No Longer Resilient

Over Memorial weekend, I finally had some time to put up my feet and do some reading. Lying on a book shelf was Robert Pike’s wonderful Tall Trees, Tough Men.

Much like Colin Woodard’s The Lobster Coast, Pike’s book offers a snapshot of a place and time in Maine, a state of vast natural resources. Pike’s is filtered through the lens of 18th and early 19th century logging. Actually, Maine was but part of a northern New England focus that included the logging stories and history of New Hampshire and Vermont, also.

Pike wrote his book in the mid-1960s. W.W. Norton & Company published it in 1967 and reissued it in 1999. It’s a book that all Mainers ought to familiarize themselves with simply to have a sense of what the state used to be—mainly a region of tall trees (and rivers to float them down)—with entrepreneurial types finding ways to turn logs into gold.

Because I was curious about Pike, I rooted around the interwebs for more info on why he might have written his book. His obituary (he died in 1997) from the New York Times was a worthwhile read for me.

It’s becoming far too common in our digitally-distracted world to think that life was always about tapping a touchscreen, rather than the kind of dangerous, back-breaking labor inherent in these parts 100+ years ago. Not all jobs included an “easy button.” Pike details the rugged, resilient men necessary for extracting value from the region’s forest resources. Likewise, Woodard’s book offered a similar story about the rebels (and rusticators) that were part of our maritime heritage. The threads are similar and point to a time of hearty souls, rather than the spleeny types dominating the present.

Driving logs down-river was part of logging in Maine.

Driving logs down-river was part of logging in Maine.

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Writers Writing About Maine

Maine is one of our nation’s 48 contiguous states, as opposed to the continental definition that lets Alaska and Hawaii into the mix. The Pine Tree State, as it’s often called, was admitted to the union in 1820 as the 23rd state, part of the Missouri Compromise.

Even better, our motto, Dirigo, means, “I lead.” When Maine (and a handful of states) held their elections in September (while much of the rest of the nation held theirs in November), the pre-New Deal Republican adage that “as Maine goes, so goes the nation” made perfect sense.

Yet, for all this talk about Maine being a leading light, writers and others have been getting our state wrong as long as writers (and others) have been offering their insights on the American experience, which means for as long as we’ve been a state, and before that—a northern outpost of Massachusetts.

Libraries are treasure troves, full of undiscovered gems. It’s not uncommon for me to have a couple of books in mind during one of my weekly runs to Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, and to arrive back at the compound with an additional three or four books I just “happened upon” during my time navigating the stacks. That’s always been one of the library’s lures for me. I’m not sure how the experience will be when libraries stop being repositories, and turn into just another digital archive, which they’re likely to become at some point. Hopefully I’m dead when that happens. Continue reading

Forgotten Writers

When I first got serious about writing, I was especially interested in people and the geography that defines who they are. This was particularly germane to Maine, my home state, and the first book I ended up writing, about the history of town team baseball. Those small towns where baseball was played on  warm July evenings, the lights rimming the diamond burning brightly somewhere in the middle of a small village, drew me back to the place and time, capturing the memories of the men who inhabited similar patches of grass and dirt across the Pine Tree State. Continue reading