Getting water took a long time. So during one of my free afternoons, I decided I would dam the stream to make a basin deep enough to dip the water jugs in, filling them much faster. I brought a trowel and found a spot twenty feet or so below the spring head, where the water passed between two good-size rocks (each the size of a big couch pillow or, as I tended to think by then, the size of a porcupine) that could anchor a dam. Watching the play of light on the braiding surface of the stream, so energetic and silvery, I felt reluctant to obstruct such a vital thing. But practicality won out.
First I scooped out gravel, fine silt streaming away in delicate tendrils, to make a basin. When it was about the size of a bushel basket, I cast around to find rocks that would fill the gap between the two porcupine rocks. I figured that a range of sizes and shapes would give me a choice when I got down to the stonemasonry puzzle. They would have to fit tightly. After ten minutes I had assembled twenty stones ranging from the size of my hand to the size of a shoe box. I anchored the larger ones in shallow holes I dug in the streambed, and then filled the gaps between, fitting progressively smaller stones into progressively smaller chinks. My hands froze wax white, but after an hour I had made a curved dam about fourteen inches high and two feet across. It looked well constructed, and I was proud of my work.
The stream didn’t notice it, though. The water slithered and shimmied through, undismayed. It didn’t rise in the basin at all.
But, I warned the stream affectionately, we hominids are very smart. We have clever minds and clever fingers! I collected still smaller rocks and wedged them into still smaller holes until I was working with pebbles the size of lima beans. I didn’t hope to make a miniature waterfall over the top, just to delay the flow enough to fill the basin to maybe eight inches deep—enough to dip the jugs or my big pot into and not have to ladle them full. But still the water refused to tarry.
Taking a cruder approach, I heaped gravel and sand on both sides of the dam. The water tarried for a few moments and then simply, cheerfully removed the gravel and kept going. So I gathered leaves, reasoning that the leaf membranes would span gaps and be pressed against them by water pressure and thereby seal the dam. They did—a little, for a while. Before long, the water had discovered all the gaps and lifted things away here and there, and the net gain in the basin was no more than an inch.
I kept at it for another hour before I understood that water’s fingers were far cleverer than mine. The water seemed newborn, so clear and quick, but it knew its job well. I was a rube, a dude, and this lithe, innocent silver snake had billions of years’ experience moving with gravity and meticulously probing everything it encountered and passing through every obstacle. The insight resonated deeply in me. The elements are subtle and profound and ancient and powerful. At this epiphany, the pieces of the world slid into a kind of order and provided a perspective of my own being and nature in relation to the world. It was both humbling and strengthening.
The next day, it rained and the stream swelled so that on the day after, when I visited the dam there was no indication that anyone had tried to build anything on the spot. I recognized a couple of my largest stones a few yards downstream. Even a little stream has unexpected muscle not to be underestimated.
Only later did I encounter the real force of Vermont’s hill waters, when an unusually heavy thunderstorm washed a four-foot diameter, twenty-two-foot-long corrugated culvert out of one of Brassard’s logging trails on the property’s east side. That stream, bigger than my spring but usually lazier, had become a car-size fist. It punched the culvert out of its position and tumbled it fifty feet downstream, leaving it cocked at a steep angle against a boulder. Earnest and Will and I dragged it back using the tractor’s winch. It took us all day to reseat the thing, and another few days to dump twenty yards of crushed rock and gravel on it to keep it there for another while.
So: humility. Brassard had suffered enough of it in his lifetime to be immune to notions about how spiritually cute it is when nature shows you you’re small and it’s big. Hail destroys your corn, cold ruptures the pipes from the well in the middle of winter when the ground’s too damn hard to dig them up, windstorms pull up sections of barn roof, ice brings down trees on the powerlines so there’s no electricity or phone for three or four days. It all costs money that isn’t there, requires time and energy you don’t have, and tests patience long since exhausted.
But I was still new enough and urban enough that I found it existentially reassuring. Earnest found my outlook amusing and made sure I knew it.
Chapter 14
I was nervous about meeting Will Brassard, because I was still terrified of Diz and because I didn’t know what judgments he might have of me as a result of my Great Betrayal.
I also knew myself as
