I notice the obvious great pluton every time I come to Tansy Town, but there are times when I almost don’t. Times when I virtually forget to see it soaring there. A day may come when I’ll forget it’s here. The residents, the neat-housed residents, do they ever forget? Is it possible to become so used to a silent great being in our midst that we forget its presence?
And, do the inhabitants become so inured to the pervading papermaking atmosphere on these dim stench-struck days—inured to what smells like vulcanized pulp soup—that they forget they’re smelling it?
I finally got my peak at the Pluton from side streets of the neighborhood. It rose steeply in chinks between houses. Then I realized what I was looking for, why I was wandering here, why I like exploring Tansy Town. I had been climbing the feet of the pluton ever since leaving my car at A gate. As I neared the town center it overshadowed brick Bartlett school, the shops and post office, the onion-dome Orthodox Church. Its steep rock face, somber, bare and substantial, was here before the city, before people arrived. And it will be here after Tansy Town and the corporation are gone.
The Pluton
Sour thoughts and careless deeds accumulate slowly, inadvertently, over time. This process tends to erode our spiritual heritage. It snowed glaciers in northern New England. Monstrous glaciers, ten thousand feet high. A slow accretion of tiny individual snow flakes. Glaciers, forgetful of places they covered. But underneath they ground away; breaking, crushing, abrading.
D. B. Wight, on the history of the upper Androscoggin, says that the town (pronounced BUR-lun by everyone here) was named for Germany’s capital. New Hampshire’s neighboring state—to the east—is full of international names: China, Peru, Lisbon, Rome, Lebanon, Madrid, Norway, Sweden, Mexico . . . Mexico, Maine?
Wight wrote that Tansy Town was originally called Maynesborough, after Sir Maynes, an English grant owner. First settled by Bethel Mainers, as time went on, its people became disgruntled with things colonial and English. So, when the town was incorporated, its settlers chose the German capital—something for the disgruntlement of their descendants, around the time of the First World War.
The valley along the Androscoggin, in that part becoming Maynesborough, then Berlin, was first inhabited by Abenakis. Their village street was lined with castoff jasper, mined from a nearby jasper cave and worked into points. This jasper was lustrous, brindled with brown and red. In this type of crystal the structure is so well hidden it can’t be detected with a regular microscope. This ecologically harmonious Abenaki communal society was agrarian—hunter-gatherer, able to survive graciously by picking up and utilizing what was needed from forest, river, rock. The first meat of each seasonal hunt was given away entirely. This was how they cared for their infirm, needy, those widowed, without family. They entertained and taught their generations with stories of their mythic hero, Gluskap. White settlers who supplanted them discovered that captive white women would not be sexually molested.
Eventually the valley of the Androscoggin, where the town hunkers, became a “city” of the wilderness. As logging center, its river transported hundreds of thousands of acres-full, northward, cut to supply hungry new mills. Trees fell like snowflakes; large farms were installed to feed loggers and their draft teams. In the late eighteen hundreds one mill ground thirty million log feet to pulp each year; 86,400,000 square feet of newsprint were produced every day. Each spring a bristling river of logs, the Androscoggin gorged with whole spruce forests, ground its way southward through the valley. Eastward the village of Grafton, Maine sent its logs and pulpwood via the railroad through Success Township to those pulp grinders and all-consuming paper machines. Whole villages—with sewers, electricity, phones, stores and homes—villages such as Hastings on the Wild River over the border in Maine, were bought and sold on the basis of timber. Not since the glaciers had the land known such voracious use.
One morning while in the Eastern Depot (doing laundry and already in a sweat) I realized I did not know the name of the Pluton. I asked the first customer who walked in. She was from away, didn’t know, but thought maybe the owner—a French woman—would know. I walked into the restaurant to ask. I wanted to know how high it was too. There followed a quest for information that led me to waitresses, kitchen help, blue collar workers, the librarian, and finally the fire department.
Along with a clatter of tableware from the kitchen came some names, Mt. Forest and Mt. Jasper. I remembered then the smaller mountain across the narrow valley from the pluton. Wasn’t Cates Hill fledging off this mountain? At the counter of the Depot restaurant there was momentary confusion as to which was which. Finally it was determined that my pluton was Mt. Forest. But no one knew its elevation.
Later, on the other side of the river, the librarian, alerted to my search by a phone call from the Depot kitchen, turned out to be helpful and pregnant. She checked the town’s history booklets without success, then to my surprise she called the fire department. While she was talking, a friendly sort who had recently moved from the Catskills suggested checking the Appalachian mountain guide. This had not occurred to me—possibly because I thought of Mt. Forest as a city fixture? Yet now the fire department came through, the librarian writing down the elevation, along with that of neighboring Mt. Jasper: Mt. Forest 2,046 feet, Mt. Jasper 1,621. And yes, the latter communed with Cates Hill and the terraced neighborhood I had first collected—where homeowners were diligently painting their trim.
The Pluton now had a wonderful grip on me: each new tidbit of knowledge made me hope for more. I now wanted to know if a trail ascended it. The librarian knew but vaguely of one. Something about going to the head of a street, one of many dead-ending on the feet of the Rock. She was unsure which street; pointed out a couple possibilities from a yellowing map on the wall.
On my way to the car I determined to find that trail, even if I could do nothing with it. There was yet the wondering if anyone in Tansy Town knew much about the most striking piece of geology I had ever seen in such a setting. (Imagine looking down on the toy-filled world at some lost gemstone—crusted in lichen—in a box of children’s play jewels.)
But was today the day to begin exploration? With mounds of work still to do on the old apples, my day was already stoked with heat. The image of Allen . . . faithfully working away beneath paper machines in industrial 120 F. heat . . .
Would need plenty of water for any climb; my thermos in the car was empty of the morning’s iced coffee. Then I spied the fire station across the street.
Well. I had been curious about it . . .
I filled my thermos from a spigot inside the station. The bespectacled, round, stolid-looking fireman sat at his kitchen table behind the shining engines, cup in hand. He knew enough about Mt. Forest to prove a creditable guide, but it was his stolidity that secured me. He knew the mountain by snowmachine: a network of trails interlaced on the backside. In answer to my question about time and distance, he said it would take a couple of hours to climb on foot. He glanced out the window and cautioned that it looked like a storm brewing just beyond the summit. I saw the pluton backed by turbulent darkness. But now I had more than I came for: unlooked for directions to a backside trailhead down the highway; I thanked him and headed for my car.
The storm-brew counseled patience so I drove around looking for two trails—those suggested by the librarian and fireman. Driving, I craned my neck to look up at mysterious Mt. Forest. What would this town, the river and pulp mill, the surrounding mountains look like from up there? Set in the White Mountains; eastward the Maine Mahoosucs; all part of the great batholithic mystery, and the Appalachian chain. This 2,000 ft. Tansy Town pluton was but a nubble of the great whole.
I drove out Route 110 looking for the Budweiser distributorship—one of the fireman’s landmarks . . . Ah. His trail shot up away from the highway, filled with square rocks the size of softballs and basketballs. It looked like a landslide leading down from disaster. I glanced higher and saw that darkness was moving off from the hill, leaving the air stagnant but undisturbed. Yet I could not devote four hours for a round-trip to this climb. Drove back to town, easing the car up and down steep back