This is the 6th in a series of pieces about Mere Brook, Brunswick’s urban stream. The town has a Maine DEP grant to plan for the brook’s improvement, with a goal of bringing it from “urban-impaired” status to Class B. Though the nearby Androscoggin is much larger and more famous, Mere Brook is truly of Brunswick. It is our aquatic bloodstream; it is the brook that runs through us.

“First, you want to clean the strings of the mesh bag into the bucket, so that any critters living there get counted back in the lab. Then, you want to scrape each stone clean into the bucket as well.” I look up at my two rock-bag mentors, water quality biologists from Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP); I look back at the mesh bag and the 30-or-so rounded cobbles. Kristen and Jeff seem serious, I think. Clean every string and stone; save what’s there. I look back up; they’re both smiling. “Get comfy,” Jeff says. “It takes a while.”

Comfy. I’m perched on the grassy bank of Mere Brook where it parses the high forest as it nears head of tide. A foot of water covers my feet and a gray, plastic bucket is wedged between them. In the bucket, which has a fine mesh bottom that lets only the water out, is a DEP rock-bag just retrieved from a 4-week immersion in the brook. Back in mid-July we bore twelve of these bags, each weighing 15 – 20 pounds to 4 brook-sites. We’re back now to find out what and who may have taken up residence in these bags. In a healthy stream, I’ve been told and read, such rock-bags become macroinvertabrate condos, teeming with little lives; in a stressed, degraded stream those lives are fewer. Or, sometimes, absent altogether.

The point then will be to save and then later count the diversity and density of the bags’ condo-dwellers. “Who lived there?” a biologist peering through a microscope back in the lab will ask. But before that moment, the “critters” must be collected from the strings and stones in the bucket at my feet, then transferred to a Ball jar and “pickled” with alcohol. “Sorry, guys,” I say to the little critters I can’t see. “It’s all for the greater brook-good.”

Some hours back, at the outset of this August day, we gathered at the old Naval Air Station gate (locked) that divides Purinton Road from…Purinton Road. At some point in a unified future, the gate and its wire-topped fencing will go away, and the land will run as it will, slightly downhill from this site toward Merriconeag Stream, which runs then into Mere Brook.

On this foray, we are six — a professional crew of 3 from Maine DEP’s watershed group (Kristen, Jeff and Amanda), Brunswick’s town planner and brook study coordinator (Jared), MMRA’s site manager (Ben), and me, general hanger-about and your scribe. We are joined by heavy-handed heat and a whine of eager mosquitoes; I, for one, am sure I look like a major prize in the mosquito lottery.

It has taken us some time to get to my brookside seat on the bank with my bucket of macrointvertabrate-booty between my feet. The woods we’ve bushwhacked are high and grand enough to pass for apex-woods, and, as underline we’ve come upon fresh (very) moose sign. We could be “out there” instead of a mere fraction of a mile from Brunswick Landing’s bustle. That’s part of the magic of this little brook that would run wild.

I lift another cobble from my bucket. It’s furred slightly with growth, which I rub into the water. The stone, rounded, washed and weighing a pound fits snugly in my hand. Streaks of green-tinged light fall through the forest canopy;

the brook burbles a bit around my feet, and time’s linear nudge vanishes.

I choose another stone, wash it, then repeat. And repeat. Even the mosquitoes seem entranced. Only the slow shift of shade and light marks time.

Later, as we lug our cleaned rock-bags and Ball jar samples from the watershed woods, I feel a little more of this place, a little more connected to the brook’s and my lives. A rock-bag, it turns out, holds more than a bag of rocks.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.