Visiting the Eastern Uplands. S. Dorman
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what Ezekiel saw . . . if I were perched up there as the sun ascended. Would the green land of hills, and the valley of ponds, be glorified by golden light as the heavenly fire passed on high? Could I gain there a sense of the approximate and feminine Glory of God?
I donned my floppy white hat to keep deer flies off my head, and opened the front door. Then I pushed the bike out, careful to make no sound—did not want to wake the dark old dog, sleeping on trampled and barren dirt, where I had tethered him.
I looked up. One long cloud was moving to diffuse and cover a golden-white sun above the wall of woods edging my neighbor’s yard. A day moving toward the perfection of its shining? Or were clouds on the increase to obscure?
The climbing stretch of hill-country road passed quickly beneath the patterned wheels as I manipulated the multiple gears of the bicycle. This middle-aged strength was fresh in my legs. Roadside things passed in glimpses—laden blackberry bushes in the curve; red limp freshly spray-poisoned dwarf sumac beneath the power lines; a bright sporty car tucked among trees. Feeling sweat flow now, I switchbacked on the steep grade before the big u-shaped house on the flat stretch. Here I passed clots of flowering virgin’s bower, a three-leafed vine mistaken for poison ivy upon our first moving to Maine.
Passing the big house of the Scot, I looked out toward the folds of old hills. Mists lay thickly in those valleys, but it did not shine. The murk of polluted sky with further mountains shadowed from the light. Vapors below met those above in heavy diffusion.
Fireweed, tall and tapering, lit the road shoulders. Now I rolled rapidly down dirt-and-gravel where the road dips before it climbs higher. In damp sand I saw the cloven imprint of the deer, but held on course, steering with care on a sloppy and uncertain surface.
There was Mr. Kaplan’s old connected dwelling, neat as a needle. Across the road was an old stone wall. Here country-cultivated shrubs had grown large and rugged among wildflowers and weeds. Here was a view of empty distance and thickening sky.
The hill ascended steepest here and breathing was heavy, weighted with the oppressive atmosphere. I pushed the damp hat back off my forehead, then found myself off the bike, absently pushing it up hill, switching back, as I had done when peddling. Breathless and sticky, I came to an end of the road proper and looked up a scrubby slope toward hidden moldering old gravestones, spied worn steps among the overgrowth—made of decaying railroad ties. I pulled the bike off road into the bushy birch thickets, climbed to the stone wall. Soon I was seated on cushiony lichen, soft covering of old stone.
Now I looked up toward the great bright globe of gas, the ancient physical source of all we have here. It was hidden among clouds of subtlest gray, but the blessed light of shining pressed through in subdued glory. An elliptical ring of it pierced the cloud roundabout.
I looked toward the valley of ponds but the view was obscured by leafy trees. Yet I saw Swans Ridge out there, elevated above a ravine. A gash below lines of conifer declared the saw of the logger, who had cut the lush covering of Swans Ridge for a developer. There was evidence of that road to Swans Ledge, which I had explored in the spring with the neighbor girls, rising away on my right. Directly across the road from me, ravaged foliage of dwindling summer held on in thick muggy air. Crickets, harbinger of season’s end, chirruped steadily in bushes roundabout, and opposite me a chickadee squeaked. Now heavy silence.
The cloud above Swans was darkening. In vapor above the gashed ridge an elliptical shaping of light slowly overwhelmed the ridge. Diminishing, it seeped out in vague crepuscular rays.
What is the saddest account in the whole of the Old Testament? Is it not that of the departure of the Shekinah from the Holy of Holies? Departure of the Glory from Jerusalem, the city of peace, itself? “Then the glory of the Lord went up from the cherub, and stood over the threshold of the house; and the house was filled with cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the Lord’s glory.”
That was the same house that the worshipers had been polluting. They had also polluted the high places roundabout Jerusalem. “And the glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.”
The story which follows, of Jerusalem’s destruction, is one of the most powerful tragedies ever told and, with the exception of Holocaust, and current ongoing Holocaust of today’s Ethnic Cleansing, is perhaps the saddest.
The sky above Swans Ridge, indeed the whole atmosphere over the valley of ponds, was dirty with cloud. The crepuscular rays were gone now. Only a dull crack, the suggestion of light, remained. The sun had vanished.
I stood up and started through brush toward the rotting railroad-ties, leading down to the road.
As I went, spreading humble lowbush blueberries—tiny, pale and blue—invited. I bent down and plucked a meager handful. So good and sweet, so wild. I pulled the bike out of young saplings and turned onto the road.
Gliding down the steep hill past Kaplan’s, I felt my hat slipping off by degrees as the wind of my flight tore it. Off it flew, a wild white thing. I reached for it with my right hand. The left pulled impulsively at the brake. The bike stopped dead and I tumbled over its handlebars, careening into the dirt and pain of my fall.
I was scraped and banged—stung! Caked in dirt, I climbed unsteadily to my feet and, shaking, brushed off my jeans, my blouse and arms. I picked up the bike, straightened the brake holds and handlebars.
Peddling down, then once again back along the flat, I saw tall thickets of brown bitterdock that I had not noticed on the way up. They spired like drought-burnt flame: their leaves drying red from lack of moisture and seasonal lessening of light. Nearing the big house of the Scot, I looked out toward the mountains, now heavily shrouded.
It would have to be another day—to approximate the Glory of God.
Future Maine
I’m in the bedroom upstairs, sitting at the old oak kitchen table, now my desk. It’s where I write words of warning. I am a writer, and that is what writers do. They comment on life. (It’s no longer called moralizing—old-fashioned word.) Comment: there is a bridge out—midway—on the route along which we roar.
But I’m not really thinking of that at the moment because my fingers are sifting through thistle seeds. My eyes stare unseeing out the window into the backyard and beyond, into the logged-over woods. Unseeing, because I’m concentrating on messages tactile, not visual.
The seeds feel minute. They feel the size of salt grains, but I know they’re larger because I looked at them. Rubbing the grains between my thumb and fingers or just covering my palms with them, sifting, I feel natural oils from these seeds.
I found the seeds when we were on our way back from Portland, where Allen had been doing genealogical research at the library. Wedged between the car door and passenger seat where I rode—a genuine thistle with three blossoms in different stages, budding, blooming, and gone-by. We found them below the Eastern Promenade. Something big had squashed a four-feet thicket of them, leaving pale canes radiating a spiny green-and-lavender crown of leaves and blooms. I continued to think of it, trying to guess what felled them (as though some large body had flown through the night willy-nilly and landed thus unhappily). We remained mystified. It did however remind us of the Scottish heritage of the thistle. Thistles that once alerted the Scots to the presence of enemies. The motto which goes with the emblem: Nemo me impune laccessit. No one provokes me with impunity.
Our plucked thistles rode with us in an aluminum can full of water where I had tucked them out-of-the-way so they wouldn’t pierce my skin with their fierce spines. (Why, by the way, do we fuss with plastic and aluminum containers? Do we know how much energy it takes to recycle them into new containers—which are promptly drained and again in need of recycling? As Allen suggests from time to time, “Why not use returnable glass containers? It takes far less energy to clean glass than it does to make new containers.” And think of the new and local business for it. This is how it was done in the days when soda bottles were shapely and I carried an ugly leather black bucket purse.)
We were passing into Gray, Maine when I noticed a