WE WERE FROM AWAY

By Gil Rogers

By the time I arrived in Maine in 1970, I had lived in Vermont (state of my birth), Michigan, New York, Mississippi, California, Guam (USAF TDY), Arizona, France, Illinois, and Indiana. So when people said, “You’re from away,” they had no idea how understated their position was. Everybody was friendly, though. In fact, when I met a woman from Perham and allowed myself to be guided all over Aroostook County (known in Maine as “the County”), I soon discovered how important connections and connectedness were to the 100,000 inhabitants. It seemed that she either knew, or had known of, almost everybody we ran into, and on top of that she and whomever it was we happened to be talking with at the moment were practically compelled to cover all the mutual acquaintances in both people’s memories, recent and distant. I was quite readily added to someone’s list every time, but always with the amicable (occasionally tacit) proviso that it was the “from away” list.

My peripatetic past notwithstanding, I was more than ready for roots. And my nine-year-old son was ready for adventure. While finishing a degree in Indiana, I found time to interest him in gardening, fishing, and boat building. Most evenings we played a hand or two of poker, sometimes at the desk, sometimes at a campfire, the stakes being such things as acreage or tree houses or something from our still to be discovered future. “I’ll bet you twenty acres,” he’d say, based on two jacks showing and who knows what for a hole card. “I’ll see your twenty acres and raise you an A-frame,” was my reply when I thought my hand was going better. Eventually, when the degree was in sight and I had a job offer in Presque Isle, Maine, the stakes grew, often outlandishly. But who knows, we both thought. Anything is possible.

Mr. Ellis, our landlord in West Lafayette, was associate director of the agricultural experiment station at Purdue and lived just outside of town on a small farm. He and his wife also sold pick-your-own strawberries to pay the taxes, although professionally he was actually a potato expert. When we played bridge with his wife and daughter some evenings, he talked about his many trips to the County and the potato market’s ups and downs: luxury cars when things were good and foreclosure when an early freeze or slumping market drove an overleveraged farmer to the brink. And “…that wonderful soil,” he would add. “A clump of earth can look as solid as hardened clay, but you give it a kick and it explodes, just begging to have something planted in it.” He claimed that strawberries and potatoes liked the same ground.

Mr. Ellis let me help with some of the farm work, such as mowing and planting. The first time I drove the tractor, towing him and his daughter on a homemade transplanter, turned out to be a clinic on how to get a straight row. He pulled up every strawberry seedling from that initial pass and gave me some pointers. It was about then, I think, that I decided my boy and I should be gentleman farmers.

One of the first things we did upon arrival in northern Maine was to shop for a pickup. We were directed to Skippy Carroll’s, met Ben Craig there (a little name-dropping), and took a test drive in a 1968 Chevy half-ton. When I asked Ben about the truck’s history, he told me that it had been traded in by Floyd Mooers (more name-dropping), who lived just downtown in an apartment near the bank. I went to visit Mr. Mooers, who told me it had been a good truck for him, but that he had simply traded it for a newer model when the clutch began slipping. “They said I rode it, but I don’t know….” We talked it over while standing next to his new truck, his waders and other fishing gear in the back.

My son and I agreed that the Chevy would suit us just fine, and I walked back down to the bank, Northern National in those days, and asked to see a loan officer. Mr. Violette (sorry, the habit is engrained now) approved a loan, and we began exploring the County for land, or land with buildings.

During those first two years, we met more people than you’d care to hear mentioned and were often escorted all over the place to see if we might like this acre or that. We rented Marilyn Lamoreau’s house during that period (she was out in Denver, earning a master’s in library science), and we had begun hoping she wouldn’t be back soon. The land-hunting wasn’t going as we’d planned.

Then one day someone said, “Have you seen Cluny yet?” “Cluny?” I asked. “Who might that be?” It turned out that Cluny McPherson worked for Farmers Home and would certainly know if there were foreclosures on the market. Not one to ignore a promising lead, I went out to see the man. He said that indeed there was a place on the Egypt Road, the “Jordan Farm,” which would become available in May. Two months later, our sealed bid won us the “Jordan Farm,” a place that though we altered it considerably during the twenty-five years we lived there, remained the “Jordan Farm.” I have wondered occasionally since leaving there in 1995 if the new owners lived on the “Rogers Farm.” Maybe not.

At any rate, my boy and I became farmers. My teaching/counseling job in town kept me hustling, of course, and had its gratifications. Many of my best colleagues were “from away,” although some of them did not stay long. The politics were simply awful, and I saw wonderfully talented people leave in their high energy years, not only Presque Isle, but their chosen fields as well. Naturally, there were some people of lesser talent: strutters, swaggerers, exploiters, and self-promoters—even plagiarists. And the managers, some of dubious talent, were most often from away. They literally counted on being away again as soon as a fresh and more lucrative opportunity presented itself. They were leap-froggers, chasing career brass rings, sliding off into the night like gypsies, sometimes leaving in their wakes a trail of damage too unwholesome to read about. They didn’t know a crop from a weed, whether human or plant.

Life at the farm was markedly different, to be sure. City people occasionally wonder why farm folk don’t chuck all the hard work, especially when nature and markets frequently go against them. I think I know why: no politics or paranoia on a farm. There is sun and rain and growth. And the surprise of what the fields and woods startle you with when you least expect it. Besides the planned excitement of pigs, horses, rabbits, chickens, bees, and family pets, I found something new every year for the table or to decorate a shelf. Mushrooms: I remember to this day where, if I were to return, I’d probably find saffron milk caps, beefsteaks, copper tops, shaggy manes, puffballs, and boletus. And hazelnuts, but you have to be quick to beat the squirrels. Wild things: bear, moose, fox, woodchuck, and porcupine. And grouse, lots of grouse. Boy, they like the high-bush cranberries.

We planted, too. Besides hay (which everybody had) we had buckwheat, oats, corn, and seven acres of pick-your-own- strawberries. We’d located our strawberry planter in the same torturous way we’d found our poker stakes farm, by calling and writing and talking to people. When we finally got a line on the old machine we were looking for, we tracked it around Maine, then to New Hampshire, and finally back to Aroostook County, not ten miles from home.

We had a gigantic elm tree on some low ground, which was so imposing it literally towered above the other trees. My boy called it the “vulture.” During the nineties there was a piece in the Bangor paper about a fellow down state who had what he thought was the biggest tree in Maine. The girth of our “Vulture” was greater by quite a bit than that of his tree, but by the time I got around to reporting it, our giant came down. It must’ve made one heck of a racket when it fell.

One of my farm neighbors, Clare Graham, didn’t think of me as from away. He thought of me as a “half-assed farmer” who was learning how to grow things, feed the stock, haul to mill, and keep the machinery going, especially the rusty relics I had dragged out of the alders. I took his opinion as a compliment. He’s gone now. It was his heart, I think, but he lived to see his farm foreclosed and his machinery auctioned off. No politics or backstabbing. Just a run of bad luck.

When you have roots you’re not so much “from away,” or at least it doesn’t feel like it. The land gets you. And the people who love the land. When I stopped renting out some rich potato ground near the Prestile Stream and seeded it back for an airstrip, I used to enjoy taking off from there to tour everything nearby as well as things not so close. My boy and I flew out to Red Pine Grove and camped near the St. John River. We met other campers there who had driven the distance on logging roads in order to fish and pick blueberries. I took my own or a rented plane to all beautiful corners of the state, from Fort Kent to Portland, Eastport to Norridgewock and beyond. Coming home by air to roost on our own little farm was just as much fun. Dean Field, who owned a sawmill just down the road in Westfield, would often wave without even looking up, just to acknowledge that we were returning from somewhere. I covered much of the same territory on a motorcycle too, in the scenery rather than over it.

People in Aroostook County are not nearly as parochial as those here in Pennsylvania, where I live now. Many of them have been to Bangor, Augusta, Portland, and Down East. They know the state and its personality. A neighbor I met here told me as I was moving in how when he’d gravitated to this location some eighty miles from his childhood home, he was asked by someone, “How’d you get way over here?” This neighbor thinks of himself as far from his native ground, but he’s not “from away.” Since that day, I’ve met many people in central Pennsylvania who have never left the county. Not even for a sports event. And there are four counties half an hour from here.

I had a fairly high-profile university job in Presque Isle for twenty-three years, but people on the street rarely asked me anything about it. Every year, by mid-April, they wanted to know when the berries would be ready. They didn’t care if I was “from away” or not. After fifteen years, I finally had to plow the berries under when it became too difficult to keep up, but even after there was scarcely a trace of the plants, I still got requests to come out to see if one or two blushing beauties could be found to decorate someone’s corn flakes.

Nowadays, even though nobody here in Pennsylvania asks, I consider myself to be “from away,” and what I’m away from is Maine.   

 

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