Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Fall

108 Fall “It was just one of those Malibu nights,” Elizabeth Adler wrote in the first paragraph of a novel, “dark as a velvet shroud, creamy waves crashing onto the shore, breeze soft as a kitten’s breath.” Fall nights in Beaver River are different. In Beaver River waves thump the shore, then ratchet over the rocks before withdrawing, leaving them spackled. In our unheated white elephant of a house, winds hard as shingles bang window frames and hammer through rooms. One night Vicki slept under fourteen layers, eight of them covers, two of these brown army blankets thick as hooked rugs. On her person she hung six layers, the top layer a hooded sweatshirt that Edward wore when he was a camper in Maine. Cold shattered sleep like frost cracking across a windowpane, and I roamed nights, often wandering downstairs and out into the side yard, disturbing deer feeding under the apple tree or at the edge of the meadow, causing them to stamp and snort. The dark was pure, and the constellations so clear the sky seemed a vineyard of story—that of Orion, who so infatuated Artemis, goddess of the moon and hunt, that she neglected to light the night sky. Unsuccessfully the other gods begged Artemis to resume her duties. Then one day Artemis’s twin brother Apollo, the sun god, spotted Orion swimming in the ocean far from land. Apollo beamed sunlight on Orion, obscuring his body and reducing him to a blot amid the glittering waves. Artemis was proud of her archery, and when Apollo challenged her to hit the blur distant between the waves, she shot an arrow piercing the target. When waves washed Orion’s body on shore, Artemis realized what she had done. Now as grief stricken as she had once been besotted with love, Artemis placed Orion’s body in the sky. Time did not ameliorate Artemis’s sadness. She lost interest in living, and ever since, the moon has seemed cold and lifeless. Fall | 109 Summer is so comfortable that the eye dulls, the warmth a mist obscuring the edges of things. In fall one shivers and shakes, raises the head, and notices day and season: the sunset, an orange band, below it black jagged cutouts of spruce, above it to the northwest pearly gray, to the southwest a wavering fall of green then a cushion of blue. I wandered early mornings, watching light seep down the tops of trees until it broke and tossed shadows across the ground. In the fall I notice more than in the summer, almost as if I am a wild creature scurrying to build a horde, not of food, but of observation to nourish me in winter while the eye hibernates. The damp woods opened; alders thinned, their leaves seared, last year’s cones bundles of small black clinkers. Cinnamon ferns curled ochre and orange, the fronds brittle and more distinct than in summer when they blew limber and green, pulsating out of individuality. Lichens wrapped dead spruce looking like yarn, antlered, hooded, shield, their colors black and silver, brown and green. Old man’s beard hung scraggily and matted from branches. At the heathy edge of a wood, balls of reindeer lichens covered the ground. A tamarack stood above blueberry, its needles turning orange, the color flickering in the morning dew. Blackberries vanished, leaving behind leaves peppered with holes and canes soggy and supple. Leaves fell from maples, scooting the air, their stems thin red rudders. Crusts of blue berries hugged bay; and apples were green and red, their shapes creased and pinched, worried looking, not rounded, groomed by pesticides. Every day I chewed wild raisins. Leaves from the raisin blackened, then fermented, giving the path along the lane an alcoholic fragrance, rich and damp, very different from the drier smell of fall in the deciduous woods of southern New England, this last often making me cough. I stopped and snuffed the air and watched bald-faced hornets scouring mountain holly and winterberry for nectar. In the quiet I often smelled deer. Near fields I heard pheasants battering into the air, the wings sounding like the blades of helicopters. Mornings were chilly, but only my shoulders got cold, and the sight of a bald eagle ten yards from me, floating the air off the drumlin overlooking the Gulf of Maine, pushed temperature from mind. I watched birds: families of flickers at the edges of fields and along the lane; in boggy scrub...