Words Like the Rings of a Tree
Mix together a bit of Annie Dillard, Thoreau and Mark Twain and you might get a concoction like Bill Roorbach’s writing in Temple Stream. In addition to being a rich narrative of a stream running through the Farmington and Temple, Maine, it’s also about the characters that wander
in and out of the author’s life while he’s exploring his local, natural world. Roorbach pulls them into his reflections on his town and the stream the way he’d reel in a fly-caught trout — no gesture overdone.
We get to know a few upstream neighbors briefly, but his nemesis Earl Pomeroy, provides the “Oh God, what’s going to happen now?” lure for the reader. It’s hard not to be magnetized by the laughable (and occasionally frightening) stories of the oversized Earl playing mind games with Roorbach, whom he dubs “Professor” or, in a moment of true irritation, “Herr Doktor,” with angry axe-swinging at least once. Pages turn quickly here —the author is a master of details and understated wryness, yet he knows how to write without overly crafting encounters with streamside locals. This is not “Bert & I” redux.
Roorbach deftly paints with words as he writes about the stream’s bends and pools (some good for summer dips), its frozen plates of ice askew mid-winter, its lush colors and sounds in seasons of thaw, its quirky resident beavers, and plethora of birds, trees and wildflowers. Yet he’s not daunted by describing the backside of restaurants, or the abandoned tires dotting the banks in town. On one of his early canoe outings on the Temple, he writes, “Despite the junk and propinquity of Subway and the sure knowledge that farmers and hunters and loggers and tomboys had preceded me, I got the feeling of being where no one had ever gone before. The road was right there, loud. But I was invisible, private, alone.”
Among the snippets of Earl stories, the deep impressions of ecology and place, and vignettes of a now-crumbled past (mills, bridges, farmsteads), Roorbach nicely threads in strands of daily life. He writes of waiting with wife Juliet for their first child to be born, and tossing sealed bottles with questionnaires into Temple Stream, one of which makes it as far as Popham Beach, found by an 88-year-old beachcomber, after whom he names his newborn daughter.
It’s as if we are walking in his footsteps as he scrambles the tangled stream banks, or paddling in his canoe: gentle, observing, and with wit the entire time, which is what seems to make it work. Temple Stream is like a cross section of an aged tree cut down —- its well-chosen words like rings, forming a glimpse of the past and present on this ribbon of water running through a town and through time.
A resident of Torrington, Conn., when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.