Archives for September 2013

Like a lot of my fellow Mainers, I’m a fan of Freeport’s famous outdoor retailer L.L.Bean. When I was a kid, trips from Boothbay Harbor to Portland meant driving along Coastal Route 1, a road that then, as now, runs right through the middle of downtown Freeport.

Those familiar with today’s upscale mecca of outlet stores anchored by the sprawling L.L.Bean complex, would be hard pressed to imagine the town as it was in, say 1956. Back then Freeport’s “downtown” was a three-way intersection with a flashing yellow traffic light and a “Flying A” gas station where the attendant would gladly pump your gas and check the oil. There was a restaurant too, as well as a “Five and Ten” store and, of course, L.L.Bean.

For such a popular tourist destination, the original Bean store occupied a remarkably modest three-story wood frame structure. The store’s appeal to “outdoorsy” types may well have been enhanced by the fact that shopping at Bean’s literally required a bit of hiking. Through rain, sleet, wind and snow access to the upper floors was gained only via a wooden staircase on the outside of the building.

Although much has changed at L.L.Bean, one thing that hasn’t is the company’s famous customer satisfaction guarantee. The inventory system may be computerized these days. But the basic promise remains much the same as it was when old L.L. himself was in charge; If you’re not absolutely satisfied, for any reason at all, they’ll replace the item or refund your money. Period. No excuses. No time limit.

I came by my appreciation of Bean’s return policy the old fashioned way: by personally schlepping stuff back to the store. Not a lot of stuff, you understand. Maybe an item every decade or so, and even then only when there was a genuine problem.

Having been raised with traditional Yankee values myself, the notion of returning something for a refund, whatever the reason, holds little appeal. It’s a bit too close to “whining” or to use that most onerous of Maine epithets, being “spleeny.”

On the other hand, old L.L. had his values too. And back then his personality defined the company to such an extent that I got the impression he’d have been disappointed if I had a problem and didn’t bring it his attention.

So, taking him at his word, when an old pair of “Bean boots” sprung a leak I simply brought ‘em back to the store and drove home with a new pair, no questions asked.

That said, the following incident (for lack of a better name let’s call it “The Yellow Rain Slicker Debacle”) involving a raincoat I’d purchased at Bean’s several years earlier might, had it occurred on his watch, have been enough to convince L.L. to rethink his generous return policy.

A well-made, practical garment, my yellow rain slicker had given me many years of exemplary service. So, I decided to treat it to a thorough cleaning. A quick review of the garment care label instructions (obviously composed by someone for whom English was neither, a first or even a distant third language) informed me that, “dry cleaning may be helpful.”

It should be noted here that in strictly grammatical terms the instructions at least inferred that dry cleaning possibly “may not” be “helpful” — in this case, it was an interpretation that turned out to be right on the money.

Responding to an urgent phone call from my dry cleaner, I raced over and made the alarming discovery that my favorite slicker had been magically transformed into a huge, saffron-hued sheet of … what? Fried won ton? Actually, it resembled nothing so much as a “gag” prop from a 1970s Carol Burnett TV special.

Though I’d have much preferred to lob the thing directly into the nearest toxic waste dump, I felt a moral obligation to return it to Bean’s if only to spare future generations of yellow rain slicker label readers a similar fate.

The sales staff did an admirable job of keeping their faces on straight as I proceeded to manhandle the freakishly flattened, outsized yellow slicker through the showroom en route to the exchange counter.

Upon arrival, true to their word (and in record time I might add) the L.L.Bean folks replaced my favorite rain slicker with a similar model free of charge.

I’m happy to report that nearly 20 years later I still have that exact same rain slicker, although, these days it’s more of a muddy mustard color. That’ll happen when you wear the same yellow slicker for two decades without ever once taking it to the dry cleaner.

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

I was pouring myself a second cup of coffee the other morning when I heard the news.

My friend Leon, a local lobsterman and a neighbor of mine back when I was living on Georgetown Island, had been shot and killed in what was referred too as a “domestic dispute.” I dropped back into my chair and stared out the window.

The story rambled on, eventually devolving into a repetition of those inane phrases that have become the broadcast equivalent of yellow crime-scene tape: “police have secured the scene”; “few details are being released”; the droning soundtrack of raw human tragedy.

For a split second I felt as though I was the one who’d been shot.

Gradually details began to emerge. Trust me, I won’t be rehashing them here. What on earth would be the point? The incident, which took my friend’s life, was simply one more heartbreaking variation on an increasingly familiar theme.

Apparently longing to recapture some vaguely imagined, bygone era, when “real men” settled their “domestic disputes” with six-guns on the streets of Dodge City, America has transformed itself into a nation bristling with firearms of every conceivable size and description.

It won’t be long before folks start driving Sherman tanks to the local gun show. Maybe they already are.

Then, is it any wonder that the sort of altercation we once rightly expected would result in a black eye or at the very worst a broken nose, is now likely to require the services of a funeral director? I think not. But, it’s deeply troubling all the same.

To anyone familiar with the ways of Maine lobstermen, a pragmatic, straightforward bunch of folks, it will come as no surprise that my friend Leon lost his own life while attempting to help out another person in need, a not entirely uncommon occurrence among this particular demographic group. That part of the story at least made some sense to me. Frankly, it’s about the only thing that did.

The man I knew, the neighbor I respected and admired for nearly 20 years was recognized in our little community as a person who expended a lot his own time, energy and resources in the service of others less fortunate than himself. He was just like that.

According to Leon, though, he hadn’t always embraced such a positive approach to life. In fact, after I’d known him a while I realized that his outward generosity was merely his way of living out a simple inner conviction.

Since others had been there for him when he’d hit “rock bottom,” Leon figured the very least he could do was return the favor. How do I know all this? That’s easy. I was one of those “others” he helped.

Well over six feet tall with the kind of workingman’s heft you don’t get from training at the local gym, Leon was the obvious guy to call when I needed help hauling my 26-foot, half waterlogged wooden boat out of the vacant lot across the street from my house, through the center of town and onto a nearby public boat ramp.

Did I say nearby? I suppose that’s always a relative term.

Arriving by the dawn’s early light in a massive, bashed up 4X4 pickup truck, its bed randomly splattered with scraps of rancid bait fish, Leon and a couple of his burly friends got right to work.

They ended up spending most of one bright, sunny Sunday wrestling the bulky vessel through the town’s narrow streets and eventually launching her into the mighty Kennebec.

Of course, since he refused to take any of my money, I ended up paying him off in Amato’s Italian sandwiches, soda and chips.

It was around this time that I began to suspect Leon’s greatest strength had nothing to do with his physical size, quite the opposite.

Somehow, my friend with the big heart and the burning desire to help others had acquired strength of a very different sort, the kind which can only be gained via a rigorous coarse of study at that most unforgiving of all the institutions of higher learning: The School of Hard Knocks.

When I called my wife to relay the sad news, she gasped then wept. After a long pause she said, “Leon was why Jesus liked to hang out with fishermen.”

Then she added, “Getting a hug from Leon was like getting a hug from God.”

I particularly like that image. I think I’ll hang onto it.

It’s comforting to imagine my friend finally receiving an endless supply of the very thing he so freely gave to all of us.

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

There are few things in life more deeply frustrating than misplacing an item you had in your hand, literally two minutes ago, then spending the next several hours searching for it. I should know. I have a positive genius for this sort of thing.

Whether we’re talking about a pair of sunglasses, a cell phone, the car keys or even a fresh cup of coffee, I have a consistent (and some say downright spooky) propensity for losing things within approximately 10 feet of wherever I happen to be standing at the moment.

“Oh,” people say, “If that (fill in the blank: pen, wallet, passport, automobile?) was really important, you’d have kept a lot better better track of it.”

Nope, in my case.

Anyway, it makes not one whit of difference whether the item in question is a gold Rolex or a bag of potato chips. When it’s time to go, poof, it’s gone!

Heck, one time many years ago I managed to misplace a motorcycle for a whole afternoon. Hmm, perhaps the less said about that particular afternoon the better.

Let’s just say that when it comes to losing things, I’m like Uncle Billy making a deposit at the Bedford Falls Savings and Loan. I stop briefly to chat with Mr. Potter. Then I’m standing at the teller’s window only to discover all that hard earned cash has evaporated.

Speaking of tellers. At times I swear I must have been channeling Penn and Teller. I’m serious! Hard, inanimate physical objects with genuine heft are there one minute and gone the next? Of course that’s absurd. Things never really disappear like that in real life, do they?

Even those famous magicians admit that there’s no real “magic” happening. It’s just sleight of hand, misdirection, all done with smoke and mirrors. I’m sure that’s true. But it doesn’t make it any less baffling when it happens to you.

High on my list of “frequently vanished” items is my cell phone. Although no great fan of digital technology, I’ve finally, albeit reluctantly, joined my fellow lemmings. Irritating and dangerous to life and limb as it clearly is, I guess the cell phone is here to stay, although in my case they never seem to “stay” all that long. Perhaps my “smart” phones have actually become so clever they’ve figured out how much I dislike them. That would explain why they keep leaving me.

A few years back my wife and I were driving around doing interviews for a book I was writing. Of course we had our cell phones with us. But, when we stopped for lunch and I wanted to make a call, my phone had vanished. No problem. My wife simply dialed my number and a few seconds later a ring tone echoed through the car.

A half hour later we still hadn’t figured out where the sound was coming from. I was starting to feel as though I was trapped in a Twilight Zone episode when my wife pointed out that the ring volume increased each time I leaned forward and decreased when I leaned back. Apparently that’ll happen when you sit on a ringing cell phone. Oh well. Now I know.

Sadly, not all such mysteries are as easily solved. About 15 years ago my entire key ring dematerialized in the blink of an eye.

This was no sissy key ring either. Heavy enough to generate a decent disability check under the right circumstances, it held several copies of every key to every car, motorcycle, boat, home, garage, camp, office, smelt shack, random padlock, Samsonite luggage set, wall safe and personal diary anybody in my family had owned for the previous two decades.

Upon discovering the loss, I immediately followed the advice of sci-fi genius Robert Heinlein in “Time Enough for Love”: “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

Hysterically, I searched in the same three places approximately 57 times in a row. No dice. For all I knew my keys had slipped through a portal into another universe.

Which brings me to a dream I had as a boy. In the dream I awakened onto a bright celestial plane. An angelic chorus harmonized majestically as I approached a massive white-columned building. Climbing the pristine steps, I entered the main hall and noticed a table stretching out as far as the eye could see.

Upon it, carefully laid out in chronological order, I recognized every single item I’d ever “lost” in my life. Euphoria overtook me.

Smiling, I thought, “So that’s where that went. I knew I’d find it someday!”

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

The first time I heard his voice it came from my parent’s stereo system. I was a 7-year-old boy then. By the time I met him in person, some 20 years later, Mike was a living legend.

Although famous mostly for his spoken word recordings, in his late thirties Mike possessed the easy grace, casual good looks and thousand watt smile of a film star. His boyish charm and self-deprecating manner were so disarming that, within minutes of being introduced, you’d feel as though you were his closest friend.

Mike also had the gift, extremely rare in the ego driven world of professional entertainment, of genuine enthusiasm for the work of his fellow performers.

Oddly enough this was particularly true of those who logically might have been considered his direct competitors. In a manner reminiscent of president Lincoln, Mike tended to be most comfortable when surrounded by a “team of rivals.”

Although not a native, a fact that he was quick to point out, Mike nevertheless loved his adopted state of Maine. Following a well-worn trail blazed by such iconic Maine “transplants” as E.B. White, Andrew Wyeth and Robert McCloskey, he fell permanently under its spell. By the time I got to know him, Mike was considered by many to be Maine’s unofficial “ambassador of humor.”

Deeply fascinated with the oral tradition, Mike ferreted out the undiscovered tales and storytellers tucked away in the corner stores, bait shops and coffee counters of Maine’s “hinterlands.”

With the patience of an archaeologist and the energy and charisma of a natural born pitchman, he set to work polishing these rough-hewn treasures and putting them on display for all to see and appreciate.

As a means of showcasing undiscovered Maine talent, he founded The Maine Festival.

Debuting on the quad of the Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick in 1976, this lively celebration of native Maine arts continued through the mid-eighties. It’s doubtful that anyone but Mike could have pulled off such an ambitious “cultural jam session.” But he made it look easy.

And Mike’s boundless enthusiasm for the eclectic and obscure was certainly not limited to the performing arts. His insatiable curiosity, mixed with a lifelong love of bicycles, a knack for tinkering and a network of like-minded “gear heads” resulted in a range of oddball conveyances.

One winter he proudly showed me his latest innovation, a 10-speed bike equipped with a set of homemade “chains” enabling him to navigate the streets of Portland during white out snowstorms. Perhaps his best-known invention was a truly bizarre contraption that looked like something from the mind and pen of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

Utilizing the basic chassis and running gear from an old-fashioned railroad hand car, Mike managed to convert the original up-and-down hand pump mechanism to a new system of his own design. It featured a series of reduction gears powered by a rider with a bicycle style pedal arrangement bolted to the top.

He transported this rig to remote abandoned stretches of railroad track. Perched atop it, he’d head out on his “rail bike” to explore miles of track across rural Maine.

Once, following a Saturday night performance in South Paris, we were packing up our gear and Mike asked if I’d mind taking the P.A. system with me since his car, a muddy brown, diesel powered, VW rabbit was “full.”

Curious, I glanced over and saw that the whole rear end of his little hatchback was stuffed with an odd assortment of gear, including a colorful beach umbrella and a massive fully inflated inner tube.

“What’s all that for?”

“Oh” he said. “I’m sailing to Islesboro tomorrow.”

As if that explained everything.

Several weeks later someone mentioned that they thought they saw Mike early one Sunday morning about a half-mile off Lincolnville Beach.

He was sailing along, all by himself, tacking to-and-fro in some sort of strange watercraft. From a distance, it appeared to be a large inner tube rigged up with a beach umbrella as a sail.

“But he was quite a ways out,” the fellow explained sheepishly. “I might have been mistaken.”

“No,” I said. “You got it right. That’s exactly what it looked like when I saw it in the back of his car.”

These memories and many more came flooding back to me last week when a friend handed me a faded color publicity shot of Mike taken shortly before his untimely death at age 45, killed by a drunk driver while riding his bicycle in Hawaii.

Now, forever young, he grinned up at me from the worn glossy paper, my old friend Mike, known to the rest of the world as Marshall Dodge.

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

Perhaps you’ve noticed that just as the weather has begun to cool in the waning days of summer, the rhetoric in the long running feud between Maine lobstermen and their Canadian rivals is heating up.

Don’t worry, I won’t be jumping (literally or figuratively) into the middle of a disagreement between rival gangs of lobstermen.

I’ve had enough first hand experience with lobstermen to know that they tend to be precisely the sort of tough, pragmatic, rugged individualists you wouldn’t want pick any sort of fight with, particularly one which involves the manner in which they choose to make their living.

Let’s face it, lobstermen have been hauling traps and hurling insults (among other things) across the border at one another for about as long as anybody can remember. If there were a simple solution to this longstanding maritime squabble, somebody would have sorted it out by now.

So I won’t use this space to weigh in on the Maine/Canadian lobster spat. In fact, I only brought it up because it involves different approaches to the harvesting and marketing of soft shell and hard shell lobsters. The soft shell/hard shell brouhaha is a whole other kettle of shellfish, one about which, like a lot of Mainers, I have plenty of opinions.

Of course, not everyone considers the prospect of making a meal of a lobster to be a particularly enticing proposition. Honestly, can you blame them?

Even a lifelong lobster lover such as myself must ultimately concede that one’s first encounter with a steaming hot, fresh-out-of-the-pot Homerus Americanus staring balefully up at you from a dinner plate is liable to be a tad off-putting.

No doubt, the prospect of breaking and entering the rock-hard carapace of a critter, which until about 2 p.m. yesterday afternoon was minding its own business, crawling along the ocean floor, takes a little getting used to. Nor am I one of those judgmental types who view failure to appreciate this Maine delicacy as a sign of moral turpitude. It’s simply a choice. But I believe that it should at least be an informed choice.

Here’s what I mean: For a decade or so, Dan Gianneshi was my regular soundman for my “Postcards from Maine” essays on CBS.

Prior to working in Maine, Danny’s experience with lobsters had been almost exclusively influenced by stuffy, overpriced, upscale urban eateries. No wonder he wasn’t impressed.

That all changed the first time I took him to out for a meal at the Boothbay Region Lobsterman’s Co-op. The pure joy of bellying up to a picnic table with a spectacular water view to chow down on fresh Maine lobster while dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt was a revelation.

It didn’t take him long to figure out that tearing into a lobster using his bare hands, with no fear of embarrassing himself in front of his friends or generating a massive dry cleaning bill for that rented tux, was a real “game changer.” From then on, any Maine video shoot with Dan commenced with a visit to the nearest lobster wharf.

Having established that atmosphere is a critical aspect of any successful “lobster feed,” it’s time to take the crustacean by the claws and tackle the perennial soft shell vs. hard shell controversy.

In terms of Maine culinary lore, this controversy ranks right up with there with the epic “crumbs vs. batter” fried clam debate (another story for another day), and people certainly have different tastes. So, there’s really no right or wrong answer.

Wait a minute! What am I saying? Of course there’s a right answer.

Hard shell lobsters are far better than those wimpy soft shells any day. Basic lobster 101 teaches us that lobsters achieve their growth by the periodic shedding of a protective outer shell. This means that a lobster which is almost ready to shed (the “hard shell” stage) yields nearly twice as much meat as one, which has recently slipped into a new (soft) shell.

For a lobster lover like me that makes hard shell the obvious choice. As far as I can tell, the whole point of the soft shell lobster is that it’s easier to break into.

What fun is that? Should we simply abandon our vaunted Puritan work ethic so easily? I think not. I was raised to believe that anything worth having is worth working for. So I’ll take my lobster with the hardest shell available, thank you very much, the harder the better.

Oh, in case you were wondering why I insist on keeping a hammer in my silverware drawer? Well, now you know.

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register