Maine Metaphor: Experience in the Western Mountains. S. Dorman
assortment of Minor Civil Divisions (MCDs)—911 in all. But a glance at any map divided into MCDs reveals three distinctly telling sections: each possesses a different geographic orientation. The southwest section of Maine is made of former colonial towns, originally surveyed and laid out according to the old metes and bounds method, used when Maine was a district of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On the map it presents a pleasing hodgepodge to the eye. Across the midriff of the State, towns have a canted magnetic-north orientation. But in the north section, where Piscatiquis and Aroostook counties hunker over the crown of the State, one sees the vertical precision of the True North—the north polar orientation. The whole looks like a wad of overgrown vegetable cells whose DNA got bungled during differentiation.
Steep Hippie Hill is named for our friend Paul, who is possessed of an overgrown deep-brown beard. This ringletted mass may reach to his waist, but it’s not apparent because he keeps it tucked out of the way inside his shirt. Paul’s daughter made a screenprinted poster for his birthday: just a 40-year-old hippie. Yet, I don’t see a hippie when I look at Paul. I see a Hebrew patriarch in the wilderness.
If one is not possessed of a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle, one huffs and puffs her way up his hill. As we neared the top, Allen and I saw the stone and cedar-shake house through white spindly birches. From here it looks like a modern spacious Middle American home. But, as we gained the summit, a difference appeared: His stonework is rustic, made of glacial till from his gravel pit. It’s not the precious professional masonry found in upscale neighborhoods. The sunny house, sitting above the surrounding garden plot, and circled by the pale green of spring trees, had its roof raised by friends and neighbors on a Saturday morning.
Paul’s house is not hooked up to CMP, Central Maine Power. No network of wires connects it to an erector-set substation or the nuclear generator at Wiscasset. Commercially generated electricity hasn’t made it to this part of the township. When he first built up here he used an eight kilowatt wind generator. But a bolt of lightning followed the cables into the basement of that first structure—a wooden one. His handbuilt house was burned to the ground.
Today we pass photovoltaic solar panels glinting in the yard. These provide power to light his lamps and run the refrigerator in the new stone house. Keeping food fresh up on this hill is no small feat. Five hundred watts worth of panels produce power even on cloudy days. He uses storage batteries to save up the day’s sun. Several batteries in series provide 120 volts of direct current. He uses an inverter for non-DC appliances. It converts the 120 volts DC into 120 volts AC, a difficult electrical trick. The alternating current is an imitation of the pure sinewave which the electric company produces. According to Allen (an electrician by trade), the imitation is produced by turning DC on and off in stepped sequence: first in one direction or polarity, then in the other. The result is a jagged-looking sinewave. Filter capacitors then smooth out the jags enough to trick motors and AC appliances into thinking they’ve got the real thing, CMP’s thing. Having an iced drink at Paul’s house is a feat. It signifies patience and a willingness to deal attentively and effectively with the astronomical source of all our energy and food.
We found Paul around the corner of the house, working on an old roto-tiller, having a time getting it started after a winter’s idleness. It was the first week in May and the garden was waiting. He smiled and stopped work instantly upon seeing us.
As Allen and he talked about the vagaries of post-winter roto-tillers, I looked around at the surrounding contour of hills visible through greenly budding treetops on all sides. Then I handed Paul a book that one of the fishermen thought he might be interested in: How to Survive without a Salary. “You could probably write three such books,” I observed.
Paul will show us around. It’s been well over a year since we’ve seen his place—this acreage of woods, gardens, and young orchard. We stop at the corner of the house where a 300-gallon tank is supported on a truss and fed by gutters under the eaves. I look up at the silver expanse of corrugated roof and ask how much water he got from yesterday’s slight rain.
“Enough to fill the tank.”
I smile my feeling: impressive.
Behind the tank sit Paul’s sap trays, now idle from the season’s activity. This is the year he modernized his operation. Hippie Hill’s flanks are interwoven with sugar maples. For years he and his family have been lugging the sap in buckets to the boiler. This year they let the thin liquid fall through tubing.
Talking, we walk off behind the house and down a greening lane, an extension of a former old county road that passes out through the back of his land. Along this old road we see his second, more massive, soily garden plot. Beyond this we pass another field, with stumps and a large blackened circle in its midst. He had a bonfire here during a thaw. Paul points out old stone walls crisscrossing the land, still partly hidden by trees and brush. He likes to consider the pioneers who first cleared his hilltop: two soldiers of the Revolutionary War who were awarded grants, Wallace and Wellington Byrd.
Paul researched his deeds at the county courthouse and knows the history of his land by these documents. It’s fun to trace the chain of ownership for a particular piece of property, and familiarize one’s imagination with the hands, now dust, that formed these now-moldering old walls. This land stayed in the hands of the Byrd family until the time of the Great Depression, when it reverted to the town for back taxes. Then it was bought by other town residents for $200. Paul walks us back to show Allen and I the old foundation of Wellington Byrd’s house.
On our way, we stop to see the new orchard standing in a clearing of grass. New orchard? Paul has bought the old varieties of apple trees to furnish his grove. Varieties with names familiar to me from a study done two years ago: names like Baldwin, Ben Davis, Red Astracan; and my favorite, Westfield-Seek-No-Further. As we approach over the grass, I see that the young Seek-No-Further is just beginning to bud. Paul isn’t too happy with the sight of fresh wood at the tips where buds have been chewed off by deer. He is reconciled to the fact that when a tree is mature enough, as this one is, the deer provide a form of pruning that is not devastating. He points out a seedling near the lane: a Red Astracan, replacement for one nibbled away before it was mature enough to withstand the loss.
In “The World’s Food Supply,” Robert E. Rhoades writing in National Geographic traces the fragility of today’s food supply to genetic uniformity. He also traces the salvation of food by the use of “land races.” These are the old varieties, now dying out, which were once used throughout the world to produce myriad kinds of corn, fruits, grains, coffees, and other vegetables. In other words, the basis of everything we eat. Today’s agriculture is monoculture. Industrialized farms grow a single type of corn, grain or vegetable; each genetically tinkered to improve its yield. When a blight occurs the loss is devastating. Yet the great and various propagation of food known in the past would arm today’s farmer against such loss. Here, in furnishing this orchard with carefully preserved land races, Paul uses the proven ways of the past against our presently limited and industrialized food culture.
On what was once the old hilltop county road, treading down grasses, struck by birdsong, we pass the Red Astracan to enter woods, in search of Wellington Byrd’s foundation. We follow Paul’s lead, for the road—overgrown on either side—is rutted with the treads of his tractor so footing is awkward. The dark of foliage overhangs and shadows us. We are sometimes forced off into the budding bushes by water in standing puddles. Again we see the old stone walls and realize that this overgrown little-used way was once a buckboard thoroughfare. I’ve named this essay “The Overgrown Way” for this metaphorical quality.
Just off-path we step in among bushes above the deep-sunk cellar hole. The deepest and squarest I’ve ever seen—massive green foundation stones are the largest I’ve found in any such cellar hole. Paul points out the large stump of birch he cut inside this hole. Good, healthy, white wood. Rings tell that it was 100 years old at cutting. The homestead was built, indwelt, decayed and dispersed in the hundred years prior to that: a product of Wellington’s labor on land granted him after the War of Independence. (Another term and event rich in metaphor.) This great tree made its home and nurture in the cellar hole and lived on for another hundred until the time of Paul’s saw.
We stand talking about the prowess