Читать книгу Visiting the Eastern Uplands - S. Dorman - Страница 7

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 lowbush blueberry scrub would always flourish there.

Today is our day to make at least a start on visiting the Eastern Uplands, so long a goal of my hungry creativity. It’s also the day of our first long flight together after an interval of almost two years. That he keep licensed, keep in practice, Allen and I are flying. We’ll fly to an airstrip at Deblois, on the great blueberry barrens in Washington County, at the opposite and eastern end of the state from these Western Mountains. The winds of finance have moderated to allow a writer’s junket and chance to brush up on flying skills. Thus, we are now lifting off the runway of Oxford County Airport, and I am feeling the smoothness of takeoff in the rental, a light little Cessna 150. Silently rejoicing.

The green ground drops away. I’m grateful it’s easy to ascend and so joyous an act. Yesterday’s brief foray in sky was all turbulence and banking and sickening slam-bams. I don’t even want to recall it. Timing is all in avoiding turbulence, and yesterday ours was way off. In the a.m. Allen did his three takeoffs and landings (required) and then I hopped in. We flew over Thompson Lake and then turned to intersect the Augusta VOR, a navigational aid. This, while winds of convection played lift-and-slam with the plane. It was only moderate turbulence—so he said. Thus I learned that moderate turbulence is enough to crack me to the core and wither my wits away.

Only a brief flight—up and around and back in no time—but completely deranging while it endured. Depending on currents, the human psyche can be sound one moment and shattered to bits the next. All that was left to me was gratitude that the turbulence had not been “severe” or “extreme.”

Consider my paraphrased definition of Plane and Pilot magazine’s diagram of disturbance rated light through extreme. “Light” may have roll disturbance less than 5°, where control corrections are instantaneous. “Moderate” throws the craft banking up to 30°, moving things about in the cockpit—maybe a passenger’s stomach?—and control time will lag. With “severe” you get unresponsive controls with attempted corrections, angles of 50°—you’re on your side—and airspeed can shear 25 knots. “Extreme” is rare but you’ve already lost control when you’re rolling past vertical.

Allen has said that under certain conditions it’s best not to fight it. Best to let go the controls and allow the plane to right itself.

But I need not think of yesterday’s turbulence, for here we are, rising smoothly, quickly, the white farmhouses sinking and diminishing beneath the technical marvel of this craft. We lift above Streakéd Mountain, are banking over firred and rocky ledge . . . now away into the east, into ascending sun. Long shadows stretch across the rich green lawn of Oxford and Androscoggin counties. Looking back, I see our remote tiny shadow trailing over the ground. Lush and golden is this new day, and convection turbulence in early morning atmosphere is nonexistent. If we are fortunate we’ll arrive smoothly at the barrens one hundred and ten miles away and depart again before the earth’s warming truly begins. With that warming would come devilish convection currents.

Allen touches back on the throttle. The plane slows its ascent. I look down to see green patterns in fields, occasional delicate bogs dotted with trees, dark winding ribbons of streams; and lakes lakes lakes. The ocean, to my right, is but a dim blue guess upon the southern horizon. We cross the dark Andy River, the Belgrade Lakes, this lakey land. A reflection of sun shoots a blinding beam up from shimmering waters, as far as I can see. There’s a pool of pure light across the midriff of Cobbosseecontee.

Augusta traffic this is 23 Juliet approximately 5 mi. west of the Airport at 2200 ft.

There’s the airport, artificially elevated at one end above the white tenuous highway. I look over my shoulder at the green oxidized dome of the Capitol, at that dark band, the Kennebec River, below our wheel. There’s the toy traffic moving on avenues of commerce and policy. That’s where decisions are made concerning the fate of our water and air, the body of earth. There stewardship over creation in Maine is executed. Back out over the countryside now—the artwork of the pit laborer with his tiny machine. Sculpture in sand and gravel, an archaeological dig for dolls. The works of humans are visible from the air because our machines make it possible to carve out large areas, erect large forms within the body and being of creation. My own being inside this mechanical marvel is large, exaggerated, significant in comparison with the minutiae below. And you, there in the distance beneath us, are little, scarcely noticed, of scant consideration.

We approach Penobscot Bay, the bumpy contour of Camden Hills to our right. A smokestack of the Bucksport paper mill—thin and white—the large green island of Verona, jewel in the throat of the great river. The small white side of Fort Knox comes into view as we pass Mt. Tuck.

Guidance from Augusta’s VOR plays out. We still have the compass and begin looking for specific lakes—landmarks—to guide us. I stare at outlines upon the chart, look down out the window. So many lakes pass, pass away. One after the other beneath our stationary black wheel—and I lose track. How easy to be lost flying in air, to lose any airstrip upon the unfamiliar various beautiful land. And without that airstrip. . . where would we be? Will Deblois be lost?

Allen’s voice tickles in my ear, in my earphones, startling me from reverie. Pretty good wind drift right here. See how the plane goes off? He gestures southward.

The wind!

Yet, even now at this tilting reminder I fail to grasp its significance for this flight, for me.

Bogs are appearing regularly below, bright green and oval, tapering. A dark river curls through green green bog. Now there are wide plains crisscrossed with beige lines—The blueberry barrens.

Then Allen sees it: the Deblois airstrip. He banks, descending to pattern altitude, but finds he must correct for the wind and do a straight approach. Sinking, I peer out on colorful moving specks and scattered piles of red upon the vast green. There are neat barracks-style blue camps in rows—now abandoned by law. Pickers are bused or drive out to the fields in their beat-up old cars over reams of rutty roads. There’s a warehouse of the same blue hue and a company name, visible from the air.

A thump of turbulence. That old sinking feeling, this prickling thrill. The strip enlarges significantly as we descend. Jouncing.

And mockery moves in my mind as I recall my earlier desire to learn flight, to someday fly and land a plane. The field of tarmac expands like a balloon blown up in my face. I feel the rapid rate of descent and a stiff crosswind. The landing. It’s certain: I will never land a plane, never land an airplane. I will never land a machine that flies through the air.

For all Allen’s care, the landing is off-center. The light little 150 craft is routed by the crosswind. I have that old relief and dissipation of tremendous tension: We are down.

Pouring on prop power, Allen turns the plane and we begin back-taxiing toward 330. At the end of runway 330 is a dirt road through the green field, leading to pickers—and the blue outhouse, for my searching gaze. The Deblois airstrip, the blueberry corporation’s own, is in the midst of a vast blueberry field.

Allen turns off the engine and we sit momently in sudden silence. It nudges the craft. It whistles under the wings. Wind. It speeds across the barrens with lonesome desolate force.

. . . Uh-oh. . . .

I’m numb from the long ride aloft in a vibrating machine. I reach, and manage to flip the latch, swing the door open. Out I climb, stiff. Together we start down the dirt path toward workers . . . and the privy. Allen stops to scoop a handful of blueberries. I keep walking toward the workers, toward the outhouse nearby them. Lining the path are those piles of red I saw from the air: plastic berry boxes.

Writing for the Bangor Daily News, Clayton Beal told of fluctuating and uncertain raker rates. Box prices vary year-to-year and are often not revealed until the workers are in the field. In 1986 the rate dropped 35 cents a box because they had picked an outstanding crop the year before. This is the reward of the diligent seasonal worker?

According to the Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies, harvests are accomplished by crews of 40 to 45 rakers who work for a leaseholder. Crews are Canadian and US Native Americans, and Mainers, local descendents of settlers. The latter eke out the livings of teachers, fisherman, clammers and loggers. Of the former, Micmacs, Malecites and Passamaquoddies all take part. When Europeans first landed and explored these barrens, they found the native peoples communally harvesting barrens in a prudent and proven manner.

It’s morally estranging that these are the workers who go hungry before they feed you and me. Migrant workers, whose hard-working hands are so ready to feed us, depend on the indignity of handouts before they can begin work. The Good Shepard Food-Bank, a faithful make-do operation, knows about the problem in Maine. In a paper entitled More Than Food, I will soon be reading about red-tape bound General Assistance. The bureaucracy, which stands in our stead as taxpayer’s steward, will neglect to provide for arriving workers because precise documentation is lacking. Rules change, labyrinthine paperwork fails, people who would feed us go hungry. All prior to the start of harvest. Here’s a precise document: a hungry body and weary soul that is nonetheless eager to work. And this situation is that of agribusiness in general, usurping land that (morally) might be owned as familial and communal. As it once was: by the clan or family in the midst of a healthy community.

A man goes into the portable outhouse. I stand away, surveying this section of barrens, these locals, trying to take everything in. The minutiae as well as the vastness. A blonde woman straightens up from berry-raking. She moves stiffly toward a big old gas-guzzler parked by the privy.

I smile foolishly and say, “Hi!” What am I to these workers—someone who came down from the sky to use the privy? Someone with enough money to spare for a junket?

She fumbles with pieces of wet clothing laid out on a sheet of plastic on the trunk of her car. A twisted pair of panties falls into the dirt. “Goddamnit,” she says. “At this rate I’ll never get the laundry done.” (Making a joke of it?)

The man steps down out of the portable privy and walks away. I move toward it, Allen having caught up with me is now also waiting to use it. When I come out, the blonde raker, her laundry, and the car, are gone, having sped off for parts unknown. Did I scare her away—or has she begun a fifteen or twenty mile torture trip over jolting gravel to find a dryer?

I watch a man and woman stooping over the task. They stoop to scoop, and turn, dumping berries into red containers. Stoop to scoop, and turn to dump. Stoop to scoop, and turn to dump. Continual stooping, stooping and turning. I begin to feel it in the back as I watch. While Allen takes his turn in the portable, I glean snippets of conversation from the two rakers, finding myself too shy to approach and ask nosy occupational questions.

The woman says something about stiffness and ointment.

“I’m about Ben-Gayed out,” returns the man. He wears shorts, a bandanna and has a long bushy beard. The sweeping wind makes it hard to catch every word. Then “. . . some strange man crawling into bed with you.” He laughs.

I grimace. Why is it I just don’t like talk that robs lovemaking of its beautiful appeal: words which bring sex down into the dirt instead of raising it up on the cool stems of orchids or lady slippers (which, however, spring from the dirt)? The man has a beautiful form—tan and fit from his labor among the fruit. The fruit he picks is shapely, sweet, a pulpy container of seed and emblem of ripeness and sexuality. He works mechanically, ten back-breaking hours a day in the sun on a barren full of fruit, the result of sexual reproduction. Because of the monotony of his repetitious action and industrial proportions of the work, he must see and feel his hand scooping blueberries all night long. The days are spent turning blue fruit into green currency, the source of his living throughout the month of August.

Perhaps the fortunes of these workers will change when the mechanical harvesters overrun the barrens. The world’s largest harvester (at this writing) is a steel monster, 16 ft. wide and 20 ft. high, with 700 rakes mounted on belts. Three years ago, in 1987, it was picking 1000 boxes a day with the aid of four people. When the machine ousts them, migrants will be further cut off from the land, inexorably losing their connectedness with the source of their bodies, the soil. This blue fruit of beauty in its green bed is the mediator of life between them (and us) and the soil. Ten hours a day, a paying fruit and a broken back are better than absence, machinery, and no pay. The best is to own the land you tend, the fruit you pick for your family. Familial and communally, yours.

Allen joins me and we turn to walk back toward the plane. Is it absurd to hire a plane and fly—clumsy, mechanical, noisy, polluting, and anxious—across the state? To a county at the opposite end, get out, go to the toilet, hear a snatch of conversation out of context, grab a handful of fruit and fly away? Is it absurd and fantastic? Ayuh.

Walking, I reach down into the low berry-laden bushes for the guilty handful. The practically rainless July has our Department of Agriculture thinking the season’s harvest will be half what it was last year, but this patch is burgeoning. There appear to be two kinds of berries, two shades of blue. One is dark, purplish, reminiscent of grapes; the other a light blue, like pale dense sky. The Cherryfield-Narraguagus Historical Society sent me a packet containing essays for a contest they sponsored. Eighth-grade essayist Renee Foss of Harrington wrote about types of lowbush berries. Some are prone to disease, causing crop loss. One is a fungus attacking the blossoms when weather is cool and wet. Other diseases include witches broom, redleaf, leaf rust, powdery mildew. The variety within the Maine wild blueberry makes for resistance. Resistance not found in the uniform. It is part of the elegant mechanism of nature, of her complex tapestry of land races, the enduring various species.

I crush the thieving handful between my teeth and juice pours over my gums and down my parched throat. How dry and tight my throat has been, how refreshing and necessary the taste of blueberries just now. I long to sit down and eat, to feed among the berries, but they aren’t ours, and there is another pilot waiting his turn with the plane at the Oxford Airport.

I grab onto a wing strut and fit myself into the cockpit. The plane rocks and creaks in the wind.

. . . Uh-oh. . . . The little answering quiver wakes in me.

We bank away above the barrens and I look northward toward a stark geometrical plot of rich brown earth. It’s scored with darker lines and limned with white. Trenches and piping? At one end is a clean white structure with three silos. Children’s toys. Where’s the organic in the articles below? If I were down on the ground with them I’d have a sense of their lack of proportion. Are gigantic boxes, cylinders, networks of pipes necessary to our nourishment? By monstrous mechanical harvesters? Does it reinforce the deceptive view that production of food with hands is solely drudging and joyless? But hunter-gatherers knew. There is no joy below me in a plot at once immense, artificial, technological. But how about stooping-and-turning, ten hours a day? I’m a domestic, and a creative writer—arrogantly I raise questions. I just don’t answer them.

We cross above a jewel-like green bog, teardrop in shape, surrounded in dark conifer. Now our tail is toward morning sun. I see our formerly trailing shadow-craft ahead of us, moving over the green Ground of Maine.

Occasional turbulence, thump! Our elevation is 2600 ft., our guide a magnetic compass: heading due west.

Feel the RPM’s pick up going into this wind? Allen’s voice tickles through the radio headphones clamped over my ears. He gives it more throttle and says we’ll ascend to 3000 ft. where it should be a bit smoother. I smile and touch his arm in gratitude.

My ears begin popping as we climb. The headphones cut some of the swishing, droning and consuming noise of the mechanical craft, but they carry an electrical droning of their own. A constant low static and occasional rhythmic buzzing. Sometimes I’m pierced by the ablated disembodied voices of other traffic.

He tells me to find a landmark due west and he’ll fly for it. After a bit I spy the thin spewing stack at Bucksport, and point. He looks over at me, grins. Maybe he’s enjoying the look on my face. He says, It’s your turn to fly.

The plan to ascend has brought scant respite from the occasional thump-bam! Western skies are gathering their morning’s allotment of low level ozone and haze. The air over there is dirty and we are heading for it. A heavy line blankets the horizon, reaches toward the north and mountains in a vague dirty blue distance. These gases come up from the country’s great mechanized Northeast Corridor. They are one of the indicators of turbulence and must be scaled if we are to escape it. Worse, before this runs a broken and clotting raft of cumulus toward which we’re progressing. Above that line we would perhaps find calm air. But it’s probably too high for the Cessna 150. That ominous retribution of industrialization is just too steep for our little craft.

Greenhouse gases, but one of corporate America’s apparently lasting legacy to our children’s children, are what Senator George Mitchell called “the man who came to dinner”: they’ll stay and stay. The Senate majority leader from Maine wrote in his book World on Fire that CO2 emissions may stay up there for centuries. They are being released far faster than the atmosphere can remove them. Were we to keep emitting them at current levels they will intensify up there, indefinitely.

In trying to stay his course into the wind, Allen’s arm and grip are tiring. He takes his hands from the yoke and jokes about flying with the rudder pedals. Might find some clean air a bit higher . . . We’ll try 4500 ft. We are crossing the Penobscot, passing the paper mill with its smokestack below.

Fumble in my purse for a motion sickness tablet. Have forgotten to bring something to wash it down. The tiny white pill breaks between my teeth. Clouds pass quickly, flowing eastward on the wind like scum upon a river. We drone westward through the flow, pushing through currents. The wind pushes back, hard, requiring yet more fuel. Whump. Bang! The tablet, disintegrating in my mouth, bites back with a bitter taste as its protective coating melts away and begins burning the tip of my tongue. An acrid chemical burning. Bang!

I’m trying to take notes, hoping for occupation to settle my unhappy mind. Below I see some small circular bog overtaking a wooded area. Dead trees have fallen there like pickup sticks on a carpet of green. Who can pick up a stick without disturbing the others? Can any of the children who play with these toys? My mouth is on fire. My inner cheeks and gums burn. The tip of my tongue turns numb.

Clouds roll over us, one by one. Updrafts below lift and jolt us as we pass under them. Allen ascends to 5500 ft., then 5800 ft.. Man-made things below shrink to insignificance. And I can heed them no more. The immanent dirty elements are all. Cloud, wind and gravity’s threat have consorted to pound the pomposity, along with its imagined securities, from my puny soul.

(With good luck, it says, you’ll never have severe turbulence.) Enfeebled, I look above toward the blue.

There’s the pallid moon ahead! waning before midday. It is reclining, belly-up, and sickly pale. I take off the headphones so Allen won’t hear me murmuring psalms. It’s so noisy I can feel the words vibrating in my larynx but the sound of them never reaches my ears. Now I am letting-go the controls (as advised), hoping the craft of my own being will right itself. Bang! Bang! Bang! A thousand fears crowd into my mind. I thrust them back with inaudible recitation. Below me the Maine Corridor, our humble extension of the great Northeast Corridor (commercial, industrial, political) is spread out beneath the dingy air. (I will fear no evil. . . .)

Allen looks over at me, concerned. He asks if I want him to land below at Augusta. It’s a sacrificial offering. He would have to leave me and fly on to Oxford then drive maybe 60 miles through the hills to pick me up in the car. Mutely, I shake my head.

Having passed the Kennebec, we begin descending over Androscoggin and then Oxford counties. The toy villages, so peaceful, serene enlarge. One in particular catches my eye, Hebron, with its Academy—recognizable by the graceful lawn surrounded in stately brown buildings, the neat small edifices of learning—now on vacation. We round the green mound, Little Singepole Mountain, which rises above it, comforting rock. Beside it hunkers Streakéd Mountain.

I spy the automotive raceway—a landmark—beside which the runway spreads. The airport runway that never looked so blessed. Never have I so longed for landing. Give me to drink of its nausea and despair. Increase the sickness and sinking of this jolting descent. Fill my mind with all its attendant and frantic fears. Let me drink to the last drop these necessary dregs . . . for when it is drunk we will be down.

Oh, the welcome expanding tarmac, the veering and hopping of our quaking craft.

Ah Allen, Allen, we’ve landed! We are down from the turbulent sky!

I tried to negotiate the aisles at the Oxford Hills grocery store but kept veering slightly right; pushing the cart. Disoriented.

“I feel like I’m crabbing into the wind,” I said to Allen beside me.

“It’s how I held the yoke all the way back.” He rubbed his shoulder. “I must’ve pulled a tendon or something, trying to keep it on course.”

It was that northeast flowing river of wind, that struggle with wind-shear, gusts and convection. He flew a heading of 330° in order to maintain a course of 270°, because the wind kept forcing us off course.

“That flight tested all my skills—control, communication, navigation. The wind clipped so much off our speed I thought we were flying backward.”

When we stepped from the store into the parking lot, I looked up, seeing soft cumulus overhead, interstitial with the calm blue sky. Those clouds adrift there, so peaceful, serene. Now that we are no longer among them.