Scouring the island for fallen limbs and driftwood, I >nd, in
the dry brush on the north end, a foot-long piece of a birch
branch one inch in diameter. Its bark is smooth and deep reddish brown. A beaver has sharpened one end to almost pencillike precision. It occurs to me that if my island were suddenly
besieged by, I don’t know, say, hostile seatbelt enthusiasts, this
sharpened birch branch might help stave o= an attack. I decide
to keep it in my tent, next to my sleeping bag.
I also >nd a piece of driftwood that looks as if it has been
deliberately sculpted into something that would not seem out of
place in a modern art museum. It has a kind of base and, as I
set it on the picnic table, it evokes something vaguely >gurative,
some prehistoric creature of the sea. A series of intricate, wavelike patterns weave across the dry, gray bark as if for years Lake
Umbagog has been writing its own autobiography on this soft,
impressionable wood. The piece of wood has been shaped by the
most elemental forces—wind and water, perhaps even >re—the
same forces that the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi
strove to emulate in his own work.
Guy Davenport has written, “What is most modern in our time
frequently turns out to be the most archaic.” It occurs to me that
this little piece of driftwood was fashioned by the most archaic
forces of all. Davenport further observed that our modern passion
for the archaic in art “is a longing for something lost, for energies,
values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an industrial age.”
This seems absolutely correct to me. I suppose it is the same longing that caused me to heave my canoe into the back of my truck
and drive halfway across the country to this lake, with its preindustrial solitude. Perhaps I came here to enact some urge buried
deep in my genetic past, and thus deep inside myself. A primitive
boat and a primitive paddle brought me to a campsite labeled as
“primitive” on my map. And here I feel I am at the source of
something. The source of the Androscoggin River, in fact, but also
the source of some unmediated, authentic experience.
