"Following an overgrown trail for a quarter of a mile
in a northerly direction we discovered and named the NORTH POOL
A dry time of the year, yet water was flowing
--there might even be fish--in the river,
which would be accessible to us at the old bridge site."

November, 2000–
      A brief widening appears in a rock-strewn stream nobody much knows about, or cares to. It's a dubious destination, protected by the nature of itself, far off through a scruffy woods. It is a spot unaccustomed to guests, so does not brighten the lights or turn up the music, or sully itself with corsets and cosmetics. It hasn't heard about cultural trends in the art of exotic tourist destination propaganda. It remains simply as is, a geographical bohemian.

      The North Pool is what it is, and graciously so. The scenery will not inspire Kodak Moments for most people. If you let it be it will speak dialogue you'll hear no place else. It will not lecture loudly or declare firmly with pestering shrill. And you won't hear it right away. It may take years and many visits before its voice can be heard. Then, if you care, you'll need to learn its old-fashioned dialect, regarded these days as quaintly dull. The North Pool does not indulge hurry-warts. Patience is tested and teased (to weed chaff from the grain), it's part of the wisdom. Like listening to English spoken through the foggy gauze of a thick Yiddish accent, repeated exposure teaches best.

      The North Pool became named (as do most worthy names) when an exasperated father blurted words in haste to an impatient little boy who wanted to know where he and his father were going through tangles of underbrush and doubt: "to The North Pool." It was north of where we were at that moment. Dad did not say it capitalized, but I heard it that way.

      That's all little boys usually need. It silenced my questions and kindled grand fantasy: drenching water falls and water slides and Moms with Kool-aid cups and rocky cliffs, amiable sunny skies and extravagant candy stands out the far side of meandering miles and thrashing branches and trip-sticks, and bare-naked witch trees swooping low to snatch away boys.

      The day was early December. Cloudy and cold. We came out of the trees to The North Pool. It was nothing except more of the same, merely a wide windy place of a shallow river where dirty jagged rocks gaped and frigid rootbeer water (another of Dad's coined phrases that stuck) hardly moved. Tag alders created claw-some barriers between us and the river and we plunged through to stand on mucky ooze and dirty stones laced with awful ice, fingers and cheeks tingling cold.

      Why did Dad bring me here!? This is an ugly hateful place with dead dingy leaves. It's dreary and cold and I want to go home.

      He knew more than I did. He did not take me there because he knew a fondness for this site would seep deep through the years. He took me there not for my benefit, but because it was what he wanted to do on that late afternoon in diminishing light; it filled his longing for quiet places, away from human score-keepers, far from the clamoring distractions of an impatient world.

      My God I hated that place, and the drab infinity of its remote pointlessness. I disliked being slapped in the face by stiff brushy branches and stumbling over rocks lurking beneath rotting gray foliage. I loathed the cold and lashing wind seething through bare branches and gray cloudy despair far from home where there was warmth and a comfortable toilet seat. And Mom, who loved me and would comfort Dad's mortifying torment.

      But I was betrothed.

      Through the years Dad continued to take me on walks through our forty acres, north along his blaze-painted trees and the surrounding endless miles of unbroken forest, pointing out differences between popple and birch, discovering bear sign and deer scat, observing to me the high sighing whispers of giant white pines, both of us exploding in simultaneous yelps when grouse erupted almost underfoot--wings booming, feathers fluttering. The seasons were balmy on these wanderings, leaves easing gold, the sky blue. We invariably passed on The North Pool path, detoured off to water's edge, sat on a log, listened to woodpeckers and chickadees and water burbling, or high flying geese fleeing roughly toward south. Sometimes he talked as we sat. Dad spoke with me, not at me, in a way he never did back in the city. He taught me things I needed to know.

      Pilgrimages to The North Pool were infrequent, once every year or two. The North Pool became the rest stop, an oasis to build a fire and dry out soaked gloves and heat a wiener in winter; a sitting spot or napping bank in September's warming sun when the insects were gone.

      Through the years I have visited Disney World's perfection, Niagara Falls' gaud and Yosemite's grandeur. I have warmed myself on Pensacola's snowy sand looked at Rockettes' legs and ogled San Francisco's bridge. All of the gorgeous attractions man and god hath wrought. They filled senses with extravagance but left me senselessly void, instant sensation with proximate expiration dates. Herded by guides and shouted by barkers, but no time to think. Press on, photograph this next view to savor later--no time for it now. Buy this, drink that, hurry-hurry-hurry!--next tour departs in less than four minutes! And from the folding chairs on the sightseeing deck I am told to observe limestone cliffs with ten-foot high announcements "Duke - 99" and "Dee Dee + Chad" spray-painted near the top and helicopters thumping close overhead, stenciled "Riverviews On High" to their sides, and gawkers leaning into bubble-fronted windshields and tumbling out through open sides, and jet boats roaring at sixty nearby. And the sensual stimulation hollers louder and faster, blotting out the mind, muting the soul, shouting it down, numbing me dormant for the sake of amusement and pleasure and rabid appetites unquenched.

      I feel differently about the North Pool forty years later. EZ and I stopped there a few days ago during a meandering walk. The water was low, jabbering and cooing as usual over rocky rapids. I sat on The North Pool Sitting Log--that name was established for eternity when my own son heard me use the phrase in a moment of hasty absent-minded answer two years ago. He capitalized each word by his own interpretation as though I'd intended it that way. Little has changed during all these years. The trees are stouter with fuller crowns at the tops and the witch trees aren't quite so severe. Nobody still goes there but me and a dog and a son or a daughter. Few know it's there, or care. It remains inaccessible by motor vehicle and seems poised to stay that way.

      And the water continues to chase the equator, a determined dawdle.

Six months later--

      I brought these words along last week to read aloud, and receive critique, if North Pool was willing. As I finished the second paragraph, it interrupted, and explained that it was not teaching, or telling me new things I didn't already know. It was only listening to my muse then repeating it, so I would hear what I hadn't been able to hear elsewhere. It has no agenda of its own, but to call out what is within. ~CM.

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