Above me soared the tree-clad wall. There were houses up here; a high quiet neighborhood on the feet of the pluton. I felt conspicuous and intrusive pulling up into driveways, backing away again. Searching for a path.
A spring, piped and speeding into a bucket set in rocks beneath trees; behind a swing-set I spy a thin brown trail rising among rocks. I yank the parking brake on the Subaru, get out and go behind the house into this yard where a family is busy with summer’s recreation. I am speaking to a mother and small son about the path, asking permission to pass. The boy becomes hoppy over my proposed climb. His older cousin once said you could see all Tansy Town from up there. A man, hugely potbellied and readying a kiddie pool, grants me permission. He warns about slippery rocks: Someone fell not long ago.
People in Tansy Town have aided my quest, and once more someone has thought of my safety. I thank him, promise to stick to the path and avoid the rocks; walk to the spring, stick my kerchief under its silver stream, wring it out and wrap it around my hot head. Now I pass into woodland shadows beneath the pluton.
But remembering my promise not to climb on rocks prompts a laugh. Too soon the path has disappeared and there are nothing but rocks to climb on. Here are rocks, thin trees, and blueberry bushes. I kneel among berries and begin stuffing my face.
A nudge. I stop, look carefully at a berry: wild, small—tiny-wild: its color deep blue under its light bloom. The pale silky bloom of this blueberry is very delicate. It comes off with a careless touch of my thumb. (May I be moved to care, refrain from greed.) Berry’s smell is fresh and luscious; the small seeds stick in my teeth.
Clambering over nubbly rocks and boulders; my lunch bag swinging off my shoulder. Views open out for me through leaves of spindly pale birches. Massive granite boulders slope down, I climb up, and turn. Now, unimpeded, the view.
Much of Tansy Town is spread about, some of it climbing upon the opposite slope of the valley. That would be? . . . My first guess is the other side of the Androscoggin. But smoke, issuing from trees on my right points its location there. The other is a more northerly house-choked view—the flank of Jasper, Cates Hill—the first neighborhood of my collection. It is a littleness of distant houses, and neighborhoods, prompting an affectionate fondness in me. Think of them, living their tiny little lives, remote. Remote in stories, the stories of their lives. And there, a bit to the right, is a patch of curved highway, silent in distance: Route 16, the way remote to the Wayside, the old Abenaki village site, the north, and Aziscohos Mountain in Maine. And beyond that scrap of smoke on my right are the shades of the Mahoosucs, where the Town of Grafton vanished when the wood ran out. Yet, for all this, the pluton’s path has not taken me far. I feel myself lifted upon the flank of the giant, but understand instead that I am only perched on its tumbled knees.
Immediately surrounding: rock and peripheral foliage. Air is hot and hushed, still. So hot I am even missing the hum of insectan life. Looking around, above: more boulders, coarse and uneven. Knobby pegmatite, old, old and cast down from the head of the pluton. Cast down by frost-plucking, the freezing and thawing of glacial melt water in cracks and crevices of the old gouged stone face.
I hop back onto more level rock (with an obscured view), and set my lunch in shadows. Great gapes are in boulders above and below. I peer into one, dark, cool-looking, of rubbled pegmatite. Pegmatite is granite, the grains of which are exceptionally large. It veins these mountains and valleys, crucible of gemstone and shining or opaque mineral. Light slants in from another hole on the right revealing a heap of broken pegmatite on the floor. It is a caveful of tumbled rock, perhaps the size of a Papermaker’s blend chest.
I reach in and feel the rock with my palms, my fingers. Grayish quartz and books of mica in a background of pink feldspar—all from the broken mineral glory of the great face. I saw the same constituents in that outcropping beside the highway the other day: not coarsest, blocky pegmatite but tubular intrusions of pink granite. From a distance it was almost uniformly pink, smoothed, fissured into neat blocks. Here granite’s constituents are separate, whole, and retaining their forms, identities, peculiarities—if shattered.
When in solution beneath the earth, these now crystalline features sorted themselves and settled out according to type; according to individual element, because the crystallizing temperature of each varies. This corresponds to experience in adult life which occurs when one retires (more or less) from certain influences, consciously choosing those that agree with one’s nature and thought. One’s identity, crystallizing out of the solution of the crowd, is thus allowed to form. G. K. Chesterton wrote that the purpose of having an open mind is in order that one may study and come to conclusions about the nature of things. And a conclusion is perforce a closing, the maturation of mind acknowledging something, letting it be what it is. For a mind kept constantly open achieves no stability whatever. (Of course there are qualifiers for this.)
I grab my lunch, hop back to the sloping rock and its prospect. Slowly I eat, absorbing the silent, almost oppressively still, view. Masticating and meditating. Finished, I start out across the boulders, searching for sight of the vast, sheer, vertically streaked wall that is so striking when viewed from almost any corner of Tansy Town. Away, through bright birch leaves, I make out an area high above: reflected light like sky. Through obscuring leaves the wall looks beige-colored, speckled or streaked with brown. A small framed view. I turn away, pick a course over rocks, around trees, descending.
The cries of children come up through trees, the murmurings of their mother. Through the tired green I see backs bent to the activity of berrying. Along the path now I see the boy who said you could see all Tansy Town up there. “Did you get to the top?!” “No, I did see a little something, though.”
As I pass the swing-set sweat drips from my face. My head, still wrapped in its now-dry kerchief is heavy and hot. This is the hottest summer in fifty years, documented. Spy the gushing spring and run to immerse this hot head. Oh . . . Cold enough to cramp. I walk toward my car, recalling the other, the secluded, spring beside a railroad track with its invitation.
At first I had thought the people of Tansy Town barely aware of this overtopping pluton. Then I went questing, discovering the accretion of caring. Caring solidifies itself, like jasper, like crypto-crystalline quartz, and like the lives of natives whose society is whole. Perhaps the pluton moves in and out of each individual awareness. They don’t all know its name, elevation or dimensions. But, because I pursue this quest, I find that many have been here.
Some live on its feet. Others have climbed or slaked their thirst from its flanks. And some have fallen from it. Those who live near may eat of its fruit, play in its eastering shadow. They experience Mt. Forest.
The Beautiful Gate
A week has passed. The well is very low. Hottest summer, documented.
Yesterday morning I sat in the car, drinking coffee, reading genealogical notes on apple people, waiting on the clothes. Then, keeping to the east shore of the Androscoggin, I drove north to Milan (MY-lun), stopped at the country airport there. Allen wanted me to find out if they had a Cessna 172, a Skyhawk, one he could rent. Got his private pilot’s license last year, but hasn’t been able to afford flying until lately.
While waiting for the airport manager to get off the phone, I stood quietly looking at a green map on the wall. A New Hampshire map, with parks designated. I noticed my usual studying place, Wayside, south of Milan on the other side of the river; but suddenly I wanted to find another park with another view. And more shade. I spotted a state park—Milan Hill—just across the river a few miles from where I stood.
In the car I head across river and up the long steep hill. It’s already 9:00 a.m. and I haven’t touched the manuscript of the apple story. Am usually knee deep in it by this time. Pulling through the park gate I notice a fire tower on top of the hill above trees. A tower at the apex of steep Milan Hill. View? View.
Park in shade and get out the manuscript. Am surrounded by woods, but I can see the silver tower up there through a gap in dark trees. Anxiety has been bubbling beneath the surface—writers feel it when they should be working but aren’t. Searching my notes for clues . . . find some direction, begin to write.
Now, clues