Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [77]
But this is about longing, not logic, and it’s cheap, and practically effortless, and before we know it we own a camp, a mysterious little dacha on an impossibly narrow six-acre triangle bordered on one side by state forest, on the opposite side by the dirt road, and along the shortest side by a grassy, boggy marsh.
That marsh! Water from Owl’s Head wandered down the side of the mountain, in little freshets and mosquitoey swamp-spots through our woods. I loved that—our woods. The first thing we did was to make a trail, down from the house, winding through the forest toward the marsh, attempting to discover what our acres contained: an old apple tree, the ruins of a schoolhouse, a practical universe of mushrooms in splendid varieties of russet and cream and toast, almond and ghost-white. Evidence of deer, bear-scratches on the tree trunks, a raccoon who woke us in the night by knocking the bird feeder against a trunk to make the seed fall out. Realms of moss, and pockets of mud, and bugs.
Part of the water from the marsh bubbled from our spring—“ours” because the property came with a lease from the state of Vermont, one renewed year after year, to allow use of particularly cold and clear and fine water from a spring on the shoulder of the mountain, up on state land. A rubber pipe ran downhill from the spring to the camp itself.
Each autumn the rubber pipe had to be lifted out of the spring and drained, to keep the line from freezing and bursting; one of our first tasks was to climb the side of the mountain and put the pipe back into the spring, so that the water would flow back into the house again. Finding the spring was the problem. It wasn’t possible to follow the pipe, since over the course of fifty years or so it had become completely covered with fallen leaves, fir needles, moss; here and there it was visible for a few inches (just enough for some passing animal to bite, from time to time, so that we’d hear a hissing hose in the woods and know it was time for repairs) but then it would disappear, hopelessly lost. Someone had painted yellow circles on trees, as trail markers to lead to it, but time and weather had worn them away. Eventually a combination of yellow spots and tracking stream beds led to what seemed an enchanted place: out of a dark and mossy grotto formed by a cluster of stones, water welled up from somewhere so far beneath the mountain we couldn’t guess how long it had been traveling upward toward us.
It was necessary to reach into the dark, into the chilly water, to pull the pipe up, take off the plastic wrapper that sealed it for the winter, and fit on the brass cone which filtered out any moss that might find its way in and clog the pipe. Wally refused; I lay on my stomach on a stony bower of moss starred with wet leaves, and reached down into the bottomless world of the spring to find the pipe—like reaching down into time, into the darkness of a fairy place. When we opened the valves back at the camp, the sweet water—which had a kind of subtle presence to its taste, not a flavor exactly but a quality, which might have had something to do with our knowing its origins—came thundering and farting and blowing out the tap into the kitchen sink, rattling the house until the air in the half a mile of pipe was gone.
The water that we didn’t use trickled along, wandered, sank underground, feeding the moss and the alders and supporting the marsh in dry seasons. The marsh lay in a kind of saddle, a valley between bluish, misted Owl’s Head and another mountain considerably further away. A creek wound through the middle, frequently dammed by beaver, who’d flood the road and begin their work on the building of their paradise until the farmer who depended on the road had enough and undid their labors