Important Annoucement for CMP Customers

Central Maine Power will be purging its power lines on April 1, 2009. All CMP customers are advised to unplug all electrical appliances between 1030 and 1035 AM to avoid possible damage from power surges as the old electricity is forced out.
CMP advises that this is an annual event, occurring every April 1, and is necessitated by the changeover from heavier weight winter electricity to lighter weight summer electricity.
All customers are being thanked in advance for their cooperation.
“Flip a switch, and we’re there.”

Gleaning, or How I Heat for Free

When my wife and I first moved into our house in July 1979, it was not finished. The electrical system consisted of one socket. One half of it was occupied by a string of Romex wire, into which was spliced, at intervals, several light bulbs which ran from the kitchen up the ladder where the stairs would eventually be to the bedroom. The other half powered an ancient refrigerator, a donation from a former selectman of the town. Plumbing was a few months away from complete, and where there is a flower garden today, stood a small, plain outhouse. It could be illuminated at night, if need be, by a kerosene lamp. Insulation and sheet rock was non-existent. With a six-week old daughter, we knew there would be a race to beat winter.
We had both quit our teaching jobs to make the move. I was going to be the oyster baron of Casco Bay with my brother-in-law and another partner, and as soon as Heather was old enough to be left with a sitter, Susan would resume nursing. The oyster farm could pay us in nothing but sweat, and the $260 per month I earned as a captain in the Army Reserve, commanding a combat support company in New Hampshire, didn’t stretch very far.
We were entering the time we now refer to as “The Winter of Ham Hocks and Beans.” Each week we would make up a new soup, first pinto beans, then yellow eyes, peas, and lentils, which would be enriched with a ham hock and rice. Our diet was rounded out with dairy products and cereals we bought with W.I.C (Women, Infants, Children) coupons and sometimes augmented with a huge brick of government issue cheese my father-in-law would score at the senior center he attended. Store bought beer, or anything like that was out of the question, and so I brewed, from a recipe in a prohibition era book, a beverage called “molasses beer.” That rates its own story later, but anyone who drank it felt pity on us, and would bring enough real beer to leave behind a bottle or two.
Heat was a wood stove. Fortunately, we had the foresight to purchase five cords of hardwood before we left our jobs, but being neophytes, we had no idea how long that would last or how warm it would keep us. It was then I started gleaning. At the end of each day, I would go down to the shore to pick up drift wood and lug it back up the steep bank to the house. Most of it was punky soft wood, but sometimes the sea gods would give me a break and cough up a nice piece of oak or better an oak plank that had been part of a commercial wharf. Soaked with years of fish and engine oil, they burned really well.
We don’t eat bean soup as much as we used to, and the smell of molasses beer will never permeate the house again, but I still glean. People call me crazy for spending the year, when the bay isn’t ice-bound, hauling pieces of wood much to heavy for me to be carrying, up a steep bank to cut up with an electric chain saw. Soft wood, they say, is lousy firewood. Well, I have to disagree; free wood makes great heat, no matter what it is, oak, birch, spruce or poplar. True, softwood doesn’t build up a bed of coals, but I use it when we don’t need a fire all night. I figure I can heat my house for free, right into December, although the free wood usually lasts until about the end of November. And no, I don’t burn pressure treated wood. I save that for projects, such as the platform my rain barrel sits on.
Most of the shore ice is gone, so I went down to glean today. I got a piece of oak, about 4’ long. I figure, cut, split and dried, will last me a cold January night. I retrieved some stray pine and poplar, which will probably keep me warm for two nights in the late fall.
Maybe I am crazy or cheap as many tell me, although I prefer to think of myself as parsimonious, but when those first sharp nights of October come in, I’ll go to my wood pile, bring in an armload of free wood, and sit back with a beer not made from molasses and stay warm.

The Value of Cooking

My road to becoming a self sufficient cook has come by many stages. After leaving college and joining the Army, instead of a promised trip to Germany, I was sent to the back of the beyond at Fort Hood, Texas. There I was installed in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, which at the time offered a square, cinderblock room painted institutional green and furnished with a chair and bed, upon which were generations of cigarette burns reaching back to the Korean War. A common refrigerator in the hall was placed for the convenience of the BOQ rats, who stole everything desirable, someone else placed in it, such as beer. So I purchased a toaster oven in the exchange and stocked up on the cheap TV dinners available in the commissary at a cost of four for a dollar. Each of them consisted of a dollop of wall paper paste, three or four pathetic, dried kernels of frozen corn and something that was supposed to resemble either a piece of fried chicken or beef something or other.
As soon as I could, I made the acquaintance of some other single lieutenants in my battalion, and we rented a house. Those who cooked were exempt from doing the dishes, and so I learned to prepare my first delicacy: French fries. I made these by cutting up potatoes and throwing them into a pan of boiling vegetable oil, and served with some sort of fried or broiled meat, and, of course, beer.
Tours at Fort Hood for second lieutenants were mercifully brief, it being situated in the middle of the dry belt of Texas with no social life within a four hour drive. The buildings at the time were still WWII vintage yellow wooden structures which stretched out for miles. I was told Vietnam would be an improvement, and in some ways it was. At least the married guys couldn’t get any either.
Being in the infantry we subsisted on C-rations, various meals served in olive drab cans, with a fairly decent variety. One can consisted of the main meal such as “Ham and Eggs, chopped.” In the field cooking was accomplished with small bits of C-4, which we all carried. That’s right, the very C-4 which is still very much a part of the Al Qaeda basic supplies. It has the consistency of dried up marshmallows and is safe unless mashed into a combined space and ignited quickly. In the open it burns at a temperature about three times the surface of the sun. This was proven by one, who, after heating his coffee water, decided the right thing to do would be to douse the flame, and stepped on it. The result was that it melted a hole through the bottom of his boot. Since re-supplying the infantry with footgear was of rather low priority with the rear echelon folks, he stomped around the jungle with a hole the size of a fifty cent piece (ever seen one of them?) in the bottom of his boot.
My favorite recipe, taught to me by a self proclaimed Hill Billy from Kentucky was to take the can of beans and franks and the can of cheese, something akin to Cheez-whiz and melt the latter into the beans. The water crackers which accompanied the cheese were broken up into the mess, and as with all recipes, anointed with hot sauce. I still make it, only my wife makes us eat it off dishes, and not out of cans, the way it is supposed to be consumed.
Ham and Eggs, chopped, combat quiche, were generally eaten cold. That was a meal you either liked or detested. On one occasion, as a reservist, I was assigned to a regular army battalion at Ft. Knox. Trying to be a good guy, I volunteered to take them. The response was quick: “Get in line, bucko.” I happened to get into a unit of Ham &Eggs, chopped aficionados.
Stationed in Germany, I learned to make French onion soup from the French wife of a fellow unit member, and to cook chicken in beer from a civilian military intelligence officer. I kept all this knowledge, because I knew that a man, who can cook, is sexy…Even if he is a dork.
On our first date, I cooked my wife an eclectic mix of kilbasa soup, potato pancakes and shoo-fly pie. It was love at first bite. It certainly wasn’t my looks or money.
I have since learned that cookbooks are only guides and after a while you learn that you can mix things like ground chicken and nutmeg. And as my favorite painter, the late Bob Ross, used to say, “Let’s get crazy.”
Tonight my wife said she was going to cook pork chops in barbecue sauce. She said I didn’t sound excited. I replied her cooking was predictable.
Mine evokes fear. When my girls would come home from school and ask, “What are we having?” Heather, the oldest, would tiptoe into the kitchen and report back, “One of Dad’s creations.” They would look at each other with wide eyes and very uneasy faces.
Now, Heather eats sushi, that which commercial fishermen would refer to here in Maine as “bait,” or “gurry.” She recently offered me a piece, and said, “Try this, it tastes like the smell of Dick’s Lobster Wharf.
Yup, it did.

Druk een for Englisc

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like today if the Saxon shield wall had held that October 14, 1066 and William the Conqueror had lost the Battle of Hastings? Probably not, but I ponder such things. Sometimes I even sit on rocks, when they have been warmed by the sun and something will come to mind that makes me think, “Ain’t that odd?”
The Saxons, who inhabited the south of old England, spoke Old English, a Germanic language not unlike the German spoken at the time, and akin to Dutch. To the north in an area referred to as the “Danelaw,” recent conquerors and settlers spoke an old Scandinavian dialect, which stemmed from old Danish and Norwegian. The Normans spoke an archaic form of French.
So, if William had packed up his surviving troops and sailed back to Normandy, what would the world look like to us now? In all probability, I think, Saxon and Danish would have blended into a language less inflected than Saxon, maintaining vocabulary from each. “Inflection,” for those whose language education didn’t get passed diagramming sentences, means simply that as a word changes its meaning in a sentence, the word or the article in front of it changes.
Latin is an example of a heavily inflected language. For example, the word agricola, or farmer (our word “agriculture” is a derivative of it.) changes as it is used. Agricola non est nauta means “the farmer is not a sailor,” with farmer being the subject of the sentence. Agricolam video, is “I see the farmer. In this case farmer is the direct object of the sentence. Remember that from 9th grade?
Anyway, so we would be speaking a decidedly different language with a Scandinavian or Germanic flair to it, but what about our history? Certainly there would have been different rulers over the course of English history, and their personalities and policies would have colored and shaped what happened to a point. However, England, because it is insular, would still have developed into a sea power, and still would have been predominant in the history of North America. Would the 13 colonies have eventually seceded through violent revolution or quietly evolved into an independent nation such as our good neighbor to the north? I haven’t really pondered that, and the rocks are still too cold to sit on.
What I do know is, if you called the phone company, a utility or some other commercial entity to whom, “your call is very important,” the first option on the answering machine would probably sound something like, “Druk een for Englisc.”

The Aral Sea

When I was a kid I would get interested in something to the point of obnoxiousness. Maybe that is why I had few friends, or maybe I was that way because I had few. Either way, I started collecting airplane photos, which came with chewing gum much as baseball cards did. I could tell you the names of every aircraft in the Royal Canadian Air Force or describe the wing markings of the Peruvian Air Force. I put together a model of a plane called the “Pogo,” a propeller driven plane designed to take off and land straight up and down. It had a short life.
Then it was birds. I read the print off my parents’ Audubon book, and bemoaned the fact that the birds I really wanted to see didn’t come as far north as the Maine tundra. I tried painting them, but with five and dime water colors, four inch brushes and no talent for art, I quickly became frustrated.
So I turned to the Civil War. My grandfather had already given me an excellent grounding in American military history for a fourth grader. He gave me, in the third grade, a biography of George Armstrong Custer, and promptly informed me, that had old yellow hair survived the Battle of Little Big Horn, he probably would have been court martialled. I cajoled Chip Koerber into making blue forage caps out of construction paper for all the kids on the street, so we could re-enact battles. Our hats turned out to be disasters, so I turned to geography.
I always finished my social studies assignments ahead of the allotted time, so I would quietly go over to the globe on the counter by the window, and one day, I noted that there were seas all over the world. I found the Ionian, the Banda, the Weddell and the Sea of Azov. I also found the Andaman Sea, the name of which fascinated me; I was sure no one else knew of its existence but me.
I then hatched a plan. I was going to cover the entire walls of my room with a huge, museum quality map of the world, on which I would place all the seas. I found not only was there a Red Sea, a Black Sea and a Yellow Sea, but a White one as well. And then there was the Aral Sea, totally landlocked, stuck to the east of the Caspian Sea in the middle of Asia. What would a sea way out there look like? I wanted to go there, and sail around it.
But I never did. I went away to college, bummed around Europe, went off to fight a war in a place I had never heard of as a child, swam in the Tasman and South China Seas, and returned to live a fairly predictable middle class life, working in jobs I never knew existed as a child and never would have aspired to if I had.
After a time I began to notice how things have begun to change. The good, gentle old folk, the ones who knew the secrets of handling a team of plow horses, spinning wool into yarn on the porch, shoveling coal into the bellies of steam engines or who had walked the wooden decks and reefed the sails, have all faded away. The parents, the aunts and uncles, who put together the family picnics, flipped the burgers and roasted the hot dogs for us kids, are one by one becoming absent. Those men and women, who came home from the wars those years ago, became our teachers, den mothers and parents of our friends, in increasingly greater numbers no longer answer the roll call.
Our hometowns as we knew them have disappeared. Where once the men from Brunswick crossed over the river to hunt deer in Topsham, there is nothing but pavement and big box stores. Maine Street, alive every Friday night with people buying their groceries at First National or A&P, going to the movies or the five and ten cent stores, is dying, lined now with galleries and coffee shops, which do not attract the number of people that made it so vibrant. The furniture store that converted its basement to toys and where Santa Claus listened to lines of runny nosed kids, no longer exists. Even the Christmas boughs which arched Maine Street with brightly colored, boisterous lights have been replaced with bland clear lights and timid, politically correct banners wishing a happy generic holiday.
And then there is the Aral Sea. Once the fourth largest saline body of water in the world during my younger days, it now consists of three, highly polluted lakes. Its once fertile bottom is a barren salt pan, a resting place for the hulks of the fishing boats that once plied its waters. The fishing villages that once lined its shores are now ghost-towns.
We can never go back to see the old folk and hear their stories, we can never go back to the homes we remembered, and we can never sail the Aral Sea again. Time hurries us along to wherever it is we’re bound.

My Irish Aunties

The period around St. Patrick’s Day is the time in which we prove, “There are only two types of people in the world: the Irish, and those that wished they were.”
In 1902, my grandfather Millar left his father’s farm, traveled to Londonderry and there disembarked upon the Caledonia for the US. He was twenty years old, dapper, but very small, and had five US dollars in his pocket. I often wonder if how scared and lonely he must have felt leaving his family and a farm he would, as the eldest son, have inherited. He would never mention how he felt, although in response to my question as to why he left, he replied, “I was out plowing one day and realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking up the ass of a horse.”
Upon arrival he somehow got himself to the home of some distant relatives, successful tobacco farmers in the Connecticut River valley. Instead of welcoming, they were not impressed with having a poor immigrant show up on their doorstep and convinced him that Springfield, Massachusetts was the place he should be as the Presbyterian (He was an Orangeman) Church would take care of people like him. So they put him on a train and off he went.
He eventually found a job, ending up working for Spaulding Sporting Goods, designing and manufacturing golf clubs. One of his designs, using a drop forge, was called “The Chicopee Putter.”
In time he sent for two of his sisters, who followed him over. The elder, Mary, settled in Boston and became a registered nurse at Mass. General. The younger, Eveline, still in her teens, lived with him, my grandmother and their new baby, while working in a flower shop. In 1917, word came from Ireland that their mother was dying of cancer. So my grandfather accompanied them to the pier in Boston where their last view of him was disappearing from site in a snow storm as they sailed for home despite the dangers from German submarines.
I grew up knowing I had a family in Ireland, and once in a while we, or my grandfather would receive a Christmas card from these mysterious people across the sea. In 1966, when I went to Germany to study, I decided I would have to visit these people and see just what they were like, as my father’s side of the family seemed fairly lacking in distant relatives.
Mary had married and due to the hard economic times in Ireland, moved to England where her husband found employment operating a farm owned by Oxford University. On spring break I flew in from Frankfurt to Southend on Sea, and in going through British customs put her address as my destination on my forms. The customs agent asked who she was. I will never forget what happened next. When I told him she was my aunt, he swung his rubber stamp down on my passport and said, “Welcome home, son.”
Mary lived in a thatched roof cottage with a flag stone floor in a village called Waterperry. To get there, I had to travel to Oxford and then take a bus to a small town called, Wheatley. Arriving there, I learned I had missed the twice weekly bus to Waterperry, but the friendly agent told me how to get there: two miles across freshly plowed April muddy fields in the gathering dusk. By the time I came over the hill and the village was below me, it was late afternoon, and I was covered with mud. I thought I had walked into the village of the damned: it was a ghost town. I could hear window shutters flapping in the breeze and feel eyes on me from behind curtains. I walked to the end of the village when I finally encountered a farmer, right out of a James Herriot story. With his directions I knocked on the door of the house to be greeted by a pixie in coke bottle classes. As I had missed the bus, she thought I wasn’t coming, and gathered me up in tears. She apologized that the co-eds she had invited out from Oxford to entertain me had been forced to leave. We sat by her fire drinking cider, while I recited what everyone in the family was up to and then she asked me how the Boston Braves were doing. I had to tell her they were now in Milwaukee and the Red Sox were the only game in town. When bed time came, she tucked me in, even though I was 21. Her stories will be another post.
A month later, taking advantage of a student strike against increased cafeteria prices in Germany, I flew to Belfast, and was greeted by the younger generation, and taken off to see Aunts Grace and Eveline.
Grace lived in a farm house on the top of a hill, which was appropriately called, “The Hill.” I was forewarned so when she bolted from the house, I was not surprised. She had not come to the states, and I was the first of the American family she had seen since my uncle in World War II. Although, small in size like Mary, with the same twinkling eyes, she was a dynamo. She had a heart condition, which despite her doctor’s frantic urgings, did not stop her from chopping firewood. She was up at first light with her sons, James and Edward, for the daily milking, preparing them a breakfast which would fill an army. Not being a morning person, I could not explain to her that I could not force down steak, eggs, and oatmeal at 7 in the morning. I was more a gag down a glass of orange juice person.
Eveline lived on the farm, on which my grandfather had been raised. She regaled me of stories of early Springfield MA, and we tried to track down information on “Uncle Archie,” who, my grandfather claimed, had come to the US, fought in the Civil War, was discharged totally fed up with America and went home. There were vague memories of his “blue peaked cap” in a chest somewhere, the that was all.
I was taken from place to place, “which would be of interest because your grandfather went there,” and met people whom he had known, most of whom forgot the generational gap and referred to me as “Jimmy Millar’s boy.” The experience gave me a feeling of pride, to know the good people I had come from, but also gave me a sense of loss. In meeting my Irish “aunties,” I realized, perhaps selfishly, that I had been deprived a life time of extra grandmothers, who probably would have spoiled me when I was little.
I see in my daughters’ eyes, the twinkling blue and the infectious smiles they all had, and although they are gone now, and I only saw them that one time (I did see Eveline once later) I love them as if I had always been with them. I’m damned proud of my Irish family, and, yes, when St. Patrick’s Day comes around, I’m going to proudly say, “There’s only two types of people in the world: the Irish and those that wished they were.”

Review

Review by Chris Considine

Mr. Millar realistically articulates the travesty of war from the prospective of a young American Army Officer during the very unpopular Vietnam War. However, war is apparently more "trendy" today when Mr. Millar was getting shot at. Soldiers of that time were pariahs, while soldiers of today are heroes.

Mr. Millar describes the camaraderie that develops among soldiers that are doing their best to stay alive, which is the same camaraderie that troops have today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout the book you see this trust among troops grow, under fire, and wane, when relegated to the rear echelon, where the self-described heroes build their pseudo legacy for their progeny.

Reading this book served to rekindle the absurdity of war feelings that for me personally go back to that time, yet history are now repeating themselves again fail to understand the culture and intestinal fortitude of our opponents. We were arrogant then, we are arrogant now.

This book is a timeless record that will behoove our soldiers of the future to read and evaluate. It doesn't give you a warm and fuzzy feeling at the end, nor should it. War sucks and you may die and your families then must unwillingly enter the world of the living dead.

Read the book and spread the knowledge that all soldiers, are heroes. Lastly, our heroes from Vietnam, who never got the respect they deserved, and the military heroes of today, lived in horrible conditions, risked death and their country still has not saved the world.

Marbles

When the snow began to melt away from the streets, and puddles appeared everywhere, particularly along our dirt sidewalks, the kid population turned out to drain it away. It was probably more from just wanting to see something moving after living in a petrified, white landscape that motivated us, as opposed to a desire to get rid of the snow. Much shoe rubber was worn away as we became hydrological engineers, dredging systems of canals, of which the Dutch would have been proud.
This time of year also brought out the first sport of spring: marbles. Bags of them would be brought out from wherever they had been stored since the previous spring, and playgrounds, vacant lots and unpaved walkways took on the appearance of a prairie dog village, for we did not play the game in which they were knocked out of a ring. We had no good pavement for that, and so we pitched them into holes.
The great game of marbles had its own set of rules varying from playground to playground, street to street, and had its own economy and language.
There was, for starters, the tools of the trade. They were works of art, multicolored swirls of various colored glass beads, more commonly called “alleys or aggies.” The older folk also referred to them as “glassies,” to distinguish them from the semi-round clay pellets of our parents’ days. Some of us even had a few of them hidden in our bounty. “Cats-eyes” came along later, clear glass with a colored plastic center, which did indeed look like the namesake. Then there were “croakers,” much larger and heavier. Many of the kids, whose fathers worked in the shipyard used ball bearings that were liberated from The Yard as a substitute.
All of these would be carried in a sack or an old sock. My mother had made me a corduroy bag with little felt marbles appliquéd on it. One enterprising soul carried a khaki bag, which turned out to be a personal effects bag from his father’s WWII service. Its purpose had been to carry the most personal items of a wounded man, such as wallet and toothbrush, around his neck during his evacuation.
In the language of the game, the terms all ended with the suffix “ies.” For example, you could play for “funsies” or “keepsies,” the latter being our introduction to playing for loss, gain, or being hustled. Playing “funsies” was for the very small and wimps, or if your current supply was way down.
At the beginning of each game, when the hole had been bored out with someone’s heel, and a shooting line had been scraped in the mud, the economy of the game kicked in with a determination as to the scale of the game. One could play for “onesies” or “twosies” in which case each player would pitch one or two marbles. A croaker could be pitched at a value of, say, one equating to three alleys. You see, we were learning the rudiments of currency exchange. High stakes games might include “tensies” or “twelvesies.”
The next formality to be decided was whether to play “nothingsies” or “everythingsies.” With the former, only the crooked index finger could be used to shoot a marble. Under the latter, there were various moves that could be used to move a marble: “Shovesies” was for anything less than three foot lengths from the hole and the only move allowed in “nothingsies.” A “picksie” was for a marble three foot lengths, but less than five from the hole. That required picking the marble slightly off the ground and arcing it towards the hole. Beyond five foot lengths, a “bootsie” was allowed. That allowed the player to place the side of his foot against the marble and swing his other foot against it, propelling it toward the hole.
The first shooter was chosen by the scientific method of “eeny, meeny, miney, moe.” He or she pitched the marbles towards the hole with the intent of sinking them all. After each had shot, the person with the most marbles in the hole attempted to sink the rest by the above methods. He shot until he missed, and then the second person, the one who had placed second after the initial shots had his chance. The last person to sink the final marble, won the pot.
Little fingers resembled raw beef as the games progressed in the cold mud. Mothers must have dreaded laundry day as well.
At Longfellow School, this blatant form of gambling, hustling and extortion was tolerated so long as the marbles weren’t brought out during class. Marble bags had to be kept in your desk or closet, or be subject to confiscation. Some of those teachers had to have marble collections that would need a vault like Scrooge McDuck’s. There was a fantasy of Miss Ridley or Mrs. Stevens rolling around in a swimming pool of them. (Wait, we were little and innocent: they were clothed.) We often wondered what happened to all those marbles. Did the teachers have a secret tournament after we left?
The odd thing is, after the ground dried, became warmer and more conducive to actually playing the game, the marble bags all disappeared until the next season.
Marbles were fun. Sadly, I can’t imagine a school allowing it today. How will today’s kids learn about international finance without them?

The World's Briefest Trip Abroad

Paul and Sylvia Nadeau are two of our best friends. We met while Paul and I were still in the Army Reserve and both are from Aroostook County (The County to Mainers). For a number of years, as part of our reserve duties, Paul and I were required to travel to The County to inspect military skills classes being held at the National Guard armories there. Our unit was a school with classes being taught at local centers, Paul and I acting as school principals. It was during one of these trips that we took the shortest trip on record into Canada.
Aroostook County occupies about the northern third of Maine and is inhabited by about 10% of the state’s population. It consists of many heavily forested acres and the big sky of farm land. Potatoes are the largest crop grown. The southern half is made up of mainly of folks tracing their ancestry to the British Isles, while the northern half, predominantly the St. John River valley (The Valley) is comprised of people descended from the early French settlers, most of whom still speak French, and English with a delightful accent: French with a hint of Celtic lilt. Sandwiched in between is a small colony of Swedes in the towns of Stockholm, New Sweden and Westmanland.
The greatest people in Maine live there. They are good humored, and a person’s intelligence is measured not by college credits but by common sense. Our Senator Susan Collins, who operates with such an intelligence not common in Washington, is herself a County girl.
During the time I was in State servitude, I would travel to The County with the Maine State Police, another of my favorite group of folks, where we would conduct school bus driver training. It was not uncommon to hear drivers discussing the merits of vehicles in French. We would know what they were talking about because the words, “automatic transmission” and “air brakes,” could be heard from time to time. At one point, one of my trooper colleagues was asked if he could speak French. To his negative reply, he was asked, “Then how does it feel to be dumber than a Frenchman.” Great folks these.
Although I don’t miss working for the state, I miss the great people I had the privilege to hang out with. Take for example, Jim Grandmaison, of the Ft. Kent School District. His name translates to “Big House,” but his decidedly French speaking secretary loved it when I called asking either for Mr. Big House or Senor Casa Grande. He always claimed that to come south, he parked his car, an alleged ’54 Studebaker in Medway (look that up on the map) where he would pick it up after a dog sled run south.
But I digress. Paul and I had to inspect the classes held there, so we would drive north on Friday, stay at the farm with Virgil and Althea, Sylvia's father and stepmother, and Saturday morning would find us in one of the armories. We tried to get done by noon to allow time for some trout fishing or bird hunting for Saturday supper as the seasons allowed.
Now, our pride was that we held the only classes in basic artillery skills, and nuclear, biological and chemical defense in the entire US Army that were held in French; that being with the battery in Ft. Kent.
One year, long before 9/11 as we were up there, the price of gasoline was significantly lower in Canada than the US, and with the armory literally a snowball’s throw from the border, we crossed over the bridge, dressed in our US Army uniforms, asked the friendly Canadian border agent for the location of the nearest gas station, and ten minutes later pulled up at the US Immigration Service gate to come back in. The guard looked at us, two uniformed commissioned officers, and asked how long we had been in Canada. Paul looked at his watch and said with a big smile, “Ten minutes.” “What are you bringing back?” “A tank of gas.” With a laugh and shake of his head he waved us through.
Life was a little simpler then.

Maple Syrup Time

The snow still lies deep on the ground, deep enough to need snowshoes to avoid where the depressions in the ground are hidden, and one leg can suddenly disappear to the hip, throwing you off balance, and making you rejoice in your wealth of Anglo-Saxon vernacular. But it is that time when the tops of the trees feel the strengthening sun, and draw up the sap they have stored in their roots since the fall.
I rummage around in my shed and find the tin in which I keep my spiles and then retrieve the plastic jugs I have been saving since the fall from under the house. I prefer cider jugs, as milk jugs, no matter how diligently you wash them, manage to retain a certain essence of sour dairy product. Next I take my snowshoes down from their hook in the garage, and throw them in the back of the truck, along with a claw hammer, brace and bit. The spiles, from which the sap will flow, go into my jacket pocket. I run a string trough the jug handles so I can drag them behind me, throw these in the truck, and I am ready.
In the past two years, I have learned that slogging through snow is hard on a body that in the time of my childhood would have been considered old. So, I drive to a location where I can get into the deepest woods with minimal walking. This will also be true once the sap runs heavy. Multi-trips through snowy woods while carrying a full five gallon can will work up a decent sweat on the coldest day.
In my layered, checkered Maine guide shirts, I look like my grandfather, or so my cousins all tell me.
The naked trees creak as I draw into the woods as if they were talking to one another. I think they are telling each other that the fool is back and that he’s no threat. Other than the wind in the branches overhead, there is no sound but the biting of the drill bit into the tree. Sap oozes out immediately, and as I hammer the spile home, there is an instant spurt. I slip a jug over the spile, and as I trudge away, I hear the soft drip, drip as the sap is beginning to collect.
With only the tools to carry, I now realize how stiff my hips and back are. Snowshoeing is not a normal walking position. Tomorrow I will retrieve today’s run, and set the rest of the spiles.

PS: Tomorrow is here. It is well below freezing, so there will not be a sap run. A foot of snow is on the way for tomorrow. March is a winter month in Maine.