Sagadahoc Stories #76:1/24/99
Thaw
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The world is adrip at 5AM. Completely still and thick fog. A warm
air mass pushed into Maine yesterday, dumping rain onto a snow-coated
landscape, and temperatures barely dipped below freezing overnight.
Now, before dawn, it's disconcertingly mild, the eaves are trickling,
and all the dooryard ice is slick and sloppy. Can't see past the
woodpile. I crank the Owl, set a scalding cup of tea in the holder,
and slide down the drive. Headed to Whitefield to milk the Torberts'
goat again. |
Feel my way north, with low beams groping for a scraped centerline.
Can't imagine how I'd get there, if I didn't know the road. All
alone in an impenetrable mist. The bridge at Richmond is a ghostly
gridwork with its mouth full of moisture. The road lifts up out
of the Kennebec Valley, and the hard curves in Pittston spook
me with their suddenness. No sense of speed until the path turns
out from under you.
| I'm in a fog myself. On Friday I flew to Albany for a service
marking the passage of Willy's mother. Now I'm doing the chores
while Jim's family is at his mother's funeral. When someone close
to you dies, you travel a ways with them into the mystery. Willy
taught me how important it is, when the void opens, to have someone
on this side, standing by as an anchor. Helping to haul you back.
He's done it for me. So I hopped a local to the Hudson, just to
be there, and came back to play farmboy. It's not that easy, of
course. You look out over the edge at funerals, and it takes a
while to regain your balance. |
Pirouette
|
These elders chose the right moment to go, and you have to wonder
at the grace of those in extremis. Willy's mom, who spent her
last years in an Alzheimer's confusion, played the piano until
her final days, shifting key from verse to verse. At the end she
waited for the whole family to be there, and they sang her favorite
songs as she died. Jim's mother, the ambassador's wife who always
got the details right, waited until her grand-daughter's wedding
was over, before she let go. Peggy says we too often hurry the
dying in our rushing civilization, but they seem to know the necessary
timing, despite our haste. And I better slow down on these curves
in the fog.
Snow Mist
|
Helena is very dubious about me this time. Too many strange hands,
I guess, but eventually she gives her morning quart, and I button
up, head home. Daylight now, and you can see the shadows of trees,
the dark loom of brush along the roadside. The air is full of
white light. Wind rises with the sun, and the landscape starts
to move. Pluming wraiths of mist stream across the way. Now the
fields open out, dark details appear, then fade in the flowing
whiteout. A line of pines stand clear, like a Chinese inkwash.
A lone appletree in a sea of white. |
| By the time I get home and strap on my snowshoes the wind is steady
southeast, and racing fogs are running through the gullies, whirling
out onto the river. The shoes keep me from sinking into snowmush
in the woods, but striding along the river I feel my legs and
feet getting soaked. Looking over my shoulder I see that the backs
of the rackets, as they drag on the river ice, are sending up
rooster-tails of spray, and my back is drenched from the waist
down. I highstep back into the hemlocks and come on a maze of
deersign. So this is where they're wintering. Up on the airfield
a flock of snow buntings leapfrogs along the runway, now washed
clear of snow. You can see the far treelines, and it's starting
to rain again in earnest. |
|
If this keeps up, we'll only have a couple weeks in the deepfreeze.
Not enough for my taste. But enough for the old folks to go out
into a crystal stillness. The ice is still pretty good, a foot
or more under the camps, and all the smelt operators are going
full bore. Andy and Bert have 55 shanties on at River Bend, Littlefish
has 18 up and running, Jimmy and Chubby have their full complement
on ice, and the native settlement on the Abby looks like a drunken
village. The fish have held up pretty good, so everyone's grinning.
Weekends the lots are full and smoke is coming out the stacks.
|
The past couple weeks passing cells have dashed snow on us, but
shaken it down with rain on the backside. After each drenching
it took a couple of cold nights to reknit the river surface, then
you could skate the Cathance in the early morning. By noon the
sun turned the top into gush. Not the greatest icecapades, but
gliding along the seeps before the sun is high gives CC a hard
run. And the skiing on soaked snowfields is fast, the hills a
falldown. |
The transition from shoe-slogging to kick-and-gilde, then to sprint
skating, mirrors the different speeds out there in America. It
can take me two hours to sweat my way around a backlot circuit,
or I can be in Albany. I took two outings to the urban this week,
and the pace staggered me.
| I'd done a couple of sample illustrations for a book proposal
Capt. Ken is rustling up: WOODEN MIRACLES, a collection of tales
about trees, and I took them over to Arrowsic Wednesday. Ken is
putting Chessie back together after chopping out all the topside
rot, and the smell in his boatshed made me hungry for Spring.
He said he was making a woodrun to Black Mountain for some sycamore
the next day, and I offered to ride shotgun. Well, my conversation
didn't help much. We got turned around in Gorham, and saw a lot
of Windham before we got to the mill. |
Songbird Tree
|
Black Mountain has taken the marbles in the wholesale hardwood
business downeast. They started out as another gypsy dealer in
exotic woods, bringing in tropical lumber from Nicaragua when
the Sandinistas ran the show. Dealing in jungle wood is a risky
business, however. Back in the 70s Greg Kaminski shipped a container
load of Brazilian hardwood to his homestead in Washington County,
and started peddling the gorgeous figured lumber to woodworkers
around the state. He'd spent years in Brazil in the Peace Corps,
and saw an opportunity to connect the dots. Some of us jumped
at the chance to get unusual wood at a discount, but got more
than we bargained for. Without an established kiln schedule for
the lumber, it was anybody's guess how to cure it. Too much of
Kaminski's product exploded after it had been turned into fancy
cabinets and delivered to dry houses. It got so you could buy
odd lots of that Brazilian wood for pocket change (and I did).
Liberty Elm
|
Black Mountain had similar experiences. For a long time they had
lifts of through-checked Ziricote begging for a market, and I
wish I'd bought more of it. But they smartened up, and saw that
the only longterm business which could thrive in Portland was
as a supplier of conventional species to wholesale customers:
production cabinetwork, building contractors, institutional buyers.
Guaranteed stable KD lumber of fixed grades, delivered in bulk.
Now most of the gypsies of their generation have disappeared,
and Black Mountain is the only real game in town. |
This attrition, and the steady inflation of materials costs, means
you better fill your wallet before a trip to the yard. No more
smiling and smoozing with wood junkies and picking up bargains.
I could only get to pick at the mill because Ken has an account,
and had been invited to sort through the sycamore. Something about
power of the press. We squatted his Toyota's shocks with lizardskin
sycamore, quilted and wide-board cherry, then got the bill, and
swallowed the medicine.
| As long as we were close, we decided to go to Black Mountain's
retail outlet, where there's a wider variety of species, at fancier
prices. My bins are about empty of some things (blacks and yellows,
base boards and exciting planks), and I was hot to refill. They
saw me coming. The one guy who knew me from way back tried to
cut me some deals, but the new manager countermanded every discount,
and I paid top dollar for every piece. We pulled out into wall-to-wall
traffic, and I couldn't get out of town fast enough. What used
to be a leisurely safari through the back end of Portland, a friendly
exchange with fellow wood-lovers, and a reasonable market transaction,
now feels like a gridlock commute, a quick hustle, and a hard
squeeze. Maybe if I was the sort to haggle, I wouldn't have paid
$14.50 a foot for that Black Limba they couldn't remember the
original price of. Maybe again that's the price of survival in
a cut-log business. |
|
My Friday excursion to the Jetport and Albany drove the point
home. The sense of impersonal interactions in a rushed-up world
was best confirmed when I tried to find the location of an address
in an Albany suburb by stopping at a police station. They were
busy, just shrugged, said it was in another jurisdiction, and
sent me back into the rain. When I found the place it was only
half a mile away. But don't bug me. Get in line.
Sag
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Living in a small town you can forget how the horses run out there
in Urbanity. Highball your prices and hustle the trade downhome,
and you may end up out of business. Do otherwise downtown, and
you'll get trampled, or so it seems. This helps explain why the
local artist eats beans: he forgets how to command respect. He
forgets to be clever as a monkey and bold as a stallion. Take
the local boy out of his stall, and he looks like a horse's ass. |
I came back to the hinterlands bemused and confused, and glad
to be home. The dissociative experience of mortal encounters,
and the alienations of modern life, bump you off center, put you
in a fog. Personal encounters with whole people in place, help
clear the air. Setting your hands to tangibilities makes it real
again. I set about racking up the ebony and amarello, red birch
and white oak.