Two more short essays

These two essays appeared in a collection called What’s the Story? I published it ten years ago with a small Vermont press whose capacities I seem to have greatly overestimated: that’s to say that it sank like a stone wrapped in lead. I still like the collection, but them’s the facts.

Big Musquash Stream

–for Christopher Matthews

True to its Passamaquoddy name, the stream’s alive with muskrats, furtive little paddlers. The seemingly infinite tract of slough that stretches from either bank shows domed and gorgeous. Pickerelweed blooms on and on in the water, a purplish-blue mass that almost matches the sky. The forecast calls for storm a bit later, but I mean to push on, the sweeps of my paddle narcotic. Lightning may threaten, but for now I’m full of those sweet old delusions: that my way lies clear, that I have nothing but time.

A cow moose grazes where Flipper Creek drops southerly into the main branch. She wears a dangling pond-lily beard, and she goggles at me, unfrightened, almost torpid, as insouciant a creature as the world knows. I slightly bend the canoe toward her, but she goes on blinking and chewing. I’m close enough to see the gnats around her eyes.

Noontime. A flight of nighthawks has gathered above the flow, untimely, not hunting but racing. I’m struck by the beauty of their aerobatics, so pure and thoughtless, so unencumbered.

I haven’t explored this bog in some time, but surely it can’t have a thing in common with my gallant friend in the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. He’s all in a tangle, living with pains of body and heart, both equally exotic to him, and it might seem strange that he should enter my thoughts on Musquash, were it not that I love the man and worry about him daily.

There’s no soul for miles and miles– only muskrat, nighthawk, moose, and now some black ducks skimming insects from the backwash of a languorous eddy. The surface slick reflects the birds exactly, right down to their primary feathers, colored like the flowers and the sky. It’s as though I’m asked to celebrate blue. I do, but there’s more to be celebrated, despite my far-off friend’s multiple sclerosis, so cruel and daunting, his crushing divorce. As for that love-grief, what could I tell him? That I’m glad I’m far past courtship myself?

I suppose I’m selfish, at least just now; I try to banish my own thoughts of the friend, wanting no distraction, let alone heart-heaviness, to mar this easy beauty as I slide over barely detectable waves. The small effort that my progress demands will be repaid: soon enough, I’ll drift home on the faint current to my wife and love of over thirty years. That is, if I make it back to the launch ahead of that far thunder.

I’m sure I will. My constant returns make my absences worthwhile, as in the trite saying about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer: it feels so nice when you stop. But of course my trip hasn’t hurt me, quite the contrary.

Despite myself, I think of my friend’s quaint, ancient village, a speck on the map. Its precipitous hills make it hard for him to walk to the bus or the corner shop nowadays. It’s always a challenge for me even to visit there. Some air of romance pervades the town, but its alleys twist into knots. You might hide that whole settlement in this vastness of bog, through which Big Musquash Stream so mazily wanders, though in the end there’s only the one way out, and I know it.

Stone Rollers

–for Don Metz

At that stage of our lives, we scrambled up Smarts Mountain and any number of others: Demmick Hill, Holts Ledge, The Hedgehog Den, Mousely, Smith, Cottonstone, on and on. Having made our camps at the top, at some point or another one of us would say we could live like that forever.

All the seasons called us to those heights, but especially winter, when we could light as big a blaze as we wanted and could dance like imagined, aboriginal tribal people, the firelight bright as noon, our shadows shooting clear to the crowns of trees, high branches sagging with snow. Afterwards we sat by coals and said, perhaps, the best things we’d ever say to each other.

It’s like yesterday. So goes the cliché, but my body at least knows better. I can still climb those old hills, but at a far more deliberate pace. I’m grateful enough for that, given the condition of some friends. My friend Don has aged more robustly. Still, the two of us could never do the thing, strange as it was, we also did back then, because it would require a strength we both must admit has inevitably waned. We wrestled up great rocks and sent them down the steepest slopes we could find. Each boulder pulled hard from the frozen earth, but once it did, soon became a force that nothing –unless it were an even bigger boulder or a stout trunk that flashed an orange wound when all that weight struck it– could even slow.

A snowshoe hare once hopped aside just in time to save itself. Winter songbirds flushed. Each understory shrub and sapling salaamed in the wake of power released by strong, young, reckless men, the boulders’ speed and clamor enough to rouse whole neighborhoods.

All this was simply something that you’d do if like those young men you knew you could live this way forever.