Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey - Hardcover

Bill Roorbach, recent winner of an O. Henry Award, is the author of Big Bend, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award; a novel, The Smallest Color; and a memoir, Summers with Juliet, among other books of nonfiction. His short work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Granta, and the New York Times Magazine, and been widely anthologized. Currently, he holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross. Temple Stream flows from an article that first appeared in Harper's Magazine.

Summer Solstice
The most direct route from our parlor to temple Stream is out the deck doors and down the steps, alongside the barn and down some more, following the slope of our scruffy backyard past the gardens, past the hollow apple tree, through the milkweed meadow to the ever-thickening bramble of raspberries. From there it's a bushwhack into a boggy stand of balsam fir and white birch, then over a tumbled and moss-claimed stone wall, across the neighbor's first hayfield, finally through tangled streamside alders to the water, four hundred paces altogether, a thousand feet due south, thirty-four feet of altitude down. The stream there moves slowly through beaver flats, its course marked by silver maples and black cherries and yellow birches leaning. It's a pocket paradise--birdsong and beaver work, no roads near, no houses in sight, large hayfields on both sides, a broad swath of sky above.

Our house was built in 1874 by Mary Butterfield and W. F. Norcross, newly wed, and was positioned not quite across the street from her parents' house and on their land (which had been Abenaki territory). Mary's husband and infant son died just three years later. She must have walked down to the stream sometimes to try and think, grief-struck. Her parents' house burned down about the same time, more sorrow. They came to live with Mary in her place, which was tiny, if still new.
By the time my wife, Juliet Karelsen, and I bought it--October 2, 1992--the house was considerably bigger, having grown addition by addition at the hands of a succession of owners in the hundred twenty-five years since Mary mourned. Juliet and I have put in endless hours of repair and remodeling, but it's still a modest house, well worn. The floors slant sharply, the porch roof leaks chronically, the bedrooms are hot in summer, the dirt-floor basement is wet in March and April, the mice come in from the fields in fall.

We heat with wood in winter, and the heat expands to every corner. Sunlight fills the house always, and if the rooms are eccentric they're cozy, too, and after more than a decade they are our own, so much so that the house and grounds seem the very structure of our marriage. Knock on our door and you knock on our lives.

The high ground around here is Mount Blue, modest in montane terms at thirty-two hundred feet, but impressive when viewed from the Sandy River, which flows through our town, Farmington, Maine, at just three hundred sixty feet above sea level. Atop Mount Blue on a clear day, after a steep hike on a frank New England trail, one clambers over broken chain-link, climbs what's left of the old fire tower, and looks west, sees Mounts Washington, Jefferson, and Adams--the highest northeastern peaks--and endless other humps and hills and mountains, all blue and purple with distance, sometimes white with snow. One feels oneself well atop the rugged world. The closest peaks north and west (many of them mounted by the Appalachian Trail) make the Longfellow Range, named for the poet.

Eastward, there is diminishment: Day Mountain smaller than Blue, Derby Mountain less, a glint from Varnum Pond to orient the view, Porter Hill just there (our house nestled near it somewhere indistinct), Voter Hill unmistakable with its tall radio tower, then the Farmington hills smaller, and smaller yet: Perham, Titcomb, Powderhouse, Cowen. One's world-eye peers down a short, primordial slope, following Temple Stream southeast to Farmington, where it makes an unhurried confluence with the Sandy River. The Sandy continues east till it meets the mighty Kennebec in meanders at Norridgewock. The Kennebec meets and absorbs the Androscoggin yet further east at Merrymeeting Bay near the city of Bath, flows on in estuary past revolutionary Fort Popham and finally to thorough (yet continual) dispersal in the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean.

The Temple is our point of contact with all the waters of the world.
I meant to mark our first summer solstice on Temple Stream with a little hike and a swim. The day was all southerly breezes and unseasonably hot, every green thing taking hold, the sky blown with popple fluff and soaring hawks.1 Juliet was at Clearwater Veterinarian with our dog, Desmond, and the new puppy, Wally: Wally had to get his shots.

I'd spent the morning rough-wiring our gutted bathroom--our only bathroom--the third room to go under the hammer in nine months of hard do-it-yourself remodeling. The steel tub balanced loose on bare floor joists, soon to be replaced by an antique claw-foot (found, like Wally, in the classified ads)--twenty dollars, a hundred mile drive. Juliet and I had been bathing by candlelight under broken plaster for two months, not an altogether unpleasant fate.

I shook the old vermiculite insulation and sawdust out of my hair, dropped my electrician's belt on the kitchen table, hurried through the attached barn and out into the day--sky like blue heaven, white butterflies floating purposefully over everything. I fairly dove down the lawn. You could hear the stream roaring through the fields below--that's how high the water was after a week of rain. I'd strip down and jump in quick no matter how cold, wash the frustration of the morning's work away, slough off every dead cell of winter, emerge a new man, baptized for a new life in this new house, this new town, this new world. I gamboled down through the tall grass and hawkweed flowers, playing wild.

At the raspberry brambles I pulled up short. I had distinctly heard a low grunt just beyond the olden stone wall and five or ten yards into the dense foliage of Lulu's woods. I'd cleaned up an old farmstead dump just there, took out a wringer-washer, several mysterious boilers, a bedframe, maybe a hundred bottles of no interest, but I'd had to leave the cars, four rusted old beauties heaped upon one another, no engines, no tires, grown over nicely and camouflaged by Virginia creeper and wild grapes.

That grunt. My dairying neighbor's Holsteins had been pushing their way through his faulty electric fence as a matter of course, but this wasn't a cow. I pretended to forage in the brambles, thinking not to scare whatever beast it was before I could get a glimpse. My neck prickled with the distinct sensation of something watching me, something very large. There'd been coyotes all winter, singly and doubly and in a large, loose, howling pack. We'd had a bear for several weeks that spring, a nervous and scrawny but formidable yearling that repeatedly visited the compost pile back up the hill behind the blackberries, closer to the house. But my gut guess was moose, because the presence I felt was that size, and moose were common enough, if not in this exact spot. I turned my head incrementally, picked as if at berries, looked slyly into the trees. Back behind the stone wall something moved distinctly, shuffling in the litter of the forest floor. I peered into the shadows. Nothing. I stepped closer, pretended to examine raspberry leaves, all the while scanning the thick foliage of the wood sidewise.

Then the creature spoke, in a booming voice: "Berryin'?"

I jumped, shouted a curse.

The voice said, "I'd not expect many berries this time of year!"

"Who's that!" I demanded.

"Didn't mean to scare you," the loud voice said.

I spotted him then, a huge figure in the leafy dark.

One prefers to minimize one's fear: "Startled me, is all."

"I hate a start," he said, pronouncing it stat, and stepped into the light.

He was enormous, wide beard untrimmed, two streaks of gray in it, thick mustache that fell over his mouth, flannel shirt, top button ripped, thermal-underwear shirt beneath despite the heat, massive shoulders, massive arms, massive hands black with engine grease, massive chest pressing the bib of a huge pair of Carhartt overalls, legs like tree trunks, big leather shoes that looked to be shaped by a chain saw, unlaced, heavy rawhide dangling, one pant leg rolled up high showing long johns.
It's the first day of summer, I wanted to tell him. It's ninety degrees.

His gaze was not unfriendly, exactly, more like wild. He was a moose. He said, "I couldn't help but notice you have some cars here." Caz, he said. Couldn't help but notice? He was deep in our space. He took a couple of long strides toward me, climbed nimbly up on the jumbled stones of the old wall, displacing them noisily with his weight, eyed me but briefly from my skinny ankles to my tattered gym shorts to my Field Gallery T-shirt, cast his gaze on the closest of the old cars.

He said, "This one here is a '36 Ford coupe. That one there is a '32. This chassis under here is from a Model A, yessuh! These wheels must be older yet. That under there is a Volkswagen Bug, 1959." My visitor didn't smile, didn't make eye contact, but looked at the car bodies fondly.

I relaxed as best I could, tried for an affable tone, said, "I kind of inherited all these."

He looked at me hard. He said, "Where is it you're from? I can't place that accent."

"We moved here from New Sharon," I said, which as an answer to his exact question was a lie, as was the covering concoction of a Maine accent I'd thrown in for good measure. Juliet and I had only rented in New Sharon, ten miles downstream on the Sandy River, a tentative first year in the area after I'd taken my first teaching job, at the University of Maine at Farmington. But for the moose man, I wanted to be from Maine.

"New Sharon? Not our New Sharon. You're from Connecticut, yes?"

He had me pegged exactly.

"True enough," I said.

"Lotsa money down they-uh," he said, exaggerating his Maine twang.

"I prefer it here immensely," I said.

"Immensely," he said. He jumped down off the wall easily, clatter of rocks, tugged at all the vines, put his hands on the roof of the nearest car, rocked the formerly unmovable thing a few times. I stepped up to...