Maine Camps
Jerry and I left Brunswick in 1976 in a car leaking brake fluid. Things in the Brown household were less than perfect. It was good to be out of it and on the road. We headed northwest while a light autumn rain fell all along Maine's central highways. Plain country greeted us, patches of deciduous trees just beginning to change color, woods thrown across a landscape as flat as Kansas. In their midst, decaying paper mill towns offered polluted rivers and bad food; the inhabitants thought both were good enough. Further in, at Greenville, rich New Yorkers had arrived by private plane for their guided adventure. They strode about, dressed by L.L. Bean, while scruffy outfitters eager for City cash did the heavy lifting. The seaplanes that bobbed on Moosehead Lake waited to take Manhattanites into the deep reaches, where the deer and the landlocked salmon were thick.
The Weyerhaeuser Corporation let us in for a more modest venture. We did not know what to write in the registry regarding our destination. "Let's try Ragged Lake," my cousin suggested. An old map loaned by a friend placed campsites at its edge. It was a 2-mile walk from a road and at the moment we did not fear the trek and favored isolation. Into the lumberyard timber we went, driving across a horizontal terrain broken only by the bulk of Big Spencer and, in the distance, the incomparable Katahdin. When we left the car, still miles from the Lake, we shouldered bad packs and we fared badly. The trails disappeared. The earth had covered the wounds of the Company's clearcutting with a scar tissue of thistles. The underbrush cut like a knife, wrapped vines around our thighs, deposited ticks on our calves. The ecology of the industrial forest added insult to injury. Low swampy places smelled like piss on the latrine floor in a lumberman's tavern. Something rotted. Dank as it was, it resembled the Southwestern desert in that each route chosen was a bad choice.
Three hours in, we stumbled upon Ragged Lake. We broke through the thickets to a copse of birch trees, the walking smooth and a fine camp site cleared out next to the lake. Fresh water fell from a small rock face near the site. The season's first freeze had relieved us of the murderous mosquitoes. The weather was cool, the day's warmth just fading. On the far side of the lake, we could see a decrepit fishing hut. Nothing else disturbed its shores; we were in the Maine Thoreau had once passed through, lamenting the sawyers brute work on virgin timber.
As dusk settled in, the loons began their appeals. Screams echoed across the lake and echoed again where the water opened up into another lagoon further out, and then in the lagoon beyond that, a ragged shoreline. Mad complaints made by mad birds. They were driven crazy by the stars. The points of light shone in the black sky and they glimmered again on the mirror of the black water. In the morning, the sun took up the whole place with a light hand. The flat terrain let it grab the whole solid mass of northern woods in a sudden illumination like those blasts of light from the heavens in Spanish Golden Age painting. Its grasp got weakened only where mist rising off the water blurred the bays and lagoons and flats that gave the indeterminate lake its name. Geese that had honked on our arrival had departed early that morning for South Carolina but a great fishing bird worked the water 150 yards away. The forest was more beautiful in this long perspective across a blue canvas than up close, where three centuries of rude lumbering had stunted it. Looked at across the water, it was a deeply woven blue green carpet of god's doing.
We smoked dope and drank whiskey. We skipped stones and competed over the number of jumps achieved. I led by a great margin until Jerry started to compliment me on my ability and express the conviction that he could never catch up. That disturbed my aim. We talked about his faltering marriage and my new love affair. We talked about our Southwest. At night, we sang in a harmony of sorts Don Maclean's homage to Van Gogh, my cousin's musical skill compensating for my lack of talent. After two nights and two days, two dirty men fitted up. With burdens on their backs, they moved out. Once more we fell forward and backward in the vines and thistles like clowns crazy as loons. Coming through one inhuman thicket, we stopped dead in our tracks. Ten yards ahead, a bull moose looked upon us in an unfriendly manner, drool running down his maw. My first sight of such in the wild. What I remember is a set of grinding teeth beneath a purposeful nose attached to a horned head. Vaguely, in the rear of that image, was a beast the size of an elephant. As he stood there glowering, it became clear why he was built that odd way; those long skinny legs carried his brute mass above the nasty brush and into the waters where the lilies float.
We excused ourselves and made for different parts. Three hours again of labor and the car finally came within sight. We whooped for the comfort and the beer it offered. Then we quieted down and studied the long dark stain of brake fluid that lay beneath its old frame. We poured the last we had in and set off, more than willing now to eat that rotten Mainerd food. On the way out, we stopped in at a joint in Skowhegan filled with the taciturn and the unfriendly, made more so by our aroma. Turkey slices, gravy, mashers, white bread, 3 cups of bad coffee, execrable pie. The waitress was thirty, a pretty girl turning toward a handsome woman worn by work. She had rich dark hair, long enough to pull back into a tail behind her white neck. Sweet blue eyes sported a bit too much mascara. She brought a fine figure to the cafe floor, slim in her waist, full breasts, curve to her hips, long legs. She had what my cousin likes, weight in the thighs. We two must have been enticing to her, with three days of beard, bedraggled, filthy, and smelling of the foul brush and mouse slobber. She liked us despite all that. "How are you fellas?" she kindly asked. My wit was with me. I replied "tired."
She set a smile on me. Stepping up, she leaned her lovely frame over the counter, giving me what she had for free. "Been on the road?...Oh I wish I was traveling." I looked at her. I managed Hemingway. "It is fine." Her voice turned wistful, "I like the road a lot; it would be nice to be out of here and out on the highway." She broadcast another smile for me, and placed her hand down on the table next to mine. She turned and moved along between the tables. I stared at her hips as they said hello to customers on the left and right. Jerry murmured "Ladies love outlaws. In a deceiving kind of way. They know such men are fools. Three days in the bush and you fall in love with a waitress. You do know she is simply getting tips, don't you?" I kept looking. I said, "Cuz, if you weren't here I'd be in that woman's bed tonight." He snorted scorn. He was jealous of the attention she gave me. Sitting back, taking a sip of the dregs from his coffee cup, he said to the world, "Ok, let's share her." I turned and examined his stubbled face and considered how he smelled. He deserved rebuke for a lack of respect for women and for poor personal hygiene.
While on the way to Ragged Lake, we had stopped to climb Big Spencer. It stuck up out of the flats almost 2000 feet. I came up second on the steep trail, interspersed with ladders. My cousin's shorts he was proud of 'cause he hadn't gotten into them in years and now could since the deterioration of his marriage had started him jogging, well, they moved up and down in a tight kinda way as he climbed the incline toward the lookout tower. I gently hooked my finger in a loose belt ring and gently let the weight transfer. I slowly let him help pull me up, listening to him grunting from the effort.
Given the terrain, the top yielded large views of largely the same lumberyard timber. Still one could see Katahdin and lovely blue lakes, while being divebombed by birds with intents like those of the bull moose. Katahdin looked glorious, western in its affront to the dull plain below it. I wish I had climbed that peak. I wish I had asked that waitress to come down Boston way, to test whether my cousin or I was right about her true feelings.
We did this trip in the best weather one can have in Maine, early fall, freeze dried mosquitoes, still warm enough. I came to like the winters as well, at least as they are expressed on the battered coast. I had begun to visit Jerry in metropolitan Maine in the mid-70s, taking the bus from Boston. He had been my closest companion in different eras of my youth. His father often went bust and his mother and the kids would come live with our grandma in Roswell. When I was in college in Denver, so was he, until he threw it all over and headed to San Francisco. It was at the height of its counterculture fame, and he was intent on being a famous musician. That ambition got torn up by the manpower needs of the Viet Nam War. We had little contact during his long, unhappy years in the Navy. After I arrived in Boston, he got his last post at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick.
He endured a marriage as unhappy as his enrollment. We started joining up again. Our parents encouraged it, as they would if there were any geographical proximity between family members, not matter how unlike the souls. My folks visited me in Boston and we all went up to the Maine house, where an unhappy couple had seized on having a baby as the solution to the problem of a failing marriage. My sister was with me and we pose in front of the 19th century farmhouse. My cousin and his wife were, of course, renovating the shell "to how it was in 1880," a goal only a masochist or a New Yorker would set. I am just turning 30 and stand next to my father who is in his mid70s, my age now. He looked pretty good. So do I, half long russet hair, and a good attitude for the camera, disguising an unhappiness that had begun to settle around me. Jerry has his infant Gabriel in his arms and he looks proud of what he has done. Forty years later that child, morbidly obese, broke his back and died a long and painful death, breaking my cousin's heart in the process.
With the renewal of the old friendship, I got to see the metropolitan coast from Kennebunkport to Port Clyde and to live for a while in his places in Brunswick and Bath and in the shacks Jerry took up outside these towns. I came to love Maine's fierce weather, a far stretch from Boston's insipid gloominess. In the winter when the Bostonians and Quebecois had removed themselves from the motels, the coast became as lonely as the western desert, its elements differing yet similar in ascetic harshness, fierce sea hammering fierce rock. After these sights, when I went into the Boston Art Museum, I understood for the first time Hopper's Maine paintings. Still, the master was the alcoholic, the melancholy Winslow Homer. He got to the heart of the thing. Right and Left, one duck already sacrificed to the small burst of light just under the surviving bird's lifting wing, the grey sea more important for the painter to convey than man or beast or shot.
My cousin's crew was drawn from the little coffee house music scene he had re-entered, guitar in hand, after mustering out. These long-haired, pale, sincere folk lovers were young escapees from suburbs in the East. They sought to live a truer life. Often macrobiotic. I knew their ilk from Boston. Susan Backman had introduced me to a Cambridge crowd whose dingy apartments were strewn with dobros and mandolins. Susan herself played at an Appalachian dulcimer as I recall. I called this gentle crowd the Rounders, after the local Cambridge record company enterprise they hoped to make music for. To their credit, some did. The Rounders were a welcoming sort, likeable, and kind to me. The music? Well, yes and no, the simple melodies and simple playing could be charming and then, like the Celtic jigs and Appalachian reels leaned on, took on a monotonous, cyclical tone.
At one Maine party where these were the everlasting themes, a jazz violinist from New York came along with Jerry and me. In the midst of one of the repetitive jams, Malcolm suddenly took off into realms of heaven and hell, the fiddle now that devilish instrument of creation and destruction, sawing and grinding and spinning out of control, so out of control the dobro players and the guitar strummers and fiddling girls lost the way. They started looking around askance as they let their instruments down and the monotony faded away. That left the devil's violin all alone in the air. One last wrenching spiral up and then down, Malcolm brought the strings right back to the simple plodding melody. He gave me a smile as I looked on in joy, and I commenced to be dancing a jig.
The University of Denver, where I spent undergraduate days, and Boston itself, had made my acquaintance with another set found on the metropolitan coast, one I liked much less. The Brahmins' scions, coming up from Choate, sailed their boats out of little harbors near the great grandfather's ancient seaside house. Short hair, Bass Weejuns with no socks, not so much contempt for those lacking Cabot or Lowell as a last name, as a lack of recognition that they existed. True Downeasters I knew only by caricature and ran into rarely, usually back in the thicket with their Quebecois wives. They were a cold bunch. They seemed to be always trying to live up to the caricature. They took pride in giving bad directions if they chose to give them at all. Frosty, reticent, taciturn, in bred. Frost's poem on fences and neighbors struck me as a perfect indictment. Something in the Yankee likes a wall.
I began to take considerable risks up there in that frosty land so foreign to my experience. I liked to run when it was below zero with a stiff east wind. I came back with my skin burning from cold. We went out on the sea when Jerry found a friend with a sailing boat. She took us along a fine channel until we breached the Atlantic itself. We slipped along for a few nautical miles until we came to "Final Rocks," mystical wet stones that announced to braver sailors that the open sea lay before them. We dropped anchor and we dropped acid. For hours we cavorted in the summer waters, letting the now smooth waves carry us out toward Portugal and then back to the safety of the small rocks. As I turned back toward the boat, swimming in the cold rolling ocean, a black beast, slick and fast, shot up past me and arched in the air, looking back and casting an amused eye upon my ill-equipped body.
Jerry once gave me a Christmas present of a sauna session. The property was right in the middle of the completely snowed in forest with the temperature flirting with negative. The little encampment looked Finn enough, and the sauna was blistering hot. After we couldn't take the heat any longer, Jerry and I came stumbling out into the freezing air. I was soon looking up through blue ice while floating in water as close to freezing as it can be and not change state. I was trapped beneath thick ice. How few have lived to report the sensation! Pressing against its smooth surface with my hands, kicking against it, and all I achieved was to force a few bubbles to float uselessly up.
Escape was at hand. We had lowered our blazing bodies into a swimming pool through a hole chopped in the ice. I felt no cold at all in the frigid water, limbs and trunk warm and pleased. I swam back under the ice to the exit. Coming up into the snow-covered forest, in the dead of night, I saw my cousin standing at the edge. He was knee deep in the snow, glimmering pale white in the winter moonlight. He was like a god giving off light, mist rising off his flesh. He prayed, his hands raised to the moon. "Oh lord I do not feel your cold at all, I'm standing next to a pool in the summertime, ha, man alive, holy shit this is life!" I lifted myself out and stood on the ice's surface. I became divine as well, the air thick with the incense rising from our bodies.
By this point my cousin's marriage had collapsed. Short on funds, he had taken a summer-time shack used by a New Yorker for hunting. Trouble was, it was dead winter. Trouble was, it was a true cabin. The place had a worthless, stubborn wood stove that barely heated itself. We had celebrated his marital release by drinking a bottle of vodka, during which I actually slipped under the table, giving rise to a triumphant remark from Jerry about his superior capacity. Shortly thereafter he fell into bed, puking into a pan I brought in. Enjoying my superiority, I looked at the product in the pan and barely made it out the door, leaving green vomit along the tamarack bushes that lined the way up to the shanty. Cleaning them off the next day brought my attention to their beauty, so I wrote a ditty on how elegant the little cones were. The New Yorker poetry staff liked it but not enough to put it in print. Good judgment on their part.
I became so taken with Maine winters that I decided to challenge one. I got two mates in Boston to vow to camp out in Maine's black forest in the midst of Maine's white snow. We got together and discussed tactics and drank beer, then just drank beer. As the day of our leaving approached, a northeaster came rolling in. I tested my cheap sleeping bag by sleeping on the back porch in -5 degrees. It did not work. As temperatures collapsed so did the courage of my companions. Each found he had a prior worldly engagement. In a gesture reeking of macho stupidity and a measure of courage, I vowed that I would go. Or, more accurately recalled, I told Jerry that there was a proviso: if the weather turned impossible, I would stay in his place and pretend that I went. We devised a hoax complete with avalanche survival, a likely tale in flat Maine.
Packing up my patched together, graduate student budget camping equipment, I took the bus to Brunswick and then got carried over to my cousin's shanty on Salt Marsh road below Bath. From there, I could walk or snowshoe along the peninsula that ran out to the sea. I wouldn't be too far away should frostbite set in. There is a photo of me as I take off, one that makes me laugh and cringe. Upon my head stands a strange black knit cap that rises like a bishop's mitre. Not so high however as the ghastly sleeping pad which sprang hither and yon on top of it all. Believing not unjustly that it would insulate, I had fashioned the pad out of cheap mattress foam and haphazardly strapped the escaping puffs into a lunatic yellow mass. That sat on a cheap backpack frame that injured me for many years. Around my neck I had hung a leaky old metal canteen, destined to freeze and crack on this trip. My gloves were..well...my dad had used them to work on cars. I had a green object hanging low on my pack, perhaps a tent, the only piece of backpacking equipment I had bought in a legitimate backpacking store. There was 60 pounds up there to be conveyed via snowshoes of the ancient horrible indigenous Mainer variety. I was utterly unprepared. Nor'easter coming.
Miracle of miracles, the weather turned utterly around. Despite the known fact that it was February, Maine began to march toward summer. On the first day I was out, it got up to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the snowshoes got removed right quick. At night it returned to perilous cold. I set up my little camp on a ledge over the frozen salt marsh that ran back a full mile from the sea. I crawled into tent and bag at dusk, about 5:30 PM in the dead of winter. Shivering like a wet puppy, despite having all my clothing on and all extraneous objects shoved in the sleeping bag to reduce cold air space. I began to slip into a state inferior to sleep when I heard the most god awful CRAAAACKKKKKK!!!! It scared me shi.....well all the metaphors are fundamental.
Shivering was now prompted by a fear so stark that I thought staying in the tent would save me. Well, I wasn't going out. I managed to drift off again into an unsatisfactory coma. Twelve hours later, the sun filtered through the ripstop nylon. Vaguely sensing it, I enjoyed that slumber we all relish when the little boat we are in rocks back and forth between sleep and awake. Right in the midst of a pleasant dream about my future glories as a historian, CRAAAACKKKKK!!!! Goddamn I thought I was going to jump out of my skin except I desperately needed it given the weather conditions. My fear of viewing my fate outside was dampened by a compelling need to urinate. I squirmed out and scanned hither and yon for the unlikely damn fool hunter shooting at dusk and dawn, or worse, the monster Big North Bear knocking down trees for the sheer heck of it. Nothing, nothing but me and an exquisite expanse of white on green fir, blue black Atlantic, and a sweep of frozen saltwater 30 feet below me.
Stomping around on the ice and snow, cooking my breakfast gruel, it came to me. The salt marsh had gone to bed the night before as I did with the fading of the light. It got up the next morning on the same marker. Losing the sun's rays at dusk meant the slight warming had given way to a new hard freeze. That seized up the breached portions with a loud grip. And in the morning, an equal 45 minutes after the sun's rise, the clenched fist of deep ice had given way in one big place with its own loud protest. Or so I figured.
I had my coffee, packed a day bag and went down to the sea. Along the wooded promontory, limbs and leaves had become ghostly arms and fingers; wet spruce needles frozen clear as if captured in glass. At the shore, the beach lay helpless before an angry sea. The nor'easter had pissed off the Atlantic. The scene drove me to an intemperate mixture of metaphors. Great waves spent themselves against the granite boulders at the end of the beach in cannonades, one blast after the other cracking against the stone. After each salvo, the waves turned merry, dancing up the rocks, twirling their skirts, shimmying back down into the dark water. There the snake was coiling, flexing the speckle of its back, bunching its muscles together for the next salvo. A lulling, peaceful sound of gentle waters emerged as the gunners reloaded the barrels. At times, the occasion calls for mixing.
Along the beach the spray burst across the sand. I turned into the headwind like a Mainer, my face stinging and my hair blown back, caution about my receding hairline thrown to the wind. Moving back from that edge, I lay down on rocks removed from the battle, these well warmed by the generous sun. I pulled out my trusty reflecting space blanket, stripped off my sweaters and shirt and caught some rays, thinking of my timid friends Larry and Big Dan cowering back in Boston. I constructed the conditions I had endured in a highly hazardous language, embellishing, or better said, inventing my travails. Rarely have I felt so satisfied with myself.