Circus Turtles, Hellgrammites, Ants and Calling Loons
by Tom
Carlson
All truths wait in all
things.
--Walt
Whitman, “Song of Myself.”
My
grandfather was a large man of large appetites. He was chief engineer for
the Goodall Textile Mills inSanford, Maine. He was also a self-taught
surveyor, homebuilder, boat builder, real estate speculator, photographer,
historian, draftsman, fly fisherman, and bee-liner. He was not tall, but
made from outsized parts as he was, and with his timbrous voice, he seemed
taller than he was. He had a
large head, with ears and nose to match, an ample belly, firm and
proportional, not so large that the trousers couldn’t be worn around its
equator. It also proved a
perfect landscape for a silk-backed suit vest or its fly fishing
counterpart. He also had
large hands spoked with thick fingers and yellowed and striated nails from
his Chesterfield unfiltereds. My mother would
inherit a modest facsimile of his hands, and she would coat the same nails
and fingers with the same nicotine palette from her Camels.
Frank Clark was the prototype
Downeast Yankee, the type Ben Franklin defined and the kind he himself
became—growing up in Boston and working for his printer
brother. Independent, curious, morally straight, shrewd, practical,
ambitious. The Englishman becoming an American, the Calvinist turning
capitalist. The church-going
horse trader.
He had a playful sense of humor, a
large explosive laugh, and a chronic twinkle in his eye which was shared
by his wife, my grandmother, though she was more often his audience than
his co-conspirator. When I was eight, they took me to the circus in
Portland.
I came back with Wally, a half-dollar sized (and priced) turtle in a
little cardboard box with cardboard bars to look like a cage. Wally made it two weeks before
succumbing. I had grown very attached. My grandfather told me we’d give
Wally a Viking funeral. Aboard a cup-shaped section of the Portland Press Herald Wally lay
stiff and spraddled, Leonardo’s little Vitruvian Man with a shell. Below
him lay the clear, still waters of the toilet. “God speed thee on thy errand in
the deep,” a basso voice sounded above me. The blazing kitchen match touched
a corner of the vessel. The
flush roared like a judgment, the Press Herald spun down the vortex,
and Wally was gone. I stared
for a long time at the charred flotsam, at the match adrift like a little
oar, wondering if Wally might get caught in the backwash, and
reappear. In the kitchen I
could hear my grandfather’s voice. It sounded jolly and irreverent. I could hear my grandmother saying
“Oh, Frank.” She didn’t sound mad.
I can see her at the four-hole woodstove
cooking dinner when my grandfather would come through the screen door
from the car, me behind and my older cousin Bruce Clark behind me, breathlessly
telling her what he just did to us or for us—this time to us:
we would often walk miles out the camp road, past the Johnson farm and the
old couple with the bulls across the way, out onto the paved road toward
Springvale and Sanford to meet Gramp coming home from the mills. And
every so often he would drive right past us pretending he hadn’t seen two
lone boys waving frantically on the empty road. He’d disappear long enough
for us to believe—once again—that he wasn’t kidding, he hadn’t seen us,
or wondering if his outsized sense of humor included a prank like this,
making us walk the three miles back to the camp. We’d wait and wait, and
finally turn to walk back. And then he’d appear in the distance, come back
to get us. We fell for it every time. And every time my grandmother would
listen to our story, then look at Frank over by the sink drinking ice
water, pause a moment, and offer that one high-pitched laugh before she
went back to smiling and cooking.
My grandfather coaxed us through
life by voice and artful indirection, by surprise and example, and
occasionally by a Downeast Zen lesson. The camp had ants, a steady,
unrelenting, migration of them. My grandmother fought them with spray,
little round metal traps, poison powder. Until one day my grandfather
announced at the dinner table that somehow the Clarks seemed to have
gotten in the way of these creatures, that, sadly, the cozy camp he had
designed and built had somehow come to straddle an old Indian trail he
called it that they (the ants) were using, and he concluded it wasn’t our
place to interfere with the order of things. The Clarks would accommodate them. The ants entered on
the screen porch looking out over the lake, a slow rush hour of them, and
headed across the floor to the living room, across that floor and out a
crack in the paneling next to the large fieldstone fireplace on the far
side of the living room. With
patience and a finger-wide path of maple syrup, he simply re-routed them,
up the porch wall by the metal glider, across the porch on a ceiling beam,
into the living room on the same beam, and then down the wall beside the
fireplace and out their old exit low on the wall. It was the exact same
Indian trail, just twelve feet higher. Many a rainy day I read or slept
or tied flies below the ants streaming in single file, or watched Jimmy
Piersall, Jackie Jensen, and Ted Williams, or at night, with the few
fishing boats twinkling on the lake between the pine trees out the picture
window played Parcheesi with my grandparents and my older cousin Bruce, or
cranked the shuffling machine for their games of canasta with George and
Alice Fields or the Duttons or, by myself, watched Gorgeous George wrestle
Verne Gagne on the fuzzy TV.
My grandfather once bet a friend
who worked at the sporting goods store on Main
Street
that he could catch a salmon in Square Pond even though no salmon had been
pulled out of there in thirty years. One evening after he got off work, he
picked me up at the beginning of the camp road near where all the wooden
camp signs on posts were clustered crazily or laddered up the trunks of
trees near the main road. We
drove back to the camp; he changed into his chore clothes and old shoes,
gathered some waders and nets down in the shed where the boat gear and gas
cans were stored, and off we went.
We drove in the old Plymouth
Cranbrook along narrow road after road lined with ferns and huge pines and
white birch, past burned-over sections of woods sprung up now with
blueberry bushes. Much of the trip was made in silence, but every once in
a while, Gramp would slow down and point out a farm that told a story, a
secret lake winking through the trees, or where the Gendron Lumber Mill
had cut timber off his land back during the Depression.
We finally parked in a field and
walked to its edge where I could hear a stream close by in the woods. It
was only six feet across but bounded over boulders and tree roots at a
fast clip. My grandfather took me down stream and waded out with me up to
my knees in the cold, rushing water. He handed me a fine cotton-mesh net
stretched between two two-by-fours each about four feet tall.
“Hold the net upright in the water
using the two-by-fours.”
I lowered the net into the tumbling
water in front of me. I leaned on the two-by-fours on either end of the
net like crutches. The net stretched almost all the way across the stream.
The rushing water pushed it back against my legs. I held the wood uprights
firm in the current.
“That’s good, Tommy. Now I’m going to go up stream and turn over
some rocks. You’ll catch what we’re after.”
“What’s that,
Gramp?”
“Hellgrammites,” he said. “The
best salmon bait there is.”
I had no idea what a hellgrammite
was. But now wasn’t the time to ask. The water was pulling hard and
unevenly at my legs.
Gramp climbed out of the water got
back in the stream about thirty feet up. He waved at me and bent over up
to his shoulders in the tossing water. I could see white water running up
the backs of his arms where he was straining, and then again, and again he
went down. Then he straightened up for a moment with his hands on his
hips, looking down towards me.
I couldn’t wave. It was beginning to get dark. He got out of the
stream and made his way back down to me.
He said, “Do what I’m doing,” and
he bent over and grabbed the bottom of the two-by-four under the water. He
had the top of it in his other hand. Together we lifted the net out of the
water, flat in front of us. It was dark with leaves and small branches and
muck. We made it up on the bank and laid the net out on a grassy area
under some white birches. Gramp carefully ran a finger through the trash
in the net like a diamond merchant over tiny stones on black velvet. I didn’t know what shape he was
looking for so I watched. Gramp had a rusty blue coffee can with him.
“Ah, here we are. Ay-uh,” and he pulled up something
wriggling from the net and dropped it quickly in the coffee can. I
couldn’t see. Then he got another, thick and about four inches long, and it
bent up towards the thumb and forefinger that held it as though to bite
them, and Gramp dropped it onto the flat palm of his other hand. The
hellgrammite was wine-colored, around four inches long and segmented with
many legs and feathery clusters along its sides. Its head was mainly two
gigantic pincers. These things were actually the larval stage of a very
large insect, but to me they looked like space aliens. Even Gramp steered
clear of their business end. When we had about a dozen of them and the
shadows had deepened in the woods, we headed back to the
car.
We had to wait until Saturday
morning to go out for the salmon. We got up in the dark and took the
flatbottom boat Gramp had built and the five-horse Johnson and motored
down the shore toward where the camp road crossed a culvert. There, Gramp
cut the motor and fitted the oars into the locks. The light was gray. We
rowed slowly out toward the middle of the lake. Gramp’s rowing always
sounded different. When I rowed, the oar locks squeaked and chattered, but
with Gramp there was one throaty clack and then silence for the rest of
his steady pull.
He kept swiveling around to line up
some landmarks—it looked like it was the culvert behind us and the end of
the boys’ camp island off in the distance in front. There was some third
point off to our left he seemed to be watching also, but I couldn’t tell
what it was. I could have
asked him of course, but my grandfather, I knew instinctively, didn’t talk
a lot and liked little dramas, mysteries. He always delivered, and so it
was more fun to be surprised by what he was doing than to have him explain
it away beforehand. He seemed to like it that way too. Here he was, out to
do something that hadn’t been done since before World War II—and he’d
predicted it, just the way the Babe had pointed to the outfield fence that
time before he whacked a homer over it. So the less said the better.
Finally he stopped rowing and
swung the boat about to check bearings once more. There was hardly any
breeze, but it would pick up. He noted its direction. We’d be drift
fishing.
“Hand me your rod, Tommy.” He tied
a larger hook on it and pinched on a couple of small split shot about a
foot above the hook. Then he shook the coffee can carefully and tweezed
out a hellgrammite. He held it right behind the pincers and threaded the
hook under the hard shell covering the first segment. The hellgrammite was
unhurt, but collared and angry. “Now let it down to the bottom, and then
freespool it so the hellgrammite can crawl around naturally.” It took a long while for the line
to reach the bottom. I left
the reel open so the line played out slowly with our drift and the
hellgrammite’s movements. “I dynamited here thirty or so years ago,” he
said, almost as an afterthought. “Through the ice. George Fields and me.
Drove the car right out here.”
So that was it. A depression in
the bottom. A homemade honey
hole. Last summer Gramp had pointed into the woods at the beginning of the
camp road and told me there was a little trout stream not far in there and
if you followed it down there was a wide, deep area where’d he’d dynamited
years ago. I got worms and a cane pole and crawled in the tall grass along
the stream until I reached the wide part. From my knees I stretched the
pole over the grass and dropped the worm as far out as I could. I caught a dozen delicious
brookies. Gram cooked them that night with new potatoes, fresh tomatoes
from the garden, and blueberry pie for dessert.
