Pond’s pleasures inspire essays

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or that have other local ties.

A PLACE ON WATER: ESSAYS” by Robert Kimber, Wesley McNair, Bill Roorbach; Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine, 2003; 130 pages, paperback, $12.95.

Ah, to have a cottage on the lake. Lounging under the pines. Swimming in midsummer heat. Drinking beer in the evening and chatting with neighbors about poetry.

This is the idyllic world of Drury Pond west of Farmington (or is it east of Eden?), according to “A Place on Water,” a book of three essays by Robert Kimber, Wesley McNair and Bill Roorbach. McNair is a professor in the English department of the University of Maine at Farmington, where Roorbach, the author of the novel “Big Bend,” also taught for some years in the 1990s. Kimber is an environmentalist and author of “Upcountry: Reflections from a Rural Life,” recollecting his two decades living on a farm in Temple, the town containing Drury Pond.

The pond gives all three writers plentiful material for their ruminations on the summer side of Maine, a kind of writing that is almost a literary genre of its own representing the state as a sort of Down East paradise, for about three months out of 12, anyway.

The central theme of the three essays is Drury Pond’s pleasures. Each writer details his desire to have a place to get away from it all, and each expresses great comfort in the others’ help in making the desire come true. Kimber explains how he helped McNair scout and eventually buy a cottage on the shore, and McNair is pleased by Kimber’s and Roorbach’s company, as fellow aficionados of solitude and poetry. Roorbach appreciates being allowed to partake of the pond’s gratifications even though he technically has no shorefront rights.

In all three essays is the gauzy, happy sense that the pond is a sort of Walden, where man meets nature – or rather, where man escapes from civilization, which, it turns out, begins at the permanent homes a mile or two up the road, about the same distance Thoreau was from Concord. McNair in “Ship, Dream, Pond, Talk” specifically pictures his cottage as a literary retreat, and at one

point compares the possible world at Drury Pond to what life must have been like at Robinson Jeffers’ tower in Carmel, Calif., hoping the pond will inspire poetic thoughts similar to those the natural beauty of California inspired in the evanescent Jeffers.

There is, however, the constant threat of civilization: “I can’t help but wonder if what happened around Jeffers’ house [the encroachment of the city] will one day happen around ours on Drury Pond, free as the pond now is of jet skis.” The pressure of reality may be too great for the world dreamed of by the poet, but this discomfort is soon forgotten as the essay continues its meander along the summer lakeshore until it softly stops.

Much the same scenery is described in the first essay, Kimber’s “Drury Pond: An Idyll,” and much the same attraction to it is expressed. Kimber, too, frets a bit about what he imagines might go wrong – future neighbors might be too numerous or (worse) too loud or (still worse, apparently) undisposed to appreciate the beauty the same way he and his friends appreciate it.

Kimber has a picture in his mind of the way life should be, and it is in general not the way the world is. And so his pond is quite a frail place, on which is pinned his desire for a paradise not much different from the one conjured in wall-calendar photos of Camden in mid-July.

Roorbach’s “Cowbirds” fantasizes less and narrates more than the other two essays. It is a genial report of canoeing and swimming excursions, more like the nature essays of Edward Abbey and Gretel Ehrlich than a reverie of summer Maine. Roorbach is skilled at crisply, affably naming what he saw and did, and his essay evokes a good-natured feeling for the pond without getting mired in philosophic conjectures he isn’t disposed to handle.

Of the three essays, Roorbach’s creates the most convincing air of appreciation for nature. It’s a whole, tight piece of writing which, unlike its two companions, doesn’t wander, and is a nice performance of its kind. But it must be said that none of the three measures to a literary benchmark such as E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.”

“A Place on Water” is a book to read when winter can no longer be borne, or when the bugs aren’t too bad and you can doze off in the hammock, probably never realizing you’ve fallen asleep. – by Dana Wilde

AMOS AND HANNAH: A MAINE MYSTERY, by Elizabeth McKey Hulbert, Xlibris. 106 pages, $20.99.

Maine islands appear to be custom-made settings for young adult mysteries, if the number of new titles each year is any indication. What better locale, after all, for junior sleuths and mysterious strangers than a sea-girt Down East isle? Add a budding artist, a bird carver and a lobster thief to the mix and you have Elizabeth Hulbert’s contribution to the genre, a diverting tale full of intrigue and Maine coast flavor.

Hannah Cummings is a young Great Islander with a talent for watercolor. One day she meets up with Amos Boseman, an older, somewhat peculiar gentleman, who has taken up off-season residence in a converted fish house. Admiring her work, Boseman offers to give Hannah some “pointers on painting.” They are, as it turns out, birds of a feather.

Hannah is a philosophical, moody girl. “How much simpler life would be,” she wonders, “if one were a cat … or a gull … or a crow … and happiness a question of whether the mussel shell would break on the rock … or the mouse be too slow to scuttle into the safety of his hole.” Boseman, too, is something of a loner, an ex-alcoholic with a tragic past who finds comfort creating birds out of wood. He recruits Hannah to paint his creations and eventually they become partners in art.

Hulbert draws her characters with care, each individual adding to the colorful cast. Hannah’s little sister Sally is especially winning, by virtue of her antics and the charming way she mixes up words. “If I’m a defective, what should I do?” she asks Hannah after lobsters are stolen from an island fisherman.

At one point in the narrative, Hannah accompanies Boseman and friends of his on a boat trip to Southwest Harbor to visit the Wendell Gilley Museum. Hulbert puts in a nice plug for the famous real-life bird carver and the handsome museum that displays his work (readers who know the Gilley Museum will recognize the “young curator” who greets the visitors in the foyer).

As a special rapport develops between Hannah and Amos, family affairs, football games on the mainland and various romances keep the plot moving along. Some of the transitions and revelations toward the end seem a bit awkward, but the author’s ear for language and brisk prose overcome any lapses in what is an entertaining whodunit.

Hulbert, who lives on Mount Desert Island, is a seasoned writer, with several children’s books and feature magazine publications to her name. “Amos and Hannah” is a nice addition to her list of credits, a perfect curl-up read on a damp summer day.

THE JOURNEY OF THE LITTLE RED BOAT, by George Smith, Smith Publishing, Lambertville, N.J., 2003, $16.95.

When George Smith found a red rowboat floating free down the Medomak River, he found his inspiration. Smith, the grandson of children’s book author George Henry Smith, decided to write his own children’s book, “The Journey of the Little Red Boat.”

Although he lives in New Jersey, Smith has Maine “cred.” Two grandparents grew up in Fryeburg and a third in Thomaston, a descendant of the sailmaking Dunn clan. He can trace his roots back to several Thomaston sea captains and spends each summer in Medomak.

For expertise on children’s books I lean on Matthew Vanderzee, who has just reached the wonderful age of 5. When I read the book to this grandson on his birthday, he was transfixed from start to finish. I found the tale of a boat that blows away from its original home, only to find love and acceptance with a new family, to be a little sad, a little wistful. But I bow to Matthew’s superior powers in these areas. – by Emmet Meara