We would sit at the dock late into the night and listen to the loons calling to each other. They were ghostly, haunting cries that echoed across the inky hills. The sound carried so well over the lake that you could make out conversations between campers on the far shore. And we used to swim late into the night until a seasoned outdoorsman told us that the lanterns attracted eel.
The camps without electricity were without question the best. The gas nozzle hissed and glowed and made the room warm and bright as we sat around playing endless card games on tables made from polished slabs of birds eye maple some logger found fallen in the woods.
The most misrepresented thing in Maine would have to be the moose. I came to Greenville picturing him as a massive beast, full of grace and magnificence. He turned out to be nothing more than an ugly horse with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Most natives of Maine despise the moose; he is, at best, a novelty, though he’s often considered to be a lumbering nuisance who would knock down poorly run telephone cables in the middle of winter. They only tolerate him because he sells keychains and stuffed animals as central Maine makes much of it’s profit from moose-related tourist ventures. Most of this is paid out in insurance claims when a moose is thrown through a windshield.
No one has anything to do in the north Maine woods. Oh, don’t get me wrong: Mainiacs work as hard as anyone. But when the whistle blows at the end of the day, a general sense of unrest falls on everyone. You can either head down to the Dairy Bar to cause a creamy ruckus or hope your satellite television is working. The only other options involve a great deal of creativity and outdoorsmanship and usually end like a chapter out of Thoreau’s Walden. Fortunately, I love being creative, being outdoors and being compared to a transcendentalist. That’s why I loved Maine so much.
