Sagadahoc Stories #81: 3/1/99

In Ordinary

The remains of the old fertilizer mill were still smoldering when we got back to town, with Doug's bulldozer nosing around between plumes of acrid smoke. Only the big mixing hopper that had been hidden in the central building is left. Poking up like a rusty thumb in the civic eye.

Last Remains

We were no sooner in the door than I got a call from the first selectman. In honor of mouthing off on current "development" projects, I've been appointed to the Community Development Advisory Committee. I should report to the town office to take my oath of office, and get co-opted. Nice try, Frank.

I've been reading "Mourt's Relation" and William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation," the contemporary accounts of the Pilgrim's first years over here. Wherein community development required everyone to live within walking distance and attend meeting, or submit to the penalties. You should be in sight of your neighbors lest you be tempted into sin, or go native.

Things haven't changed that much since 1620. The well behaved and well intentioned still run town meetings, and the better sort still see fit to plan what's best for the rest of us. It's all very democratic. You just have to be of a nature to sit around on committees, play politics, and be devout. Comprehensive Planning is our new writ. Reading between the lines of Bradford, I suspect I'd have been banished to Merrymount. Or gone bush.

When you first get home after an excursion in the larger world, a small town seems cramped and incestuous. A local artist wonders if he's missed the boat by following private visions in the provinces. I felt much better after helping Brent disassemble his smelt camp and haul it home. Nothing like good company and the sharp bite of February on ice to blow off the fumes. The next day it was sub-zero with a windchill, and dragging Dr. Bob's camp off the Abby got us hopping. Welcome back to reality.

All the Cathance smelt operators have pulled their camps. The fish have stopped biting, but there's still a squad of shacks on the Abby, and the wardens are taking video IDs so they can fine anyone whose shanty goes adrift. It'll be a while yet, however. Three days of deep freeze turned the sunmelt back into perfect skating, and I slithered across the last days of February.

Capt. Ken came up one afternoon at low water, and we slip-slided into a light southerly, almost to the head of the tide in Topsham. The ice was getting rough and broken in the tight curves by the railroad bridge, so we turned tail and flew back to Bowdoinham.

Next afternoon it was puffing northeast, gray and raw, with dark curtains of precip banded aloft. Mr. Mann and Theo joined CC and me by the bridge, and rigged up their kite. Seemed like a good day for skate sailing.

You discover the wind has to blow faster than you can skate in order to drive you. I could easily keep up with the sailing Mann except in the puffs. But it kept puffing harder and harder. By the time we got to the narrows, Mr. Mann was yodeling off and away. Theo and CC had given up the chase. Time to put our noses into it, and it was a struggle to make headway upwind.

Mr. Mann broke down his sail, and we trudged like cartoon characters back to our boots. The snow started to blow. Maybe the last skate of the year.

With one thing and another, Peggy hasn't gotten out gliding on the ice once this winter. She wasn't back in school two days before the flu got her, and she lost both her voice and her hearing. Spent the rest of the week sipping hot liquids and croaking, "EH?" I determined on a bit of wooden medicine, and conjured a lignum frog to pull out of her throat. Not completely effective. I'll have to practice my juju. Dr. Bob warned me about practicing without a license.

It seems to be a time of healing gestures, or jesters. (See Wands and Ritual Objects.) I'm working on a commission piece for a healer/massage therapist, and half the people I know are sick with something. Jan has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Caught early with a mammogram, they're treating it with radiation. I wanted to help with the emotional upheaval, having gone through it so recently ourselves (with the loving support of Jan and Sam). I made them a Boob Angel on a wand, so they could shake a stick at IT. A gift from one boob to another.

The last time I made a Boob was when I was selling wooden puns on the corner of Thayer and Angel Streets in the early 70s. One week my stock included, among other absurdities, an Egg on Your Face, Butterflies in Your Stomach, a DingBat, and a Boob. A breast-shaped figure with big feet and a stupid grin. An Italian couple stopped at my pitch, and asked in halting English how did they mean. Trying to explain wooden wordplay across that divide was hilarious, but when we got to the Boob, the sign language was priceless.

"A Boop?"

"Yes. A Boob," the toymaker gestures.

"A BOOP!?" Giggles.

"UnHuh." We all chortle. And the Boob goes off to Italy. Those sophisticated Europeans. Maybe this Boob can help carry something off, too.

It snowed all night, and by morning there was half a foot of wet whiteness glittering the landscape. Still winter, but the days are so much longer now, and the sun stands higher. That old arctic bear doesn't have the same menace. The mice continue nibbling at our roots, though. We've been trapping them steadily all winter without seeming to thin the herd. And they've paid us back by girdling the maple sapling we planted last year. Now we're having phantom electrical problems, and I wonder if the little gnawers have a taste for old insulation.

We've had some electric frights in this tinderbox over the years. One night I woke and smelled something strange. Tottered downstairs to find the footpedal on Peggy's sewing machine incandescent red, at the point of ignition. Arcing receptacles. Then we had that meltdown of the main breaker during a heavy rain last year. If you thought too long about the wiring in a hundred year old house, you'd live on Maalox. There are layers upon layers of cable snaking into the main panel downstairs, and I still don't know where some of them lead to. I've tried to disconnect all unused lines, and through check the active ones, but it's a mare's nest down there. Now one branched circuit is cutting out intermittently. Peggy woke with a start at 2AM the other night, and shook me, saying, "Smell that?"

I didn't, but I paddled round the cellar in my bare feet muttering imprecations at the rodents and wiggling wires. Then my trouble light started shorting on and off. Whaaat? I soon noticed that the furnace wasn't kicking in, just humming loudly and clicking off. The oil side seemed fine, but the blower motor was hot as a pistol, and the squirrelcage frozen tight. The jam was throwing the system relay. The motor is in the airway, and Peggy must have smelled hot windings blowing up the vents. I freed the bearings, bumped all the relays, checked that it was working, and went back to bed.

I fixed the trouble light next day, but when I tried to chase down that phantom line fault all I could find was mouse turds. I'll keep setting traps, but I think I'm selecting for light tongued mice. More and more often they seem able to lick off the bait without triggering the trap. Hopefully they are soft-mouthing those wires, too.
Saturday morning CC played tripsy until I dug out the skis and took her for a romp. It was good skiing in the woods, but out on the river the snow was deep enough to bog the glide. Sliding along the icy seeps was faster, and a persuasive northwesterly pursued us upriver. A mature bald kept pace with us, beating from perch to perch. Except for these grand birds our river landscape is utterly unremarkable. I'm constantly reminded of the paintings Karl Bodmer did of the Mississippi and Missouri riverbanks in the 1830s. How he managed to capture the nondescript. There are a lot of Bodmer scenes up the Cathance. You can't even photograph them.
I made my usual circuit across the neck to the lower Cathance. A snowmobiler had broken trail along the powerlines, but the surface was getting tacky enough in places to grab my skis. I encountered hunters heading into the pines, and wondered what season is open. Turkey? It was a fast run down to the river again and home into the wind, past Shorey's and Bernard's and Jimmy's. Even though Shorey is in Amsterdam someone has his camp out on the ice, and it's the only shack on the river. Giving something to the river demon is an old Shorey tradition. This year the offering looks to be part of his ramps, and maybe his shack.

Shorey's Landing

By the time we got back to Brooklyn I was pooped. After skating, cross country skiing seems like work. I'd forgotten to wear one less layer, and had to wring myself out before I could face the day. Another ordinary day.

That's the big lesson about returning to your hideout. Most days there's no NEWS here. No big events. No extraordinary visions. Just an occasional eagle. But we're cozened into believing that life is about novelties and excitements. The media are full of melodrama. All the tales are breathless. If there's no headline to your story, you must be missing it.

Trying to record the very ordinariness of a local life, the slow seasonal round, the minor episodes, begins to unravel the tangle of a busy mass culture. It's hard enough to see the nondescript, even more difficult to capture it. But the simple dailyness, the ritual round, is the very stuff of our lives. Bodmer's quick studies are so evocative because he managed to catch ordinary glimpses of a passing time, and save them for all of us. Straggling willows along a low shore, and all of the West beyond.

For all the grand pronouncements of the Puritans, all their justifications about bringing light to the salvages, all their being God's chosen workers, it was the simple lessons of daily survival they learned which opened the door to New England. And it was Squanto and Massasoit and the seasonal fishermen downeast who showed them most of the tricks. Most of the first colonies were dismal failures because the newcomers expected sudden riches, great revelations, big news, but weren't willing to labor for it. The special gift the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth was their common sense of dailyness. Their willingness to plant corn. They saw being here now as a holy undertaking. Their ordinary as something extraordinary. Nice work, if you can do it.

 

Next Dispatch Previous Dispatch Dispatch Index Home Index