Maine: A Love Letter

Dear Maine,

Photo by Walter Henritze

As a frequent visitor from Oregon, I have a few observations about you. They are meant affectionately, of course. When you come from a state where everyone wears socks with their sandals and nobody owns an umbrella, you do not take potshots.

Maine is not a large state by western U.S. standards, but if you start at the bottom and work your way up on the coastline, you will have gone north and south enough times to develop your own polarity. The underlying granite is corrugated and pleated and it trails its fringe into the sea like a hippie mama. As a consequence, most people in Maine seem to live somewhere on the water, and with a substantial acreage, too. It's cheap. No one has much money and they get by selling each other antiques, plowing each other's driveways, repairing each other's plumbing, slapping on each other's additions and installing each other's generators. They've got a homemade sign up in their yards with their specialty and phone number, and the economy lumbers along at a perfectly adequate clip. By contrast, our economy in Oregon is based entirely on selling each other coffee drinks. We too are poor, but alert.

The magnificent granite also rears up inland, surfacing like whales. It's not unusual to see a whole pod of granite slabs cresting the soil right in the middle of the woods. And it's easy to see things in the woods. Out here we let our forests get quite unruly, but people in Maine like to tidy theirs. They keep a hacksaw handy-by, clip out any unsightly saplings and chip up the debris, leaving a neat duff floor and a view to the nearby water.

The houses have a big patch of these tidy woods in the rear, a vegetable garden out back, and a massive lawn bounding across the property and hooking up with the neighbors'. It is possible to ride a mower for several hundred miles most places, and right to the bottle redemption center everywhere. People come home from work and hop on their mowers, pushing the speed lever up to the max to outrun the black flies, and then they've just got time to boil up some lobsters and go to bed. That's only in the spring, of course. Later they're outrunning the mosquitoes. There's a day or two between black fly season and mosquito season, and folks get on their phones to tell each other just when that is. "They took off yesterday here in Winthrop," they'll say. "They should be clearing out of Waterville real soon." It's party time.

Everybody in Maine knows how to take a lobster apart, and they eat the green stuff, too. No one is squeamish about dropping them in the boiling pot, either. I tend to cringe a little every time I see it, but I don't have to slice my pork chops off a live pig. They drop their lobsters right into the steam, and then every one of them will maintain that the lobster doesn't feel it. There's no logic in this. They say this for the same reason people insist dogs mustn't eat chocolate. More lobster for me; more chocolate for me.

But my favorite thing about Maine is the architecture. That's a big word to apply to the houses that lope over the landscape, and implies a degree of deliberate design that isn't actually in evidence. What really happens is someone back in the 1800s builds himself a house. He builds himself an outbuilding down the way. In the intervening years he accumulates children and odd building materials, and every time he gets a dab of money together he scabs on a new room. The new room gets put on wherever there's the least granite. After a hundred years or so, the house is lurching across the yard and threatening to stagger into the outbuilding. Winters are harsh. At some point, it just makes sense to hitch the house up to the outbuilding, poke in the last interior door and grab the hacksaw without even going inside. And bingo, there's your architecture.

There's nothing about this arrangement that makes sense, from the standpoint of artistic composition. It's not what you'd get if you sat down and designed a house that size. But somehow it speaks to me. It reminds me of my own interior landscape. I start with a modest idea, lose track, struggle for nouns, forget where I'm going, hook one random thought to the next, and before you know it, I've made an essay.

Photo by Walter Henritze

Nothing Guns Like A Deere

It is a sad fact of human nature that, when faced with a gathering threat, we dismiss or deny evidence of impending doom until it is blatantly obvious, when it might be too late to do anything about it. This was never more clear to me than when I opened up the Sunday paper and found not one but two articles about people who had been murdered by their riding lawn mowers. Wake up, America. Our garden tools have been conspiring against us for a long time.

I'd become aware of this menace years ago. It starts in all innocence with bulb dibbles and trowels, but soon enough a couple hoes are leaning up against the wall of the shed and the neighborhood goes all to hell. Pruners and loppers move in, followed by gangs of hacksaws and chainsaws, until eventually the shed is all blades and teeth. Leaf blowers inspire sensitive people to homicide. And yet no one seems willing to put two and two together and mount a defense.

The only time I ever dared to operate a riding lawn mower was at my sister's house in Maine. Something in the water there--lobster sweat, perhaps--has led all rural residents to blanket their considerable acreage in lawn, each abutting the neighbors', stretching for miles in every direction. Even with a riding lawn mower, the task of mowing begins on a Monday and culminates on a Sunday, by which time it needs to be started anew. One member of the household is dispatched to deliver periodic sandwiches and no one rests until late fall. My sister's mower had five speeds, and I planned to get familiar with only the first. The topography seemed certain to tip me over if I tried to get the speed up, and I am not a courageous soul. I rumbled off on my first pass trailed by a fleet of curious snails and promised to check back within the month.

Sadly, it was black fly season. We western Oregonians are unfamiliar with black fly season, but the learning curve was zippy as hell. Plugging along in first gear, I gaped in horror as tiny flies swarmed onto my face and chunked divots out of it and injected anti-clotting juices until my blood trickled freely in such a way as has not been seen since the Crown of Thorns incident. What fresh hell is this? I jammed the shift into second, then all the way up to fifth, before outrunning the flies. I got a little air time over the quince bush hummock and had the whole acre scalped in no time, bailing out at the backdoor and vaulting into the kitchen on the dismount. The mower was on a trajectory to return in a few weeks, by which time it would be mosquito season. Maine has its charms. But.

The woman in Oklahoma who was done in by her mower had six speeds on her machine. She had taken it out on the city streets after 10pm, hit a pothole and overturned. This is what happens when the voters care about nothing but tax cuts. I believe a person should be able to gun her lawn mower down the street after dark without worrying about potholes, but I'm a liberal. She was subsequently run over by her own mower, suffering a severe thatching, and then done in when the mower returned for the cross-cut.

The other mower incident was a murder-suicide. The unfortunate fellow perished when his mower burst into flames. Why did he not disembark, you ask? It's so easy for us to second-guess after the fact. But when you're just about done with your acreage and are making that final swing around the crape myrtle, your plastic flamingoes under one arm ready to re-stab into the ground, you always think you have a little more time before you catch fire.

Finishing that mowing job for the week is a powerful motivator. Let us never forget the case of the man in Mississippi whose feet caught fire when he was nearly done. He finished the job and was almost home free, jumped off, grabbed a mattock and began chopping the fire line to keep the flames from spreading to his torso. Bled out, poor guy.