Temple Stream

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. [read more]