“There exists a Kitchy Springs town hall,” announced Dad for about the fifth time, “on the map. Right off the Overpass.”
“That would make too much sense,” from Mom.
“That town hall,” I said again, “will turn out to be something like a trailer up on blocks. I want to go straight to the source.”
I had the snow globe on the seat beside me and Feldspar was acting as though she had only one job from now on which was to keep her head pointed in the direction of Kitchy Springs. My trombone case was on the floor at my feet.
“It’s marked as Tabletop State Forest land,” said Dad, believing some old misinformation as we pulled into an empty dirt-and-gravel parking lot.
“It’s privately owned now,” I reminded him.
“This parking lot leads to another parking lot,” said Mom, heading up a grassy S-shaped side road like she knew what she was doing.
“It’s owned by the Cusaki people,” I reminded her.
“They obviously expect,” said Mom cheerfully while steering, “a little traffic in tourism.”
“A very little traffic,” mused Dad. The upper lot had a single vehicle parked in it, an old Ford truck that looked as though it had picked up and put down a few hundred thousand dirty loads in its long working life. Once upon a time it might have been fire-engine red like my hair, but now it was a dusty rusty case study in pocks and scrapes and accumulated automotive war wounds. Its bed contained wooden boxes of wrenches.
“Whose truck this is I think I know,” said Dad as we parked. He was mocking the first line of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and inviting us to play the game of continuing the lampoon.
“His gun is in his bunker, though,” supplied Mom as we got out. She and Dad were smirking. They played this kind of game a lot, horsing around in a literary vein. How could I not pick it up? Out of a sense of daughterly duty, I finished the quatrain:
“He will not mind my stopping by
To watch the Kitchy waters flow.”
That was not bad, I thought, even though Dad and Mom seemingly wanted to peg the truck driver as a trigger-happy backwoods menace.
“The Springs will be above us.” I pointed to the obvious path. It went about a quarter mile uphill through some thick and untidy woods. The air in there got quiet. You could tell the land was basically a pile of stone rubble with thousands of years of dirt and trees now rounding its stairsteps. We came to the base of a modest slope where balsam fir and red spruce seemed to fall back willingly to allow a theater to be cupped out of the forest, and down this rocky face the Kitchy came sparkling. It was not exactly a wonder of white water, but the thing making it prettier than a hundred other forest streams, I say again, was the way it forked into three cascading rivulets at the top of the slope. Their streams rejoined at the bottom in a pool that drained away toward the Tabletop Creek which in turn would leak into the Connecticut River which in turn would eventually find its way to Long Island Sound. We walked up the hill in silence. The path was easy on the feet, with ferns and moss spread out like a picnic blanket at the top. Only after a moment of distraction did we realize that a fourth person was present with us there, a man standing so still amid a triangle of sheltering pines that we might have missed him if he hadn’t spoken.