Maine Metaphor: The Green and Blue House: The Green and Blue House

By S. Dorman and Patricia O'Donnell

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous.
Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, "God." God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild--but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation. I've tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor, also.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Sep 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781498201049

S. Dorman

S. Dorman has lived in Maine and studied its ways for thirty years. Maine Metaphor is her series of creative nonfiction. Her Substack, titled "Do I Like Free Will?", engages with speculative fiction, fantasy, 19th and 20th century literature, current culture and human knowledge. She is the author of several works of speculative fiction, including The God's Cycle, Gott'im's Monster 1808, and Fantastic Travelogue. Her current work-in-progress is Historical Fantasia: Four British Journalists--Boswell, Chesterton Hitchens, and Orwell--investigate the Hereafter.

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Maine Metaphor

The Green and Blue House

S. Dorman

Foreword by Patricia O’Donnell

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Maine Metaphor

The Green and Blue House

Copyright ©

1989

,

2014

Susan C. Dorman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN

13

:

978-1-4982-0103-2

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0104-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 10/01/2014

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

The Green and Blue House

Collecting Neighborhoods

The Pluton

The Beautiful Gate

Private Property

Measuring My Moose

Exploring Its Treasuries, Its Upper Chambers

The View and Spirit of the Day

The Beasts

The Weather

The Water

The Silence of Aziscohos

Deer Hill

The Notch

The Body in Vapor

Miracles on Deer Hill

Perspective

Pilgrims and Strangers

Chasing the Water

Drowsing in the Wood Mill

Taking the Controls

Amazed

Forget-me-not

Summer on Solomon’s Porch

The Emotional Gamut of Flight

The Blast Furnace and the Hermit

Earl

Migrations

Patch Mountain Dwellings

Invisible Reality

Greatest Mountain

The Blue Cradle

Reduced In Importance

The Loons Ascend

Streakéd Mountain

Seeing Deer

For Ronald Allen, who wanted to come from away.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land . . . I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; trees grew through it . . . The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out . . . They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walking

Foreword

Twenty-five years ago, as a new Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in Farmington, Maine, I encountered a woman who wanted nothing more than to write about Maine. Susan Dorman seemed to emerge from the Maine woods and streams, as New England as the land, but she had actually recently moved with her husband and two adolescent sons to economically-depressed western Maine from economically-depressed blue-collar Pennsylvania.

Susan’s husband found work as an electrician in a paper mill and Susan, completing a self-designed major of Maine Studies, began a directed study with me. As she recalls it, she wanted to write about Maine’s mythological view in literature. I suggested she begin a study of journals instead, and keep a journal of her own. From that, this book grew, taking on its own life, a life of yearning, digressions spurred by curiosity, unexpected epiphanies. Never sentimental, Dorman’s prose reflects the mystery Maine is to her, and something essential to its character. She writes that Maine paralyzed her at first, freezing her hard as a rock, but in this collection of brief, surprising essays, Dorman uncovers not only a deep understanding of Maine, but a hard-won love. The book is a record of her thawing, her gradual falling in love with Maine as she comes to understand herself through its landscape.

This book is not a memoir about Susan and her family; it is a book about the landscape of Maine, as portrayed in the words of one with an uncommonly acute ability to observe, to see, and one with a language that is never commonplace, yet never showy; that is always in service to what it sees. She writes in one chapter that she wants to honor Earl, the illiterate man who works at the local dump, and it occurs to me that in every chapter, every page and every word, she wants to honor not only the people but the landscape, the rocks and rivers and especially the trees, of her adopted state of Maine. In this she succeeds, as well as any writer I’ve ever encountered.

She calls her book Maine Metaphor: The Green and Blue House, and the title is apt, for she has the artist’s way of seeing metaphorically. Dorman writes, Writers are always turning over rocks, peering into holes, tickling the backs of someone’s knees looking for metaphors, yet she doesn’t search hard for metaphors: she seems to have the kind of vision that sees metaphor everywhere in the natural world. As she struggles to see what Maine is, and to hear its speech, she can’t help but see it as a metaphor for the interior life, for the deepest part of her self.

Susan Dorman, a contemporary Henry David Thoreau? Perhaps—but a Thoreau who tramps the earth of New England with an awareness of her husband, working deep in the bowels of a paper mill, allowing her the luxury to take in the towns, the hills and sky of her adopted state of Maine; a Thoreau who can’t help but worry how the bills will be paid, and how her sons are adapting to this new land. A Thoreau who is acutely aware of the irony of the fact that, while her husband works at turning Maine’s trees into money, high on a catwalk above massive digesters giving off hydrogen sulfide and other gases in the hot, oppressive beast of the paper mill, she hikes and daydreams under those trees, learning all she can about them to bring them to us unharmed, to do them honor.

Dorman writes that her goal is to write something deep, fine and detailed, on Maine, drawn from the records—geological, botanical, historic, prehistoric. This list does describe her book, but it leaves out one thing: the personal voice and life of the narrator, who comes achingly alive for us in response to this state, this land she loves and struggles with. Her goal ultimately is spiritual quarry, which she consumes while still afoot.

She also writes, A sense of wonder needs constant renewal. In her searching observations of the natural world, Dorman finds wonder in places both distant (within a small plane, circling above its shadow below), and near (the pale green ovary inside the sepals of the day lily), and she brings that wonder to her reader. She watches and remembers the world she sees. A cricket in the night tells her, You might write about me; she listens, and does.

Patricia O’Donnell,BFA Director of Creative Writing,University of Maine Farmington

The Green and Blue House

Having heard that it was the green and blue cathedral, I wanted to see this varying land of mountains, lakes, and skies. Having seen the rocky forested superstructure, I wanted to find meaning in its buttressing. We had been told that here bread might become body, water turned into wine; that the cathedral’s rituals were mighty and hallowed but, above all, purposeful; and I wanted to know if it were so. But first would come the experience.

Allen and I stop outside town at the diner, for coffee to drink on our way up north to Aziscohos, then mount rapidly through Grafton Notch, fourteen miles of designated scenic Maine highway. We find views of dark Old Spec and white Bald Pate mountains, of foaming, tumultuous Screw Augur Falls; rising at last to the vision at Upton overlooking Umbagog—vast, blue, watery. Far below us spreads the deep green lap of beauty. Yet one might see such sights driving to work on an ordinary weekday in these Western Mountains. Had we remained in deeply depressed blue-collar Pennsylvania we’d have missed them. Had we stayed in the trailer there, cut off from electric and gas (wondering how we would care for our two adolescent sons in the coming winter).

Now we dip down into New Hampshire, follow our route north along Magalloway River, until reentering Maine. I notice a double-topped, firred mountain, rightly guess that it is Aziscohos Mountain, which, according to the AMC Maine mountain guide, has a trail winding to a fire tower. From there a view of fifteen lakes rewards the climber, says the guide. A shade less than two-and-a-half miles upslope, it’s a two-hour climb (or so the book says). Briefly we consider it, but Allen, a contractor’s electrician, is exhausted from climbing around on the jungle-gyms of the Papermakers in 110 degree industrial heat. All week. And I—a student currently studying old fashioned apple varieties among other Maine subjects—am just plain lazy in the heat.

We opt to stop at the old concrete dam. Steel-blue conduit a few feet in diameter runs out from it, following the rock-choked stream southward. Allen says it funnels water to a generator downstream. Aziscohos is a contrived lake, the valley being logged and dammed in 1911 to make certain that paper companies on the Androscoggin had enough water to generate electricity and drive logs down to the mill; to process their products and flush away wastes. Before Aziscohos was flooded, this beautiful lap full of water with hills now underwater contained two smaller lakes. Perhaps 11,500 years ago Paleo Indians lay waiting in the breach between for caribou migrating north or south. They got their food by means of fluted chert clovis points, fitted to reloadable shafts.

Our own quarry here in the Western Mountains, now that our physical being is cared for, is more intellectual, emotional; particularly it is spiritually nourishing. With this journal, writing and rewriting, of natural life here, I hope to surround, if not capture, the quarry. For one is always writing around one’s subject, theme, experience: never tackling it directly. Spiritual nourishment, I find, is a living quarry consumed while still afoot. Here we are already swallowing the water as it turns into wine. Here at the dam the large lake lies shimmering before us, trailing away into the north. This coolness, blowing off the chop, is why we’ve come, as well. We’d like to escape the heat of this week and the highway; to travel alongside this body of refreshment, Aziscohos Lake.

Allen and I return to the car and two-lane twisting highway, in search of a lakeside road. Coming, we see a deer—long-legged doe—cautiously crossing pavement. Is your fawn in the woods, I wonder, staring at the green tangle as we pass. But a fawn would not move, by instinct; and I would not recognize a pile of still spots on still, thin legs.

And we discover that the only lake view available to non-owners or their leaseholders is from the dam. The paper company has a private, guarded road along its western shore; private individuals lease campsites on this eastern side where we drive through the dust—all equipped with no trespassing signs. The jobs of fifty thousand Mainers depend directly or indirectly on these vast corporately owned forests, Allen’s job with the contractor being one. At this writing in 1988, almost half of Maine’s woods are owned by absentee owners; some as far away as Japan. (And I am wondering—how can they care?) All this about Maine I am learning, even as I write.

Resigned to this viewless gravel road, I get out the wildflower guide to key out a few specimens seen here—determined to learn, through repetitious study, what flowers refresh the cathedral:

A tall flowering spike, magenta, a raceme, called fireweed. This is the edible wild asparagus. Tender young shoots may be cooked as greens, leaves for spinach—all with the possibility of bitterness, unpalatable as the plant ages. Ah, but yet, mature leaves are best as tea. These are the tips you will find in another guide, one to edible wild plants. With care, we may be nurtured from first to last with this plant. When seen in banks, how fireweed grips my gaze!

I am in Maine, I followed my spouse here; it was where he wanted to be. He wanted to be alive in Maine. For me it is enough, and will become more, although it has disturbed me, this move. And Allen must pay for his dream with work in regional paper mills where views are concrete and steel, where sounds enter as feeling into one’s body. Sometimes it drives him to fantasy: driving back down the dusty road, we talk about what we want to do yet in life . . . two middle-aged long-married folk. Should we go to graduate school, do Northern Studies? We want to see and know the north, perhaps Labrador? We could camp; fly in, land on pontoons, do a feasibility study for growing hydroponic vegetables. Hydroponic—without soil—for glaciers pushed Labrador’s soil (as they pushed Maine’s soil) into the Atlantic; clean into the sea, all that fat vegetable potential. The inhabitants of Labrador eat their vegetables in the form of fishes. Our talk is based on book gleanings, feeding this fall into fantasy.

A list of things identified: jewelweed (a regular orange flower with curled spur, such as I knew in Pennsylvania), Cynthia (small dainty daisy-like disc and pedals), rough cinquefoil (perfect yellow flower with toothed palmate leaves), yellow hop clover, yarrow, common evening primrose (tightly closed in sun). Cow vetch. One brown rabbit.

On our way back we stop at the isolated Trading Post Restaurant & Tackle Shop above the hidden green-tangled river bank, possibly the cleanest eating house we’ve ever seen. Dianne and Sonny Littlehale’s home cooking, beer on tap, hunting and fishing licenses, tackle and custom-tied flies, gas, T-shirts. Their pumpkin pie is too rich, sweet with whipped cream, but umm the iced coffee. Sonny, quietly washing dishes, answers Dianne’s question. He can remember when this low house was built. He went to school here, long before Dianne moved to the area from away and bought the place. Sonny is fifty-six, had always worked in the woods until that triple by-pass last fall. There’d been the winter to rest up, says Dianne, who keeps an eye on rosy two-year-old Brian. These two, living on the far rim of middle-age, are the experience. The living experience of northern New England.

What with the talk, the human exchange, we almost leave without paying our bill. Out in the parking lot Allen comments that it’s good to go to a new place like this and visit. There’s scarcely connection in a mere What’ll your order be?

We travel back down the scenic highway through the deep notch, rocky, tree-banked. Grafton Notch says the sign: the glacially carved gap in the Appalachian Mountains, connecting Maine’s geography with that of New Hampshire. There’s little to show that the lumber village of Grafton thrived here during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, home and workplace to one hundred hardy souls.

I once saw a towering humped-backed moose, with white antlers, day-dreaming, chewing his cud here beside this roadway. There are other wonders to be seen along this route (in order when descending from Upton): Old Spec, third highest mountain, Table Rock (we’ve climbed this overhang on a precipitous path), moose cave, Mother Walker Falls, all followed by Screw Augur Falls, not the least of these geological gazing-stocks.

Here at the falls we stop. Water feels cool, revitalizing as it runs over hot bare feet. On rocks grow bright green moss, of varying species, wet with this coursing stream. Below me the water-carved cleft, true to shape-name. Its steep, curved and resistant sides are igneous—a twisted funnel, full of foam and force, the experience of living water cutting and smoothing. Here are round smoothed bubbles of rock; much of it bare-bleached above the normal flowline of Bear River.

Signs on this trip reveal. We look up to see the text for the week emblazoned on wood: Glaciers, receding thousands of years ago, spawned vast erosive runoffs. A glacier blocked the northern end of Grafton Notch, channeling meltwater southward. Bloated with sand and gravel, cobbles and ice, it cut metamorphosed granite, producing