They were in the mountains then, the stony rivers full of black water—melted snow—and the sheen of reflected blue from the sky didn’t much soften the impression of cold. Coming up into a pass Moses raised his head cheerfully to the voluptuous line of the mountains, the illusory blue, thunderous and deep, but the loud noise of wind in the bare trees reminded him of the gentle valley they had left that morning—shadbush and lilac and already some arbutus underfoot. They had then got to the approaches of French Canada—those farms and towns that seem, from the winter’s cold and tedium, utterly unprotected: St. Evariste, St. Methode, the bleak country of the Holy Ghost, exposed to the lash of winter. Now the north wind was bitter, the clouds were a cheerless white and here and there on the ground he saw patches of old snow. They reached the village of Langely late in the day where the old launch—the Cygnet—that would take them uplake and into the wilderness was tied to a wharf and which Moses now loaded with their duffel bags and fishing tackle.
There was nothing at Langely but a post office and a store. It was late; it would be dark soon. The post-office windows were lighted but the shores of the lake were uninhabited and dark. Moses looked at the old launch, tied up at the wharf, her long bow and her helm shaped like a steering wheel. He recognized in the length of her mahogany bow, with its brass funnel and brass-bound bulkhead, that she was one of those boats built years ago, for the leisurely comings and goings of another generation of summer people. Four wicker chairs stood side by side on her deep stern deck. Weathered and raveled and threadbare, they had carried—how long ago?—women in summer dresses and men in flannels out to see the sun go down. Now her paint was dirty and her varnish was dim and she bemoaned her dereliction by rubbing the wharf in the northerly wind.
His father came down the path with the groceries and an old man followed him. It was the old man who took off the lines and pushed the boat into deep water with a hook. He must have been eighty. His teeth were gone and his mouth had sunk, accentuating the little thrust of his chin. He blinked his eyes behind a pair of dirty glasses and poked his tongue out between his lips and when he got her into forward and full speed ahead he settled himself very stiffly. It was a seven-mile voyage to the camp. They carried their things up to a ramshackle place with a chimney made of soup cans and they lighted a fire and a lamp. Squirrels had gotten into the mattress. Mice and rats and porcupines had come and gone. Below them Moses heard the old man start the motor of his Cygnet and head back for the post office. The icy light of the afterglow, the noise of the launch as it faded and the smells of the stove all were so unlike their beginnings that morning in St. Botolphs that the world seemed to fall into two pieces or halves.
Here on this half were the deep lake, the old man with his superannuated Cygnet and the dirty camp. Here were salt and catsup and patched blankets and canned spaghetti and dirty socks. Here was a pile of rusted tin cans around the steps; here were Saturday Evening Post covers fixed with roofing nails to the bare walls beside the Fisherman’s Prayer, the Fisherman’s Lexicon, the Lament of the Fisherman’s Widow, the Fisherman’s Crying Towel and all the other inane and semicomic trash that has been published about fishing. Here was the smell of earthworms and gut, kerosene and burned pancakes, the smell of unaired blankets, trapped smoke, wet shoes, lye and strangeness. On the table near where he stood someone had stuck a candle into a root and beside this was a detective story, its first chapters eaten by mice.
On the other half was the farm at St. Botolphs, the gentle valley and the impuissant river and the rooms that smelled now of lilac and hyacinth and the colored engraving of San Marco and all the furniture with claw feet. There were the Canton bowls full of forget-me-nots, the damp linen sheets, the silver on the sideboard and the loud ticking of the clock in the hall. The difference seemed more strenuous than if he had crossed the border from one mountain country into another, more strenuous he guessed because he had not realized how deep his commitment to the gentle parochialism of the valley was—the east wind and the shawls from India—and had never seen how securely conquered that country was by his good mother and her kind—the iron women in their summer dresses. He stood, for the first time in his life, in a place where their absence was conspicuous and he smiled, thinking of how they would have attacked the camp; how they would have burned the furniture, buried the tin cans, holystoned the floors, cleaned the lamp chimneys and arranged in a glass slipper (or some other charming antique) nosegays of violets and Solomon’s-seal. Under their administration lawns would reach from the camp to the lake, herbs and salad greens would flourish at the back door and there would be curtains and rugs, chemical toilets and clocks that chimed.
His father poured himself some whisky and when the stove was hot he took some hamburgers and cooked them on the lid, turning them with a rusty spoon as if he was following some ritual in which he disregarded his wife’s excellent concepts of hygiene and order. When supper was finished the loons on the lake had begun to cry and these cries seemed to bring into the cabin, overheated now from the stove, a fine sense of their remoteness. Moses walked down toward the lake, pissed in the woods and washed his hands and face in water that was so cold his skin was still stinging when he undressed and climbed in between two dirty blankets. His father blew out the lamp and got into bed himself and they fell asleep.
The fishing was not at Langely, it was in the ponds deeper in the woods, and they left for Folger’s Pond at six the next morning. The wind was still northerly and the sky was overcast. They crossed the lake in a dinghy with a two-cylinder motor, heading for Kenton’s swamp. Halfway across the lake the old dinghy sprang a leak. Moses sat in the stern, bailing with a bait can. At Lovell’s Point his father throttled down the motor and turned the leaky boat into a great swamp. It was an ugly and a treacherous place but the landscape seemed to Moses enthralling. Rank on rank of dead trees lined the shore—tall, catatonic and ashen, they looked like the statuary of some human disaster. When the water got shallow Leander tipped the motor into the boat and Moses took the oars. The noise of setting them into the locks startled a flight of geese. “A little to port,” his father said, “a little more to port …” Looking over his shoulder, Moses saw where the swamp narrowed to a stream and heard the roar of some falls. Then he saw the shapes of stones through the water, his oars struck and the bow grazed the shore.
He pulled the boat up and made it fast to a tree while his father examined a scraping of boat’s paint on a stone near where they landed. It seemed to be last year’s paint. Then Moses saw how anxious his father was to be the first man into the woods and while he unloaded the gear Leander looked around the trail for footprints. He found some but when he scraped them with a knife he saw that they were lined with mold and had been made by hunters. Then he started briskly up the trail. Everything was dead; dead leaves, dead branches, dead ferns, dead grass, all the obscenity of the woods death, stinking and moldy, was laid thickly on the trail. A little white light escaped from the clouds and passed fleetly over the woods, long enough for Moses to see his shadow, and then this was gone.