.

the no-see-ums find me and begin nipping—like the nipping of minute piranhas. Interesting distraction: my first encounter with them since coming to Maine nearly five years ago . . . Maybe I can ignore them. No-see-ums aren’t so invisible in this midmorning light. A sixteenth of an inch with a fierce little bite that proves maddening over time. I take it for half-an-hour then start the engine. Must leave with regret for Milan Hill is a quiet, refreshing place to work.

      . . . But that tower there . . . Its view would reward me.

      When the third landing is reached, I am among branches. On the fourth vertigo assails. Clustered leaves of the treetops below me are whirling. I grip the rail and think about flying with Allen. Then I look out at distant peaks. OK. But a look down sends me spinning again. Gaze on the distant view, I climb to the fifth landing. Here am able to rest on the mountainous evidence of the encircling massive Appalachians. In the silence of their strength fear goes.

      First recognized are the Presidentials. They are highest, most distinctive, bunched compactly together, a brotherhood. And they are furthest southward, the lightest shade of blue. Mt. Forest is to the left of the Presidentials, closer at hand (might I reach out and—), dark green in color, the old green of conifers and aging summer foliage. A silent distinctly truncated mass, rounded at its Tansy Town end. I can guess at the town clustering on its foothold. And from here I see that it is a long shoulder stretching out of a slightly hunched and higher mountain. But is this truly that Pluton? For I had thought it would be rounded to its backside.—Yes, there is the tell tale silent smoke of the Papermaker churning up from a fold of the hills. Ah, and now I am recognizing its neighbor, Mt. Jasper, the next hill over from my perch here on Milan Hill. Cates Hill is flung out there beneath—part of that fold in which the mill hides itself.

      The Cascade Mill where Allen works installing cable tray among the jungle gym of pipes: the booming Land of Mordor. Where there is no Silence. Motors vibrate and roar beside broke-chests where great sheets of broken paper are pulverized. Tied off above concrete, he works in extreme humid temperatures where rivers of caustic chemicals flow.

      Up here in heaven I walk around the fenced fifth landing of the fire tower, absorbing the silent infinitely patient and circular view. I compass it with my gaze.

      Eastward is the Mahoosucs Range, notched in its midst, made high with the presence of Old Spec. Slowly turn toward Upton Hill where Allen and I passed on our way from Aziscohos a few weeks ago: Am looking at my former viewpoint over a distance of time and space. I was younger then, searching for a way to gain entrance to this book; desiring to see, understand, and write about Maine.

      Turning, still turning, see lower hills ascend toward the distant Laurentian Shield in Quebec. I have gone into the edges of Quebec, noticed the difference in typography between the rough jagged Western Maine wilderness and southern Quebec’s more gentlemanly country side—rolling and spacious, green and tended. Shorn into farmland. A French countryside, decorous, clipped and shaved. Up close, the border between Western Maine and the Province is sharply self-evident. Stateside is shabbily dressed in scraggly forest and patched-up old houses. The French dress their green land with villages crowning their hills distantly, churches like dollops of heavy cream on top. Quebec holds a curve of the circle of civilization, surrounding the deep Maine woods. Surrounding an outpouring ocean of limbed trees, supply for the encompassing international network of mills, large and small. Here, from a hilltop in northeastern New Hampshire, the Province seems a blue undulate vagueness, and Maine stretches unknowable into the northeast.

      My eyes continue scanning a long western view, where nearest green hills sit silently before me. The wind blows silence in from great distances as I study these ancients directly opposite. The serrated profiles of mountains here in the northeast often remind me of crested waves standing still. A crenulated line against sky reveals the unspoken might of snowflakes, those crystalline feathers built so precisely around a speck in thin air. The mighty accumulation of feeble flakes is power enough to truncate a mountain, a range, an entire chain. The subcreative glacier sheared wave-like curves in these low hills opposite. Plucking at the weighty granite, minute mechanisms of frost-wedging wrought out another draft of the old hills, and carried its superfluous well-roundness away. The leading edge of Maine mountainous waves is usually southeastward, indicating the direction of glacial melt and flow.

      Now I’m noticing bald spots, very green and bright, draping across the high sides of these cresting wavy hills: clearcuts made by loggers, to feed papermaking mills. From this vantage they look like carpeted pastures, peaceful and inviting. The clearcut hills are pastoral, a quiet place in which to set a sheepfold. And, actually, deer do love them for fresh young browse. I cannot help but sigh deeply, resting my gaze on them. Oh these mountains. Only these mountains for ever. And that little piece of smoke over there, temporary companion to them.

      I follow a desire, a curiosity to drive Route 110, a new, circuitous way back to Tansy Town. A long drive, a lot of extra miles on the car, too much gas. The apples will wait again. Often these days I am impatient, harried by those apples . . . But the living’s the thing. The patient view from above has quieted, encouraged me.

      Part of the drive is spent looking for a shady place to park and work. I find it in a tangle not far from water, finish off a good chunk of narrative, for The Apples of Livermore, and take to the road again. It’s hot, a blasting afternoon. My hands stick to the wheel; I feel the furnace in my nostrils. This stretch of Route 110 is straight and pure in the heat. I and the little Subaru am wavering through the shimmering heat; feeling what heat does to things, molecules, causing each to flow into another, adhere. If I leave my hands long enough on the wheel they will become the wheel. I am part of the melting mixture of elements. Think about it: A rock is crystalline hard because it’s frozen. Earth, outer earth, is really too cold for rocks. If I were as cold as a rock I wouldn’t be able to move. If rocks had feelings, they would be far more comfortable inside earth amidst intense pressures, reactions; fusing and flowing, living and lively. But heat has the opposite effect on me, making torpid.

      Yet even here I sense the nudging, waking me enough to recognize with surprise that the string of mountains passing are bright with green bald patches. These are the clearcuts seen from the Milan Hill fire tower! I make a quick U-turn and backtrack to stare up at them. The patches are vast, rough, no longer smooth pasture as seen in heavenly patient distance. The clear-cutting is recent, but not this year’s: patches are not brown, gray; not the evident wounds of being taken to ground. This bale of forestry has bestowed character in the dark green mountains. Slung across the midst of dark tree-clad flanks, they are billowy with new foliage. The devastation of a logging session cleared the way for this springiness of green youth. Living surfaces are youthful again in these patches.

      Patch devastation occurs in mid-life, bringing with it some form of renewal to the gray and brown areas. Now, five years into the trying move to Maine, maybe I’m getting it: when we came here—broke, roofless, dependent on charity—locals, the natives, were helpful and not too indignant. Others thought we were plain crazy—coming to a hardscrabble place like interior Maine, where jobs are indeed scarce. To look for work?! But from the moment we arrived, the move invigorated Allen. He was joyful hitchhiking to work that first winter, paper-bag lunch in hand. But Maine was too cold in custom and culture for me, paralyzing in its climate as well. It froze me hard as a rock. Now, seeing these clearcuts brings understanding, even a touch of elation.

      I start the car, pull back onto the highway toward Tansy Town to close the loop started this morning. I travel the highway down a heated wind of movement, inexplicably glad.

      Approaching Tansy Town, I saw the Beautiful Gate. Natural walls flanking, on either side, the glacial gap down which I flew. I saw that Mts. Jasper and Forest stood ascendant on either hand of the valley; rocky, arresting, soaring gateposts in a lithic wall around the city. I was now realizing at last the geographic relation of town to Mt. Forest, understanding that this was a community walled by many mountains, traversable by two principal passes in the shape of a cross (as seen from blue heaven).

      But, with this debris of city below in the form of warehouses and other not quite savory businesses, my attention might easily have been drawn away from the beautiful lithic gate. A preoccupied person on a business mission might not have noticed; a hurry-up-get-the-apples-done