We are paddling on wind-hazed water, in another century. Spruce, jack pine and balsam cozen the shore of this drinkable lake, an unbroken expanse of green under a cloud-streaked sky that is both broad, and intimate. Floating below us, the inverted reflection of Spencer Mountain is scored by the long, straight wakes of two cruising loons.

Maine, for me, has always been synonymous with the outdoors and the ramblings of Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden and the assertion, made in a time before boom boxes and squealing electronic devices, that people “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But he wrote another book that captured a different place and different sentiments, The Maine Woods, about the wild north country that made me, when I read it, want to see a moose knee-deep in a tea-colored river and discover other remnants of a landscape that profoundly moved this the most famous of American nature writers.

A few hours earlier, I stood in a barn down in Willimantic, Maine, with a handful of other pilgrims. “There aren’t too many ‘don’ts’,” Garrett Conover was telling us. “Don’t use the ax. Don’t talk to us during dinner prep, and don’t relieve yourselves less than two see-fars from the water.” A see-far is the distance you can see into the woods while standing on the bank. “There’s no giardia where we’re going. You don’t want to go down in history as the one who introduced it.”

He wore a belt with a moose etched into the buckle. His beard was reminiscent of Thoreau’s, his gaze fixed on a point several see-fars in the distance. His wife, Alexandra, stood next to him in battered Stetson, scarf and wool vest; both sported the familiar Maine guide “shoe,” really a rubber boot with a leather upper. Their barn was loaded with traditional expeditionary gear: a 16-foot birch bark canoe made in the style of the Penobscot Indians, snowshoes of bent ash and rawhide, and pack baskets of beaten ash strips they made themselves. A dozen “blanks” of drying ash hung in a side room, to be carved into paddles with a traditional north woods crooked knife.
The rest of us look considerably less Thoreauvian in floppy hats and rip-stop nylon jackets, all of us “from away,” as they say in Maine: Susanna, an artist from Chicago; Robyn, a social worker from Manhattan; Svea, a retired nurse from Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s home (”I have traveled a good deal in Concord.”); Svea’s granddaughter, Sofia, nine years old, half American, half Italian, from Bologna, in pink boots; a professional photographer, Jim, from Kansas; and me, a writer from the environs of the nation’s capital quietly desperate to escape them in July.

We had all received the same letter from the Conovers telling us what sort of trip to expect. “If you are reluctant to part from radios, cell phones, satellite phones, and your lap top computers, please seriously consider not participating… Much of the magic in wildlands trips comes from engagement with the present, with natural conditions, and with the temporary tribe of each group.”

Our tribe is now about to camp on Lobster Lake. We quickly learn the set-up dance: canoe unloading, tent site selection, tent erection and, finally, body immersion. The lake is cold enough to get even a Mainer’s attention. “Step into my office,” says Svea after the swim, and we take turns sitting with her at a picnic table provided by the Maine Department of Forestry, for pulse readings. She is learning about “plant spirit,” and explains, “I would like to take each of your pulses everyday. The Chinese say that’s an integral part of the healing process.” I doubt that Thoreau would have been sympathetic to the notion of plants having spirits, despite his transcendentalism, but he would have found it interesting and no doubt would have recorded the experience.

Thoreau made three visits to north-central Maine—in 1849, to climb Mount Katahdin, and in 1853 and 1857 to the headwaters of the Penobscot and Allagash rivers. Along the way he encountered hunters, loggers, and other explorers and passed through a continuous forest that seemed inexhaustible. He took notes about plants, birds, mammals and other natural phenomena and commented on things as various as the stars and the destructive habits of his fellow human beings. He wasn’t after financial gain, or sport, but knowledge, valuing wilderness not for its product but for the inspiration and wisdom it could impart to his and future generations.

I am confident that he would have documented the Conovers’ cooking routine as well, had he been with us. Garrett has fetched spruce while Alexandra arranged the pack baskets and food boxes (”wannagins”). He cuts foot-long logs with a bow saw assembled for that purpose while she sets two poles in ground, lashes the galley pole between them, and suspends buckets on chains. Garrett expertly splits the logs with a fine Swedish ax, produces a flurry of wood shavings and then a crackling fire; Alexandra has the biscuits in motion. He makes a pot of his “decapitated” (decaffeinated) coffee while she peels potatoes and gets the steaks ready. He assembles a skillet 18-inches across out of a canvas case and she prepares the salad.

“Around here the name Thoreau brings a groan,” she is saying. “When he came through in 1857 he refused to exchange news of the outside world with a family living at the portage to the Allagash. Thoreau just took off down the trail, and then he got lost. The story was picked up by all the guides in the Chesuncook region, and they have long memories. I heard it from our mentor, Mickey Fahey, who heard it from his, Tommy Smart, who heard it from a guide who was alive at the time.”

The tradition of the official Maine guide goes back to 1897, when they were accredited by the state to promote the beauty of Maine and to assure clients from points south that the forests, lakes and rivers were user friendly. The first was a woman, six-foot Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby who wrote a newspaper column and convinced one of the railroads operating in Maine to send her to a sportsman’s convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden with a genuine log cabin and a stuffed moose. So Alexandra is part of an old tradition, but Maine woods lore is much older, and it is the early traditions that got the Conovers interested in making their own pemmican and moccasins sewn from smoked deer hide, and in natural pursuits not related to hunting and fishing. They began their apprenticeships fresh out of college in Massachusetts more than 20 years ago, with liberal arts degrees and a desire to study under the legendary Maine woodsman, Mick Fahey. “Garrett and I were already competent outdoors people,” as Alexandra points out. “Then Mick asked me if I wanted to learn to paddle. I was insulted.”

Fahey had learned his skills from Smart and from members of the Penobscott tribe he encountered as a younger man. He taught the Conovers, among other things, to put their bodies into 40-60 strokes a minute, with a paddling style and rhythm used by Indians, trappers and voyageurs of an earlier age, known alternately as the Maine stroke, the Canadian stroke, and the north woods stroke. Fahey taught them much more—”not just to question but to understand nature—astronomy, limnology, forestry. We got so much from him and other old-timers. They opened windows that led to everywhere.”

Garrett later wrote the ultimate treatise on poling canoes, Beyond the Paddle, and together he and Alexandra wrote, A Snowwalker’s Companion. Neither of these is in the camp library—a clear plastic bag—but I do find A Canoeists’s Sketchbook by Robert Kimber, The Book of Swamp and Bog by John Eastman, The One-Eyed Poacher of Maine by one Edmund Wayne Smith, and The Wildest Country, a Guide to Thoreau’s Maine edited by J. Parker Huber.

That night, under a crisp quarter moon, a loon calls. The sound is often described as demented but to me is the pure, unrestrained voice of the wild, repeated and answered from across the water.

I awake to the crack of Garrett’s ax against fresh spruce logs, rise to the smell of bacon in the big skillet and dine on hashbrowns and eggs to the tune of Sofia’s jokes. (”What do invisible cats drink?… Evaporated milk!”) Soon I am leaning into my new north woods stroke, on the Penobscot River, watching weeds on the bottom sway like golden hair in the current. A family of Mergansers swims noisily away, a belted kingfisher scolds. Every now and then we dip our cups into the water to drink, a rare opportunity in America today, though one Thoreau would have taken for granted.

He traveled in 1853 with his cousin, George Thatcher, and an Indian guide, Joe Aitteon, who provided ducks for their breakfast, to go with tea and hard bread; Aitteon spent most of his time trying to shoot a moose. When he succeeded, Thoreau carefully measured it. “I did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large.”

Our tribe has moose on the mind, too. We find tracks of Alces alces Americana in the mud adjacent to our next camping spot, upstream of Ragmuff Stream. The cloven hoof marks look huge. Thoreau wrote, “this hunting of moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him… is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses.” We wanted the simpler satisfaction of seeing one.

Thoreau stayed just up the hill from our next camp site, in what was known as Smith’s Halfway House, for Ansel Smith who provided lodging for loggers and later moved a bit south, to the shore of Chesuncook Lake. The foundations are still visible, as is the rock-lined well in the pasture taken over by bunchberry, wild pink roses and red hawkweed. Fodder was grown here for draught horses used in the days when trees were cut and dumped into the rivers, where they stayed until spring thaw carried them south.

“Thoreau could not have foreseen that so much of this would remain,” Garrett says, showing us around. However, clear-cutting has eliminated vast stretches of forest just beyond the tree-lined banks, and now there is little but cut-over country a few see-fars from the last drinkable river on the eastern seaboard. These lovely woods are little more than a screen for one of the great timber bonanzas of all time.

In Thoreau’s day, logging and hunting were the reasons one traveled in the woods. He went against the grain when he wrote, “Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.” That was close to heresy in the twilight of Manifest Destiny, when the building blocks for a young nation were still coming out of places like this. It seems to me, looking at the remains of Smith’s forgotten enterprise and considering the effect of massive clear-cuts beyond the river’s fringe of trees, that Thoreau’s genius was not in taking off for the wilderness and making sense of the experience, but in having the imagination and daring to question prevailing attitudes about its use considered anti-social and no doubt anti-American. Now we’re at the ass-end of the headlong exploitation of phenomenal resources that was already humming when Thoreau passed through.

By the time camp is set up a certain easefulness prevails. Susanna and Sofia sit on the bank, painting with watercolors; Svea has Robyn stretched out on the ground, to “release tension” by passing her hands through the air above “bad energy fields.” She asks Robyn, whose eyes are dutifully shut, what color she would like to see, and Robyn says, “Sky blue,” which is the overarching hue in this remarkably dry, insect-free passage through country notorious for precipitation and bugs.

Supper is Cornish game hen, parboiled, split and roasted in the skillet, seasoned with paprika, garnished with sauteed chopped celery and almonds and served with rice and squash sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. Passing clouds briefly release raindrops that dimple the river but distract no one from dessert: pineapple upside-down cake that inspires Sofia to squeeze her fingers together in an Italianate gesture of pure perfection. This sort of camp life is a dying art in an age dominated by freeze-dried protein and carbos inhaled for biking up the next mountain. But real food leads to real contemplation in a sepia, stop-frame moment, and I imagine Henry David scribbling on his scraps of paper and Joe Aitteon inspecting his leaky bark canoe.

Before bed I open The Wildest Country and learn that the dying Thoreau’s last words were “moose,” and “Indians.” In the middle of the night I am awakened by the sound of something large stamping about in the shallows, crawl out of my tent and find Robyn already about, wearing a headlamp. “Moose!’ she whispers, having seen it clamber up the far bank.

The river slows and broadens south of the Hay Islands. They were named for fodder grown there to feed the hearty Percherons that hauled logs in Thoreau’s day and stayed on the islands year-round. Before we know it we are on Chesuncook Lake, an Indian word meaning “a place where many streams emptied in.” A bald eagle tilts high above this luminous, ever-expanding realm that pushes the far bank into the distance.

We are faced with two days of flat water, but first will spend a night on sheets, at River House, built on the site of Ansel Smith’s structures in 1864. The original homestead included a blacksmith shop, an icehouse, a barn, and a log house that Thoreau considered “but a slight departure from the hollow tree.” All that is gone now, the white clapboard house that replaced it owned by a young couple from Massachusetts, the Surprenants, who decided to escape with their five children to a simpler era.

David Surprenant meets us on the shore, in trim beard and Bermudas, loads our gear into a trailer and hauls it up to the broad front porch that overlooks the water and the mile-high thrust of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s reigning peak. The village of Chesuncook is readily accessible only by boat. A dirt road crosses marshes that require serious all-terrain capability, and the Surprenants use a World War II troop carrier to bring in their supplies.

Chesuncook has a dozen year-round residents. The Conovers lead our tribe to The Store in the Woods, for a bottle of homemade root beer, and then on to the village church. Pilgrim’s Hymnals are scattered over the seats, to be picked up when the old pump organ begins to wheeze. Each Sunday an itinerant preacher is brought in and put up at the inn. “He either preaches to a dozen people, or 30,” says Alexandra, “depending on whether or not they come over from the Boy Scout camp.”

The cemetery, the ultimate New England social register, is populated with simple stone memorials, including Tommy Smart’s, Ansel Smith’s, and a sprinkling of Penobscot Indians—all of them associated in some way with Thoreau’s memory. Mick Fahey is buried here, too, his gravestone inscribed with a verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson: “I am a part of all/ That I have met.” Fahey died in 1985, and Garrett and Alexandra stand for a while over their old friend. She says, “We brought that stone here in a canoe.”

The Lake House porch was made for sitting and that we do, gazing across at Gero Island, feeling guilty for not having to put up tents. Dinner is served in the dining room, under gas lights unavailable in Thoreau’s era and quaint in ours.

On our next to last day we cover fourteen miles on flat water, the wind, usually a constant, banished along with the rain. Scattered across the bright surface of the lake like carefree children, we chatter among ourselves. Sofia reads a Harry Potter story; Alexandra, paddling alone along the shore, sings; Susanna paints the ever-present water, gray, glacier smoothed rocks on an endless beach, sear fallen timber like rough-hewn steps leading to the bright, birch-framed mysteries of the forest.

Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods: “not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain… far in the recesses of wilderness.” The same can be said for the rest of us.

Our tribe has found in the north woods good spirits, plant and otherwise, and a kind of pride. I have mastered a version of the north woods stroke (”mastery” is a tricky word in Maine), and everyone has shed some doubts about the necessity of modern conveniences. It’s all a kind of playacting, of course—and beneficial because of it. If we can keep alive the once-vital connection between us and the physical world and have fun at the same time, then who can object other than the floggers of jet skis and microwaves?

We are comfortable in our new element, knowing, of course, that Garrett will get the fire going and Alexandra will bake something to celebrate with on our last night together—iced lemon cake, in fact, decorated with yellow loosestrife, red oser dogwood and pearly everlasting, to be digested while watching feathery northern lights climb the vast Maine sky. So no one really cares when wind comes up in the afternoon. We can already see the island where we’ll camp, we can almost smell the wood smoke.

We stopped for a light and he wheeled around on the seat to say said, “Sir, you must not call them scars. It is an insult. They are not scars. They are marks. They are my proud marks telling of my family and my village. Wherever I go I am me to all the world. Can you say that? You must not call them “scars” they are marks.”

I said I was sorry and that I thought I’d just get out now and walk the rest of my journey. I gave him an embarrassingly large tip and he peeled away leaving me on the curb chastened—another untraveled American bonehead.

Thinking now about the encounter I know exactly what the guy was saying and why he was irritated. On my right hand I wear a ring my father and my grandfather wore. When I look at it for any length of time I am anchored, fixed in place and time. It is like a memory box; it contains my past like a talisman—happiness, hope and gratitude; sadness, regret and puzzlement over how some things turned out. Scenes from a life.

On my left had, on the index finger, I wear a scar that is very dear to me. Actually there are two scars on that finger, the other a crescent shaped result of a dumbassed whittling mistake made before I learned to take extra care when pulling the blade toward yourself. It should have been stitched up but it wasn’t and so remains distinct reminder of the old momism we all heard “Always carve away from yourself, son.” Of course most moms don’t carve slingshots or make tap sticks for rabbit hunting, thus are unknowing that properly knitching a stick requires an inward pull. But no matter now. Moms did have uses.

The other scar, although somewhat faint, a mark worthy of note at least to me, is a result of my having accidentally stuck the finger into the mouth of a large, angry chelydra serpentina. Now if you don’t know what one of those is—and I didn’t before I looked it up—try big damn snapping turtle: those guys you see floating just below the water’s surface in ponds, their fist-sized noggins sticking up for breathing, those guys you picked off with your twenty-two, who hissed at you and sprayed a puking smell when you messed with them, who snapped at you with a mouth like two bent knife blades. Bad fellows, these, but in the ponds of rural Alabama as plentiful as hoe handles.

They do make good soup. My grandmother’s cook at Thornhill, Chaney, a round woman with breasts like two balloons into which she would sweep me as a small boy, exclaiming, “ You is my heart!”, was a pro at turtle soup. Although, for reasons that will become clear, she rarely had this culinary opportunity because nobody wanted to mess with catching her a turtle.

A word about Chaney: she cooked for my grandmother, “Miss Helen” for over thirty years , living out behind the big house in a one-room cabin with a screen porch and plenty of shade, her home kept neat as a pin. I felt I was her favorite among my cousins—but perhaps they felt the same. The secret thoughts of servants like Chaney, loyal, faithful, always pleasant with a smile and a laugh just when it was needed, and savvy, so savvy, were just that in the end—very, very secret.

She made me buttermilk biscuits in the shape of airplanes and pistols. She wore a starched and crisply pressed white uniform and for all the thirty years had to ask Miss Helen for the pantry key before preparing each meal. Chaney said one early Spring morning when my cousin Louis, brother Innes and I were at Thornhill for a long week-end, “ Pastures is wet this morning an’ them snappers be walking around. You cotch me one up and I make soup for supper.” And off we went in an Army surplus Jeep my father had bought at some auction, or maybe got in some sort of trade over in Mississippi.

Snapping turtles are scavengers and in the Spring rainy season roam the fields searching for carrion. They will eat anything including each other. They can weigh up to thirty pounds and live as long as thirty years. In the water they are quite docile but on land they are always in a bad mood. Totally solitary creatures they spend much of their lives buried in mud. I’ve always figured their constant dyspepsia was caused by the fact that they got no mothering, none at all. Female snappers lay their eggs and hit the road, leaving their young, for the only fragile period of their lives, to fend for themselves. No momisms for these fellows, no night-night snuggles.

We found a large snapper pretty quickly in the muddy grasses below the Little Pond dam. He hissed, snapped and spun around a couple of times, but with a large cedar stick to hold him still we got a string around his hind feet and hung him on the hood of the jeep so that he draped down over the radiator.

We headed home to the soup pot but soon came upon another monster. Feeling cocky, that dangerous state of mind now referred to by free-fall knuckleheads as an “adrenalin rush,” I said, “let me get this big boy.” Louis pulled the jeep up to the big turtle and waited while I got the string, jumped out and put my foot on the turtle’s back to steady him. As I tried to loop his hind leg. however, he spun under my weight and snapped at my hand. Ah, but I was too quick! Quick, yes, but not lucky, Snatching my hand back from the jaws of my angry prey, I flung it, rather the index finger of it, square into the mouth of the turtle on the radiator.

The rest happened fast and doesn’t make much sense. They say that once a snapper gets hold of you he won’t let go until it thunders….and there was not a cloud in the sky. Somehow, thank God, the thing didn’t get a good grip and without thinking I snatched my finger out peeling off a strip of skin where his beak had dug in; hurt like hell but I was already recounting the event to the amazed girls I knew I see in the eighth grade Monday morning.

We had good soup that night. It was more like a stew actually. And we soaked up the broth with Chaney’s buttermilk biscuits. I wore a bandage for days longer than needed and bored crap out of my friends telling the turtle adventure. Finally, Billy Price said to me, “Tartt, that’s a pissant little cut. Quit going on about it. You’re lucky you ain’t Pine Knot.” Peter “Pine Knot” Prat was a guy a couple of grades ahead of me, short, funny, well liked and, so folks said, “tough as a knot in a pine board”. His daddy, Peter Prat Sr., owned the dry cleaning shop in Livingston. Pine Knot was bushhogging his daddy’s pasture one day and fell of the back of the tractor when he hit a bump hidden in the tall grass. The bushhog ran over him and cut an arm off at the shoulder. I had to admit Billy Price had a point.

Years later, while the scar was still a little pink, still worth noting, it came in very handy at boring dinner parties in our nation’s capitol (boring at least to me) and at pretentious art world lunches in New York. Just to spit in the soup, I’d hold up the finger and ask “Know how I got this scar right here?” Then I could once again find the voice of provincial innocence, feigned this time, an aggressive put on. Not like the authentic rube who offended the Nigerian cabby so much later. Scars and marks, road signs on the backward journey to where and who we are right now.

Four men in a borrowed boat are churning up mud, trying to get a close look at the invading cane. Aboard are Tony Prochaska (then the Chester Riverkeeper); two Chester River Association board members, Andy McCown and Tyler Campbell; and me. Prochaska had lived on the Eastern Shore for five years and fished and crabbed the Chester, but he has no picture in his head of how the river was before that. McCown, also the associate director of the Echo Hill Outdoor School, grew up on the river in the 1950s and 1960s, prowling spits of land where now he can’t set foot.

It’s a watery world turned upside down. Then, sandbars were mostly bare and bottom grasses grew so thick along the riverbed they fouled the props and, McCown remembers, made the grownups cuss. Today those submerged grasses are mostly gone, as are the crabs that hid there, and those once sandy beaches are covered with stands of phragmites that can grow so densely that some wildlife cannot enter.

“It’s like watching the houses sprout in Delaware,” McCown laments.

Across the river and upstream of Morgan Creek, he points to a narrow opening in the crowded cane. “As a kid I used to go up that creek, and I don’t recall any phragmites,” he says. “Then it was all cattails and wild celery and wild rice. You don’t see any of that now.”

That phragmites is one of the Eastern Shore’s most aggressively invasive plants is obvious. Why that’s so is less clear. In fact, it’s not even an “alien” plant — or not always. Prochaska has brought along a packet of scientific papers that say phragmites has been growing inland along the Atlantic coast for thousands of years, as proven by core samples taken in peat bogs. When Capt. John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1606, he wrote that Indians of this region lived in dwellings thatched with the cane.

Currently, general scientific opinion holds that the native reed may be a stable presence where it exists — but the rapid expansion is due to the introduction of another variety of the plant brought here from Europe and Asia. It is known, for instance, that phragmites was used as packing material in crates shipped aboard sailing vessels, which may have resulted in its spread.

The giant grass is not universally disliked. People in various parts of the world have used it to make boats, paper, fishing spears, even jewelry. One study among Prochaska’s batch of papers cites phragmites’ role in cleansing waters of waste material, including heavy metals and sewage. It stabilizes soil in areas prone to erosion. It can also enhance water quality through nutrient cycling.

There’s much dispute over phragmites’ value as food and habitat for birds and other wildlife in the U.S. More than 70 species of birds do use the plant for nesting materials and breed in phragmites stands, notably redwing blackbirds along the Chester. However, ornithologists suspect that forage for the birds becomes inaccessible when phragmites stands get too dense.

When I observe that environmentalists in Europe seem to like the stuff, McCown interjects, “I’m not saying it’s good or it’s bad. Just that it’s here.”

Where it wasn’t, he means.

McCown notes that open bars of sand are critical breeding grounds for some species, like Maryland’s diamondback terrapin. Yet many of those sandbars, where McCown once took students for field trips, can’t be explored now because they’re overgrown by the tough cane.

After slamming downriver against the wind, McCown slows our boat just off two sister points of land familiar to recreational boaters. “That one downstream is Frying Pan. It’s bigger, but now it’s been covered by phrag. This one’s Skillet.”

I know Skillet. Every summer, in late August or early September, I’ve come with a group of friends to raft up here. We anchor in the shallows, set up folding chairs and coolers on the sand if tide allows, and celebrate the full moon rising.

Today the tide is low. But there’s only a couple of feet between water’s edge and the phragmites wall. This season, if we come again, there won’t be much space for mingling. We’d have to stand along the bank in single file, like stalks of the invading cane.

Photo from the Smithsonian Institutes

rest not on the hawk

but on its shadow, on rock, on bark,
all belief suspended and the bruise of light wavering

on rims of bark. I recall the yellow light
of the sun starting to descend and the way

the neighbors sat on their side porches to watch with a kind
of wonder. What is it these people yearn for?

My own desires

so strong they are written
on my skin, but in a foreign language deciphered

when the shadow of the hawk in this remaining
light takes flight

curving the hill like silence cut from ruins.

[published in Tar River Review]

But hey, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is at stake and to reach the very best in public housing sometimes you’ve got to get in touch with your inner ninny (check occupant). After all, it isn’t easy these days being a Republican presidential nominee who believes in evolution and global warming — not if you’ve been rash enough to say so in public. So, to make up for those gaffes, you’ve got to play to the chucklehead base.

This is why McCain, a true American war hero, a politician unafraid to cross the aisle for bipartisan support, a maverick who risked political purgatory trying to rid Congress of the campaign contributions stink, a senator who has braved the wrath of almost all his colleagues by attacking their sneaky practice of budget earmarks — like the odiferous “bridge to nowhere” — is now going around the country pandering to fat cat audiences by making fun of scientific research.

To get those campaign contributions from anti-big-government donors, McCain has been waging a personal war against federally funded biology projects. He gets haw-haws by attacking a $5 million study of grizzly bear DNA, cracking wise, “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue, or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

Never mind that grizzlies are on the endangered species list or that wildlife biologists are unanimous in praising the research as ingenious, and definitive. The study by respected biologist Katherine Kendall involved placing hair traps over 12,000 square miles, collecting over 33,000 hair samples and individually testing the DNA of each one — and discovering resurgent health of a species that once ruled the West. Until this study nobody knew how many Grizzlies there were; now there’s a much better idea: hundreds more than previously accounted for.

Targeted, too, for special ridicule is research into how methane emitted by livestock affects the atmosphere. McCain’s boilerplate line about this one, delivered with a wink, is, “I always wondered about the testing procedures used to determine those effects on the ozone layer.” That one always gets guffaws. Well you probably have to be there.

Funny, John, but it turns out that animal waste is really serious stuff. Ruminants like cattle are digestively challenged creatures. They are prodigious belchers and fiercely flatulent. That high-fiber diet works right through ‘em, and piles up. A study by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that the world’s livestock play a larger role in global warming than planes, trains, buses and automobiles combined. In fact, livestock emit more greenhouse gas as measured in CO₂ equivalent — 18 percent more — than all transportation. Livestock manure generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which itself has 296 times the global warming potential of CO₂. This manure is responsible for 64 percent of human-induced ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Phew. And it’s going to get worse. The UN reports that livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s land surface, mostly for pasture but also including arable land used for growing animal feed. Livestock are a major driver of deforestation; 70 percent of former forests of the Amazon are used now for grazing. Global production of meat and milk is projected to double by 2050. Thus, the methane released by animals is currently responsible for almost one-fifth of greenhouse-gas emissions around the world — and will account for two-fifths in another generation.

This pollution is particularly severe in the U.S., a country with outsized demand for animal products and an industrial approach to satisfying the hunger. The so-called waste lagoons common in pork and dairy production and the manure piles connected to cattle feedlots are especially intense sources of methane. Anybody who’s ever driven within a mile of one will regrettably remember.

When questioned about his criticisms of research into such topics, aides of the supposedly straight-talking senator begin speaking with forked tongues. One campaign assistant is insisting to reporters that McCain “doesn’t question the merits of these projects, it’s the process he has a problem with.”

Now that, senator, is a lot of gas.

Just south of the Carmel River, a field of artichokes ran down to the beach where surfers risked cold waves heaving against black rocks. Beyond that point the land shed its California trappings, including Carmel’s pastel bungalows, and the continent seemed to tilt upward and to the right. The place was one perpetual edge, I thought, where ordinary concerns paled before the prospect of gravity and its effects. To live was to cling to the mountain and view things in a vertical perspective that surpassed what was commonly considered beautiful; it was to feel the heat of a persistent sun, to smell eucalyptus and red dust, and to hear – when the wind was right – the reverberation of waves in rocky crypts hundreds of feet below.

It was 1963 and there was no town of Big Sur, just an unincorporated collection of wooden structures that included a gas station, a store, a campground and a bar or two. Here the Los Padres National Forest, which included much of the Santa Lucia Range, touched the highway. Hairy, bundled figures not yet labeled “countercultural” hooked their thumbs in the clear air, hitchhiking to what I could not imagine, since the next 60 miles of coast looked empty on the map.

Some were bound for Nepenthe’s, a bar and restaurant that became somewhat famous when it appeared in “The Sandpiper,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But for the moment Big Sur was not widely celebrated. It languished in a happy sociological trough between the demise of the Beat Generation and the advent of San Francisco’s “summer of love,” which, in a few years, would bring thousands of day-trippers west for experiences that had nothing to do with literature or nature.

Nepenthe’s offered a fine view, as well as black bread and hot soup. The habitués existed on the proceeds of trust funds set up in eastern cities, according to my friend, another wayward post-grad at Stanford University. They billed themselves as artists, but the real article could be found a mile farther down the road, at the Big Sur Inn, a ramshackle but charming collection of houses up against the mountain, made of redwood scraps, with steeply pitched roofs, cunning little balconies and elaborate, rustic woodwork signifying a highly idiosyncratic intelligence. It belonged to an old-timer named Deetjen, a Norwegian emigrant who according to his story came south by donkey in the early years of the century and constructed his bucolic kingdom where the road had then petered out. Deetjen’s wife had died, and he had gathered round him enough legends and compliant young visionaries to keep the beds made, the pancakes flipped, and an occasional fire in the hearth.

The tiny bar supported the elbows of various people wrapped in serapes and animal skins, with staffs and bongs, big silver earrings and beards of fierce impenetrability. Deetjen drank jug wine and wandered around the place trailed by his cats, sufficiently drunk to be sociable, if that is the right word. He managed to be contemptuous and friendly at the same time, no small accomplishment.

We slept in a tent and hung out at the inn in the evenings, eager for tales of early derring-do in the literary wilds of Big Sur. It was all marvelously arcane and authentic, and, besides, the girls serving hot tea had about them the woolly concupiscence of apprenticed dharma bums, or so we imagined. We went for a walk with one of them, our breaths freezing in the winter night, our soulful conversation overwhelmed by the intensity of a sky like stretched black plastic riddled with an infinity of bright punctures. The moon broke free of the mountains, spreading a silver film over the broad Pacific, and we had the distinct impression that we could reach out and touch Japan.

Deetjem claimed to disapprove of Henry Miller. That had not prevented the two of them from having long, contentious conversations when Miller lived a few miles down the coast. Deetjen was proud of the association, despite the fact that he often called Miller a “guttersnipe.”

By day we hiked in Partington Canyon, to the south, where a fast stream descended through redwoods to the ocean, in a cove where dramatic rocky overhangs, twisted madrone trees and drifting spray created the visual patina of an Oriental scroll. We waded the creek and found an old tunnel dug through the mountain, full of puddles and broken supports, that opened up onto a secret harbor choked with kelp. Waves rolled in with fearsome power, smashing against the rocks and raising the water level 15 feet in an instant.

An iron cable, snarled and rusted, had once stretched across the harbor’s mouth between bleached wooden bulwarks – a testament to what we were sure had been an illegal port for coolies, opium, and timber. More likely, tanbark had made its way down off the mountains and through the narrow passage to waiting ships. Before the invention of chemicals for tanning hides, the bark of the tan oak tree had created a heady industry in the Northwest and wiped out a lot of forest in the process. Remote Big Sur still had its share of tanbark trees, protected by the inhospitable coast.

A scramble round the rocky headland provided access, at some risk, to tidal pools full of scarlet starfish. I will never forget the sight of a seal floating on its back in the ocean, eating abalone, blissfully indifferent to the human presence. That isolated stretch further revealed a cave that had been used by the coastal Indians a thousand years before, still full of old oyster shells, blackened by smoke and, we discovered, occupied by a young man from New York. His girlfriend lived in a shack up the canyon, he told us. When we asked where he lived, he pointed to his head. “In here.”

The canyon above the highway rose steeply beneath an increasingly dense redwood canopy. Generations of needles packed the narrow path above the rushing water, and the decaying logging camp. I had never stood directly beneath a redwood, and, looking up, was mesmerized by the loss of depth perception. Big band-tailed pigeons streaked across the thin slivers of sunlight. Beyond the treetops, far up the mountain, precipitous grassy bluffs spread skyward, seemingly inaccessible and infused with mystery.

I came back to the Big Sur the next spring with a beautiful girl I had met in Palo Alto. Her name was Penny. We had a drink at the Big Sur Inn but didn’t tarry; I was in love and no longer much interested in the tall tales of a smoldering Norwegian. We camped in Partington Canyon and climbed out onto the rocks, held hands and watched the gray whales migrating south, rising and falling like great ships, so close that we could see the spots on their hides and clearly hear them gasping.

The next day we packed a lunch and scaled those heathery slopes. The magnitude of the hike is difficult to imagine; I am still amazed that we made it. At one point we turned around, confronted the unblinking blue eye of the Pacific and instinctively sat down to avoid falling off the mountain.

We discovered – everything was a discovery – an empty house with tin walls, a neglected asset of the rarely used Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. It didn’t compare with the subsequent discovery, higher up, off state land, of an old shakes-covered cottage with an overgrown grape arbor leaning into the mountain and a hoe rusting in the sun. All we could do was stand and stare at the 40 miles of coastline: To the south, huge headlands tumbled into the sea. Heavy timber clung to the creases and the ridge line, and the bluffs seemed to glow in the midday light.

We knocked on the door of the cottage, but it had been long deserted; faded café curtains covered the windows. The place needed some sympathetic soul to reclaim it, and we talked about doing just that – then, and after we were married, but there were other ambitions to follow.

I often though about that cottage 2,500 feet above the Pacific, and wondered what had become of it. Twenty years later I found myself in California again, on a magazine assignment. I decided to go back to Big Sur. I expected it to now resemble Carmel and was pleasantly surprised to find the village still unincorporated and the hillsides little populated. There were more people living up the canyons, but the precious feeling of isolation had endured. The bartender at Nepenthe’s told me that Big Sur had become middle class, social protest and free love having been replaced by bowling at the Naval Station at Point Sur. Drinking and drugs were still popular, she added, with chardonnay edging out the jugs and cocaine replacing pot as the substance of choice. A new restaurant had opened to meet increased culinary demands, owned by a man who once a week put his television set and some popcorn into his Volvo station wagon and drove north with his wife until they could pick up a favorite television show beamed through a break in the mountains.

Old Deetjen had died in the interim; his inn was managed by a friend who built fires under Henry Miller’s old bathtub and allowed guests to stew in it. The place was as dilapidated as ever. I slept in the cottage called “Chateau Fiasco,” with a display of Hindu bells and an amulet tacked to the wall outside, and a guest book on the table in which a guest had written: “The raccoon in the room at 3 a.m. was quite a surprise, but fortunate in that it woke me up in time to go to Esalen.”

A well-known local painter, Emil White, had opened the Henry Miller Memorial Library in his home down the road. White had grown old in the shadow of those redwoods but had retained a youthful accessibility. People of all ages in Big Sur considered him a kind of local treasure, with justification. White had established the library because he missed Miller and wanted people to have access to his works, and to old photographs reflecting the Big Sur of half a century before.

I drove to Partington Canyon and walked down to the ocean. The tunnel through the mountain had been shored up, a footbridge set across the stream, a fence built to prevent people from rock-scrambling. But otherwise the scene remained unchanged. I hiked up the canyon, and then climbed the steep trail I knew would lead to the abandoned cottage, envisioning a collapsed ruin, or the victim of one of the fires that regularly swept the coast range. I heard a chain saw. From the forest, I could see a bearded young man burning brush near the house, which had a new roof. I could see beet tops in the vegetable garden and beehives on the far slope.

I approached the house, watched by a pair of slate-blue eyes under the bill of a baseball cap held together with baling wire. He wore a ragged T-shirt and work boots, and his expression was neither encouraging nor hostile. I explained why I was trespassing after two decades of curiosity. Instead of ordering me to go back where I had come from, he said, “Let’s take a break.”

We sat in the yard and talked. His name was Jeff and he had stumbled upon the place in 1971, eight years after Penny and I had done the same, and decided he was going to live there. His determination had proven to be a lot stronger than mine. Over the years he had worked as a journalist and for the U.S. Forest Service, until the house and 100 acres came on the market. The property had been homesteaded by a Danish couple back in the ‘20s, he said, and later passed to an aspiring developer who fortunately failed to come up with a method of levitating tourists. Jeff was able to put together a syndicate of friends and family to buy it, and he lived on there alone, supporting himself by running occasional pack trips in the remoter parts of the Los Padres National Forest, over the eastern ridge.

“Everything I accumulated in life has finally come to rest here,” he said. That included a good naturalist’s library, some Indian artifacts, and a CB radio powered by flashlight batteries. Also a burro and a horse happily stamping their feet in the barn farther up the hill, prospering grapevines and fruit trees, canned food in the root cellar, and the joy of waking up every morning in that setting. We shared his bread and spring water, my oranges and chocolate, and the view I remembered so well. “It’s the nicest spot in California,” and I wanted to say the nicest anywhere.

A few more years passed. One summer I drove to California from Washington in a few feverish days. My son, Brennan, grown now, was a student there, and we found ourselves together on the road leading south from Carmel. His long, tousled hair and disdain for sartorial niceties reminded me of people I had seen in Big Sur 25 years before. It gave me pleasure and a renewed sense of awareness to see Brennan’s reactions to the same things that had originally struck me with such force – the breathtaking drop from the highway’s edge, the stands of redwood and the tidal pools of Partington Canyon. At one point he said, “I think I might bring a friend here. A female type.”

We hiked up the mountain the following day, packing fruit and a bottle of Napa cabernet for Jeff Norman. He came warily out of the cottage in cutoff sweat pants. He had, after all, chosen to live there because he valued privacy, and I felt uneasy introducing him to Brennan with a bit of high country formality that seemed to amuse them both.

Jeff showed us the new vines that he had planted and a fire lane that had been cut through the property since I was last there, miraculously saving the house from the most intense flames in 50 years. We drank the wine on his little patio, our eyes straying continually to the view. One of Jeff’s neighbors from the other side of the canyon dropped by – a mere four-hour detour. I heard Jeff mutter, “Grand Central Station.” When the neighbor had gone, Jeff served Brennan and me borscht made from his own beets, and waved goodbye before heading up to muck out the stable.

We slept in a high meadow that night, on the edge of the world. The next morning a peregrine falcon floated by us in a dream of feathered symmetry and high evolutionary art, its lustrous black eye passing over us in a brief assessment before it dropped from sight. We hiked on down and found a late breakfast under way at the Big Sur Inn. It had come under yet another management. The loquacious Georgian was gone; the ghost of Deetjen had been thoroughly exorcised, and weekenders from Los Angeles and San Francisco in pressed jeans and bright sweaters filled the dining rooms. “This place has been yuppie-fied,” I complained, and Brennan smiled.

He could have said then that the trend was upward. Now Big Sur has a “country inn resort” high above the road with a paneled lobby heavy with rustic furniture, lighted footpaths, hammocks strung under shade trees, and in the rooms latticed shutters opening onto a view of high meadows and ocean. There are fires laid, beds big enough for three, matching drapes and throw pillows, and chardonnay in ice buckets. The receptionist was previously a “work-scholar” at Eselen ten miles down the road and into deep-tissue massage, “cranial work,” acupuncture, acupressure, rolfing, and “zero-balancing, which is communicating with energy. No hippies now, it’s corporate.”

The dirt road behind the inn winds upward through strands of madrone and fir. After half an hour’s climb you can see Point Sur to the north and blond meadows all around, and not a human being in sight, although there are houses now with chameleon roofs blending into scrub and stone. The old elevation of mood still resides in this view and in this air, but the panoramic zero-balancing entails more elegy than discovery.

Lunch is served on inn’s broad deck. On the back of the menu is a promotional paean conflating a love of nature with commercial opportunity: “I am the Hawk. I have sailed the winds over the peaks and canyons, forests and meadows, sea-worn shores and soaring cliffs… This is a land majestic to the eye and the heart, but sternly unforgiving to those who would seek to diminish its primal authority.”

A year ago I would have been standing on my park bench in a shouting panic, drawing attention and scorn from longer-time New Yorkers enjoying the park after nightfall. Now, though, I was more concerned with how the article would end, so I just lifted my feet off the ground and continued reading:

In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.

– Joseph Mitchell, “The Rats on the Waterfront” (1944)

I moved to New York City in the summer of 2006, shortly after graduation from Washington College in rural Chestertown, Md; before that, I had grown up in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Pa. — both places I considered far more nature-oriented than the concrete environs of Manhattan. Sure, I knew of evil subway rats (from children’s cartoons) but I had never seen one scamper along a sidewalk. I’d lived here only a few days before I had that experience to write home about. Soon enough I was a fan of a “New York Moment:” letting tourists entertain me as they would notice a large rat running down subway tracks, gasp in shock, next mutter something in confidence after calculating the safe distance between themselves on the platform and the rat on the tracks, then remark aloud how this was something they certainly never had to deal with back home, and thank goodness for that.

Shortly after subletting a windowless basement room in an East Village apartment that cost more per month than my parents’ mortgage ever did, I was in the bathroom one night when I heard a skittering in the tub next to me, an annoying sound that I ignored as long as I could before pulling back the shower curtain to expose a rodent, desperate to escape the slippery porcelain. I called in the roommates and excused myself from their disposition of an unfortunate creature that could not swim well enough in scalding water to save itself. I wore sandals in the shower the next day.

In my next apartment when I caught a mouse using our bathroom, I responded with aplomb, calmly climbing onto the toilet and grabbing the nearby plunger. However, as I was on my way to the gym, I could do little more than leave a note, “LIVE MOUSE under plunger - Do Not Remove!” The roomies took care of that one, too. Some weeks later, discovering nibbled bags of bread and mouse droppings throughout our place, we took action to reclaim our beautiful second floor apartment for ourselves. I got glue traps and placed them all around, forgetting almost instantly just where I put them until a month later when an incessant scrabbling noise under the stove signaled at least one gluey success.

All that progress and nothing has changed. I woke up today to loud complaint from my roommate, who saw another rodent running through the kitchen. His observation seemed quite ordinary to me, as I saw one saunter across the living room floor two nights ago while I was watching television and give me a look as if disdaining my program choice. Here, rats have advantages over, say, intruding Philadelphians. They were here before we were and they will certainly be here long after we move in search of another place that promises to be free of them. Tenants don’t stand a chance of kicking out the native-born New York mouse or Manhattanite rat from an apartment it’s called home for years. I’ve accepted a level of coexistence, understanding that every so often some infestation, coupled with a media spotlight, will shut down the neighborhood Taco Bell.

And nothing makes living with rodents more tolerable than learning of the new bedbug epidemic spreading through Manhattan. So grows my urban wildlife list, and I can scratch off another predator. The nature-lover must accept his place in the Hudson River food chain. After all, it is the Year of the Rat, ever since a parade went down Canal Street in Chinatown last month — and I was born 24 years ago in this same auspicious year of the calendar as reckoned by Chinese — so I embrace all this, wholly, inevitably, and hardly bothering about the pigeon shit on my doorstep, as destiny.

Peter W. Knox graduated from Washington College in ‘06, with a BA in English and Creative Writing, where he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly features magazine and a weekly columnist for the college newspaper. Knox now lives in New York City where he works in book publishing and occasionally crafts essays for nagging college contacts on the side. Knox has been published in various magazines since 2004 and you can always find him at his website: www.peter-knox.com

Egyptian heads, occasionally an ancient
bark to mark their clumsiness on land—all neck
and legs and wobble.

One rises, stretches wings above the flock.
He preens and shudders, then rejoins the rest as they resume
their mission: to be black

against this whiteness.

I cannot say for certain when Lillian came to work for us, or more accurately, for my mother. Looking back now it’s almost that he was always there but it must have been when I was around ten. He was our yardman and would show up several days a week in his light blue 1949 Chevy Fleetline. It was nearly a decade old with hard miles on it. He never drove over twenty and closed the doors gently. He wore heavy, black dairyman’s galoshes that came nearly to his knees, a longish canvas jacket and a gray felt hat that was a size too big. Lillian was over six feet tall and bent at the waist, all elbows and knees but quite graceful at the same time as he crouched and dug, tending my mother’s azaleas or her spider lilies, pulling the green hose over his shoulder to water a new spot of the lawn, or edging around the boxwoods. Whether he knew much about gardening I can’t say. But he did know how to please my mother and keep on her good side.

“Miss Dorothy is real good to me.” He would say. Sometimes I would hear their voices in the yard as they talked for periods of time in the afternoons. What about I do not know – but their voices rang of friendship. I became friendly myself with Lillian over a trapping incident. My mother had Lillian put up a platform bird feeding station outside her bedroom window, and each night some varmint would come to scavenge. It came late in the night and we could never get a look at it.

“Hey, Lillian,” I said one morning as he was bending over tending something. “Could you bring one of your beaver traps tomorrow and show me how to set it? Mother wants us to catch what’s getting all the bird feed”. “ Yah suh. I can do that.” He replied without ever looking up. ”Morrow morn’n, yah suh.” Lillian showed me how to pull apart the trap’s jaws and set the trigger in a notch under the bait plate. “You put the meat on ‘fo you set the trigger. Else you lible to get your finger snapped. Then set it down easy. Trap ain’t big ‘nuff to break a finger. But it can hurt a’mighty.”

That night late, after we’d all gone to sleep. hysterical howling arose outside. My flashlight beam cast a perfect circle around … not panther or some other exotic prey to match my fantasy, not even a coon, not a possum (both of which would have been at least respectable prey to my mind). No, it was a small orange house cat, really pissed off, yowling, hissing and spitting at any attempt to get near. One hind leg, clearly broken, was firmly caught in Lillian’s beaver trap. And there was no getting it out until morning when Lillian arrived. I had not considered this contingency so I went back to bed. We all went back to bed and tried to sleep as, eventually the cat’s yowling became soft crying.

“Ain’t no getting it out” said Lillian the next morning. “You get scratched up and chewed up. Only thing is to kill it. Leg is broke too bad.” Another contingency not considered. “Git yo daddy’s twenty-two,” he said.

“Lets wait “till Mother goes to town and Sally’s in the kitchen.” I said.

“Yeah. Das better,” he said. Later I shot the cat once in the head. Lillian put the body in a sack and put the sack in the trunk of his Chevy. Said he would tend to it later.

He did not know exactly where he was born or when. And he never knew who his father was. He heard that his mother had been with a Choctaw Indian for awhile and he thought this man was his father, when he saw his high cheekbones in the mirror and the reddish tone of his skin. He remembered living with his mother in a small shack in the low woods on the Succranochee river. They lived there just the two of them and she taught him about plants, their secret properties, about how to mix them with organ parts she would cut out of small animals, to make potions and poultices. She said the eye of a squirrel mashed and mixed with the fruit of the may apple and the root of a sassafras sprout would give partial seeing to the blind and third-eye-seeing to those who were not blind if they were strong enough for it. She said the liver of an orange cat was good for stomach ailments when taken with springwater — and when mixed with black powder and the urine of someone with third-eye-seeing could make an enemy flee its own home.

It was his mother who taught him to set his traps, how to find the beaver’s hole and the otter’s slide, where to put out a scent and how to hide the trap perfectly, and what bait to use depending upon the season. He would trap his entire life. He loved the solitude of it and the return of his mother to his mind. He spent days alone checking his traps deep in the swamps – on land where he had permission to be and on land where he was a poacher. Beaver were not plentiful in southwest Alabama and the otter was scarce. But he made do and almost always had a few pelts ready when Mr. Cotton, “the skins man” stopped at his house every other Thursday. When he handed Mr. Cotton an otter skin it was with a particular air of dignity. “Got an otter here for you, Mr. Cotton,” he might say. Or, “This here’in’s a real nice ‘un, Mr. Cotton.” Lillart would think to himself that tending his traps in the deep woods was the only time he felt right inside.

A few days after our success trapping the cat I asked Lillian if he would take me with him one day to check his traps and teach me what he knew, and this produced an awkward moment between us. I could tell I had put him in a spot - namely how to say “no” to the son of the white folks he worked for, and do so in a way so as not give offense. Blacks in the South at this time had to be facile in such moments. It was a wire to walk, the preserving of private dignity and the staying on the right side of “the man” all at the same time. Lillian said, “I ain’t never took nobody with me all these years ‘cause my mammy said not to. She said it would hex my hand. I don’t recon I better start now. How ‘bout we hunt some squirrels one day. Das plenty I know at yo daddy’s place on Alamuchee Creek. Morrow morn’n we go. How ‘bout dat?”

So we hunted squirrels instead and I was satisfied. I took my father’s .22 rifle to make it sporting. A running squirrel was hard to hit. Lillian brought his “meat gun”, the singleshot twelve-gauge with a thirty-two-inch full choke barrel. He said, “I could get on the moon wid dis gun.” We walked the Alamuchee creekbank for hours that day and killed many gray and fox squirrels. Some were shot running on the ground, some from atop the ninety-foot sweet gums and black oaks. I would shoot into high up nests and if we flushed a hiding squirrel Lillian would shout, “Yon he! Yon he go!” And if I missed more than twice with the rifle he would cut loose with the shotgun and blast half the top of the tree. One way on the other we got ‘em. Lillian carried the kill in the back pouch of his coat and I had a few in my pockets. He was so loaded with game that once he slipped into the water trying to climb up the creek bank and landed on his butt there making loud shrieks of high-pitched laughter, on and on. I had never heard him laugh.

When Mr. Jo came to his little house to ask if he had taken tools from the shed, he said, “Yah suh. I did. A hammer and a hatchet. I was borrow’n ‘em. I git ‘em now.” He got chewed out` good and hung his head quietly. He knew Sally had told on him. He knew she wanted him gone and took her chance. Mr. Jo was the boss and owned his house so he knew it was time to be humble and to be quiet. Dealing with Sally could wait. He thought Miss Dorothy might help, but he figured she and Mr. Jo were not getting on right now so he’d just keep quiet and keep saying “Yah suh, Mr. Jo” He did not know why Mr, Jo and Miss Dorothy crossed up. But he could tell it was not good. That night he cut out the liver of the orange cat and made a mixture.

Years later I asked Sally why she and Lillian didn’t get along. This is what she said: “He tried to put a hex on me. Lillian’s cunjah. He was steal’n from yo mother and I knowed it and I tolt it and he tried to hex me away. But he didn’t. I got him ‘ cause I know things too.”

“How do you know he tried to hex you”

“ Oh, I knowed alright. He dug little bitty holes under each one a my windows and he put a thing in the holes. He put in somp’n to make me want to leave here. I saw ‘em next morn’n and I knowed what to do. I put lye in them holes and covered ‘em up with ashes from my stove. That kilt the hex. Now he is gone and I am here.”

It was almost sundown when they told him Miss Dorothy was dead, that she had shot herself. He did not ask any question but went into his house and lit the lamps. He sat before the open door of his stove and looked into the flames and didn’t move. He watched the flames’ patterned undulations and he marveled at all that he did not understand and at the strange ways of world.

The stealing of tools continued and finally escalated to missing lawn mowers and electric saws and drills. Sally said it was Lillian. Finally my father sent Lillian on his way. My brother said Lillian cried when he and my father went to tell him he had to leave his house and could no longer work for us. Lillian said he did not steal any tools but, ‘Yah suh,’ he would be going tomorrow.

Long later, a family conversation:
Lord, Jo. I didn’t know Lillian got the blame for that. I was the one who took all those tools from ya’lls shed. It wasn’t Lillian. It was about a year before I finally got off the bottle. The family took all my money so I couldn’t get any whisky. I stole those tools and I sold ‘em to get whisky money. Lord, I’m so sorry for Ole Lillian. I truly did not know. I was very sick, but I think I would have confessed if I knew Lillian got the blame. Yes, I think I would have. I’ve been sober now for twenty-five years but… oh, poor Ole Lillian. I feel real bad about that.

Artwork: Portrait of Lillian by Margaret Hunter