SPRING DIDN’T COME TILL APRIL THE YEAR EARL DROPPED HIS skidder on the ice. And Good Friday was good indeed that spring: fifty degrees, comparatively balmy, each breeze carrying a scent that was a memory, every new bit of green an inspiration. I was a bud and opened, too, quit work early, ten A.M. I collected my fly rod and drove just a mile downstream, parked by the Twin Bridges (once two identical covered bridges, now just a single cement span augmented where the old twin had been by an eight-foot-diameter flood-stage pipe, fraternal twin at best). I scrambled down the high bank to the streambed and walked through the tunnel the huge pipe made, whistling to hear the echo.
I made my way downstream, nymphing on the faulty theory that above the millpond in early spring there’d be large trout on the move. (In fly-fishing parlance, nymphing is the use of a specialized lure, or fly, which amounts to a lot of thread and fur and tinsel tightly wound on a hook to resemble the larval stage of several common stream insects. You let the nymph—a woolly bugger, a hare’s ear, a stonefly—bounce along the bottom with the hope of attracting the interest of a hungry fish.) The going was tough and the fish weren’t biting (or weren’t there to begin with), so I turned back exactly where Earl had crashed—no obvious sign of the disaster now, just a quiescent pool with one sandy bank caved in. On the way back upstream I stopped fishing altogether and simply enjoyed the rock hop, concentrating so hard on my footing that I didn’t realize I was back at the Twin Bridges, and didn’t see the person till she spoke:
“Another little boy with his fishing pole.”
Startled, I peered into the dimness of the huge pipe.
“Never fear, I’m just a little wood sprite,” she said. Her voice echoed eerily off the corrugations of the galvanized metal, gained volume, but was still the wavering voice of an old woman and no sprite, as sprites are ever young. As my eyes adjusted to the dark in there I saw she was standing at the other end of the tube in dead water to her bare knees, holding up a long skirt. My own feet were cold in boots and I hadn’t touched the water.
She said, ’You didn’t ask, but I’m considering this pipe.”
I walked on through to her end on a rim of sand and stones. Standing on a big riprap rock, I loomed over her. She looked up at me with clearest brown eyes, held her skirt, wicked little smile; she could have been ten years old. But she was at the other end of things—very old, it looked. Her hair was a rinse-white puff, her face nicely creased from smiling, her skin dark. She seemed to tilt a little to starboard, wore a neat little gray cardigan over a ruffled blouse, and out of her sleeve stuck a nice wad of tissue, which she pulled out at that moment for a dainty sneeze.
“Pine pollen,” she said.
“It gets me, too,” I said.
“Just look how this pipe-way is gathering sand,” she said. “It’s thirty feet long, at a guess, and if you look, you’ll see that the latest flow made three turns in that length.”
I looked, looked again, saw only slowly that the stream, long receded, had pushed up several sandbars, leaving a sinuous track through the pipe.
“Rather beautiful,” she said.
I agreed.
She was encouraged by my interest and continued: “It’s just as if the corrugations of the pipe weren’t there at all—the water is ignoring the pipe absolutely. You know, they always talk about flood stage clearing the pipe-way, but it doesn’t happen in these low-incline installations. The water considers this overflow a back channel and wants to fill it.”
She raised a hand for help climbing out of the water and I took it, pulled her up gently so as not to yank the arm right off of her—that’s how delicate she seemed, weight of a sparrow, bare feet dripping. She never let go of the hem of her skirt, which was a lovely thick drape of blue cloth I couldn’t name—I thought wool, that light sort of wool cloth you find in good pants, with a weave to it. I looked up by my truck and spied her car: an older-model Mercedes, very sporty, polished and gleaming, the same blue as her skirt.
“You are a lovely man,” she said in thanks.
“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, giving the words a courtly flourish for her sake; clearly, she came from a more formal time.
“I would like to go sit on that log.” She pointed upstream to a large beech tree lying stripped on a sandbar in the bright sun. We climbed slowly up the bank and made our way holding hands along a sand ledge that formed a shelf over the stream, a hundred yards or so. At the root end of the old tree a suitable throne had formed, and there my little stream queen alighted, her bare feet in the warm sand. I sat on the log next to her, pushed my heavy hiking boots into the sand to form mounds, kicked them down, formed new mounds, over and over.
“Tell me your name, winter bird,” she said.
I did.
“Tell me what you do,” she said.
I said English professor, since that was the quickest thing to say and was true at the time, true enough.
“How unpleasant,” she said pleasantly.
And I tried to make it sound actually quite wonderful, which you could see was what she’d hoped in a way, that such a job could be wonderful.
“Do you bring your classes here?” she said.
Well, no, I hadn’t, but often brought them outside in spring. “But the outdoors, you know, it’s distracting.”
She grimaced at that observation, said, “It’s the proper distraction. You must bring them here.”
In the next hour I learned her name, Connie Nosalli, and lots more: that she was from Mississippi originally, that she considered herself “colored” though she was very “light-skinned” in her terms, that she seldom thought about race anymore, except to get out in the sun as much as possible to be as dark as possible in honor of her heritage. Her hometown was called Roxie, near McComb, Mississippi, “not too terribly far” from New Orleans, Louisiana, which she pronounced carefully for me, as if it were possible I might never have heard of it. All this sitting on a log in a stream of talk—clearly she hadn’t had anyone to regale in quite a while.
She said things like “Tell me about you, and I’ll tell you about what a fool I’ve been, including that I voted for Richard Nixon twice.”
I told her lots about me, starting with a quick version of my views on Ronald Reagan (loving him, she gasped at my calumny). I told her about my whole life, really. I loved the way she smiled and nodded and frowned and sputtered and laughed and groaned alternately at my revelations. She had a way of keeping eye contact, keeping it most comfortably. I stopped my mounding of the sand, stopped eyeing my escape truck there on the steep bank far on the other side of the stream.
She’d been born in May of 1908: her eighty-sixth birthday was coming in two weeks. She had a clear, almost British, accent, no trace of the South whatsoever. She had met her husband late—she’d been an “old maid” (she said) of thirty-four, a high school teacher of science who’d never been further north than Jackson till older than that, but who had “started down” to Texas to get a master’s degree in biology, which was just one unspecialized science at the time.
Later, she would tell me about some difficulties of race she’d suffered: particularly, that she had been “passing” as “white” from college into middle age—staying out of the sun (as she said lightly), treating and bleaching her hair, and simply never raising the subject of her heritage with anyone ever, and no one asked. She was quite proud of herself, not for “passing” but for fooling racists and getting what she wanted, which wasn’t the degree, as it turned out, but a husband. She’d been “injured” as a teen in a way that left her “barren” and “scarred” (I didn’t pry further) and had simply never thought of herself as marriageable.
After college, which she’d attended across the border at Louisiana State, in Monroe (accent on the first syllable), she’d started teaching high school biology, “passing” once again—never had a date, not once—spending her afternoons in the field making observations, studying at night, amassing a natural sciences library for the woebegone school. Soon she’d tired of that life, wanting more, but stayed with it ten years until she despaired and applied with little hope to graduate schools, using only a first initial and her maiden name. She was the sole woman in her graduate program at the University of Texas, Austin, which covered multiple sciences, just showed up to begin the program without letting them know her gender be-cause no one had asked, and none of the application forms had inquired. “I was so ugly they never balked.” She must have had some stories about the South at that time, but she never told them, never spoke of the South unless I asked impertinent questions, which she answered shortly or not at all.
She achieved her master’s in two years, but had to leave school in her third, which would have started her on the road to a Ph.D., forced out not by what she’d always feared—racial or gender issues—but by a romantic scandal. She’d fallen in love with one of her professors, an “Italian from the snowy Alps,” as she put it, a charming, tiny man with a thick accent. He was a hydrologist of little note, a sparkling, funny teacher in his sixties, beloved of students but not so much by colleagues at the university, a deeply troubled soul who had lost his family—all but his beloved baby brother—in the First World War. He taught future engineers practical science but saw his own area as purest field science, a kind of formalized love of rivers.
Dr. Nosalli and Connie had begun their romance (apparently quite torrid for the era—one of Connie’s charms was the constant, coruscating juxtaposition of frankness and modesty), begun it at the end of her first year in school and kept it secret till they were wed, at which time they left for Massachusetts—the professor had applied for and won a fine job with the federal government as a civilian hydrologist for the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1950, flush times, he and Connie bought a secluded cottage on Long Pond, down in the Belgrade Lakes of Maine (about twenty miles from Farmington), and from there they’d explored widely, doing his brand of science, which was also hers, and forming an impenetrably tight alliance, a kind of dual solitude. His pet interest was sandbars, gravel bars, sand carry, and just plain sand, and his late lifework—a hobby, really, since he never managed to write his papers or even abstracts—was the Kennebec River, the Sandy River, and two of the Sandy’s tributaries.
Memorably, she said, “ he trouble with marrying a much older man is that much older men die.” And, indeed, Dr. Nosalli had died in 1961, at eighty-five, which was Connie’s age when we met on Temple Stream.
She said, “You could always find us right here on Sundays. In fact, if you want to be in touch, come looking for us. I’m not in the book. I haven’t an address, at least not one I’ll give you! I’m a summer bird!”
Later, I would learn that Connie came to Temple Stream nearly every Sunday when she was in Maine, which was about six months of the year, from midspring to midautumn (the rest of the year she was somewhere she wouldn’t disclose in Massachusetts, one of the Boston suburbs). And later still, she would give me her P.O. box in Belgrade Lakes, to which I might send an invitation to a summer potluck (these she never took up) or a Christmas card for forwarding. Temple Stream was just a stop on the Sunday tour of her husband’s study locations. And in this weekly tour she not only remembered him and their life together but continued his research, in a way, which in honesty had been all observation. Looking closely at streams was her work and her calling. She seemed a Buddhist nun to me, engaged in this seemingly pointless and purposefully endless task.
She said, “I think of him every day.”
THAT WAS MY BIRD SPRING. I’D HAD AN INTEREST FROM CHILDHOOD (birding was my only easy merit badge in Boy Scouts), but that was the year I really began to revel in the dawn chorus, to walk around with binoculars, to keep lists and notes and dates, to acquire more and more sophisticated bird guides. Birding, in fact, quickly supplanted my old love of fishing.
Most of the winter birds were around, of course, what Connie called the year-rounders: the chickadees, three kinds of woodpeckers, the stalwart blue jay, tree sparrows, song spar-rows, the occasional pair of pine grosbeaks, the occasional flock of yellow grosbeaks, juncos in slate flocks, one pair of cardinals dependably, several rock doves (i.e., city pigeons) from my neighbor’s 1820 dairy barn, a large flock of mourning doves, huge ravens, noisier crows, nuthatches white- and red-breasted, pine siskins, redpolls in large flocks, tufted titmice on no discernible schedule, starlings in great flocks, robins, golden-crowned kinglets (a chipper, busy little flock of tiny birds back in the balsams of our woods intermittently), gold-finches. The male goldfinches turned bright yellow from a tarnishy green in late March, just as the summer birds began to turn up.
Around solstice, a pair of hooded mergansers arrived on the stream, he with his great retractable hat of black feathers, garish parabolas of white behind the eyes, hooked black beak, she with her bouffant feather-do slicked way back—punk-rock babe with Camaby Street dude, sporting around, paddling up-stream and out of sight, floating back on the current and into view.1 They seemed to be looking for nest sites, paddling to the edges of the stream, looking up under snags, inspecting the muskrat den that I’d thought was in use still. Did that winter mink get our local muskrat? He must have, as the birds took over the den, diving to its underwater entrance, appearing any-time I stomped on the opposite bank, popping up out of the water one at a time, male first, paddling fast at sight of me, taking to the sky in squeaky protest, a long loop I followed with binoculars. If I sat out of sight they’d return within ten minutes. By late April, no amount of stomping would get the female to show herself. Only the male would appear, and attempt to lead me away. Of course, I let him. (Later, when the female was out and about with her brood of nine merganserlings, the male went missing.)
And Wally flushed a common snipe out of the boggy edges of the first hayfield, the bird flying over my head showing that comically long bill and landing not far from my feet, playing statue. The bill weighted the head earthward—the bird looked downcast even though he was a nice, plump, leaf-colored soul, looked abashed, perhaps about that long nose. But he was not abashed, he was a bird, and that beak found food for him nicely, shaped to its use as a mud probe and forceps to search out then pinch and extract worms from soft soils.
A brown creeper—that small busy bird with decurved bill and self-absorbed air—appeared on the dead young elm where I’d hung a ball of suet in a net bag left over from onions. He started at the bottom of the tree, crept busily up to the suet, pecked out a sample, flew down to the base of the next tree.
And dream-gazing out the kitchen window while putting dishes away, I spotted a huge wingspan soaring high over the stream, subtle turns to follow the watercourse, an air of dominance, deep calm. It took a minute to let myself see that white head—a bald eagle, of course, on a reconnaissance flight. I watched it a full three or four minutes till it disappeared over the trees upstream, and then I watched the sky where it’d been, dishes forgotten. When I snapped to, I called my friend Bob Kimber, who lives three miles up the Temple. “Eagle coming your way,” I said. A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was Bob: “Here he comes.”
Later that week I walked down to the water early in the morning to see who might turn up, found the usual chickadees and blue jays. With my binoculars I spotted some juncos, too: winter birds all. Then, just across the stream, a fluttering caught my eye, resolved into a large flock of cedar waxwings busily eating something off the remains of snow. I looked at the granular snowpack around my feet: snow fleas, tiny black bugs hatching everywhere. The waxwings dove and ascended, perched and leapt, noisily snapping up the bounty. I got the briefest glimpses of pointed crests and dark masks, red wax-seals stamped on wings.
I spotted a sharp-shinned hawk only because it had insinuated itself among the mourning doves in the dog yard, and one of them in fright flew into the big screen on the laundry room window. I turned from loading the dryer in time to see the baffled dove leap to flight from the lawn, only to be snatched from the air by the waiting sharpie: flash of wing, silent death. Later I’d find the feathers fanned neatly on a stump in our woods, all else gone.
I knew the advent of summer was irreversible when the first grackle of the year appeared, swaggering among the lesser birds under the feeders, collecting the cracked corn I’d strewn. More so when I heard the first red-winged blackbirds calling: that’s a swamp song, the first selection on summer’s sound track.
An April Fool sleet storm left five inches of the tiniest of ice balls, colorful sun prisms that the mourning doves crunched in their bills one at a time for hours.
Past dusk on a warmer day, I heard the familiar croak of the American woodcock in my neighbor’s barnyard. Initially, I thought it was a misplaced frog, but then came the twittering tones of the male’s ascent, that weird whistling of air through wings that announced a very fine specimen was here in the world and owned that territory. The female of the pair simply waited on the ground for her lover’s antics to cease, for the ad-vent of the stiff-legged approach he’d make in the end for her favors. I looked to the dusky sky in time to see his spiral progress up and up and up till I lost sight. Then I listened harder. Soon the bird’s invisible plummet to earth was complete, and I heard a brief song and scrabbling, then the croaking again, then the whole process repeated, a cock for each field in the neighborhood, solo croaking, solo flights till mid-night, while the females, less excitable, stayed put. I felt so fond, each male like some bumbling friend with a crazy plan to attract women that in the end, and against all logic, works.
As April grew, my sightings increased: vulture, mallard pair, fox sparrow. On the fifth, I moved the birdhouses on their posts away from the garden into newly dug holes near the apple tree. That very afternoon a bluebird flew in and perched on the roof of the middle house. In the sun the next morning I spotted darker blue flashes, forked tails in the sky, and the tree swallows were back, birds born in the boxes I’d built: fine by me, even if the result was the displacement of the bluebird.
Maligned cowbirds joined the other blackbirds: which of the many nesters around would they choose to host their eggs?
On a walk down to the stream I saw our kestrel—that small falcon—harassing starlings, saw him perched imperious on the popple top he’d always preferred, emperor’s square head. He perched twenty minutes without a movement, surveyed the great world. I left him to it, walked to the water, used my binoculars to scan the trees alongside the Temple, spotted a kingbird. This new arrival took the highest bare branch around, skydived rhythmically for insects. A raucous cry made me wheel to see a kingfisher hunkered on the lowest branches, watching the water for fish: the Temple is a world of kings. And along the sandbars, rusty blackbirds, Lincoln’s sparrows, spotted sandpipers. A savannah sparrow piped on a top-twig perch in the alders, throwing its head back with passion. Vireo, veery, yellow-bellied flycatcher, phoebe, thrush.
Suddenly, a pair of common mergansers swooped in over my head like aircraft (I could hear their wings whistling), landed fast on the water, skied in on their feet leaving wakes, bright orange bills, the male purest white with a mallard-green head, wingspan of almost three feet (by contrast, the hooded merganser’s span is about two feet).
On the answering machine at home I found a message from Juliet: driving into town she’d seen wild turkeys in the cleared land across from the Kings’ house. Thinking about that, absently surveying the sky, I spotted the first heron of the year, flying the eagle’s route, but effortfully. In the woods I heard the first warbler song: witchety, witchety, witchety: common yellowthroat. A partridge drummed, a hermit thrush whistled.
Chorus in the evenings: spring peepers.
Then it was May, and merry, merry. In the yard, purple and house finches sang. In the woods, a hermit thrush called from a regular perch on a low branch under balsams. On the stream, a wood-duck pair mingled with a large flock of black ducks. In the sky, a red-tailed hawk took evasive action, harassed by crows. In the brush, new warblers sang, warblers everywhere, some on migration, some to stay the summer: black-and-white, chestnut-sided, yellow, Canada, Wilson’s. In the neighboring fields, bobolinks tootled, back from a winter’s sojourn in Brazil. Carnaval! Under the hemlocks, white-crowned sparrows appeared, six pair. In the night sky at the edges of the forest the first fireflies blinked. In the neighbor’s high sugar tree that same night, the whip-poor-will sang its first plaint of the season.
In the heirloom apple trees, a catbird mewled. At the kitchen window, the first ruby-throated hummingbird materialized, pure motion looking for the feeder that had been there the summer previous. In the beaver bog I spotted a sora, a green heron, a night-heron, and, of course, a great blue. Up in the elm tree, our northern orioles were back, working on a nest. From the neighbor’s barn on the first of June, chimney swifts emerged at dawn. Down in the morning stream after, I saw a dragonfly dipping her long tail, methodically laying eggs.
ABOUT THEN, WARBLER TIME, CAME THE FIRST TRULY WARM morning that spring—an irresistible stream day. I pedaled my old bike half a mile down to Russell’s Mill Road, admiring the tulips and narcissuses of the six neighbors along the way, coasted to the perfunctory concrete bridge over the Temple, a favorite spot to watch the water, just above the spot where Russell had built his dam. Once, a covered bridge stood there, I knew, but the town burned it in 1967 after a truck went through—unsentimental solution. Stubby granite obelisks from the old bridge lay on their sides at both ends: once even the most minor stream crossing could be a thing of studied grandeur.
I balanced on the bike by holding the battered, inadequate bridge railing and stared down into the clarity of the pool below, the mud of the spring floods having settled out. The sun was so nice on my back that I contemplated leaving the bike and rock-hopping in the stream down to the Twin Bridges—always a good stretch, but better aboard a canoe in flood time: shoot under the Russell’s Mill Road bridge, rage through a quick rocky rapids, pause in the long pond that bends hairpin around the tip of a nicely mowed peninsula (someone’s pointy yard), finally take a breath and dive into an extended chute of wild water. The same chute that once in a fit of bad judgment I rode with Desi and Wally onboard; we blasted past a porcupine having a drink at the banks while, as it happened, the dogs were looking the other way: close call.
And many times in low water I’d walked and swum the stretch—deep woods down there, good birding, curious fungi. But it was a bike day, and maybe not a day for perfect solitude, and so I puffed and pedaled back up the hill to our road, took a right and coasted downhill. Not far, just at the place the stream returns to the road, I saw my downstream neighbor Erick Apland standing in his dooryard. He was gazing upward, contemplating a large broken branch in one of the old maples at the front of his property. Erick is my age, tall, large-boned, a kind of Farmington Viking, a builder by trade and a member of the town planning board. You often see his picture in the paper, Erick planting trees on Arbor Day or organizing volunteer projects at the nursing home. His wife is a doctor in town. I’d done a little backcountry skiing with him, drunk a beer or two streamside. His house—one of the originals around here—is beautifully restored, with a magnificent post-and-beam barn of his own design and construction.
I pulled up and hailed him, and he hailed me: company. “Nice bike,” he said—my bike was a wreck.
“Nice tree,” I said.
Mild white water coursed and pounded not a hundred feet away.
Erick was wearing a green T-shirt printed discreetly over the pocket with the following brief poem:
He offered me a light beer. We drank and traded amiable insults, came too quickly to that point in neighborly conversation when the small talk is used up. There was just the sound of the stream knocking gently past. In high water, the knocking would turn to roaring, I knew. In flood, it’d be like locomotives racing all night. We finished our beers. We gazed past the trunks of small trees to the stream. We were two people who knew the water well, standing like mutual friends of the bride at a sudden wedding.
So I asked about the clover mill, which I’d read was nearby.
“Ah, the clover mill,” Erick said, and explained: settlers had had to import clover seed, a pricey Eurasian native. To save the expense, thrifty farmers would let a crop go to seed. But hulling clover was difficult, tedious work. Temple Stream power—the height of technology—changed all that, allowed seed to be cleaned in large quantities quickly by transferring motion to a system of notched troughs and hulling boards.
“Not much of it left,” Erick said. Down at the stream, he showed me the remains: a bulwark of large rocks, flat sides showing, some as big as the oxen that must have helped move them there. The miller was one Moses Craig, who lived with his father. “After the dam and the mill, they built my house.”
I asked how it was living so close to the Temple.
“It’s fucking loud,” Erick said, “but don’t quote me.”
Back on my bike, I continued downstream, past the neighborhood swimming hole, past a fallen house (there’s a bed frame in there still, and a hand pump), and to the Twin Bridges.
And there was Connie Nosalli’s Mercedes parked in its spot over the water. I found the woman herself perched on a rock in an impossible spot partway across the stream, just gazing into the current with her head cocked, dressed in a fishprint pinafore and big straw sun hat. “Oh, you’re here,” she said when I called, as if it had been me she’d been listening for. “Good, good. You’ll help me to my log.”
I struggled out to her spot, rock by rock, and rock by rock helped her out of the stream and up the steep bank to the path that took us to her fallen beech tree. There on the smooth wood I helped her sit. She patted the bole beside her and I sat too. The stream tumbled past forcefully, but nothing like in flood. Hidden, a red-eyed vireo sang its strong song: hey-you-two, on-your-log, look-up, look-at-me. The trees, newly leafed-out in palest green, waved and sighed in the breeze.
At length, continuing some thought to which I hadn’t been privy, Connie spoke: “Fortunately, I make friends easily. In fact, I’m seldom alone. Although, come to think of it, when I’m alone is when I’m most together.”
More silence, which grew a little uncomfortable. I wasn’t quite sure of my welcome. Connie seemed wrapped in herself.
Conversationally I said, “So, what are you up to today?”
“Hydrology.”
I laughed, but Connie took visible offense, so I gulped it back. And we sat. Then sat more. The stream rose and fell slightly, a rhythm of bubbling then quiet, a swelling and recession of volume. I began to think of exit lines, and once again the sand began to mound beneath my boots. Connie’s bare feet and ankles were tucked into the sand, which she wore like socks. It could not have been very warm, though the sun shone on us still.
“Hydrology,” I said, trying for a tone of reverence.
And at length, still aggrieved, Connie spoke: “Water, dear, is what connects heaven and earth. Do you understand? There is a constant exchange, earth to atmosphere. It’s the breathing of the planet.” Then she sighed, deciding to give me the full discussion: Water, she explained, evaporates under the influence of wind and sun wherever it’s exposed, “whether in puddles or ponds or lakes or oceans or streams,” or sublimates from the surface of snow and ice in cold weather. She said the other source of water in the atmosphere is transpiration, water drawn up as sap by plants and trees through capillary action, all the way from the roots through vascular systems to the thousands of microscopic perforations of each leaf, from which the plant exhales it as vapor—constantly, in huge amounts.
Connie put on her quiz face: “How much do you think ten acres of corn, such as will be grown down the way, might transpire, for example?”
“In a year?”
“How about just in a day?”
“Hundreds of gallons in a day,” I said, thinking immediately that I’d guessed too high.
“No, hundreds of gallons in a minute! They will exchange to the air thirty thousand, forty thousand gallons of water a day. And remember that a big deciduous tree can give off that much, too, in just a year. Look at all the trees around us here!”
I pictured millions of gallons flying up from them in aggregate each growing season. Instead of a downpour, an up-pour, more on sunny days. Plants, she told me, are second only to oceans as sources of water vapor. And as vapor, water defies gravity, is heated by the sun and rises like the steam from an iron. “Not that you have seen an iron lately.”
She was the acerbic high-school teacher she hadn’t been for half a century, explaining the hydrological cycle to a recalcitrant student, winning him with every wile. The stream soughed past; my head filled with scientific questions; I quit my squirming.
“And, as you have seen in your shower bath, water vapor condenses on cool surfaces. So in nature, from gas to liquid. Which is rain, most often. Your next question: why does vapor condense into rain?” She explained: warm air rises to areas of lower pressure that allows it to expand. The expansion cools the air and thus the water vapor, which forms droplets around motes of dust, and if heavy enough, they fall as rain.
My teacher looked at me closely to see if she was getting through. “What is a stream?” she asked.
I had one right in front of me for inspiration. Slowly I came up with this: “A stream is a crowd of attractive water molecules heading downhill.”
“That’s good. Good. How does the water get to the stream?”
“Rain.”
“By what process?”
“Runoff? It flows off the mountains and the hills and every inclined plane and to the stream.”
“No,” Connie said. “Though sometimes when the land is saturated or frozen that is true. What actually happens is that nearly all rain soaks into the ground.” And rain fills the crevices between every rock and grain of sand. It fills the holes in permeable rocks; it sinks in at various rates until it finds something impermeable, like a layer of bedrock or dense clay. It then begins to collect, filling all the spaces it can until the land is full, so to speak, at which point the water spills into the streams. Water in a stream and water in the ground are both just rain—the same water, only at different places. And all water is pulled downhill by gravity. Movement through permeable rock is relatively slow. Movement in an open streambed is fast.
“And to the sea,” I said.
“And to the sky, as well.”
“And to the sky.”
Most of the water on earth is in the oceans, she told me, ninety-six percent or more. Most of the fresh water is in the ice caps, most of that in Antarctica, something on the order of seven million cubic miles, enough to feed all the rivers in the United States for twenty thousand years. A lot of water is in the ground at any one time too. No one knows exactly how much, Connie said, but less than in the ice caps. Yearly, some one hundred thousand cubic miles of water leap into the atmosphere. Most of that falls back into the ocean, but enough falls back on land to feed the streams and rivers and fill the pores of the earth. Lakes get a lot—but all the lakes of the world do not hold as much water as the atmosphere holds in a year, perhaps half as much. And all the rivers in the world at any given moment hold only about three hundred cubic miles of water. The Mississippi might be a mile wide, but it’s not a mile deep. It’s but a ribbon of water and can’t hold a bucket to the sky. Still, it carries something like forty percent of all the water brought to the sea in the United States each year.
“And here is Temple Stream,” Connie said.
“Pretty,” I said, pleased when she laughed.
The sun fell back behind the hill, and we grew chilly fast. Connie rose without my aid, held her arms out to the stream, said, “What gifts you bring us,” and put her elbow up to be taken. My pickup was only ten years old then, but looked a junker next to her swanky. Mercedes. Into which she easily climbed, closed her door, rolled her window down quickly.
She said, “Another Sunday, then?”
I said, “Another Sunday, yes.”
“Hydrology,” she said.
“Hydrology,” I repeated.
“It’s no laughing matter,” she said, and burbled out an extended giggle of such merriment that I couldn’t help but laugh too.
I said, “I’m happy I found you.”
“Well,” said Connie Nosalli, composing herself, pulling her wad of tissue from her sleeve, daubing her eyes, “that’s what’s so important about spending time where you want to be: you meet people of like mind, or at least you meet yourself.”
FLASH FORWARD TO THE SPRING OF 2000. ONE EARLY APRIL morning, sleepless with her pregnancy, Juliet woke me, said: “We have to leave Ohio.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Promise me,” she said.
I promised, just couldn’t say when. I knew at least that we’d spend the summer in Maine—her last trimester—and that I’d be on leave from Ohio State again in the fall: the baby would be born in Farmington.
In the high stack of forwarded mail that had accumulated during our New York trip (and my solo mission to Maine) came a small padded envelope from Ms. Bollocks, the sort you buy at the post office: inside was a squashed Animal Crackers box containing three hundred forty extremely wrinkled, pawed, and greasy one-dollar bills along with two crumpled receipts, one for a Sawzall ferrule and blades (she’d shopped for these in Pennsylvania), one for the padded envelope. There was also a dim photocopy of a months-old electric bill, copiously marked in red pen, various amounts underlined, crossed out, added, and readded. A triple circle surrounded just the number thirty-four in the bottom line (at least two months unpaid), which in full was one hundred thirty-four. Refrigerator!!! was the only notation. The four dollars unaccounted for after that, I knew, was for the postage, rounded up. In the stack of mail, too, in a red-bordered envelope, lurked a shutoff notice from Central Maine Power. The cutoff date—which was not only Ms. Bollock’s problem—had been March 20, first day of spring, the very day I’d prowled my own property on snowshoes and watched the ice go out.
In the same pile of mail there was a postcard—image of a sand dune—no return address, Massachusetts postmark, deteriorated handwriting: Connie Nosalli was ill. She didn’t say what was wrong, or how serious just like her, of course), and despite best intentions I didn’t manage to write back: I’d get to it eventually.
In mid-May there was another letter from Farmington. I braced myself for more bad news. But no. The handwriting was backslanted, large, a child’s. The paper was heavily wrinkled, with a deep fold down the center, and the typing upon it was my own:
TO: BILL . . . FROM: COLLEEN CALLAHAN
FARMINGTON ME1.As exactly as you can: where did you find your bottle?
I FOUND THE BOTTLE 200 YARDS NORTH OF
THE IWIN BRIDGES IN FARMINGTON2. On what date?
MAY 7, 2000
3. In what circumstances? That is, what were you doing when you happened on your bottle?
ME AND MY FAMILY WERE FIDDLEHEADING.
AND I TOBBLED ACROSS THE BOTTLE.4. Who are you?
I AM A STUDENT AT CASCADE BROOK SCHOOL,
FOURTH GRADE. MR. HARDY’S CLASS. I LIVE ON
PORTER HILL. I’M TEN YEARS OLD TOO!5. Add any notes or information or anything at all you’d like.
WHERE DID YOU TOSS THE BOTTLE? WHO ARE
YOU? IS THIS THE ONLY BOTTLE? HOW MANY
HAVE YOU GOTTEN BACK? WILL YOU WRITE ME
BACK PLEASE? I WOULD LIKE YOU TO WRITE
BACK!THANKS! COLLEEN CALLAHAN
My first bottle to return hadn’t gotten far: two hundred yards north of the Twin Bridges, or something less than a mile from home, not far from Connie Nosalli’s log. Colleen Callahan’s address on Porter Hill made her a near neighbor—she lived in one of the unprepossessing new houses recently built on lots cut out of the extensive woods there. Sweet luck! Someone had found a bottle. I wrote her back immediately; greetings and thanks, answers to her questions (who am I?—good question), and said I’d see her in the summer.
Footnote
1. Mergansers are in the same family as geese and ducks, but occupy their own subfamily I’ve heard old-timers around here (and Earl) call them sheldrakes, sawbills, and even goosanders.