes to recycle them into new containers—which are promptly drained and again in need of recycling? As Allen suggests from time to time, “Why not use returnable glass containers? It takes far less energy to clean glass than it does to make new containers.” And think of the new and local business for it. This is how it was done in the days when soda bottles were shapely and I carried an ugly leather black bucket purse.)
We were passing into Gray, Maine when I noticed a sign proclaiming thistle seeds for sale in front of a sprawling lawn-and-garden store. My ignorance was so great that I cried out. “Allen, stop! I want to know why thistle seeds are sold.” Could not picture a gardener planting such seeds, not even a Scottish gardener. Once inside I was told that songbirds love them. So, with a sackful, I left the jolly clutter of the greenhouse-cum-lawnchair-whirligigs-shop.
The seeds in the bag are black. Seated at the oak table, I take a tiny hundred in my palm to examine. They remind me of mouse turds—narrow and curved, larger at one end than the other. Under the aspheric magnifier they bloom large, and show three sides with striations lengthwise. They are markedly different from the seeds of the bull thistle that Allen cut for me from the Portland thicket below the Promenade.
Sharp prickles are everywhere on this plant. Gingerly I lift the cutting from the aluminum can. Its leaves, green calyx, and stem are all thick with spines, an identifying feature of the bull thistle. Only the lavender petal parts, thickly coated with white pollen, are soft and velvety to the touch.
I leave this flower intact, but pull the dried brown petal parts of a gone-by bloom. They come forth in a multitude. Below these parts, inside the spiny ovary, are myriad pale seeds attached to folded dandelion-like carriers. I pull gently, drawing these forth into a feathery pile. A breeze from the open window blows on them and slowly they open and pop up in a cottony heap, poised to waft about the room.
Quickly I quash the bagful of black seeds down on the living, burgeoning pile. A few feathery puffs escape and blow across the table.
I take some, parting them from the feather carriers and hold them, glistening, in my palm. Now I examine them with the magnifier and add a few black seeds for comparison. The black ones are longer, more narrow at one end. Newcombe’s shows several species. There’s even a yellow one instead of lavender.
The cutting is several days old now. It’s been that long since we came back from Portland. I run my fingers thoughtfully along the grain of the spines. It seems that the older and dryer a plant becomes, the less piercing it grows to the touch.
I have filled and hung my feeder. The songbirds may show anytime. When I toted a bucket purse in junior high, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out, causing a worthy stir. It showed the significance of songbirds as environmental indicators.
Here the woods surrounding our house on two sides have been thinned considerably, causing me to wonder about the wood thrush and veery. How will they find it for seclusion and breeding in coming years? Thanks to Carson, NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) has become a worthy acronym. I don’t denigrate it: There are no backyard stewards but ourselves. It may be the closest we come to holding our spiritual ground in the physical realm.
This morning, one of those stifling dirty days, I walked up the road with the dog, picking blackberries. We left the road when we got to the powerline where dwarf sumac had been poisoned by herbicide, standing stiff, brown and dried like statues of dead trees. Here one sees the wide brutal path of the skidder intersecting the powerline’s swath.
I stepped into that swath then turned down into blasted woodland. It’d been a few weeks since we heard the roar and clank of the skidder moving in woods behind our house. The living-wage work of the logger was done. Now might be a good time to bushwhack back through the forest and see what the saw had done.
Maine has had a strange geo-history, written in earth (rock and soil) over millions of years, but the strangest may be yet to come. And this strangeness would stem from the speed with which changes occurred. They would not be written in earth so much as in atmosphere, another ancient controlling element of our life. No, the changes of the past were not small, but slow. Vast changes, both mighty and megalithic. Question: In geo-historical terms, what do Maine and Europe have in common? Answer: Cape Elizabeth.
According to David L. Kendall’s Glaciers & Granite, the warped rock of the Cape was once part of the pre-European continent. This was before it was warped. One understands that a move of such magnitude (splitting continents) could only be accomplished by forces great enough to twist rock—force, heat, pressure enough to buckle the ponderous plates of oceanic floors and shove continents willy-nilly. More recent changes include the bending and denuding of the entire lower third of the state by those
