“The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew.” Bob Dylan “Tangled Up In Blue”
Our two weeks in Maine were nostalgic and new. Old friends, encounters with abundant wildlife, vistas that cause me to catch my breath at any moment around any corner.
Early one morning we were sitting with three of our granddaughters on the little beach on Webb Lake in front of their camp, when all three yelled out something like “Whoa.” A bald eagle was pumping hard and powerfully to regain altitude with water dripping from its wingtips, rising from the lake with a fish in its talons. One of the many of various species of ducks we like watching there was beating wings furiously in the other direction from the same point of origin, clearly panicked. I wasn’t sure of the species since it was moving away with undue haste. The duck flew startlingly fast and low, barely clearing the water’s surface.
The girls told us the eagle had stolen the fish from the duck. Probably it was a merganser if that was what happened, since they will eat larger than the other common ducks on the lake like mallards and wood ducks. The eagle may have plunged while hunting right next to the shocked duck. Mary told us from “Wild Kratts”[i] that bald eagles prefer fish above all other prey. The duck was fortunate that the eagle’s culinary preferences did not include waterfowl that morning, and a full grown duck would be a talon full for an eagle. Eagles don’t often miss what they spot to eat. Their diving into the water is fast and deadly. It was an indelible moment, unrecorded as my phone was back in the camp. That’s all right, maybe as it should be. The image remains.
A couple of evenings later we were driving back from our almost nightly visit to Center Hill lookout over the lake (panorama above); as we were passing through the center of town (one store), a pair of white tail deer jumped in front of us. We always travel slowly while going through town and were easily able to avoid a collision. The buck with the rack was chasing the doe; neither were as large as they can be. But perfect, tawny, sinewy, beautiful. We looked over to the small field adjacent to the house on our right. The flirting couple were dancing, bumping, playing, cavorting, four legged straight up hops in sheer fun, oblivious to our observing them. It was a joyful moment but remains unrecorded as my phone was in my pocket. That’s all right, maybe as it should be. The image remains.
“I ain’t got no window, ain’t got no door
But I can feel sun shinin’ where it’s never shined before, never shined before
Feel sun shinin’ where it’s never, never shined before
But I’m still climbing up the mountain side
You can’t count me out
Long as I got my heart and soul
I got everything, I got everything I need
Everything I need.” Keb’ Mo’, “Everything I Need”
The temptation is to idealize Maine and idealizing is not without some justification, but that would be trivializing and unfair. Unfair to the wonder of the place and the variety of its people, unfair to anyone reading this. Like most stories, it’s more complicated than that.
Cannabis stores seem to be everywhere now. I counted at least two dozen of them. In the city. In small towns. Along country roads. Most of them look shiny, have professional logos and signage, and have more than a few cars in the parking lot. When we lived here so many years ago, weed was illegal, and weed was everywhere too, but it was in service of a rebellious panache, a naïve ‘rebellion.’ Many I knew grew their own in their garden or up in a hidden clearing behind the house. Almost everyone I knew rolled a joint or picked one out of a bowl at a party from time to time: back to the land hippies, local town young people, artisans, poets, and professionals. So did I, for a while, but I gave it up in my late twenties; an occasional recreational hobby began in Boulder a couple of thousand miles west of Maine and ended in Mount Vernon. No single, articulated reason to stop; it just didn’t seem worth the lethargy in the morning. A casual quit.
Now that cannabis is commercialized on nearly every corner, smoking weed has lost its outlaw attraction and sunk into just another way to get high on Saturday night. Or Tuesday. Along streets in clapped out mill towns that no longer have a mill, next to the prosperous cannabis storefronts, idle men and women slump on the wooden stairways of three story faded tenements with despairing faces staring vacantly back – prematurely aged with few signs of hope.
“I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but go get stoned
Let the past paint pictures through my head
Might drink a fifth of Thunderbird and try to write a sad song
Tell me baby why you been gone so long.”
“Why You Been Gone So Long,” Mickey Newbury, Eleven Hundred Springs
On a whim coming back to the lake from church, we decided to explore some roads we hadn’t driven in decades, taking a longer way home through the hills. We took the Temple Road, and dead reckoning navigation told me that we could find a shorter way home from Temple once we got there.
But I’ve grown citified and dead reckoning made me nervous where once it would not have been so. Google Maps solved that, and sure enough it highlighted the most direct route back to Webb Lake. We struck out resolutely on the Intervale Road, turned north on Day Mountain Road, which ran into Jackson Mountain Road. Somewhere along the Day Mountain Road, we ran out of pavement, but that didn’t discourage us. Roads in Maine in rural areas frequently turn to well-maintained gravel roads where cars routinely travel at forty five miles per hour.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t Jackson Mountain Road. Hard packed smooth gravel road became loose gravel road, washed out in ten foot fissures, but able to be negotiated on one side or the other at ten miles per hour – too narrow for two cars to safely pass. Then more washed out, but barely navigable with great care. Five miles per hour. The slope got close to forty five degrees-not straight up, but it felt like it. The camps were fewer and sketchier or abandoned. Finally, the camps ran out and a handwritten “dead end” sign was tacked to a tree.
My trust in Google Maps was shaken, but not stirred. It was always reliable, right? I was still on the blue lighted way. Local signage must be wrong or outdated. What do people who live here know that surpasses the AI wizard behind the black curtain? I kept going. Rita was increasingly skeptical. Finally at the top of a very steep almost impassible run of a quarter mile, a culvert was completely gone, replaced by a four foot drop across the road. Fortunately backing down the hill fifty feet or so, there was a turnaround. Slowly back to Intervale Road and turned left towards the town of Strong. A bit to eat at the good general store there across from the large factory making fuel for pellet stoves. Finally, paved state highway two lane roads all the way to the north end of Webb Lake.
Rita, as I have often given her cause to be, was patient, albeit with a sly smile or two on the way back.
“Then we’re rollin’ on
Rollin’ on
Feeling, better
Than we did last night
Rollin’ on rollin’ on
It’s hard sometimes, but
Pretty much it’s alright.” “Rollin’ On,” Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler
The day before we packed up for home, we drove over more excellent back roads to our old hometown in Mount Vernon, about a fifty minute pretty ride through hills, farms, and lake country. I was reminded of why I love this place so much. On the shore of Lake Minnehonk downtown in the building where we once went to pick up our mail, there now is the Post Office Café and Bakery. We met friends from nearly fifty years ago, Alan and Donna, for breakfast. An outstanding place, we sat at a clear finished maple table by the back windows and looked where I walked out one frozen night to do battle in what became known as the Swordfight on the Lake.[ii]
We are decades older now than when Donna used to come over to our place to watch our kids for a few hours two afternoons a week. Rita was working as a labor and delivery nurse forty minutes away in Augusta part time from three to eleven. I was on the road for a commercial lumber company and got home about six most nights. Donna’s kids, Autumn and Oak, would play with our first two, Amy and Gabriel, while Donna lovingly minded everyone at our house until I pulled in. Autumn was the plague of Gabe’s elaborate Lego creations. She delighted in destroying them. Good memories now.
At the Post Office Café, two hours passed in a moment, the conversation picked up as if it was forty years ago. Alan is a successful serial entrepreneur who grew up in Mount Vernon. Back in the seventies, he had a chainsaw and a log cutting business with skidders and trucks. Buying the rights to clear somebody’s woodlot and selling the product to local sawmills and paper mills. Poplar to the paper mills, hemlock, spruce, and pine to be sawn into boards. Hard work. Brutal work only for the strong. Later he slightly altered course and became a skilled contractor. Alan still builds custom homes for folks in the area. He starts with a wooded, difficult lot, and ends with a beautiful structure to provide shelter for his clients.
We laughed, got quiet, remembered, talked again. Caught up. Told stories. One favorite was about the time Alan came into Rita’s flu clinic when she was serving as the town health officer. A rough flu year, and the vaccine was causing some severe and notorious reactions that year. All the old folks in the folding chairs were nervous. Alan, who looked like he could bench press a Buick, lined up, got jabbed, took two steps, spun around, and dramatically crashed through some chairs to the floor in front of the horrified onlookers. Rita ran over to him. Only she recognized that prostrate Alan was quivering, and his shoulders were shaking. As he laughed. She compounded the confusion in the room by kicking him and calling him a decidedly uncivil name.
We talked of kids and grandkids, joys and disappointments. About local people we once knew well, many no longer above the ground. Nostalgic and new. Enjoyed the food and the company immensely. Reconnected seamlessly.
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
[1] “Anecdote” is derived from the Greek “anekdota” meaning “things unpublished.
[i] For those without kids around, “Wild Kratts” is a popular partially animated children’s program that teaches them love for and knowledge of many wildlife species.
[ii] https://quovadisblog.net/2022/09/18/swordfight-on-the-lake-redux/
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