弗朗西斯·拉塞爾/Francis Russell
On this waning autumn afternoon the northern Maine landscape is tart, compelling, shadowed here and there by puffs of fair-weather cumulus, remnants of summer. Here, a dozen miles west of Waldoboro, I once spent my summers from the age of 12 to 14 at one of those Indian-named boys'camps-more years ago than I like to think about.
I stand on the rise near what was once the baseball diamond. To my right is the black oak, several hundred years old, beside which we used to hold our Saturday night campfires. How many times on heat-heavy August days have I stood on this rise looking out over the wooded landscape toward the Camden hills?For me it was always a magical prospect, the austere countryside stretching away with the sharp definition of an 18th-century aquatint across hill and woodland to Mt. Battie outlined against the horizon. At our campfire evenings, when we gathered around the great oak just after sunset, Mount Battie without losing its definition would take on a blue luminosity.
Over the years a ragged second-growth of aspen and birch and speckled alder, at the far edge of the baseball diamond, has blotted out that view. Now there is nothing to see beneath the crystalline sky but the uneven tops of second-growth trees. Already the sky has begun to taken on the steelier tints of winter. Even Mt. Battie has disappeared.
On sultry afternoons, when the air quivered in the cool and fading light of early evening, I used to stand here by the old oak and look out across an interlude of scrub and swamp from which several miles away, a hill emerged. As a hill it was insignificant enough. Below its bare summit an abandoned pasture lay dotted with ground juniper and outcroppings of granite. Yet something about that hill drew me, beckoned to me, across the miles. I could not bear to take my eyes from it, I knew only that before summer ended I must go to it, make my way over the pasture, up and up past shrub and granite until I stood on the very summit. It was something I had to do. I could not explain why. I did not even ask myself.