The MIll

The year the war began we were living in an old grist mill with a stonework dam and a big pond behind it where mink patrolled the banks and frogs kept me awake at night. It was one of the noisiest places I ever lived. You were never out of earshot of the sound of rushing water there --- a heavy and roaring in the spring freshets when a great fall of brown and silver pond washed over the dam, and a thin, icy trickle at the end of January when nothing but a narrow stream of water spilled through the rocks.

I moved there in late February when the ice was rough and one of my first introductions to the nature of the place occurred when I fell through the ice one afternoon skating on the stream above the pond. It was shallow and muddy and there was no harm done, and I skated home with wet socks. But this minor adventure marked the beginning of the spring breakup.

By early March the ice loosened and the waters of the dam began to roar, a sound which reached full crescendo by mid April, about the same time that the frogs began to call. The duck-like quack of the wood frogs calling from the surrounding forest was always the first, but spring peepers made up the bulk of the early spring chorus. This was followed in April by the long trill of toads, and then the twang of green frogs or pickerel frogs, and then the bird like call of the gray tree frogs in June, and then, finally, in July, the full chorus of jug-of-rum calls from the resident bullfrog population. These carried on for the whole summer, and their nightly calling filled the sultry air; there was not a room in the mill that you could escape them.

This was an obscure little mill at the bottom of a dead end road on an obscure little stream that fed into and unrecognized river whose only claim to history was that the American Impressionist painter Child Hassam once did an oil of its only bridge. I lived there with my brother, who was the one who had rented the place, and as soon as the weather warmed, I began poking around the stream bed and the pond shores. One day on one of these outings, I found a leghold trap, which, somewhat ungraciously, I sprung. I had seen the little darting forms of mink along the pond shores and hated to think of them struggling bravely there so close to the water's edge. Green herons used to stalk the shores as well, once an osprey dove down into the middle of the pond, and came up empty, and shaking its feathers, and one evening I heard the distinct, pumping call of an American bittern. Barn swallows nested in an old unused section of the mill building, and every evening in summer they would skim over the pond waters along with tree swallows and bank swallows.

Summer was the season of the turtles as well as swallows. I'd see many painted turtles; once in winter I saw a wood turtle swimming under the ice, and periodically I would spot the great primordial head of a huge snapper who lived there and whose children, presumably, I found later in the year in September, dashing along down the middle of the little dead end road. Fat bodied water snakes patrolled the shallow waters, and periodically I was able to catch the fine tuned little ribbon snakes that hunted along the pond shores.

But always in the background of these little discoveries there was the sound of running water. By mid September the flow dwindled to a steady, narrow stream that cut through the race and barely arched over the stonework. But with the coming of the autumn rains, the waters increased. Leaves drifted over the dam, the swallows had long flown south, and one by one the other birds disappeared from the pond and the dam. Last to go was a little phoebe that nested in the mill under some eves. It hung around until December, snatching insects on the sunny side of the building.

The frogs were long quiet by then, and nightlong now we heard only the rush of the waters, and the occasional night call of a goose, or the caterwauling of barred owls from the swampy woodlands beyond the pond.

There was a late northeaster that autumn that broke off a new passage in the dam so that the waters ran out with more force than ever and by winter, the pond used this breach as it main course. With January, everything stilled down into silent ice, and before the spring break up, I moved on.