Sampler

Snowdust

Midmorning yesterday, in an unusually cold and lowery March, I kissed my wife a temporary goodbye where she always follows the trail uphill to complete The Loop, as we call it. I was lately retired, so she was busier than I, her yen for quick exercise displaying an urgency I needn’t share.

She was busier -- and a lot faster. We’re essentially of identical height, but her 36-inch inseam, as compared to my stubby 31, floats her willowy frame ahead of me at a speed to give me a workout before my intended one begins. I stood a moment to watch her, as ever a glory in my eyes, practically loping upland. When we embraced, she smelled of cold fresh air. I love that scent.

For her part, she loves repetition, following The Loop every day, savoring its matchless view of Moosilauke to our east, her trail’s every hollow and ledge a familiar. I prefer improvisation, habitually getting off-trail as soon as I head out on a ramble, especially during a good winter for snow like this one, when I can pass over the buried brush rather than fighting through it as I must in warmer months. I like that wide whiteness under the canopy, inscribed only by the movements of wild things, whose doings have provided a lifelong fascination.

It wasn’t long yesterday morning, in fact, before I came on a clear and perfect narrative: the twin stabs of a fisher exploding into a ragged hole in snow, around which the delicate rusts and grays of grouse feathers and a few little umlauts of blood showed vivid. The bird must have been resting under powder, and couldn’t burst out in time to avoid the predator.

There’s always something to read out there. So said Donald Chambers, beloved old woodsman and mentor, and no one has said it better since. Don’s words come back from fifty years ago, and I watch him, short fireplug of a man, making his pronouncement, then sniffing and thumbing his glasses back up his pug nose, his curious habit after passing judgments, which tended to the sage and benign.

Don had an efficiency about him that I always marveled at, vowed to imitate, and by temperament simply couldn’t. He wouldn’t have understood my urge to meander the way I did yesterday. If there was a place to walk to, you went directly from here to there. Carrying a pail of water or feed, you lifted it no more than a sixteenth of an inch over any rock or hummock in your way. Why waste energy?

Efficiency -- and deliberation, a quality I’ve also too often lacked: I once brought Don a wind-up clock to which I’d lost the key, for example, and he sat for hours on end with a ball peen hammer, a flat file and one brass screw until in time he fashioned something workable, as it remains today.

A fellow could cry, I thought. But how had a fellow gotten here in the first place from a tumult of animal sign in snow? He’d certainly taken no unswerving path. And yet the mystery wasn’t so deep, since my mind is never a model of efficiency. There are certain places and people to which it seems almost automatically and directly to go if I leave it alone, as I try to do on these treks; but then it’ll be off to who-can-say.

There were also living people who called to me as I read the drama of grouse and fisher. Next week, my brother-in-law would have yet another test for cancer. The doctors would check his brain for tumors, as if the colon variety hadn’t been enough, and the lung surgery to excise its migratory cells. This was a man I loved like blood family.

Oh, there seemed enough worry to hold me and others, for sure. His mother -- a lovely, valiant woman, a living mockery of every stupid mother-in law-joke ever uttered -- had fallen the day before out in Colorado. She’d been staying with her youngest of four daughters, happily the one who’s a nurse. The tumble caused a mild concussion, but diagnostics revealed something worse: a spine so compromised by osteoporosis as to make it almost indistinguishable from the surrounding soft tissue. This was a woman vigorous enough ten years back to hike and paddle with people considerably her junior.

Slightly more than a decade younger myself, I was still able to snowshoe through these two feet of powder and hump my considerable frame along for most of a day after bird dogs, sound enough to wade a fairly bossy trout stream. I was nonetheless subject -- for all my denials and exertions -- to the same penalties of time as she. Whom would I be fooling to think otherwise?

I began to mope a little, even though I wondered at a mulish aspect of my nature that obliges me to give myself little sermons, sermons on my own good fortune. A better man and saner would of course have looked at my in-laws’ health problems from a better and saner perspective: my wife’s brother had barely breached age fifty, and he was in a genuine mess. I knew he’d have given all his teeth to be in my snowshoes instead. My mother-in-law would have been grateful for a quarter hour of what I had in amplitude.

My better self knew all this; and yet the hike I’d planned, up and over Barnet Knoll, then down to an overgrown twitch road to the west, felt slightly like a plod now, with that old demon what’s the use my understated companion, so many of my dearest friends and relatives gone or threatened, and I in what had to be acknowledged as the home stretch.

This hiking was hard. Someone of my bulk, snowshoes or no, must post-hole it through such deep powder, and -- again no matter my denials -- I couldn’t do that as I pushed seventy even as well as I did pushing sixty. I suddenly felt a tart anger at that, but an equal one at my own improvidence.

In autumn, I’d gone to the Internet, as best a techno-Neanderthal could manage, to find a set of longer trail ‘shoes than any locally available ones. I needed them for just such a day as this. My 36-inchers weren’t giving me the flotation I needed, and my incipiently stenotic lower back kept complaining about the matter. I’d marked down several brands and designs, any of which would have served me better than what I wore. Maybe something in me recoiled from mixing cyberspace with the space I’d travel on foot; in any case, I didn’t follow through. I swore I’d see to things that very afternoon.

When I finally crested Barnet Knoll, I shut off my petty whining for a bit to marvel again at wild sign: there were scores of deer cuffings in the red oak stand there. As always, the life force of the untamed creatures awed me. What skill and ardor went into finding and digging up those acorns! Every single day, the whitetails needed to find some way to make it through, to discover adequate nourishment -- and so did their stalkers.

Evergreen tips around a nearby frozen patch of wetland had been trimmed as high as the deer could stand on hind legs. A pileated woodpecker had showered a pile of square-wrought chips from a hemlock. They flashed like sequins, even beneath an overcast sky.

A little farther on, the softwoods grew higher and their tops mingled more densely, and whether or not I found them, I knew the tiny golden-crowned kinglets would be busy there, flitting from one tree to another, looking among the shingled cones for enough larvae and grubs -- many times their body weight -- to see them through another day and night.

All this did chasten me, though too mildly. I didn’t really know, and never had, what struggle was, at least in its elemental shape, having been so lucky a man in my family, my career, my friends and my health. And yet I kept coming back against my will to a notion of creaturely existence as a persistent scuffle, and inevitably a losing one. To go looking for the kinglets, which I had been blessed to see ten or a dozen times, another token of my enviable fortune, struck me less as motive for the time being than habit.

To ratify the pessimistic view, I needed no more than twenty further paces to come across another story in snow: a winter-killed deer, everything gone but a patch or two of hide, a thigh bone, and a lower jaw with teeth ripped out. What little the coyotes and fishers had left was finished off by ravens and rodents.

The previous night’s light snow had sugared all the trees. Now another shower was floating down. To shove through the thick growth ahead would be to dislodge powder from above with every step. Since, bald though I am, I seldom wear a hat, soon enough I’d be feeling the cold stuff direct. I almost short-circuited the hike, but instead, perhaps more in debt to habit than even I realized, I cinched my jacket collar, inwardly whining about one more small misery to endure

Misery? Endure? Good God.

Thank heaven, the realistic view kept diluting my self-pity. I’d too often heard fellow higher-academics protest how difficult their lives and work were, and as often silently thought they might try cleaning road kill from a Mississippi highway in summer, say, or tending the lavatories in a hospital for the criminally insane, or simply teaching public high school. And yet here I’d just been grouching myself that I’d soon have to face a bath of clean snow. For all of that, something perversely gloomy kept tugging at me like a horse at its tether.

There were fairly open woods on the western sidehill before I reached the grander forest. It was midday now, and to my south a winter sun, the color of a Eucharist wafer, glimmered through the cloud cover. I had to concede that the cascade of flakes across its face looked lovely.

Thus distracted, I shoulder-brushed a skinny fir ­ which did prematurely drop a feathery spill onto head and neck. I cursed by instinct, then right away beheld how the finer flakes hovered around me like a nimbus, that pale sun seeping through it. A net of stars.

In that instant my region’s genius, Robert Frost, sprang to mind:

...........Dust of Snow

...........The way a crow

...........Shook down on me

...........The dust of snow

...........From a hemlock tree

...........Has given my heart

...........A change of mood

...........And saved some part

...........Of a day I had rued.

I hadn’t seen Frost’s crow, but even though I had been the one to shake down snowdust, my day -- which, yes, had gone slightly rueful -- turned. It was as though I instantly saw the full privilege of my life.

The dust of snow seemed some magical powder, mixed by figures from old fairy tale to induce visions of peace and rest. I could have sworn I heard a voice -- my own? a breeze’s? some god’s? ­ preaching calm.

As so often, a moment also summoned others like it. I thought back to a morning on the flank of Kenyon Hill, just above our yellow house, when my son -- now 39 and twice a father himself -- touched the back of my neck from his riding pack in a way so delicate it almost brought on tears. He was only two, and just this side of sleep, but I still feel the fuzzy stroke of a mitten under my ear. I stopped then and stood, gazing at the house through an identical scrim of snow, and felt the sort of peace that comes on a person, if he is lucky, more than once in a lifetime.

It had come on me more often than I could reckon, unearned, a sort of grace.

To recall that boy on my back was to drift on to each of his four siblings, my oldest daughter thanking me for removing my own mittens, reaching up to clasp her hands, gone cold enough to pain her. Miraculously, she told me, “I love your fingers; they’re always nice and warm.” I had doubts about my own inner warmth, certain of my adolescent demons still rampant in my soul. But from this other trail, a similar snow zigzagging ever so softly through the treetops below what locals called The Hedgehog Den, they were blessedly absent.

When he was three or four, I often hiked my younger son in the same pack to another place, where he’d shoot with his play bow at imagined game -- which he somehow imagined as caribou. The spot was just an old log landing, but we named it Caribou Country.

Once, after he took a score or so of shots in Caribou Country, I hefted him again, turned onto the downhill route homeward, and began jogging, in a way knees and back would prohibit today, singing a song that began, “I bought a mule, he’s such a fool/ That he never paid no heed.” I’d learned the song from one of the elder woodsmen who so shaped my life.

As I write this, I see Creston MacArthur inside his lakeside camp, having swallowed a belt or two of something amber, veins pushing out in his neck as he chants the refrain:

...........Go ‘long mule,

...........Don’t you roll them eyes!

...........You can change a fool

...........But a goldang mule

...........Am a mule until he dies.

The lake is buckling outdoors; it’s getting on mid-March, like today. The stove glows crimson, warming the place so that ice dams thaw and drip from the eaves. There’s that smell of must and man and woodfire I’ll always treasure. I’d be the fool to wish myself anywhere else.

On the later day I recalled, my second son sang that tune with me for perhaps sixty feet. Then he stopped mid-breath, even before we got to the refrain. I slowed to a walk, recognizing that he was deep in slumber, which likely meant he’d dropped the small plastic bow behind us. Without checking, I hiked a little way back and sure enough, there it lay, glowing red as an exhausted star in the snow.

I stooped and fetched the puny weapon, then looked out across the valley from Stonehouse Mountain. Everything so beautiful. Why hadn’t I been noticing this right along? Same snow, same peace, same sense of possibility and gratitude.

I couldn’t stop now. I thought back to the middle daughter as we descended another flank of the same mountain, her warmth piercing through the pack and my two layers of clothing. She had been sleeping almost from the moment we left the house, yet all along had been so profoundly there. Below me, under a gnarled and woodpecker-ravaged beech tree, my bird dog Bessie stood stock still, as if she pointed some phantom woodcock. But no: she was merely gazing at her master, who stood still too in that long moment, mumbling something related to hosanna, amazed not least that so noble an animal was thus concerned with him of all people!

And finally, almost twenty years gone now, the last child, my namesake, removing her glove and waving her pudgy fist through the same peaceful flurry, chanting a little nonce ditty whose words I’ve forgotten. But words weren’t the main thing here. Sometimes they aren’t. I stooped to pluck the mitten from a drift and slipped it back on.

Finally -- and all this, I suspect, in less than a minute -- I went back even farther in time to a solo descent of Demmick Hill, where snowshoe hare, white as flakes themselves, kept flitting back and forth across the ancient logging road I followed. That they should keep bursting out of the brush like that -- well, it seemed apparitional, as by God it was.

Hosanna indeed.

My self-preoccupation, whenever it rears its head, is unforgivable. It will always be a mystery to me why I must feel my way out of such funk, or more specifically, remember my way out. At too long last, both the benisons of my present life and older ones too will at length prevail over sorrow at natural loss.

That the last of our children was out of the house now must surely have had something to do with that vague inner sorrow I took into the woods yesterday. And yet surely the most important aspect of my part in raising all five involved their capacity to distract me from -- me. If I ever complained -- and what parent doesn’t? -- about the frequent chorishness of parenthood, I knew deep inside that the end validated the busywork, that in fact it wasn’t busywork at all. And the moments I’d recalled, in winter, in snow, children on my back both literally and metaphorically, would sustain me if nothing else did, if I could only be moved, despite myself, to summon them, just as I’d lately done on Barnet Knoll.

All it took was a little snow.

Standing there a day ago, I knew that a warm house awaited, but I lingered, looking up now, willy-nilly, to see Earl Bonness ahead of me, wearing the elegant snowshoes he’d wrought in that little red shop. Earl was a man who knew pain much more than most of us ever do, and certainly more than I.

There was the sudden, incomprehensible death of his daughter at sixteen, dropped to the floor in the middle of a basketball game. His courageous younger son Alan, cursed with cystic fibrosis, worked himself literally off his feet, determined to do a job right, tumbling behind a push lawnmower or collapsing under an armful of stove wood, until he finally fell for good in his early forties. There was the catastrophic death by gunshot of his grandson Tommy, which Earl insisted until his own death was no suicide but was after all still death, a boy whom he and his wife Tecky had raised. There was their contemplation of that grandson’s father as for years he wrestled his demons after coming back from Viet Nam, his wife long since spooked and fled.

Earl wore pain on his face and in his matchless basso voice, but he never went further in my company than to say “Memories can bear down on you.”

Indeed they can. But they can buoy as well. As in mind I scanned from Earl to Donald, from Donald to George, from George to Creston, from Creston to Carter, from Carter to Annie, from Annie to Ada, and on and on, beholding their faces with an inner eye, a kind of enlightenment fell on me like the snow I’d lately jostled.

What was it I’d so treasured in each and all? The capacity, precisely, to joy in how and where and what they lived. Most had known hard times and hard work that I couldn’t conceive, but they were sturdy, often even jolly -- which was to say they all valued their lives on life’s terms.

I heard the voice of George just then, after I asked him how he’d stood the crushing labor of his young manhood: making railroad ties with a broadaxe, out by lantern in the morning, back the same way at night. You took pride in your work, he answered. And if you couldn’t fix something, you let it be.

My principal labor was a luxury, even an embarrassment, compared: it was no more than the ongoing effort truly to reckon what a bounty this life, both active and reflective, had offered, and then to write down as much of it as I could.

I thought, you’d better hope you can change a fool.

All this from a small, bright dust of snow.

I’d had to hike a little more strenuously than I’d forecast, breaking trail to where I stood in reminiscence; even I knew it might be more than I’d bargained for to pursue the route I originally intended. To hell with pride, I decided, swinging south, homeward, snaking through the woods as best I could, helped on my way by the long decline.

In a quarter of an hour or so, I stepped onto a white space that stretched west to east out of sight. I gaped, having thought in decades of searching through these hundreds of ambient acres that I knew their every inch. Yet here I was on an old tote road I’d never seen! Had I missed it in the warm months because vegetation grew thick across it? I didn’t think so. Years of bushwhacking had made me adept at tracing trails that many might never notice.

I knew which way the house lay. I was not lost, not even, as those old woodsmen said, turned around. But everything in every direction looked brand new to me, the untouched belt of snow a palette for memory and imagination both. And was that a tiny dash of olive-gray in my eye’s corner in the almost equally tiny gap between two tall spruces? Had my kinglets come?

Had I been here before or not, and what did here mean anymore?

This surely seemed a new path, and its untouched whiteness provided the old inducement to walk it in one direction or the other. If there were literal, geographical places in my own back woods that I hadn’t explored, what other sorts of exploration had I failed to make?

Yes, I could head either way and see what was what. Neither way pointing home, though, I’d mark the ghost road in mind, saving it for a later day.

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SEASONS IN VERMONT

......I. ..Springtime:

...............Ross and Jack

Ross went out to to fish Rip Lake

Last spring and flipped his truck coming back.

Jack thought, you could read his whole life in the wreck:

In the upside-down cab, perch flipping in booze

From two broken fifths in the torn brown sack,

Torn Powerball tickets floating there too,

And mouldy Kentucky Fried Chicken bones.

Ross landed head down among those scraps,

Unhurt. His license was already gone.

Now a new DUI, though Jack wasn’t counting.

Jack’s his old friend, whatever that shows

About either man. I don’t have no fucking

Problem, Ross says, except everybody

Keeps sticking me under their microscope.

If he does have a problem, it’s cops and juries.

He hiked home from the crash, while Maytime peepers

Trilled in the bogs. On the gravel roads,

The moonlight made hundreds of angle-worms glitter.

Hard to believe, but one time in jail

Ross made his free call to 911.

He told dispatch he was being held

Against his will by desperate men,

They got me here and they’re all packing guns.

Why can’t everyone leave him alone?

Jack wishes his friend’s wild escapades

Were plain old goofy, like that one with the phone ­

Not like stomping some other barfly’s face.

Ross lives in a fishbowl, his friends are all spies.

So he thinks, though people can see him come

From 20,000 leagues away.

Jack thinks it’d be a whole lot easier

If for just one moment he could catch Ross sober,

But that’s not really true. Ross never remembers.

If you asked him, he’d likely claim life was a pleasure.

But no, he honestly never remembers.

......II. ..Summer:

................Sam and Leon

You know how the saying goes: Shit happens.

For Sam and his wife, things were over that summer.

They split the custody of their children.

A puny circus was back in town,

Sam took the kids, and there in the stands

Poor Leon sat with a group from the home.

Sam thought his own life was hell at the time,

But Leon’s example should have kept him from moping.

He had it a whole lot worse than Sam.

Did Leon remember his life? He smiled

When Sam waved, though one side of his face wouldn’t bend.

Leon had been that way for a while.

Sam and his kids watched some hay-belly ponies,

Unshod and shaggy, shamble around

And do their trick. Their one and only.

They reared up and waved their front legs. They did it

A dozen times, then trotted out.

It seemed that Leon’s companions loved it:

They stood and cheered, the ones who could.

Sam watched as Leon moved his lips.

He knew exactly what the old fellow said:

Yes, the one word he had since it happened.

A man came to clean up after the ponies,

Same bastard who’d loudly counted Sam’s children

­ Just two, a boy and girl, after all ­

When he showed his tickets, same bastard who later

Would clumsily juggle some clubs and balls.

Happy? Sam asked his daughter and son.

Puzzled, they nodded. Sam recalled Leon

Outside his barn, a pail in each hand,

Nodding his understated hello

As Sam drove by. He was always so modest.

Sam tried to forget him again all through

The acts that followed: the clowns, the strongman,

The acrobats, the contortionist.

For the children’s sake, he played optimist,

Saying Yes to everything ­ just like Leon.

......III. ..Autumn:

..................Garnett and Arthur

Garnett’s wrinkles

would hold a week

of rain. His knuckles

are small white onions.

Each yarn of each

sounds like farewell

here in November.

Afternoon like night

when Garnett feeds chickens

he hears more than sees them.

Arthur clenches

his pipe and puffs

with a maul to his woodpile

at the bottom of which

One longs to imagine

a dark iron spike

in a log which the fabled

river-drivers

followed downstream

till it ended here.

Stars grow sharp

to announce the cold.

The cold. Put that

in your pipe and smoke it.

Arthur inhales

and studies the wood.

Garnett’s face

could hold the flood.

......IV. ..Winter:

.................The Pastor

I have just one person left on earth who’s been

My friend through grade school, high school, church, and sports,

The pastor says. Meanwhile the winter rain

Explodes on the metal roof like handgun shots,

And it’s hard to hear the man go on: Thing is,

My friend’s lost his memory. There comes a catch

In the pastor’s throat, a thing no one has witnessed

In all his ministry. Here’s the trouble, he adds,

I’m left alone with the things we knew together.

Silence ensues, save for a few quiet coughs,

And rustlings of the worship programs’ paper.

Then the preacher seems to change his theme right off:

He speaks of Mary, and how she must have suffered

When her son referred to his apostolic peers

As family, not to her or to his brothers,

Not to Joseph -- as if he forgot the years

Spent in their household, as if he disremembered

Ties that bind. The congregants are old.

They try to listen, but their minds are apt to wander

To other things, like the pounding rain, so cold

And ugly and loud. The storm, though out of season

And winter-bitter, might nonetheless recall

The milder months, which vanished in a moment,

But they summon that time vaguely, if at all.

The sequence above constitutes the provisional text of a song cycle, on which Sydney is collaborating with Philadelphia composer Joseph Hallman.

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