Maine 2014 - Gone Fishin'!

Friday

The drizzle starts shortly after hitting the Maine Turnpike with everyone else from Massachusetts on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.  A sign a little later helpfully informs us that the Fire Danger is LOW today.  Whew.

This is our third family trip to Maine, and as the previous two have been fun (too much at times, see K'Port 2010), we sign on immediately when our friends the Kafka-Gibbons family (Paul, Patty, Gabe, and Charlotte) invite us to join them on their annual trip to Lakewood Camps, a fishing and sporting camp in the Rangeley Lakes region.  They promise to outfit us with fishing gear, and great plans are made to ensure waders and fishing instruction for all who want it.  Bring entertainments and layers and flashlights, we are told.  Patty also notes that while fashion is not a priority, liquor is. 

To get to Lakewood Camps “(since 1853),” you drive and drive and drive some more.  On the Maine Turnpike you might see something like this emblazoned on the back of a car:  "Ass, grass, or cash, nobody rides for free."  Keep classy, Maine.

Once off that big highway, you wind through the global village that is central Maine:  Poland, Naples, Paris, Norway, etc.  It is a bit like going skiing, in fact it is almost all the way to Sunday River, although not quite as cold (see Bethel Maine 2012).  At some point you turn right and think you are really in the middle of nowhere, and then you realize that in fact you can get here from there. 

(To pass the time we are listening to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I hope that I can someday use the phrase "he gnashed his teeth at me in devilish fury" because it is such a perfect articulation of the idea of teeth-gnashing.) 

Then after you drive some more, you finally get to a dock with a small parking lot, and Tom is there to greet you and stow your gear on the launch and ferry you across the lake.  You will see a loon, that is pretty much guaranteed, and it will be the first of many.

Eventually you will see the camp, and land at the long dock and you might just think to yourself wow, it is now not only wet and rainy but cold and windy.  All your bags and coats and boots and Monopoly and fishing gear and bikes and the aforementioned booze, is toted up to your cabin while everyone smiles through the drizzle and seems genuinely happy to be here.

Our cabin is named Welokennebacook but is known as Welly because who knows how the Indians actually pronounced that.  It tilts a bit to the left, but the K-G’s cabin is held together by a giant cable running through it.  The cabin to our left dips rather alarmingly in the middle.  If you want to play marbles, go to the main lodge, where things seem to be on the level.  

The digs are, um, rustic, but in a real camp way.  There is a big room with tables and chairs and the Franklin stove that we may want to get going STAT, and a little bathroom and two bedrooms.  There are copies of magazines about fly fishing lying around, and reproduction posters from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Game that say things like "GEE MISTER!  WILL THERE BE ANY WHEN I GROW UP?" and showing a scrappy boy with a stick fishing pole asking this question of a well-dressed fly-fisherman who has a basket loaded with fish and a scurrilous look upon his face.  You might almost say he is gnashing his teeth at the poor wee lad.

I note ladies in skirts in the old-time pictures hanging slightly askew on the wall of Welly, so clearly fashion was something of a priority, once. 

Isabel is immediately enchanted with the whole place.  She gets to hang out with the big kids, including the super cool Charlotte, and she can dash around outside to her hearts content.  She and Charlotte explore, discover squadrons of hummingbirds, start a puzzle, and go kayaking after dinner. 

You don't need to go out in a kayak at dusk to hear the loons, you can hear them from your bed, it is that quiet here.  But it is very nice to float out a bit in the gloaming and hear those stunning birds chortling and calling mournfully in the gathering darkness.  You might even think you are unearthing that inner peace that folks say is to be discovered in just such a pursuit.  Until your son bumps his kayak into you and starts bickering with his sister. 

Saturday

If I went outside right now, would I actually spot the woodpecker who has been working so furiously, if with indeterminate rhythm, on the outside of the cabin next door since 5 a.m.?  Possibly.  But that would require putting on more clothes.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, considering that it is about 45 degrees in here.  IN here.  But that in turn would require removing oneself from one's cocoon of blankets and pajamas in front of the fire (which one just made, yes, I am an awesome backwoods mom).

But there is also that inside-of-an-oyster early morning light over the lake, hills emerging out of the mist, sunrise business going on so out I go camera in hand, and hooray, spooked that woodpecker! 

Only half an hour until the electricity comes on. 

Here's what the little sign on the wall has to say about the Franklin stove.  "This Franklin Stove is an invention by Ben.  He told us it works best with the doors closed, less smoke and more efficient use of the wood.  He said no lightening [sic] would strike your camp if you place some paper on the grates, add some cedar kindling on top, and then some hard wood.  If you should burn only cedar, lightning may come your way."  He's right, as it turns out.  Well, I don't know about the kindling, but I can speak for the doors-closed bit.  This thing is cooking now.

Oh my god he is back.  He is like that woodchuck in Caddyshack.

You’d better get up before the bell if you want breakfast.  Bells are rung at 7:30 (breakfast), 12:30 (lunch) and 6:30 (dinner).  At dinner the night before you can order bag lunches, which consist of a giant sandwich on tasty homemade bread, some fruit, and a couple of the best molasses cookies ever.  One expects a good molasses cookie in Maine, but these are real winners.  Meals are generally hearty New England fare - prime rib, haddock, turkey, and such, but the glory of this kitchen are its pies.  With pale, thin, Crisco-only crusts (so says Whit, owner and cook of Lakewood Camps), last night's blueberry was a perfect purple pile. 

But we’re here to fish, not ruminate on the food.  Fishing, I'm told, is a bit like skiing.  Equipment intensive (I would venture even more so than skiing since wild animals are involved so not only is there stuff to wear and stuff to catch fish with, there is also stuff to keep fish in, like magnetic nets).  At breakfast you'll see folks who've already been out and caught fish.  Everyone is dressed in shades of khaki because apparently fish can see colors, so they would know you were out to get them.[1]  Except for blue, which might confuse them into thinking you are the sky.   

A lot of time fly-fishing is spent trying to think like a fish.  (You might be wondering, like I did, what is the other kind of fishing called, if this fly-fishing.  Just “fishing,” apparently.)  Fish are smart, you are told (they know you are not a friend).  But also dumb (they think your blue shirt is the sky).  They are strong, but also lazy.  They don't keep bankers' hours, but they're out there whenever you are.  They are in the still water, but near the fast water because that is where the food is.  They are hungry, but not today.  They know you are there, but they don't because fish are dumb.  And so it goes. 

Basically you look at the water and try to “read it,” which remains a bit of a mystery to me, and then you cast and cast and cast and hope that a fish takes pity on you as a beginner and bites.  If you are fortunate enough to have Paul as your instructor, you get lots of encouragement and have the great pleasure of seeing your son, who looks very handsome and tall in waders, cast like the picture on the cover of a 1950s-vintage outdoors magazine.  Is he a chubber in the making?[2]

I did ask what new fisherpersons are called, you know, like greenhorns, or swabs.  There isn’t really a term but fry was proposed.  I am totally fry.

But here’s the really great thing.  You are standing in a cold rushing river, and YOU ARE NOT WET.  Fishing is wicked equipment intensive but the best of all are the waders since they mean you can practically frolic among the boulders and never get wet.  It is quite fantastically fun.  And there are birds everywhere.  I'm told that people see God on the river, or find themselves, or become otherwise transformed.  I can report that none of those things happened to me but I really did enjoy it.  

After all that effort and your molasses cookies you might need a nap.

The day is yours to do with what you wish, and while most fish, others, such as Isabel and Charlotte, might build a survival shelter in the woods.  At 6, however, anticipating that 6:30 dinner bell, you might gather on one or another cabin's front porch for cocktails.  If you are thinking ahead you will have already started your fire so that your cabin is toasty by shower-time and bed later.  Then after a giant dinner you can break out the Monopoly board.  But you'd better be ready for bed by 9:30 because that is when the electricity is shut off and not even the water runs.  So you build your fire super-high before you go to sleep and it is still cold in the morning so you have to get up and start all over again.  

Izzy is particularly fond of wrapping herself in a giant blanket and plunking down in front of the fire for a good read.  Clever girl.


Sunday

At Lakewood Camps you rise not necessarily with the sun but with the g.d. woodpeckers at 6:06 a.m.

The sign board in the dining room at breakfast states the choice of dinner entrees, and after much discussion about the relative merits of each choice, you place your order.  Today it said BRINED ROAST TURKEY or HONEY BAKED HAM.  Under that were two drawings, one of a pig, the other of a turkey.   Under them it said 'decafe or regular joe.'  I ordered Regular Joe the turkey while Peter is looking forward to ham from Decafe the pig.

No fish again this morning but I'm pleased to report that I've developed a little blister just below my right ring finger, and my right arm is feeling a little fatigued from all that casting.  While not yet at the point where I have actually caught a fish, I'm feeling pretty chuffed about my progress.  I tried a Crazy Eddy for a while.  Turns out that Crazy Eddy is not the guy across the river but a kind of fly.  This is one that you use in rapids, apparently, as it looks like a wounded – not dead, per Gabe, but wounded – minnow.  Bill wonders if it has Xs for eyes, or perhaps just one X since it is not dead, but wounded.

At lunch we chatted with another family who come here regularly, the beautifully-coiffed Melissa Lee and her husband Duncan who has the vaguely maniacal intensity that signifies a hard-core outdoorsman.[3]  They told us about the trip they have planned for later this year, to fish 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle.  Apparently you drive for 20 hours, the last ten on logging roads with only intermittent strips of tarmac built by Chinese logging concerns, then you get on a float plane where the non-English speaking pilot shows you the EPIRB button in case the plane goes down and he is out of commission.  Then you are at the camp but to actually fish you take a boat across the lake and hike another hour to get to the fish which are in fact the same kind you get here in the Rangeley Lakes region but about four times bigger.  Not my cup of tea but that Duncan sure does have an extraordinarily accommodating wife and son. 

Bill and Patty are happy to have found kindred canoeing spirits in one another, and take a long sunny paddle across the lake while Izzy and Charlotte help wash potatoes in the kitchen for dinner.  KP!  The boys take a muddy bike ride which ends with leaps into the cold lake, and only one iPhone casualty.  You can join in any of this, or not, and if you do, your book and reading glasses will be right where you left them on the porch when you come back because it is that kind of place. 

I don't think I've mentioned the birds, except for the g.d. woodpecker and the crooning loons on the lake.  There are your usual gulls and Canada geese, and any number of woodland birds chirping away.  I believe I saw a merganser while fishing.  There are also swift houses all along the dock and those attractive blue-backed fellows swoop and soar overhead as a pack of kids hang over the edge catching chubs.  If you sit on the porch of the main lodge you may feel like you are coming under attack from the hummingbirds who buzz around and fight and dive onto the feeders and in and out of a nearby cedar like Spitfires over the British Channel.  This time, I know our side will win.

Maine really proves the adage about the weather changing every ten minutes in New England.  This weekend we have had cold, fog, gentle rain, driving heavy rain, wind, hail, warm sun and cloudless blue sky, and even a double rainbow over the lake.  

Monday

The morning is spent packing up and preparing for the long and pretty boring drive home, and wheedling molasses cookies out of Whit. 

I think we did all experience that sense of inner discovery that going to the woods is supposed to engender.  Here’s what we learned:

Peter has the makings of a fine fisherman, and displayed remarkable equanimity when faced with the potential destruction of his phone by freezing cold lake water. 

Isabel has a new bestie in Charlotte and learned how to wash potatoes and really really really loves Lakewood camps, so much that she cried this morning and made Bill swear that we would come back next year.

Speaking of Bill, the raging after-dinner Monopoly game revealed that he is a capitalist pig-dog slumlord rail baron.  Who knew?

As for me, I like fishing.  I would go out right now if I could, but what would I do if I caught a fish?  I haven't had that lesson yet!  Besides, the waders are kind of cold, having sat out on the porch all night.  I think I'll stay here by the fire a little longer.

---

[1] Fifty Shades of Khaki could be the name of an erotic novel set in a fishing camp if that weren't so incongruous I can't even finish this sentence.  

[2] Chubber:  super-outdoorsy-type, wears ragg socks and hiking boots with shorts and is a member of the Outing Club wherever he goes to college.  I don’t know if there are female chubbers, but Nat Crane, director of William Lawrence Camp is the archetype.  This term may or may not have been invented by my parents, but it was certainly popularized by them. 

[3] Duncan is not a chubber.  I can’t really explain why but if you saw him next to Nat Crane you’d understand. 

A Time for Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time for Gifts (New York Review of Books, 1977) is like that moment early on in your trip where you write in your travel journal with such detail and eloquence about the smallest things because you are so excited to be on your way and everything is magical and glowing through the lens of adventure.  He even manages to make a trip through London to the docks (22-25) sound breathtaking.  I know it will stay like this for the whole book because that is the difference between a real writer and a journeyman journaler.

I hit upon Fermor, who is apparently considered the greatest travel writer of all time, in this review of the final volume covering his walking journey across Europe in 1933-34.  I've not really read any travel literature, but man am I hooked if there is more like this. First, there is the epic romance of his quest.  Kind of a lost soul, PLF decides to walk across Europe from Holland to Turkey, with just some good boots and a backpack, and a few pounds wired ahead to strategic points along the way.  Of course the shadow of tragedy also hangs over it all, because in a decade so much of what he sees will be irrevocably altered socially, politically, and economically by the great storms of German aggression and Soviet conquest.  (See, you even start writing that way after reading this stuff.)  Not to mention, Our Hero is just a bit reminiscent of dear Chummy from Call the Midwife, with his elite British upbringing, and resolute optimism.  (He's way dishier than Chummy though.)  PLF welcomes adventure, judges none, and happily embraces a kind of Teutonic ideal of the wandering student, but there is an essential Britishness underlying it all that will thrill any Anglophile.

This book caught me on my twin loves of splendid language and wonderfully evocative scene-setting. There is such a richness of vocabulary, erudition, complex sentence structure, and not just big words but the correct big words.  Although Fermor starts his story with getting expelled from school, there is still that apparently natural British public school tone of intellectual exclusivity - we're not shutting you out, old fellow, but you do understand that this is just how we talk and write, so if you want to participate, you might have to swot a bit.  Fermor's geographic explorations are in some ways are just a starting point for intellectual  ones:  any old thing or view or person which he encounters will launch a scholarly tangent relating to art or history or ancient civilizations or literature or pretty much anything that strikes his fancy.  While it is true - and not hidden at all - that he wrote this years after the trip, based on notes taken at the time, these ruminations have an authentic feel to them.  He's spending a lot of time alone, walking, after all, so he has to think about something while tramping along in those hobnailed boots.  Selecting one example has almost undone me, but here's a concise but charming scene that generates a range of entirely appropriate if research-requiring tangents.
    "This part of the town [Ulm] contained nothing later than the Middle Ages, or so it appeared.  A kind crone outside a harness-maker's saw me poeering down a hole in the ice.  'It's full of Forellen!' she said.  Trout?  'Ja, Forellen!  Voll, voll davon.'  How did they manage under that thick shell of ice?  Hovering suspended in the dark?  Or hurtling along on their Schubertian courses, hidden and headlong?  Were they in season?  If so, I determined to go a bust and get hold of one for dinner, with a bottle of Franconian wine.  Meanwhile, night was falling fast.  High up in the snowfall a bell began booming slowly.  Funera plango! a deep and solemn note.  Fulgura frango!  It might have been tolling for an Emperor's passing, for war, siege, revolt, plague, excommunication, a ban of interdict, or Doomsday: 'Excito lentos!  Dissipo ventos!  Paco cruentos!'"*  (91)

Later, pages and pages will be devoted to disquisitions on the ancient tribes that roamed Central Europe, ruminations on the fantastical nature of the High Baroque as represented by the monastery at Melk, dramatic imaginings of Czech history by that window in Prague, or just a lovely tramp in the woods:
"Frog time had come.  Each pace, once more, unloosed a score of ragged parabolas and splashes.  Flights of waterfowl detonated like spring-guns loosing off in a whirr of missiles across the water.  It was a world of scales and webbed feet and feathers and wet whiskers.  Hundres of new nests were joining the old ones in the damp green maze and soon there would be thousands of egges and then wings beyond counting."  (301)

The whole German part, especially the Rhineland and along the Moselle touched a deep vein of something - nostalgia? longing? - in me.  My own German experience was of course completely different but I could picture Fermor's as vividly as anything, I felt like I was along on the Rhein, and adored reading the German and saying the place names out loud.  Ausgezeichnet.  Fermor is deeply affected by the newly-in-power Nazi presence, and carefully describes each encounter or view he has of National Socialism.  Yet one can't help but wonder if this is highlighted just a bit more than it might have been if published immediately?  The book is written in 1977, and we all know what happens.  Fermor is obviously appalled at what he now knows about the coming destruction of German culture so how could he write with a 1930s objectivity?  I can't reproduce here PLF's experience of the Hofbrauhaus in Munich as it is several pages (103-108), but it is gripping - relayed with such disgust, such fascination, some fear, and then, unconsciousness due to a katzenjammer.**  It's a bit like those kaleidoscopic montages in the movie version of Cabaret, which end up focusing in on the swastika on someone's armband.

I'll note one more motif, but after that, you've got to read this for yourself to really get the full effect.  Fermor has been well-schooled on European art and one of the great threads is his regular rumination on how the landscape or people or just the geist of the place reminds him of art he has seen. PLF steps off the boat to begin his walk in Rotterdam, so his first chapter includes all of his experiences in Holland.  Here's how he sees it:
"Imaginary interiors . . . No wonder they took shape in painting terms!  Ever since those first hours in Rotterdam, a three-dimensional Holland had been springing up all round me and expanding into the distance in conformity with another Holland with was already in existence and in every detail complete.  For if there is a foreign landscape familiar to English eyes by proxy, it is this one; by the time they see the original, a hundred mornings and afternoons in the museums and picture galleries and country houses have done their work.  These confrontations and recognition-scenes filled the journey with excitement and delight.  The nature of the landscape itself, the colour, the light, the sky, the openness, the expanse and the details of the towns and the villages are leagued together in the weaving of a miraculously consoling and healing spell.  Melancholy [whose?  PLF's?] is exorcised, chaos chased away and wellbeing, alacrity of spirit and thoughtful calm take their place. . . .
  So compelling is the identity of picture and reality that all along my path numberless dawdling afternoons in museums were being summoned back to life and set in motion.  Every pace confirmed them.  Each scene conjured up its echo.  The masts and quays and gables of a river port, the backyard with a besom leaning against a brick wall, the chequer-board floors of churches - there they all were, the entire range of Dutch themes, ending in taverns where I expected to find boors carousing, and found them; and in every case, like magic, the painter's name would simultaneously impinge.  The willows, the roofs and bell-towers, the cows grazing self-consciously in the foreground meadows - there was no need to ask whose easels they were waiting for as they munched."  (33-34)

THAT'S why you take Art 100.  In fact, this whole book is a spectacular argument for studying the humanities.

Now, Fermor isn't perfect.  There are some literary tics that he employs a bit too often - lights twinkle at some point every day, on every page, and he employs a train-window kind of visual.  Castles loom up on the bank, he passes under their shadow, then they recede into the distance.  This happens with a lot of natural and man-made landmarks, while walking, on a boat, on a train.  It effectively conveys the idea of onward movement, but I find it employed a touch too often.  Still, I'll put up with the twinkles and the receding if it means more splendidly evocative and enlightening prose.  Why haven't I read more travel writing?  I believe I shall!

*I believe this may be Latin.  Here's what google translate has to say:  "A funeral lament! Flash break! Wake slow! Waste winds! Paco bloody!"   Of course, google translate thought it was in Portuguese, so there you are.
** katzenjammer = hangover.