Young Old Gal

The little cabin sat beside a sizeable pond, in a valley of forested hills and a rocky cleft we hiked through one afternoon. Mornings the low sun briefly cast ghostly shadows of tree trunks across the water’s icy-snowy surface. It was familiar territory but like the best special places different this time, as with each time we go.
            This was my fifth stay in the Midcoast Conservancy’s Hidden Valley Nature Center, and my third with this group: six or seven women on a weekend sabbatical from husbands and children. Most of the others had been coming on this trip for years. I was a relative newbie—and I almost hadn’t come.
            Face it, I’m nearly a generation older than the others in this group. I feel good: spunky, sassy, eager to step out and explore the world. I have a friend who insists that 70 is the new 50, making, I suppose, 60 the new 40, or maybe 45, and on down. I’ll take it. 
           Even so, by coming with these women I knew I’d need to resign myself to being the slowest hiker and skier, the most hesitant to take a dip in the pond, should someone pull out an ice axe and proceed to chop a hole, as is usual with this crowd. I couldn’t help thinking of Blanche DuBlois in A Streetcar Named Desire, hiding from the light, pretending to be younger than she was.
            Shortly after we moved to Maine (seven years ago now),  my “70-is-the-new-50” friend had told me about her annual winter trips with women friends to a remote cabin in Baxter State Park. They skied 12 miles into the park, toting their food and gear. I thought, “I want to do that sometime!” I had yet to don a pair of cross country skis, but I’d done lots of downhill skiing. How different could it be? 
          Plenty, it turned out. There’s something about not having your heels locked into your bindings that utterly changes the equation. Still, I practiced, and practiced—and I got . . . okay at it. Not great, but passably adept. So three years ago when my friend Susan, the long-time organizer of the Hidden Valley weekend, invited me along, I eagerly accepted. We’d only need to ski in two miles. I could handle that, right?
          Possibly. But there was still the matter of hauling food and gear. For our own trip to Hidden Valley one snowless winter, Jeff and I had purchased a heavy plastic “jet sled,” the kind hunters use to haul their game out of the woods. It came with a rope handle, which was fine for hiking but not skiing. I needed something stiff to prevent the sled from riding up behind me when I skied downhill. A friend showed me how to rig a harness with two pieces of narrow PVC pipe: a simple, economical solution.
           Susan and I drove together to the trailhead that Friday afternoon. We were to haul much of the group’s gear (food, cookware and stove, plus our clothes, headlamps, sleeping bags and pads) using my sled. We’d take turns pulling it. We loaded it up—there certainly was a lot!—secured the gear with bungies, and maneuvered it the few feet to the trailhead.
            It wasn’t until then that I noticed the conditions. Uh-oh. There had been a lot of thawing and refreezing that year, and the snow was hard and fast.
            Susan offered to take the first turn pulling the sled. I hooked the harness to her daypack, and she took off, going downhill faster perhaps than she expected but looking like the veteran that she is. I clipped on my skis to follow. 
            I managed the first decline, which was short and not at all steep, and made my way as well as I could up the next hill. The snow beneath me was white, but it just as well might have been blue ice. Speeding downhill I tried to turn to avoid the trail edge, which dropped steeply into woods. My skis wouldn’t respond! I crashed to the ground and lay there, thinking how comical I must look. 
I glanced up to see Susan disappearing over the third hill, her back to me, the sled obediently following. I managed to get myself righted and up—and almost fell again. 
            I took off my skis and began walking.
            And so it went that weekend: Everyone else stepping out confidently, on skis or not, while I took things more cautiously. There was no judgment from the other women. Quite the opposite: They were warm and welcoming. The problem was my own mind talk. I couldn’t help feeling a bit different, having no children at home or full-time job to talk about. Being a self-employed writer can be hard to explain. What do you do? Um, I write about what interests me. It’s great, except when my mind goes utterly blank. Still, I enjoyed myself. I was doing something women from Maine do! I didn’t take a dip in the bathtub-sized hole that my companions chopped in the ice that sunny Sunday morning, though everyone else did. Susan had included “bathing suit” on the list of items we should bring, but I’d thought it was a joke.
           The following March we had a glorious six-or-so inches of snow after we’d walked into the cabin on mostly bare ground. I’d again brought my skis—and I had fun, lots of it.
            Even so, as we took starry nighttime walks across the snowy pond, exploring its thickly wooded islands, I pushed myself hard trying to keep up with the others. These are fit, energetic, mostly long-legged women. They strode along, talking and laughing—and finally I had to decide whether to ask them to slow down or just lag behind. I lagged, taunted by a vision of myself as the slower, shorter little sister. Saturday afternoon, when my friends went skiing on some of the steeper, more remote trails, I set out alone, sticking to trails I knew I could handle. My skiing had vastly improved. I wound past snow-laden conifers and through groves of leafless hardwoods, their trunks sprayed white on the windward side. I skied to the end of the trail through sodden groves of thin-trunked red maples to where the stream that feeds the pond sluices through a rocky cut. In the winter quiet it seemed that my real life was far away.
            Last March I was in Alaska when my young friends went to the cabin by the pond. This February, when Susan sent out her invitation (Come with us!), I sat looking at it for a long time. 
            Did I want to spend three days as the older-younger sister? 
            I sat down to write Susan and explain that I just felt too different from the rest of the group, and that I’d be staying home. But I couldn’t make myself type those words. Instead I wrote my feelings:
            “I can’t keep up with you youngsters,” I wrote. I’d found that “as the years roll by, you revert to your less-capable self. Humbling and enlightening.”
            “I’ll admit to thoughts along the lines of: ‘This is ridiculous. I’ve aged out. I just need to accept that.’ But I think it’s something even more difficult: I should come with you and face up to my limitations. I should cut myself a big piece of humble pie and enjoy it. I’ve earned it.”
And so I did.
            Warm rains arrived before our trip to the cabin this year, so there wasn’t any skiing. But there was exploring and feasting and lots of laughter. There were long evenings by the woodstove, talking about our lives. Saturday afternoon, after a lengthy hike, someone said, “We walked six miles! I don’t feel like we went nearly that far!”
            I said, “I do!” And everyone laughed.
            I had my bathing suit with me this time. The ice on the edge of the pond was slushy--no axe required. I was the last one in and probably stayed in the shortest time. But in I went. It’s true what they say: Cold water brings you alive.

The Chestnut Tree

My neighbor Julie gave us two baby American chestnut trees. They were adorably small, just twigs, each with a few tiny branches. And they were special, bred to be resistant to the blight that killed the great chestnut forests of the eastern United States. The American chestnut was said to be the perfect tree: strong, straight-grained, huge, and a prolific bearer of a tasty, highly nutritious nut. By the early 1900s an Asian blight had arrived in our eastern forests. Within 40 years it destroyed the native chestnut as a commercial species.

But now we had two, and the blight wouldn’t kill them! Unfortunately, something else well might. We selected a spot for them in our new yard, carefully planted them, and surrounded them with chicken wire fencing to keep deer from nibbling their little lives away. One succumbed anyway, just up and died for no obvious reason.

The second hung on. Its enclosure seemed ridiculously large, but I was taking no chances. Julie had three more, which she planted in her yard nearby. This was in mid-2019, back when the world seemed shinier, especially to us, new as we were to Maine.

During the previous 18 months we’d managed to move north, buy land, build a house, and begin our lives as New Englanders. Now we were planting trees in the old meadows we called home. Most we took from fields and hedgerows and groves too crowded for the youngest ever to prosper. We purchased a couple of sugar maples from a nursery, along with some rhododendrons for the yard. But we had so much pastureland begging for trees that we liberated as many as we could from sketchy habitat.

And now we had a chestnut. I tried to leave it alone (a watched chestnut never grows, right?) but found myself checking on it every day. It stood quietly in its enclosure, its long, slender, serrated leaves looking a bit yellow. I carefully applied some fertilizer—not too much, because of the tree’s small size. I made a point of passing by, saying hello, wishing it well.

What a long time ago that seems.

The chestnut grew the following summer, and the next. Its skinny little trunk split into two shoots, then three. Their crotches were only a few inches above the ground—not at all ideal—but I kept putting off the day when I’d trim them away. The tree still seemed so fragile! Its leaves continued to yellow unless I fed it frequently with a phosphorous compound. We tested the soil and found it to be of abysmal quality. Our land has been in farm field for a couple of centuries, and its rich topsoil long ago washed or blew away. All that remains is a mucky blue clay. So we began top dressing the ground around the chestnut with good soil. The yellowing in the leaves disappeared. The little tree fairly glowed.

I hoped Julie’s young chestnuts were doing well, and that hers and ours might cross-pollinate. But it turned out deer had gotten them.  Ours was the lone tree standing.

We’d had a little apple orchard down south, and I’d learned through hard knocks not to fall in love with individual trees. Even so, I’d tip my heart to our chestnut on each morning walk. It grew, and our love for our new home grew. It seemed we were putting down roots together. The seasons turned. Toward the end of last summer I noticed a brown ball hanging from one branch, covered with painfully sharp spines. A burr! The chestnut’s first progeny! We resisted the urge to pick it. In early September it split open to reveal four tiny seeds inside. When it came easily loose from the branch, I gently carried it inside. It opened further. After a week I was able to extract the four seeds. They were too hard and tiny to eat—an adolescent’s first stab at procreation. But they were so beautiful!

I was telling a friend about the burr and how excited I was when she said, “It’s too bad all those trees have turned out not to be blight resistant.”

What???

It’s true: A widely distributed, supposedly blight-proof chestnut strain has been found to muster only a weak genetic response to the disease. Known as Darling 54s, these received their resistance from an inserted wheat gene, which (in addition to being rather worthless in combatting blight) makes them more susceptible to drought.

Is ours one? I don’t think I want to know.

I spent the next couple of weeks hurting a little whenever I passed our chestnut tree. Then I decided just to love it, to happily enjoy its presence and hope for the best.

We had snow for Christmas Eve and a few days beyond. The chestnut still held its leaves, though they were brown and dry and rattling. I sneaked away from the waiting chores and went skiing as much as I could, knowing that within days the snow would grow slushy and be washed away by rain—even in late December. This is new in Maine. Climate change is ratcheting up, and short of massive shifts in the world’s energy usage (which, face it, ain’t coming), all we can do is hang on and hope.

And oh, the world feels unsettled in so many ways! War in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in other places to which Americans pay less attention. Trade wars, drone wars, a deep political split in the U.S.: There’s an unencouraging sense of frailty to these times. That’s a sad word: “un-courage-inspiring,” in an era when we may need all the courage we can muster. Kindness too, and the willingness to accept the differences between us, while still pushing for what’s right.

So whenever I can, I’ll plant chestnuts. I’ll seek out the most blight-resistant strain, of course. I’ll plant chestnuts and rescue trees from overcrowded woodlots. I’ll work a little at the local food pantry and take whatever other steps I can to make this planet a better place. I’ll smile at people I don’t know. I’ll move carefully in a world that seems balanced on the head of a pin, gauging how best to work for goodness, and hoping, always hoping.

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Written in Ink

            “More coffee?”

            The waitress, a round, pleasant woman, was a bit bee-like as she reached in, reached out, and backed away to regard our table. She had a thick country twang and beautiful coloring: jet-black hair and café-con-leche skin. When she tipped the coffeepot to refill my cup, I noticed a thin tracing of ink along the inside of her wrist, a garland folded gracefully back on itself to form an elongated figure eight. An infinity sign. Each loop was adorned with tiny figures, but I couldn’t tell what they were.

            I sat up in my chair.

            My parents and I were in the Virginia Blue Ridge for an autumn reunion of cousins on my father’s side. In their nineties now, Mom and Dad had reached the age where I treated them like fine crystal, steering them through the world with care, thrusting myself between them and any potential harm. The weekend’s full schedule was clearly taxing them. This breakfast was the only quiet time we expected to have, and we were lingering over it.

            “More coffee, Dad?” I prompted, trying to get another peek at the woman’s wrist. Her nametag identified her as Danielle. As she circled us, clearing plates, I decided to take a chance. “Could I see your tattoo?”

            She set the plates on a tray and extended her arm, wrist up. “I just got it a few months ago,” she said. She brushed it with her fingertips. “I probably shouldn’t have done it.” Meaning, I supposed, that in her forties she was too old for such silliness.

            “I love it,” I said, and I did. It was one color, navy blue. Silhouetted birds and stars swirled around the filigreed loops.

            Danielle gave me a pensive look. “It’s in honor of my sister,” she said slowly. “She’s got one just like it.”

            I sat back. “You two must be really close,” I said.

            “We are now.” She smiled and, blinking quickly, looked out toward the lake.

            As young children Danielle and her sister were inseparable. Unfortunately, they were born into a large family—ten children—to a woman who never should have been a mother. When they were nine and ten they were put up for adoption and placed with different couples. Their new parents didn’t share contact information.

Was her sister happy? Married? Was she still living? Danielle couldn’t help wondering. She knew their birthmother’s name but not much more, not even her sister’s adopted name. A few months earlier she had set out to find her. When at last she came across her sister’s picture on Facebook, “it was like looking at myself in the mirror.” They got together in her sister’s home in Chicago and fell back in love.

            “You were so lucky to find each other,” I said.

            “I know.” Danielle smiled widely. “She makes me feel like I’ve rediscovered myself.”

            A tattoo, a simple “let me see,” and a glimpse into another’s life.

            In the children’s novel Wayside School is Falling Down, a boy named Calvin implores his parents to let him get a tattoo for his birthday. When they agree, Calvin agonizes over what image he should choose. The morning after his birthday, Calvin’s classmates wait for him, eager to see his tattoo. He proudly lifts a pant leg to reveal a small brown, rather lumpy oval near his ankle. “It’s a potato,” Calvin says. “I just love potatoes.”

            When our son, Reid, was young, our family listened to a tape of Wayside School over and over on driving trips. It was hilarious. But I wasn’t amused when at 16 Reid began talking about what he’d get for his first tattoo. “No potatoes!” I told him. And no tattoos at all until he turned 18.

            “Why?” he demanded.

            “Because I’m the mom.” I couldn’t believe I was using that lame old phrase. But we’d argued so endlessly about tattoos that I was at a loss for anything better.

            He tipped back his head rakishly. “Once I’m 18 you can’t stop me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get a sleeve.”

            “Have at it,” I said, even as my stomach clenched.

            Reid never got a tattoo. A few weeks after that conversation, just three months shy of his 17th birthday, he was killed in a car accident.

            Among the people who helped prop me up in the months and years after Reid’s death was a woman named Kim, a high school teacher and skilled martial artist. When Reid was 12, Kim had taken him with some other students to Japan as part of an elite martial arts team. She was tough, strict, and caring, a mentor to more students than anyone would ever be able to count. Our son was among them.

            One day I found myself seated next to Kim on a train bound for my parents’ house in Delaware. At Reid’s memorial service, my mother had issued an unwitting invitation to the women of the dojo, an offhand “you’ll have to come see us sometime,” never imagining that they’d take her up on the offer. Now twelve of us were hurtling north toward the house where I’d grown up. We all planned to stay there, sleeping bags spread through every room. I was nervous about the strain on my parents. Also, my ego was screaming, “You can’t entertain these smart, strong women all weekend in a boring suburb!” It was like being in one of those dreams you can’t wake from.

            I had trained alongside Reid in martial arts. Compared to this group, though, I was a rank beginner. Seated alone, I was a little startled when Kim dropped into the seat next to me, carrying two beers. Both were for her. I was drinking rum, a choice that, I realized belatedly, gave me way too little staying power in this group. In the dojo Kim could be demanding and at moments a little frightening. Outside it she turned out to be personable and funny. As we finished our drinks, she said, “You should get a tattoo.”

            I’d sworn over and again that my body would never be inked. My expression must have shown it.

            “I’m serious,” Kim said. “In memory of Reid. I’ve got one in memory of my sister.” She pulled down the neck of her T-shirt to reveal a simple peace sign on her back, above her right shoulder blade. It was the size of a quarter. “I love having it,” she said.

            Marking myself to show how grief had marked me: That made more sense than anything I’d ever heard. As the weekend unfolded, as Kim and her cohorts drew me into their circle and made me laugh so hard that I forgot to be sad, I decided I would get a tattoo.

            But of what? I had no idea, other than that it needed to be small, easily concealed, and colorful, as gem-like as possible. The un-potato. It might be wise to put it somewhere I couldn’t see it, in case regret ever set in. My back seemed a plausible choice, and it had the added advantage that the skin there was unlikely to sag as I aged.

            Was I really going to do this? I was. It seemed like the perfect expression of outrage at losing my only child.

All that autumn and into the winter I thought about designs for my tattoo. Finally I settled on a small, blue-green sphere, an Earth Star—the jokey name we’d called Reid before his birth. He was and would always be the bright point of my life. Around this pretty planet I drew a yellow corona, with the hope that his presence here would continue to shine.

            The following spring, feeling a bit shaky, I walked into a tattoo parlor and asked for an artist whom I knew had a good reputation. He traced my design onto a template and held it out for my inspection. It was here that I had my worst moment. Oldster that I am, I needed to pull out my reading glasses to approve the design for my first tattoo.

            The inking went quickly and hurt less than I’d feared.

Back home, I cozied up to the bathroom mirror and craned my neck to see my little Earth Star. I’d designed as a yin-yang symbol, in Earth’s colors. As I moved closer and farther from the mirror, it came in and out of focus. Even so, I could tell it was exactly what I’d wanted.

            Afterwards I found myself smitten with tattoos. I quietly stalked people who had the colorful kind I liked, maneuvering close enough to them to examine their body art. Since we lived near the ocean, this was easy. Tattoos were everywhere, on the beach beneath layers of sunscreen and in the grocery store peeking from halter tops.

            Some of the designs were stunning: a silhouetted cityscape across the back of a young woman who told me she hoped to become an artist. A set of footprints in the sand running down a waitress’ inner forearm, some more faintly inked as if they’d been washed over by a wave. A foot-long orange lily off a friend’s shoulder.

            One winter on a cross-country driving trip, in a café in a small Illinois town, I noticed a button-like image on the wrist of our waitress. “What’s your tattoo?” I asked.

            She reflexively looked at it. “That one’s a peppermint,” she said. “My granddad used to always give me peppermints. He was my favorite person in the world.”

            “Is he still alive?”

            She shook her head sadly.

            In an Iowa City steak house, our waitress’ hands and forearms were covered with lines and swirls of henna, nothing permanent, but lovely nonetheless. “Where’d you get all that?” I asked.

            She stretched out both hands and admired them. “I just got back from India.” She’d been working as a volunteer with street children. “Wish I was still there,” she said. “It changed my life.”

            “How?”

            She lowered her voice. “It made me realize that I want to live a life of service—and I don’t mean as a waitress.”

            Back home hot weather rolled around again, and the tattoos came out for the summer. Stopping at a coffee shop one day, I squinted at the lines written on the barista’s back. I couldn’t make them out, but the script was pretty.

            The young woman caught me looking. “It says, ‘You are a mist that appears for a while and then vanishes.’”

            I liked it and told her so.

            “It’s from James,” she said. “My favorite book.”

I was surprised. The quote struck me as more New Age than Biblical. But indeed, we are here for only a short while, as Reid’s death had so wrenchingly shown. Here, and vanished. Only the coin-sized drawing of an Earth Star remains. 

            Many tattoos are simply larks, of course, something put on one day for entertainment. Or they’re attempts by boys and girls on the brink of adulthood to catapult themselves onto what they imagine will be the steadier footing of personal independence.

The tattoos that matter, though, hold within their shapes and script the most elemental themes of human existence: love, loss, and hope. They are outward expressions of our inner desires, hints of who we are at a level far, far deeper than that which can be touched. And so whenever possible, I collect the stories behind them. It’s a way of connecting with people I’d otherwise brush by, of sharing a few words about things not easily expressed; a way of letting them known they’re seen—and, as we move among the strangers of this world, perhaps of being seen myself.

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On Not Climbing Katahdin

Katahdin: A Native word meaning, roughly, biggest mountain; a place to be dreamed of; a destination to be earned.

         Mount Katahdin: At 5,269 feet it’s a middling peak by world standards. But it’s the highest by far in these parts, and a Maine icon. Simply getting a reservation to climb it is something of a triumph.

         As the centerpiece of Baxter State Park, Katahdin is ascended by hundreds of hikers each summer, all of whom must negotiate the park’s reservation system before setting foot on any of the steep, rocky, sometimes manageable, sometimes heartbreaking trails—every one of which passes through a piece of the wildest country in the East. Two years ago I tried and failed to get a camping and hiking reservation. Last year I snagged one but had to cancel when my hiking partner (Jeff) injured himself while sailing. And so a few weeks ago when we finally shouldered our backpacks and hit the trail under the bluest of skies, our spirits were soaring.

         Why was I so set on climbing the mountain? A fair question. It was partly the lure of the challenge and partly the rite of passage: Most everyone I know who’s lived in Maine for a while has made it to the top. But there was another reason.

Three years ago, on our second visit to Baxter State Park, we had just come through the southern entrance when we saw a hitchhiker by the road. There were no other cars around. How could we not stop?

He jumped in the backseat and told us he’d just been come down from the mountaintop. He’d hiked up the west side and down the east; now he needed a ride back to his car. He couldn’t stop smiling. He had the expression of someone floating ecstatically through the world, in love with life. I decided then and there that I’d someday climb the mountain. I wanted to be where he’d been, and see what he’d seen. I wanted that aura of happiness and achievement.

         Now Jeff and I were hiking the trail to the Chimney Pond campground with food and gear for a three-night stay in a mountain cirque a mere two miles from Katahdin’s peak. We reveled in the cool, clear air, the moist feel of the forest around us.  Sure, our backpacks were a little too heavy. But the campground was only 3.3 miles from the parking lot where we’d left the car. We had no doubt we could manage the climb.

        I had backpacked in my twenties and thirties but not since. I knew better than to go out with a too-heavy pack. That morning, after loading up everything and hoisting my pack, I began tossing stuff. Not needed—extra flashlight; not needed—bird book. Camp shoes. Two pairs of binoculars. (Jeff argued that we didn’t need any.) Why hadn’t we thought this through a little more thoroughly? (I thought we had.) There was nothing for it now but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ascending alongside fast-flowing Roaring Brook and into steeper country, where the trail was lined and strewn with boulders. Jeff’s pace slowed. I began resting often with my pack propped on a rock. Hours passed. Three-point-three miles: Hadn’t we already come that far, and more? I studied the forest around us, the spruces and firs and the occasional large maples and birches. I rejoiced when the trees grew shorter and the view opened to alpine lakes. A few steps later we both nearly cried when we reached a sign informing us that we still had a mile to go.

We made it, of course, and the pain was worth what we found.

Chimney Pond is a small jewel set in deep forest and encircled by three peaks. A smooth joining of mountainsides. We stood on the shore, marveling. To the south, Pamola Mountain curled into the long form of Katahdin, which melded into Hamlin Ridge. In many places the walls were streaked with beautiful vermilion stone. Watching the colors fade as the sun dipped below the towering ridges, I wanted to be nowhere else on Earth.

That night the stars were the brightest I’d seen in the East.

         Our plan had been to continue on to Katahdin’s peak the following day. We woke knowing this was a bad idea. We were too sore, and too depleted.

Luckily we were not too worn out to take short hikes. We explored the first section of the difficult Cathedral Trail, which began with a steep but manageable climb. We hiked the rising trail through damp forest, passing over a rushing stream we could hear but barely see, buried as it was beneath piled rocks.

We heard the buzz of a mountain chickadee. In full sun now, we hoisted ourselves around and over pale boulders taller than we were. They had been rolled together like marbles by glacial ice.  At the base of the first cathedral, the point at which serious rock climbing would have begun, we sat down and reveled in being here, here, on the side, if not the peak, of Katahdin.

Hiking back to camp, Jeff found a pile of spruce cone scales where an animal, perhaps a squirrel, had left them piled in a tidy circle. Bright mauve on their insides, they were as beautiful as bits of amethyst.

All the while I knew that this sunny day of relaxation might cost us our chance to reach the summit. The next day’s forecast was for clouds and fog and spitting rain. Even if we managed to finish the climb in such conditions, we probably wouldn’t be able to see past the end of our hiking poles.

We hiked toward Pamola Caves, moving slowly along, sometimes sitting still and just looking, examining small things we would have missed on a more purposeful, destination-driven hike: the lichens on the rocks. The small shrubs pushing stubbornly from cracks between boulders. I told myself it was enough to be on Katahdin’s flank, that the chance to pause and revel in the beauty of this country was a gift we wouldn’t have received if we’d been hellbent on getting to the summit.  

Back in camp, I sat on the bench in front of our lean-to, looking up for a long time. Three big white birches, older and grander than most I’d seen, enclosed our campsite. Their branches waved in a spunky southern breeze (a sign, I knew, of weather possibly changing). Just beyond them, barely visible, was a steep, treeless, vermillion-streaked cliff: the top third of Katahdin.

Jeff asked me if I could feel the spirits of the place—meaning the life pulsing through the trees and rocks and bushes around us. An interesting question, and one on most days that I might have answered yes. I realized that what I felt here was more expansive, a wholeness born of the entire landscape.  I hoped it would be enough, should we be stranded in camp by weather on our last day.

The weather forecast did not improve. As darkness gathered I crawled into my sleeping bag—content, though I knew this would probably be as far up the mountain as we would go.  What a gift, to be here, here, if not on the summit. I had a suspicion that I would be glowing after we made our way back to civilization. I slept deeply and well.

As often happens, the weather forecast was utterly wrong. We woke, astounded, to bright sun. Instead of packing up and packing out, after several hours of hard, beautiful, exhilarating, excruciating hiking and climbing, at last we reached the top of Katahdin.

The view from the top—and a sign of the wind’s srength

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The Bobolinks

The rumble of the mower was slow to reach the house. The man at the wheel had begun by cutting the far end of the field and looping toward the back, mostly out of earshot. This wasn’t nefarious, just a sensible path for carving through the tall grasses across the road from us— in a field that was harboring bobolinks, a flashy, noisy, black-and-white-and-tan bird that nests on the ground. 
             He had made one pass around the front field and was completing a second when the rumble of the machinery caught my attention. I glanced at the calendar: June 28th. The bobolinks would be at the peak of their nesting cycle.
             Those fields, part of a state Wildlife Management Area, usually weren’t mowed before August.
            I slipped on my shoes and went out to investigate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I was mistaken. But no: There he was, finishing a second circle around the field’s perimeter with a tractor towing a bush hog. 
             He had passed the end of our driveway half a minute earlier. I bolted down the road, running as fast as I could, barely gaining on him but gaining. He couldn’t hear my shouts. I got close enough for him to see me and waved my arms. “Hey! Please stop.”
            He halted, looked at me, surprised, and turned off the tractor.
            I held up a finger in the classic sign for just a second. “Thanks for stopping,” I said when I had caught my breath. I explained about the bobolinks, and how for years these fields had been cut by neighborhood volunteers, and not until August.
            “Well,” he said, “the state told me to cut ‘em.” He got down from the tractor, a working man in jeans and boots, muscular but a little thick around the middle. “The state told me to come do it,” he repeated.
            “They’re paying you?”
            He looked annoyed but nodded.
            “Could you wait until August?”
            He took out his phone and dialed a number, punching the buttons roughly. He hung up—the call must have gone to voicemail.
            I knew who he was trying to reach: the wildlife biologist in charge of the region. I had called him too, a few weeks earlier, volunteering Jeff and myself as the new neighborhood mowers. The man who’d done it for many years was hanging up his spurs. The wildlife biologist hadn’t called me back.
            “Could you please wait to cut it?” I didn’t want to take the job away from this man.
            He made a face. “I don’t want to get all political about this,” he said. He turned, climbed back on the tractor, started it, and put it roughly in gear. He drove briskly off, bush hog lifted, down the field to the trailer that had delivered the cutting machine to our road. 

A bobolink female or immature bird? It’s very hard to tell. Photo by Jonathan Irons, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab

When we moved to Maine, the most forested of states, I had expected to find a home nestled in trees. We ended up in an old farm field that we’ve come to love, and that’s become a beautiful meadow. Trees run down two sides and sneak partway along the back of the house. The rest is open field—bobolink country.

            Surveys in Maine show bobolink numbers to have dropped 3 percent each year from 1966 to 2017, a trend that will lead inevitably to extinction. During that half-century, the species suffered an 88 percent decline in their numbers continent wide. The authoritative Birds of Maine reports that they are “listed as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need because of concern about cutting hay and silage during the nesting season.” More recently, real estate developers have targeted the open fields.

All good reasons to care for these quirky little birds. But besides that, we love having them around.

            They chortle. They squawk. They perch on the wavering tips of grasses, the males gabbling like old men. The sight and sound of them lift our spirits. And so, on July 8th when I once again heard the mower across the road, my heart sank to somewhere around my kneecaps.

            I didn’t dare again confront the man mowing. So I called the wildlife biologist who had hired him.

            He answered this time, in a thick Southern accent that made me feel right at home. But this was Maine, not the North Carolina Outer Banks. Before we hung up, I asked him where he was from.

            “Georgia,” he said.

            I told him we’d lived down south and that I loved hearing his accent.

            “I sure have taken some hell about it all my years up here,” he said good naturedly.

            “It’s music to my ears,” I said. And it was.

            The verdict he imparted was not music, however. He’d told the mower to recommence. He’d checked and had read that the birds would be mostly done nesting by the end of the first week of July.

            That wasn’t at all what we had observed. I swallowed my protests, thanked him for researching the matter, and hung up. Across the road, the cutting was halfway done.

            Bobolink males are mostly black but have a butterscotch swatch on the back of the head that to me looks like a toupee. Their shoulders and rumps are flashily patched with white. They look ready for a night out on the Jersey shore. Females and young birds are drab by comparison, easily confused with sparrows but for the shape of their bodies and beaks. In autumn bobolinks migrate through the Caribbean and spend five or six weeks in Venezuela before continuing on to grasslands scattered through Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. They come north again each spring, settling in open fields, which are fewer with each passing year.

            The day before the mower showed up for the second time, I’d glimpsed a dozen birds—three males and nine drab females or young—on the electrical wires along our road. An encouraging sight. But that was before.

            Might the chicks in the mown fields have all fledged? It was impossible to know. In the silence after the second mowing we caught no glimpses of bobolinks anywhere, for weeks. I scanned the fields each morning, my heart numb. A flyer put out by the nonprofit Vermont Center for Ecostudies cautions against mowing in northern New England until July 20th, before which, it says, “Nests are fledging young that are incapable of flight for 10 days.” A delay to August 1 would be best. A wildlife specialist at Ag Allies, a Maine grassland birds program, echoed the need to wait until at least July 15th.

            How many young birds might have been killed by the mowing? What should we do about it—if anything? We’re new to Maine (though we’ve been here six years). This isn’t a culture where pushiness is appreciated. Then again, I’ve never been one to shirk a fight.

            One morning in mid-July, a week after the second cutting, I glimpsed two males and a couple of drab birds—females or new chicks—in the undisturbed grasses in back of our house. The males sat up tall, as if daring anyone to mess with them. Their companions were more cautious. The birds didn’t show themselves the next morning, or the next week. It isn’t unusual for bobolinks to appear and disappear. But things seemed quieter this year. Emptier.

            The following morning we left on a sailing trip. When we returned after a week, the power lines along the road to our house were empty. The fields were distressingly silent.

            Two mornings later, though, our front field exploded with birds: four splashy males and another 16 or 18 females and young. It was a party, a grass-top mashup. The birds made no attempt to conceal themselves, calling to each other, chattering away, all the while bobbing on their shaky perches. We watched; we counted; we rejoiced. When I ducked quickly inside for my tea and came back, they were gone, another of nature’s disappearing acts.

            And—that was all. I envision them now in the wild rice fields around Merrymeeting Bay, fattening up for the trip to South America.

I know I can’t protect everything I love in this world, whether people or animals or places. Even so, doing nothing is never an option.

I don’t want to get all political. Neither did I. This wasn’t a political matter but simply an exchange between people with differing fears, overlaid on the needs of a small, quirky bird.

I wrote to the wildlife biologist with the information I’d gathered: the local bobolink census figures, with dates when the birds generally leave the fields; the graph from the Center for Ecostudies recommending that mowing be delayed. That was all I could do. He wrote back within minutes to say that we can probably work something out for mowing later next year.

The seasons will turn; the election will come and go. Regardless of its results, our nation will be living with these rough edges for the foreseeable future. May I do nothing to sharpen them. May I instead find ways to soften them until—however long it takes—the concept of “getting political” over small but important matters, like caring for bobolinks, no longer holds sway over the American psyche.