I saw. And passed at last through the Beautiful Gate. (On my left Jasper, monument of Abenakis, surprising me with its bold, beige and brown rock, cropping out of dark foliage.)
There was another surprise: later, on driving through the mill town, I pass the pluton on my way to somewhere and noticed a street sign on an avenue leading to its base: Mt. Forist.
Perhaps I wasn’t very attentive to what the librarian wrote on that slip of paper along with the elevation. I have been misspelling its name until now.
Private Property
Am reminded again today, by a newcomer named Della, that our move to Maine has been a challenge to my faith in Life.
It’s one of those hot days, in a row of hot days, when sweat is earned just sitting on the kitchen bar stool over books. Sticky moisture beads just above my lips, or trickles down the armpits as I turn from manuscript to notes to thesaurus and back again, sweating for the heat and a good word.
When I’ve had enough I hop on the bike, roll down our hill and seek one of the ponds along the Town Road. Its a heavenly, ride-by-water-plants kind of road, full of green beauty and living creatures, like herons and loons. The herons are long-necked, blue and gray, the loons black-and-white checked.
The loons provoked a brief happy feeling in me that first Maine spring when we lived on a pond and heard them call. One hidden among water weeds yielded up a tremolo, reminding me of a sister left behind in a Midwestern city. It is her laughter I sometimes here in this call. As a stranger here I was comforted. Since then development has been on the increase, bringing more strangers—the seasonal kind, for whom this place is Vacationland. Building around ponds has circumscribed, impinged upon the breeding territory of loons.
Alongside the heavenly road is a shimmery swimming hole in the pond. The cool feel of water in this heat refreshes me, relaxes, releases contemplation. Gratitude lies like water, cooling hot places in my soul. After my swim I stop up at the owners’ new house across the road to thank them. This is the first season I’ve seen a sign up, asking that people take their trash with them and don’t park after dark. Private property, it verbally suggests. I had not known this was waterfront property, and, in fact, the town owns twenty-five feet on either side from the centerline of the road. I note with a certain wryness that the measurement reaches into the water.
I am from away myself and think it inappropriate to feel a tug of resentment over this sign, but I do. Local people have long used the site, possibly for generations, because it has a sandy bottom and is beside the road. To the moment, the town has been shortsighted in not securing a beach for itself.
I remember watching the place go up—a couple years ago? Didn’t they do some of the work themselves? The camp has much reflecting glass and a deck. It sits high, but I don’t climb the stairs. Instead I call up. A friendly voice answers from within.
The door opens; one of the owners comes down, introduces herself. Della is slender with a mop of curly reddish hair crowning her head—a few gray strands. She is, perhaps, too friendly. An open, welcoming and informative woman. In a further effort to communicate, she reaches out frequently during conversation to touch my shoulder.
I comment on the loon-warning sign posted near the road below the driveway. She says they got it from the Lakes Association after watching two loons being chased by speed boaters. One great bird was drowned.
Was there any trouble after the private property signs went up, I ask. She answers that they were posted after she found disposable diapers and a used tampon on the roadside. They had been picking up trash continually since moving here. As for the no parking after dark, noisy young men had been drinking there. The first sign they erected was stolen. After they put up another, the first was quietly returned.
She talks about the Lakes Association. Anyone can join, not just property owners. (A hint?) It was formed to preserve area ponds. Last week Della and the woman who lives in the cove were shown, by someone from Fish and Game, how to monitor the pond for clarity. They will monitor once a week to determine algae growth. She explains that when pollutants, such as phosphates in soap and fertilizer, enter the pond in increasing amounts, algae form. Oxygen in deep places decreases, to the detriment of pond life. Guiltily, I recall clandestine baths taken here when our well was empty.
At once Della startles me by asking sympathetically if the move to Maine has been a hard one. My gaze slides away, I murmur affirmatively. I bring the conversation to end and fly off on my bike.
Riding back along the town road, I think of these newcomers as behaving like stewards, caretakers of the ponds. From generations of users can there be any resentment against it?
Drawing near the narrows two miles down the road—I’m startled by a great spread and raising of wings but a few feet off. My approach has disturbed a great blue heron from its leggy stand among flowering purple pickerel-weed. The great bird, its long face, neck and legs extended, flies off like a living letter M to the opposite shore. Fly, yes fly, to the further shore.
Measuring My Moose
Good, good, good. A little present to liven up my day and give me something refreshing to puzzle over on my mid-morning’s walk to the post office. Look at that cloven heart shape in the sand shoulder. I splayed my fingers across it. Definitely moose. No self-respecting dainty deer would wear a foot that size. I’d never seen moose tracks on my way to the post office before living in Maine. I’m virtually certain I never saw them in, say, Cleveland, Ohio or Erie, PA.
Walking beside those homely tracks I began to feel like a companion to the moose, who must have passed the night before. I pictured him clomping along in the dark on his way to . . . Here was a moose walking along the pond road, quietly humming some old country and western tune. Probably one with a Marty Robbins flavor. I was shadowing him, wondering where in the heck mooses go at 1 AM. When Thoreau came to experience Maine more than 150 years ago, the moose he saw made him “think of great frightened rabbits, with their long ears and half-inquisitive, half-frightened looks.” He called them “the true denizens of the forest,” and “moose men, wood eaters,” as the word means. The moose and I were not walking through woods as true denizens would, we were approaching the highway.
Still puzzling out the question of the moose’s destination, I was certain it wasn’t the post office. Ours closes at five. But, oddly, Bob’s Corner Store didn’t seem far-fetched. The tracks disappeared at the highway but reappeared again in the sand on the opposite side. I trailed him past Jordan’s Restaurant, up to the turn-off to the ski mountain. We were approaching Bob’s store. Did a moose wander through here last night? I almost asked Bob, who was upending a can of motor oil under a hood.
. . . Those giant cloven hooves . . . “probably making the animal sure-footed on the uneven ground and slippery moss covered logs of the primitive forest.” Thoreau even measured his moose’s lips: “The upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for the purpose of browsing on trees.” Of course his moose was dead at the time, having been put in that state by his Indian guide. And the moose wasn’t actually Thoreau’s, but his companion’s. Thoreau didn’t go in for killing moose because it resembled killing pasturing cows.
My interest in moose trails, while not yet a science, was certainly becoming a preoccupation. So it was no wonder when, head bent over some obscure and eroded dent in the sand shoulder, I almost missed what could have been . . . my first moose-in-the-flesh on the homeward walk from the post office.
Peripheral vision comes in handy when browsing for moose. A dark shape, I was certain, had flitted across the road. Butterflies flit, you say, not moose. But remember my state. Here is an abstracted former city-dweller, intent upon would-be evidence of moose, scarcely noticing a big dark shape stirring the brush. Better go investigate. Slowly. I love living on the edge but after all there are bear, coyote, and big cats carousing in woods, all exhibiting beast-like tendencies.
The creature was a dark chocolate brown against the vivid green of the pondside wood. It stopped to regard me over its shoulder. How very strange . . . Who would keep a wild, unkempt pony in the swamp?
“Guess