BEFORE JOHN HODGKINS BOUGHT AND RESTORED THE OAKES house at the end of the Temple intervale, the poet Theodore Enslin lived there fourteen years. Bob Kimber had spent winter evenings with Enslin in memorable conversation, and told me the house had been an icebox. But the Oakes place (also known as the Albert Mitchell place, for an earlier owner) had been a step out of the woods for Enslin, who’d been living in isolation a few miles upstream, alone in one of the last of the hill farms. Denise Levertov had lived up that way too, with her husband, the writer Mitch Goodman, whom I knew a little after their divorce and before his death of cancer.
I’d loved Levertov’s poetry and was pleased to learn she’d lived nearby and written some poems about the area: Levertov was a big fish. And the great, later-to-win-the-National-Book-Award-poet Hayden Carruth had lived in Temple for a while too. But Theodore Enslin was my own big poet, important to me because he’d been a particular obsession of a beloved English professor of mine at Ithaca College—Darlene Mills—and because somehow his work had spoken to me. Until I read Enslin, I didn’t know you were allowed to break lines like that, that words could fall like leaves, that the broken pieces of a poem were as important as the whole, that sense might come in collaboration with a reader, with me. He’d been trained as a musician, and Professor Mills said his poems were a musication of language, and I (a musician too!) felt myself a player in his band.1 Best of all, the man had dropped out of society, gone off to live in the woods, had eschewed the fast streets of New York, left the academic and careerist and sellout poets behind.
Professor Mills was a nut, at least to my adolescent sensibility, but was passionate about the beat poets and the confessional poets and the language poets, anyone more or less contemporary, anyone who hadn’t died and been interred in the big Norton anthology. Her hair was a fright wig; she had orange lipstick on her teeth almost always; she wore the same dress daily; she sat too close to you in conference. I loved her. She could dig into a single bebop or die-Daddy poem for a whole period, left us seeing the very bricks of the classroom differently, left us staggering around campus with new visionary brains, declaiming. The poem I memorized per assignment was by Theodore Enslin, a long one called “The Town That Ends the Road,” which I’ve only recently realized was about Temple, Maine. I had to stand in front of the whole class and say it, stumbling right to the last stanza: “You have found the town / that ends the road, / but it finds you / as surely. / In your love of it, / you come close to its horror, / and cling there. / It will murder / you in the end.”2
Dr. Mills okayed my term paper, too, a long treatise trying to fit Theodore Enslin into a tradition. I was unaware that she didn’t believe in the concept of tradition and expected me to subvert the notion. In an authoritative voice, I declared Enslin’s work even more obscure than the poet, thinking obscurity a compliment, and tried to compare him to Longfellow, who was the only other poet I really knew back then, callow lad. In her note back, fierce handwriting, Professor Mills declared that I was the one who was obscure, and how about that? I went to her office to complain, came out with marching orders: show that Ted Enslin exists outside tradition. She loved Ted, as it turned out, had known him in Cape Cod. She handed me a pile of his books and sent me home to write a proper paper, which, of course, knowing nothing, I couldn’t do (and that C minus still stings).
Still, Theodore Enslin, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the wine-dark sea and the second law of thermodynamics and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck and Margaret Mead’s marriages and the “Two Worlds” of C. P. Snow, joined the long list of arcanities I learned in college that would become part of my mind forever, useful in understanding the world, and also over drinks with smart dates. And to learn when I came to Farmington that Theodore Enslin—my Theodore Enslin—had lived nearby, why, that was as wonderful as if I’d learned that Vlaminck had lived in my house and painted the gardens.
But Enslin had moved away years before I came, out to the Maine coast, where the moderating effect of the ocean made for easier winters. I asked after him, found he’d left a lot of admiring friends. When he came to UMF to give a reading, it was like meeting Homer. Newly a prof, I stammered and gazed on him (he already seemed old to me), and felt his wise calm, something earned. He signed a book for me—From Near the Great Pine—and I kept it on my desk as a talisman.
AFTER A FEW WEEKS OF INFANT-ENFORCED DOMESTIC solitude—intoxicating stuff, but trouble in large doses—I needed to get out. I don’t mean out to the wild bars of Farmington, or even out to a movie or some concert at UMF, just outside the house. I swaddled the small creature in blankets and cautiously propped her in a product called a BabyBjörn, a kind of pack worn on the chest, and carried her down to the stream morning and night cradling her head, showing her the changing leaves, all the color floating to the ground, whispering to her always. Once I slipped in icy mud and fell over back-ward, just let myself hit the ground—oof—never took my hands off her, the instinct to break my fall subsumed by the instinct to protect my child.
The walks in our woods got me thinking about bigger projects, more freedom, treks a three-week-old couldn’t manage: I wanted to find Ted Enslin’s mountain house, for example, which Bob Kimber had shown me offhandedly once on a ski loop. The place had been buried in snow at twilight, and we’d had to hurry past, but the vision had lingered. So, when my mother-in-law arrived to help out for a week, I called my friend Drew Barton, who was always keen for a hike.
Drew parked his car at the little turnout below John Hodgkins’s house, the old Oakes house, and we piled out into the bright October afternoon, long shadows. “Wood ferns,” he said, quickly taking in the history of the forest around us. “Poppies, birches, black cherry—this was cut in the last twenty years or so. That stuff is older back there. Hard to imagine that this was all fields just a hundred years ago.”
“Enslin lived in that house right there,” I said. “But not till he came out of the woods.”
“Whoever built it planted those sugar maples out front. Look at those circumferences now!”
“Oakes,” I said.
“Maples,” said Drew. He’s a forest ecologist, and a poet of forests, to my mind. His interest is in the relationship between all the elements of the forest—the big picture—and he doesn’t exclude beauty from the list. His dream day is wandering in the woods, compass in hand, knapsack on back, scientist-vest stuffed with gadgets, fanny pack nerdily frontward, maps and field guides and charts inside. He’s slight, meets you with an open face (scraggly beard notwithstanding), warm dark eyes bespectacled and thus magnified, something shy back in there, something supremely cocky, too, an appealing combination. He speaks fondly and tenderly of almost everything, always frank and forthcoming, funny too, often ribald.
Drew’s idea of a perfect friend goes together with his idea of the perfect day. A friend is someone you can walk with through the woods inspecting for however long absolutely any-thing that catches the collective eye. My idea of the perfect friend is someone who gets excited about the notion of, say, finding a poet’s lost house in the woods.
Drew sees his scientific job as making sense of the ecological landscape in space and time. He’s trained to think in terms of deep time, always looking for evidence of disturbances, events in the past—flood, fire, farming, logging, wayward poet—to explain what’s here now, what kind of forests past events favor (or don’t). “It’s all about vegetation,” and “Vegetation is the flesh on the skeleton of the natural world.”
We hiked at speed up the dirt road side by side, pausing to inspect the multiplicity: mysterious seed pod, unexplained depression in the forest floor, mountain maple, Christmas fern, Japanese knotweed’s upper limit, abandoned apple orchard, spiderweb in dew, elaborate sedge flower dried and preserved and still springing from bristling leaves. “Sedges have edges, and rushes are round,” said Drew, singsong, quoting an old botanist’s mnemonic ditty. “But grasses, like asses, have holes.”
I quoted Walt Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”
The mild drought of the summer had ended emphatically with a week of rain in early October, and the stream was flowing strongly. For a mile or so it runs hard by the road there, quite diminished from its size at my house, not a quarter as wide, something just a little bigger than a brook, even full. I said so.
Drew said, “What’s the difference between a brook and a stream?”
I spoke my old line: “A stream is something you have to think about how to cross.”
“Too anthropocentric. I’ve always thought of it in terms of trees: they touch over a brook, but not a stream.”
“So a road is a stream.”
“Of sorts.”
We passed Meghan Bitterauf’s party rock, several unoccupied camps, one dilapidated old house covered with a huge sheet of mill cloth, a thick material the paper mills use to protect their gargantuan rolls of new paper, commonly liberated and used around here as a mud-season driveway or a garden cover in winter. Draped over the collapsing rafters of the shack, it made a nice roof till Repairs Could Be Made, that particular form of never.
The stream fell deeper into the forest, further from the road. We passed three or four modest new cabins, hand-built, metal chimneys pleasantly puffing wood smoke on the cool day. Bright orange signs let hunters and firefighters know a dwelling was hidden up in there. On one sign we noticed that someone had drawn three little stick figures, a family. At the last house, four flags flew: Stars and Stripes, Stars and Bars, MINPOW, Don’t Tread on Me. And as a pair of large canines sprang unchained out of a shed we noted the hand-painted poem posted on a wooden sign:
Well, they didn’t bite us, only followed at a respectful (but authoritative) distance, barking ferociously: Move along! Drew and I hurried without wanting to seem to hurry, till the dogs fell away and turned for home and we reached a faint track that was the old settler way to Potato Hill, marked clearly JEEP on our map, but too grown in for vehicles. A hundred yards in was the stream and a sweet swimming hole that had been polished into the bedrock by a goodly glacial vortex, sinuous bare stone forming chute and tub down a sharp incline. The air there was loud and charged by the falling water. Our acquaintance Henry Braun, a poet living in Weld on the other side of Mount Blue, had told us that this was the swimming hole Denise Levertov had loved.
“‘Eros at Temple Stream,’’ said Drew, showing off.
I’d e-mailed him the Levertov poem of that name some weeks earlier (Henry had supplied it) and was pleased he remembered it at all, said so.
“Anything with sex,” Drew said.
We climbed out of the streambed and back to the old road. I’d been this way dozens of times, particularly admired the farmhouse that I knew was coming, one of the last standing relics of the farming past buried so deeply in this forest. (The road itself was another relic, and of course the stone walls crumbling off into the forest everywhere.) I’d described the homestead to Drew with some excitement—goats, chickens, classic Cape Cod house, tall barn, shy occupant good for a wave but no talk, his big poem of a sign, a highlight of the trip:
But the sign was gone, and then, around the corner, just as the house should have come into view, a pyramid of waste came into view instead, piles of old lathe and bigger boards and hand-hewn beams and broken plaster and mangled sheets of metal roofing, an exploded orange easy chair high atop, blue milk crates punctuating, waterlogged books, a smashed bureau, an entire existence bulldozed carefully into its own basement and then into a shocking mound. By whom? The barn, same thing, all those old pegged beams a-tumble, partly burned, the odd tire, chicken wire. I was so taken aback by the sight that tears started to my eyes. Drew felt it too—put a hand on my back. Where was the shy man who always waved, and where were his goats and chickens? I’d admired him for holding out. He’d carved a homestead from the ruins of old Temple. The violence looked methodical. We could arrive at no hypothesis.
We stared. A blue jay piped. That was the only sound, and it was mournful. I told Drew about the goats, how they’d stood in the road and blocked our path when Juliet and I had ventured up here long since, how the chickens had rushed to get around us and back to their pecking, about the little steer on a staked rope chewing his cud standing in his own mud circle in the rudimentary, goat-tended lawn. How the shy man had waved over his head at me as if from a great distance, as if from leagues away, when in fact his door was only fifty feet from the road. Now we could almost feel the forest growing in on the suddenly abandoned place, this final failure of civilization after two hundred years. Soon again, there’d be no obvious trace.
The settlers’ farms had come and gone. And, as Drew reminded me, two or more harvests of large amounts of lumber had come and gone subsequently. The forest had persisted with barely a blink. Temple wasn’t tender desert habitat, in which scars are permanent. Temple wasn’t rain forest over delicate soils, where clear-cuts never grow back. Still, I thought, huge canopy trees in open glades would look awfully nice around there, an undisturbed, plant-rich forest floor: mosses, ephemerals, rich humus, the million living creatures. I said all that.
“Just the thing the settlers came upon,” Drew said. “And they hated it.”
The road after that was two mere tracks. A hundred years back it would have been three, one for the horse. The stream at that place is at its most lovely, a strong brook tumbling through bedrock and boulders in a slight gorge through deep woods, elegiac. Out of nowhere, Drew said, “My father was a nature person too. He died three years ago. His favorite thing was to rock-hop streams.”
Quietly we came to a log yard, a widened place in the road where someone with a skidder had brought logs for loading onto his truck. Drew looked up into the woods, pointing out the boundaries of the cut, which were property lines. He said, “This is not too bad. Not like down the road, where they’ve cut it right down to the limit, which is thirty basal feet per acre, which could be thirty misshapen trees. But here, see all the good stuff that’s been left? Yellow birch, sugar maple, balsam fir, oak up top. And here we have some beech coming up, some red maple, popple for sure and black cherry, which will both get shaded out, eventually. Much more happening here than back there, already, and this is the newer harvest by years. Not a bad cut. And you know I’m not speaking of aesthetics, but the future of the forest.”
We walked, Drew talked: “Aldo Leopold has this quote about how an ecologist’s training dooms him to always see the ecological damage in the landscape.3 But I’m an optimist, and even though I do see all the damage, I see the resilience in these forests too, and that makes me feel better about chances for recovery in the long run, or as long as the forests are here, even if they’re very different because of global warming. I mean, I always feel good being in the woods. Especially thinking five hundred years in the future, five hundred years in the past. When I first got to Maine the high levels and poor quality of the cutting bothered me, but now I’m less upset by it—it’s all forest, cut or not, and we’re out here in the forest, and all this could be developed or paved as it has been in so many places, and that’s much worse than any kind of cut. In fifty years, this could be Connecticut, houses everywhere on two-and three-acre lots, or it could be even further regenerated from the farming days, and cut over yet again. Which one would we want?”
We passed a new beaver dam that pooled the Temple in a thicket of alders and new popple: venerable beaver habitat re-claimed. Staring at a new stump, Drew said, “Beaver are a keystone species.” And he explained: the pond builders alter the environment and make new habitat, create their own ecology, make opportunities for a host of other species. Further examples of keystone species are oaks, elephants, and people.
We hiked onward, slowed as we heard a truck coming, stood at the verge to let it pass: not just a truck, but a familiar orange GMC pickup. Earl Pomeroy. With a passenger. A passenger seated right up close to him, close as a high-school girlfriend. He slowed, had a disdainful look at me, pulled to a stop past me, made me walk to him twenty yards. The person at his side was a woman with long, dark hair, attractive features, dark eyes amused. She was tiny, even compensating for the impression of tininess caused by proximity to Earl squashed in the driver’s seat. My face—it must have betrayed everything. He grinned over her head, grinned through his beard, those dainty teeth. I had never seen him grin like that. He grinned, and grinned wider, seeing my grin. We didn’t have to say a word.
But I spoke: “Earl! Jesus! What the hell are you doing way back here?”
“None of your beeswax, Professor.”
The tiny, sturdy woman seemed willing to meet new people. Earl’s massive biceps pressed her shoulder, his big forearm hung down her side, his big freckled hairy mitt over her little pale hand. She said, “I am Dunya.”
Earl said, “And who’s your little friend?”
Drew stepped up, meaning to introduce himself, but Earl jammed the old truck in gear and it leapt, throwing gravel and dust, roared around the corner, and was gone. We watched after them. I was speechless. Dunya? So much for good logging versus bad logging and basal feet per acre; Earl had found him-self a woman! Further, I’d had a revelation: the two of them lived up there somewhere. Drew and I hiked on in their dust. I did my best to fill him in on the Earl phenomenon. We shook our heads and laughed and marched, a couple of professors in fancy hiking shoes, passing judgment. Was she a mail-order bride? Or had Earl conjured her from so much pine tar and birch bark, night fantasies? I told Drew about the poached beavers, found I still hadn’t forgiven Earl, not just for killing them young, or for killing them out of season, but also for ex-posing my own hypocrisy: I’d always been a fan of civil disobedience. Drew pointed out that there were any number of brutal places that civil disobedience might lead. We wondered if Thoreau had thought of that.
Quickly, Drew and I came to an old crossing, now nothing more than a snowmobile bridge, three tall spruce logs dropped over the cut and paved with planks but spanning two formidable, ox-built, granite-block buttresses over two hundred years old, built by settlers in payment of taxes. Once, according to town records, there had been a covered bridge here. This was the road to Theodore Enslin’s house, nothing that day but a grassy trail kept open by the occasional hike, hunt, or snowmobile ride.
Potato Hill grew before us as we walked, seemed a mountain. Bronzed oak leaves showered us in a breeze, the big trees letting go sooner than those down in the intervale. Even the portion of the road that the skidder men had used was growing back to grasses, healing.
A new-looking camp road leading off to the left was posted in free verse:
Those hunting camps are vulnerable—but many are still left unlocked and open: safety for winter roamers, enough canned food cached for a meal, enough kindling to save your life after a snowmobile accident, say, or a broken ankle skiing, or any of the softer ways hypothermia can kill when the temperature falls below zero. The vandals take more than the odd orange jacket or camp chair or shotgun—they take trust itself. Only the very strong can rescue it then, refuse to submit, leave things unlocked despite all. Or so Drew and I said as we walked.
At the top of a long incline in strong sun, before I was quite ready for it (my memory of its whereabouts having been somewhat faulty), we came upon Enslin’s house, a ruin. As I had when Bob Kimber first pointed the place out to me, I caught my breath: the place was the very essence of the poem I’d memorized so long before, verse come to life somehow, the essence of decrepitude, too, of entropy. What was left of the house looked like a hermit’s cottage, tilted, exposed. Young trees leaned into the airspace over the violated roof. One whole outside wall—lathe and plaster—was papered in flower baskets, had been the interior of a nice room once, moldy now. The other side was simply a collapse, beams and lathe piled on rocks and bricks.
The section that remained standing had been the kitchen. Drew and I leaned at the doorway, squinting to see inside. The door frames were skewed, the chimney cracked and falling, floorboards hanging broken into a half-filled basement, porcupine shit everywhere. Drew stepped inside gingerly, then I, testing what was left of the floor with the toes of our boots. In the corner, a trashed Glenwood stove lurked. Drew picked up a Scotch tape dispenser. ’That really gets me,” he said. “Anomalous.”
The Homasote paneling had come down in stained, fibrous shreds, exposing fresh furring strips. Under a litter of leaves was a Nescafé label. The rear corner had rotted down into the earth a couple of feet. The back door was squashed to three-quarters height. Galvanized bucket, plastic trash can, homemade kitchen table upside down (its cedar legs rough and kicking at the air). Bottles and jars all a-tumble, a section of mirror that once had held the poet’s image.
In the dooryard, such as it was, we studied a horseshoe-shaped basement, rotted floorboards fallen into it. Under the leaves and fallen branches we found wooden beams and the remains of an extensive stone foundation. Down the hill, Drew spotted three thick-holed and twisted yellow birches, eccentric. “hos e weren’t always in such dense woods,” he said, forest detective. “That was a field down there, or a barnyard.”
I took another long look into the remains of the house. One hoped for books. One hoped for volumes of poetry, notepads, sharpened pencils. But this was a considered flight, not Pompeii.
DAYLIGHT WAS SHORT, AND THEN SHORTER. WHILE JULIET rested upstairs, I’d sit in the kitchen and hold the baby, feeling my complicated feelings—love and dread, love and responsibility, love and anger (self-abnegation resented), purest love, joy. I listened to the radio till I couldn’t bear it: we had a new president. And I read a great deal, changing diapers at chapter heads. I read master’s theses. And in the warm cone of light from the standing lamp over the armchair by the wood stove, I read TheThen and Naw, which is a retrospective of Theodore Enslin’s work over six decades, newly published at the time. Looking up from the page, I thought of his house over the stream: that desolation had made me feel in some inscrutable way that I’d touched his life, whereas his poetry made me feel I’d touched his mind, a clatter of image and order and broken thoughts, wordplay unto roughhousing, all of it underlaid with a quality of somber judgment, a sense of futility inside plea-sure, each poem a mannerly painting.
Then one evening in the dark kitchen, with the baby happy on my shoulder, I got up my nerve and called him: he was part of Temple Stream history, after all, and with that connection I might start a conversation. I’d gotten his phone number from a mutual Temple friend, the artist Jeanne Bruce. Ted’s wife, Alison, quizzed me, vetting the call, then Ted himself got on the line, voluble and kind, nearly eighty. He was easy to picture—I had a clear memory of his face from our one meeting—thick beard, broad shoulders, high forehead, thin hair combed over the dome of his head, strong nose, eyes warm, lively, and a little intimidating, flannel shirt, wide hands, half-frame glasses: “Oh, yes,” he said, “I lived up on Wood’s Hill, in what I called the mountain house, there on the Natty Brook, as I called it. The house was built by Nathaniel Staples in 1792. I bought the place in 1950. The land was still more or less open, laid out pasture-orchard-pasture-orchard up the hill, with stone walls between each, all the way to the top. I simply spotted the place from the top of Potato Hill on a hike with a friend, inquired in town and was able to buy it immediately from Mark Mitchell—eighty-five or ninety acres for seven hundred dollars.”
He visited sporadically until 1961, when he moved into the house full-time. He had no vehicle: “I got to town by shank’s mare, year round. Snowshoes in the winter to the end of the plowed road, which is at the other house, the Oakes house. Then walk to town. I’d be up there weeks at a time—pretty much of a recluse for several years. One time I spent forty-three days straight up there. Someone in the village got worried and sent a boy up to see what was going on. And I saw this boy coming and yelled, ‘Who is that!’ Because I hadn’t seen anyone for so long. I left that night. Went straight down to the Lower East Side of New York for three months. Never lived quite so reclusively as that, after. The idea of all the isolation was that I wanted to know if I was as good as I thought I was professionally. I had made all these claims for myself as a poet—1 thought I better put myself where my mouth was. And I learned things about myself I didn’t want to know.”
We talked an hour or more, and when we were done I knew I had to see the place again.
Juliet and I had a babysitter two days a week, and on one of those days—Juliet on her first solo mission since the birth, a belated baby shower with friends in town (and then a luxurious nap alone )—I made lunch, filled a water bottle, collected the dogs, brought Then and Now up to the end of the pavement, carried it into the woods along the stream, past the year-round people, past the hunting camps, past the We-Bite dogs (Wally and Desi, with eyes cast down, allowed themselves to be sniffed, stayed out of trouble by way of submission, then hurried along behind me), past the quiet man’s destroyed house, and to the turnoff where once a covered bridge had been. I inspected the bedrock down under the current bridge and found the bored holes Ted had mentioned in our phone call, anchor sockets for a portable shingle mill, he’d said, a machine the last wave of settlers had brought with them.
I don’t know what I hoped to achieve, but I carried Ted Enslin’s new book, his life of poems, to his old dooryard that perfect sunshine day. Potato Hill seemed taller and craggier than it really was, rose in spruce slopes from the high Temple valley to its bare top. I noticed a tin cup hanging on a peg jammed into a thick old tree near the ruin, took it down to the little feeder brook (Jessie Brook, issuing from Jessie Pond, Ted’s Natty Brook), washed it out. Back at the remains of the house, the dogs sniffed and whined after porcupine scent, thankfully without result. I stopped at the door, knocked ceremonially, listened bemused for a greeting. What a mess the old place had come to, what a shipwreck! I’d thought to sit and read in there, but it was too chilly, damp. So I dragged the homemade old kitchen table outside and set it up in sunlight, placed the dented drinking cup at my spot. A settler’s beam across stones made a bench. I sat down, put my elbows on the table, poured a little water, and read poems aloud, starting with “The Town That Ends the Road”: “It is this place / that you look for, / and you find it: / well-watered by / a brook called stream—/ almost, hut not quite, / a river.”
The dogs wandered off, rooted in leaf litter down by the old yellow birches Drew had pointed out. Ted had told me he’d asked the logger he’d hired to leave them standing—they’d been at the side of the original barn, which he said had fallen in 1955. I could hear the stream as I read, lost track of the words on the page, heard Ted’s voice, our phone call: ’Yes, we bathed in the Temple, washed clothes in it. Later, down at the other house, we’d swim at a camp Chester Orem owned. Great swimming. The locals, you know, there was word out that Ted and his girl, Alison, skinny-dipped.”
I’d asked him if he’d considered himself part of the back-to-the-land movement, and he’d bristled: “I came to Temple a generation earlier than the back-to-the-land people. I moved because I didn’t want to live the way most people lived, the usual cubbyhole. I wasn’t part of a movement; it was just something I wanted to do. I didn’t like city living. I simply hacked out a life for myself, learned how to do things for my-self. At first, when the back-to-the-land types started coming, I was delighted to see it. But some of the parts of that movement, the socializing, the mouthing of big themes, I couldn’t take. I just wanted to write.
“Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman—I brought them to Temple. I was the only one of my persuasion up there. I knew them down in New York. They pushed me about finding them a camp, and I did, a place called the red camp.” Dramatic pause. “It was painted red.” I laughed: the good jokes are simple. “An old logging camp, abandoned, but in pretty good shape. I found the owner, an ancient old soul named Charles John Prescomb, fellow had a lot of land. Asked him if he would rent the camp. So I called Denise and told her I’d found them a camp. And she said how much. I said, well, it’s pretty cheap: two dollars a week. And of course they came.
“Denise Levertov also washed clothes in the stream. They spent the summer in the red camp, then found their house down on Mitchell Brook there. Carruth came later, George Dennison, Bob Kimber, Jeanne Bruce, any number of writers and artists and musicians. The locals were fine with us, I think. I had some very close friends among them. I was purposefully quiet about what I did. To them I was just the guy up in the old house. The poet. And it got around that I was writing. ’Oh, yeah, he’s up there writing dirty books, making a mint a money!’ These stories would get back to me. I heard that Slim Hodgkins—he ran the store—said I was ’Peculiar as hell, but a pleasant man to talk to.’”
I sipped water at Ted’s table and read one more poem in my loudest voice—“The Glass Harmonica”—letting the words echo through the intimate valley: “It snowed in far country / North and / beyond the trees. /As I went through the mirror I My breath froze / clouding it, / and they saw me no longer / in the villages of spring.”
The dogs heard me calling out and assumed it was time to go, trotted back to my side. But I only ate my lunch and read out loud till a bank of clouds came in and the air grew cold around me. So I closed the book and tucked it in my rucksack and put the table back in the kitchen havoc, upside-down as I’d found it, hung the cup on its peg, walked away from the fallen place, and down the old trail to Temple Stream.
Footnotes
1. During those college years and for a few years after in New York City, I played keyboards with no great distinction in a number of raging bar bands.
2. You will find the whole poem reproduced in Appendix A, page 275.
3. Aldo Leopold was a forester and college professor who roamed the country doing various kinds of science during the first half of the twentieth century. He is the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a collection of poetical yet incisive essays and journal entries about his life in the wild, about the importance of nature, about the imminence and sadness of its loss.