Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 6 8 ooking back on it, I can barely remember the contours of Wolcott Pond, and sadly, these 15 years later I might not even be able to find the place. It's disconcerting to remember a place in the gut but to realize that the details have been lost beneath the detritus of age and memory. But the feeling always comes to me this time of year, when the sun takes a shallow path across the late-summer sky, and I recall the image of one magnificent fish and sunlight sifting through fir boughs and the certainty that something was soon to be lost. I was house-sitting at Ann and Dave's that summer, as they had taken North on another of their long journeys into Labrador. Much to my surprise, they'd asked me to watch over the place: the garden, the house, the wood-fire cook stove, and Tobey, the aging Brittany. Even I was skeptical of my ability to keep house, just an 18-year-old kid after all and none too responsible by any account. As they pulled onto the dirt road and honked a goodbye, Tobey raised his head and followed the engine noise. He whined once, looked at me, then dropped his head on his outstretched legs. Soon all sound of the car disappeared, leaving only a breeze in the grass of the sheep pasture. Somehow, though, despite the silence, the end of a season clattered to the ground all around us. I sat down. With a hand on Tobey's head, I leaned back against the fence. Vermont's seasons probe the boundaries of possibility, much as the Green Mountains push at the northern borders of our country. A summer in Vermont is condensed into a wildly succulent couple of months, when all living things fill to bursting on the lushness of the season. Love is made, offspring cast upon the wind or settled firmly in the belly, then it's over. Something shifts in August, foretelling the wood smoke and frost, a jubilation of color, then the clamp of winter over the hills. Summer is but a pair of glowing months, and I sat there drinking in the end of it, noting the metallic sadness that hinted at the coming fall. I'd fallen in love the previous year, with a girl I'd no more understood than deserved. She was, in fact, as lovely and fleeting as anything I'd yet known, with hair the color of oat-straw and a childlike, pigeon-toed gait. She was strong and blue-eyed; her name was Jackie. She came from a poor and proud and splintered family. Maybe it was this that I loved most, her willingness to look straight at the collapse of her people and still see beauty, to seek it in fact, in the simple designs all about us. We walked together over the dirt roads of the village, and we rejoiced in the grit of winter. She wrapped me in a blanket beside her on a north-facing hillside above Wolcott Pond one night, and introduced me to the Aurora Borealis. There, dancing somewhere over the water, reds and greens and honey-golds streaked down toward us, creating a light that cast its own shadows on the darkness. It was all so magical and so mysterious that it scared me a little, as I could no more make sense of this cataract of color than I could understand the girl whose hands were wrapped in mine. All I knew was that both were beautiful, and that neither were quite what they seemed. I opened my eyes when the sun dropped behind the trees. It was cooler. I was hungry, and Tobey and I walked up through the pasture and back toward the door. We went inside. Tobey ran right for his bowl and scratched the slate floor. A loaf of bread lay on the table, and I broke off an end for him. I chucked it in his bowl and he inhaled it and snuffled around for crumbs that were not there. I got a beer from the fridge and walked to the phone; I'd call Jackie to tell her that Anne and Dave were gone, and she should come down from her room on the Common. W e ran Tobey beside Wolcott Pond that evening, beneath a crisping twilight. The dustiness had left the air, edged out by a heavier chill. Bats and nighthawks swooped, circled, became a kaleidoscope of motion upon the purpling sky. Tobey drifted through the firs chasing intangibles, and emerged only to pounce amidst the wet hummocks of the pond edge. His purpose was more frivolous than mine. I walked beside Jackie near enough to feel her warmth, her closeness anyway. She never reached to take my hand, and I dared not force hers. I pointed out the places where the big bass lay, hoping words would fill the gulf, and wondered aloud where all the July fireflies had gone. Jackie shrugged, pulling her steps from the squelching mud. The space between us undermined our proximity. I reached out to her once and touched her hand as she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She stopped walking and looked at me, but somehow not with reassurance. She looked at me as if from a distance. I took my hand away. A bullfrog grumped from the muddy edges, and I turned toward it. The night was coming quicker now and engulfed the day in that glow of a moon just rising and a sun just set. I surveyed the shallows for the frog, looking for something real on which to focus while fear eddied in my heart. The water had achieved a cellophane skin. It grabbed the sky little moose lake by Thomas aquinas daly L