Visiting the Eastern Uplands. S. Dorman
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tighten up a bit on his leash, urge the dog on. As we emerge from behind the large u-shaped house, built to take advantage of this view, we see the first spouts of colored fire shooting up from the dark hills; hear its thunder, far away, born with force through the airways of the Western Mountains. I stand in the road—looking out across the valley toward richly blazoning sparks. There are the distant landmarks, particularly the lights of ridge-side condos, in Canada, Maine.
The artistic u-shaped house is dark and I don’t know whether the owner and his family are out-of-state or at the celebration. Possessed of this fine large second home, they are rarely here. The father is a Scotsman, complete with rich Gaelic accent. (But can he play bagpipes?) I checked the landscape for thistles honoring his heritage and find none. The significance of the Scottish symbol eludes me at the moment—something to do with gratitude for comfort or aid. His home sits precisely where the dog and I used to stand to take this view. These days I stand in the road or perch on a rock across the way.
I seek one now and, tugging on the leash, make my way over to it. This jumble of freshly dug rock glimmers, lambent in clear bright dusk of a summer’s eve. The rocks haven’t yet become engulfed by lichens—which darken in slowly plundering the rock.
I settle on the brightest rock because it gives unobstructed view to this drama of fireworks blazing across the valley. In our lengthy summer dusk, trees opposite the road are dark and lacy-looking against the lighter sky. A breeze rustles black leaves, but not enough to sway slender stems. The seven or eight successive layers of hills between here and tallest Agiocachook have blended into one dim ridge, and the fireworks—fountains of green and red, orange and golden white—spout up from below against that dark mass. A faint purple hush of haze lingers upon the contour of mountains. In the northwest, blue faint light of a lost sun persists, silhouetting the hills that are next neighbor to our own block of hills.
I sit quietly, watching pinwheels and fountains; spheres with red tops and green bottoms; Jupiters of color and light—fiery glints thrown up by artists. Some so bright they flash lightning on rocks beside me.
Sound often comes when color is gone, owing to the difference in visual and aural waves. Distant booms and boks kindle imaginings of giants slamming their doors. A husband and wife, striding the mountaintops, in fits and fights. It’s a contest, a battle not so much between sexes as between egos.
Boots hears them and is afraid. He’s hard of hearing now and so hears only when it’s extra loud. Then he stands, restive, and starts to wander off. I call him back, recollecting his fear of thunder, of fireworks, and of how that fear came into him.
It was a Fourth of July gathering, when a very strange drunk threw a firecracker into the dark—ka-boom!! Careless in drink, he threw it at the dark dog tied up among shadows, away from the gathering. The dog yelped and cried. And so did the drunken stranger. He cried and cried and wished to God he’d never done it. Over the years since then the dog has gone temporarily insane over thunder, fireworks, fire arms, rumbling pulp trucks, anything. Shiver and howl, tear up the ground, rip the door apart. Now he is hard of hearing and half blind. Sometimes it’s hard to get his attention because of this physical deterioration. I call and call, but he continues in the wrong direction. Yet I have discovered something good out of all his distress. The dog hears, he obeys me, when I clap my hands—bang!
As promised, the show is a long one. But I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve seen my share of such displays and find my attention wandering. I’m just too impatient for the grand finale, a favorite of this spectacle.
A lightning bug goes blinking by—long cold green flashes, like those used in American Morse code. And, actually, the firefly’s display is coded and singular, meant to attract a particular species. There are seven codes, one for each species. The male, in the air, is signaling his prospective mate down on the ground. Only she, whose answering precisely matches his, will be selected for his amorous attention. Her cool yellow-green assent, flashing up from the weeds, holds the only attraction. The six other species could flash all night and it would not mean a thing to him.
As I turn my gaze back to the fireworks display, I find myself imagining spectacular battle in the valley five miles away. A thrilling prospect—to witness high desperation, the anguish of armies in flashing brightness, in color and thunder and rain. War, we learned in watching Desert Storm (televised spectacle), is indeed glorious and stimulating to safe spectators. And these fireworks remind me of patriotism. I think of another battle, fought during the War of 1812, which inspired the national anthem that so stirs us on occasion. It’s a curious convoluted song in both melody and word, full of powerful imagery: a star-scattered cloth, glaring rockets, glimmering dawn. And once the tune for a bawdy clubbing song in 18th century England. Are its inheritors reverent and grateful yet?
Sitting up here on hard stone, awaiting the grand finale, I want now only to see it and be on my way. It’s late, I’m tired, and home beckons me from the valley. I guess I’ve seen too many such displays. . . .
Then, popping!!—it happens. Fire in the mountains, roaring. As though dark distant thickets of pines ignite on tinder lands. Here is the transfixing crescendo, a colored inferno, glancing up in furious might. I watch until it stops in sudden silence, leaving only tiny lights of distant condos where once the fire stood.
I slide off the rock, hook Boots to his leash and start down. But I glance back, startled, into the east—directly opposite the silent spot on the dark blended mountains. Through trees eastward a great brightness dawns, shedding shine across the heavens, dimming lights of stars. My breath is caught and held. It must be the moon, hidden from sight among the woods.
The dog and I descend Deer Hill, and moon’s face unseen sends light through the black leafy stems on my left, eastward. Approaching a wall of trees in the curve ahead, I see, not the moon, but its beam upon the trees. And another shaft strikes leaves in the woods—gleaming green light—as I pass: a single long dash like that of a firefly.
Then, as we near home, comes a clearing in the path of its search-beams. At last I look up to see the moon-face itself. The great round disk has washed its face clean in the light of the sun. All its garments are white.
We keep walking, down toward the house where I will chain up our dog. But my thoughts turn back now to the pipers who played in the morning, who wailed on the pipes. I think back to the drummers who kept time. Among them was an oddly dressed drum major, beating on the bass drum: boom . . . boom . . . BOOM!
It was later in the day when they played for the crowd at the foot of Deer Hill Road where the town celebrated its birth. There I got a good look at the drum major’s costume. To my untrained eye it was a costume, but later I learned that it was regimental attire for the 48th Canadian Regiment. The drummer’s sporran, kilt, and blouse were over-mantled by the skin and head of a leopard, bestowed for valor in combat by an Ethiopian leader. They were playing a song so powerful it made me feel like leaping.
On a night like this, after a day filled with symbols of such mighty heritage, some story-tellers might be drawn to invoke the tale of the Pied Piper. As a kid I worried so about that story. The parents, of children who were lured off, should not have denied the piper his due. To be free of rats deserves a grateful response—but whatever became of those little ones?
Yet now that I’m grown I don’t worry about them. Ingrates like those parents might not have raised them so well. The children did better to follow the piper.
Flight to the Eastern Uplands
The day of the Eastern Uplands has finally arrived—at least in part. Geographers and geologists may decry my loose use of the term. I adapted it on coming across a version of “Eastern Uplands” while looking at the geological map in Mantor Library at the University of Maine at Farmington: “The Dissected Uplands.” Today we plan to explore its southern edge.
I expect that from the air Maine’s blueberry barrens will look a flatland, dissected into geometric quilt-works by the impulse for orderliness on the part of agribusiness field owners. But nature has played her part, with glaciers, by scrubbing those uplands of soil and leaving in their wake nothing but plains, bogs, and a few monadnocks. She gave fire to natives, ensuring that