Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [89]
By now in mid-August, the pond was as thick as vegetable stew, and showy white water lilies floated on the surface. They were as big as salad bowls in the mornings; toward evening they shrank to teacups. I saw daily blooms of darning needles, those iridescent blue dragonflies that manage to hover and dart with astonishing speed, whirring their four transparent wings. No doubt they came from the pond, where they had lived as nymphs in the mud. Maybe it was the plethora of these bejeweled and delicate insects that accounted for the absence of mosquitoes that we enjoyed at the cabin. Darning needles are great eaters of mosquito larvae.
This was a period of frequent thunderstorms. Often, as I drove to the hardware store or Melby’s, the National Weather Service would break in to the radio program I was listening to, with static and an alarmed voice warning of severe thunderstorms, which were great fun when they broke over the hillside with fierce cracks and booms and buckets of water falling from the sky. Standing out in one for just a minute left you as soaked as if you had gone for a swim. In hardly any time, though, the sun would be out again, the leaves sparkling and the blue darning needles darting this way and that over the wet ground. Even as the clouds disappeared and the thunder booms traveled ever farther away, the air remained suffused with moisture and smelled of sulfur, and the humidity lingered into the nights, which now were beginning to cool. The late summer nights carried the scent of cut hay and overripe vegetation. The season was fading.
This was the time when the birds began to congregate in readiness for their flights south. The pond was a resting place and feeding station for migratory birds. Some of the migrations were already under way. The teal, bluish buzz bombs, were the first travelers to arrive and then depart. The wood ducks departed soon after. They were spring and summer residents, and each male wood duck was a glorious sight as it exploded from a woodland stream, offering only the quickest glimpse of its red head, cinnamon breast and lemon yellow flanks. I walked to the pond’s far side, passing through the woods and meadows that rimmed it to reach its outlet. A small brook flowed over and through a derelict beaver dam and carved a muddy channel through a boggy place spiked with gray tree trunks, remnants of the flood from an earlier dam that must have increased the circumference of the pond and killed the surrounding timber.
The mud at the outlet was rich with insects, and scores of goldfinches were provisioning against the long flight ahead. They were late nesters and would be among the last to depart the pond and hillside. I scanned the pond’s edges for the great blue herons and snowy egrets I had seen in the summer. The egrets reminded me of those old-fashioned carpenter’s rulers that were a half dozen pieces of pinioned wood that could fold to fit into your hand or extend up to six feet in length, depending on the need. I saw neither herons nor egrets, and I guessed both were standing in the warm water of a Caribbean cay, maybe picking up shrimp. Ah, Maine to the West Indies! The great coastal sweep from the Maritimes to Martinique was not a watershed, but it was a coherence of natural order, made so by winds, currents, weather and wildlife. Was there a better place on earth than this magnificent littoral? If so, I hadn’t yet seen it. I was lost in one of my Atlantic meditations when I heard the scratchy and guttural yawk of a raven. I looked up and saw it perched on the limb of a big hemlock tree. He was no migrant or fair-weather resident. He and I would share the hillside through the winter.
We continued to work at the cabin on weekends, and in October we put down the