Country Lane

It doesn't wind, it doesn't feature ravishing dairy maids in verdant leas, it doesn't have towering English oaks sheltering the gentry from wind or heat or bumpkins in the fields, but I still like it, it's close to home and on a frigid January day, it's mine. And the dog's. We've completed two-thirds of the walk, and have turned east down Bay View Terrace. It's a lovely little road, maybe a quarter mile long, almost perfect in its ordinariness.

Between Cann's Beach Road to the north and Granite Point Road to the south, there's probably 100 acres of woods, broken only by the Macintosh's houses - parents' and daughter's - and their driveways and woodpiles plopped in the middle, and of course by Bay View. It's a normal woods, cut by deer paths, not very dense, brown and black deciduous and green evergreen and white birch, an owlish kind of place although I've seen but one here. There's a kind of meadow half-way down, made flatter and more obvious by the snow, which in summer is overgrown with scrub and fireweed. Besides the Mackintosh's, barely glimpsed even in winter, there are only two other houses, both near the end, both small, unprepossessing. (At the very end, the water spawns big ones.)

I stop dead, for no particular reason. Mia also freezes, expecting something to confront. In the crunching of boots (mine) against ice and snow, and the tinkling of a blue rabies tag (not mine) against collar I've failed to hear the thrilling silence of a woods in winter, so cold that wind is not allowed and animals are tucked away safe. Absolutely the only sound is a dog barking, and I know that dog, it lives on Granite Point a half mile away and it sounds like it's barking up that tree just over there. Everything is preternaturally clear: sound, silence, flaking birch bark, wisps of sea smoke on the bay, the cliffs of Vinalhaven which I can just barely see. And close: the cold is intimate, in your face and toes and lungs, heightening all sensation.

Most of the way down Bay View there's a curious little tableau that I've often wondered about, ascribed Victorian secrets and fantasies to. A small hut sits thirty feet off the road, falling down, windows broken, door barely attached and splintered. Yet it has dignity and style, a peaked roof, a large window looking into the woods. Across the road on the south side is a rectangular patch of open grass, now snow-covered, lined with blackberry bushes. Someone takes the trouble to keep it open, mowing the grass in summer. On the day after the death of Andrew Wyeth, I like to think that the hut was a studio, for a painter or a writer, and the patch his place to take the sun and inspiration, and the mower his ghost. I like to think he's there for the love of the ordinary.