Tales from the past: Learning how to do it the Maine way

Although I spent most of my life in Washington DC, one of my most educational experiences was working on my parents’ farm in Maine as a young teenager. In the 1950s, it became an organic beef farm several years before Silent Spring was published. I was driving a six wheel truck when I was 14 and about the same time helped to move a house. My mentors in all this included Jimmy Mann and Walter Stowe. Among the things I learned from them was that on a farm you can't talk your way out of a problem and the only bullshit of value is that you find in a field or in the barn yard. These were later useful as a journalist in Washington.

SAM

Walter Stowe had been the caretaker of the place when my parents bought it. He had worked for many years for the highway department of Massachusetts and was short, stubborn and funny. He believed that Packards were the best car ever made, though the dis-junction between his stature and his vehicular tastes often made it appear that his car was being driven by the dirty green baseball hat on his bald head.

Mr. Stowe appreciated having someone to instruct and with whom he could share his skepticism of my father's current projects. At an earlier point in his life, Mr. Stowe had told a lot of people what to do. Now Jimmy Mann, a recently returned young Army veteran, was in charge of things on the place. I think Mr. Stowe was skeptical of that too but he didn't say so. He had to make do with gruffly telling me to fetch his paper bag of nails, move a board a little to the left and so forth. It wasn't the Massachusetts Highway Department but he made do and I didn't mind at all.

Besides, he never got poison ivy and would eat some to prove it to me. He had a stock of sayings of which he never tired. He could recite a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck speed and when you asked him how much something cost, he always replied, "25 cents, two bits, two dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a dollah." When you picked up your end of a plank, the instructions also never varied: "Head her southeast!" When you said goodbye he said, "Keep her under 60 on the curves." And he offered this assessment of a suddenly departed brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now he's upped and died right in the middle of hay season."

When he needed to stall while thinking of a reply, he would go into a brief shuffle, observe his feet intently, pick up his dirty baseball hat and scratch his bald head, finally declaring, "Well now!" with the occasional addendum "Ain't that somethin?"

When I introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged, he did his shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then looked up at me over his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for a girl."

" . . . Er, Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."

Shuffle. Hat back on.

"Glad to meet you anyway."

Behind his back, we called Mr. Stowe 'Waltah,' just like his wife did. Mrs. Stowe would have made a fine mother, but she and Walter never had any children. I know she would have made a fine mother because I would regularly drop by their house just to talk, knowing that there would always be fresh baked cookies before the talking was over.

By the time Kathy met Mr. Stowe he was very old and his upper torso had a permanent forward rake. Our neighbor, George White, says he would occasionally see Mr. Stowe, while working in his garden, lean over too far to pick something, pushing his new center of gravity beyond its limits. Mr. Stowe would just disappear among the tomatoes. But he made do to the end. When Mrs. Stowe forbade him to repair the roof on the grounds that a ninety something man shouldn't do such things, Mr. Stowe reluctantly called a roofer, then donned his carpenter's apron and climbed to the ridgeline where, like an aged great blue heron, he sat and supervised the operation.

George's wife, Carolyn, who spent nearly all her young summers nearby recalls the season-end ritual in which her parents would instruct her to "go over and say goodbye to Mr. Stowe, because he may not be here when we come back next year." Mr. Stowe lived long enough for Carolyn to repeat the ritual with her own children.

JIMMY MANN (L) AT FARM BUREAU EVENT

As far as I was concerned, there was little Mr. Stowe didn't know and little he couldn't do. And if he didn't or couldn't, Jimmy did or could. Jimmy's family had come to Maine 300 years ago His father, Horace, ran a farm just before you turned onto the main road to town. Horace Mann was taciturn and stolid even for Maine, with that native blend of rock-hard integrity and soft-eyed gentleness. Once, at a Farm Bureau supper, as the home-made root beer fizzed around the ten pound block of ice in the galvanized tub, I heard Mr. Brewer tell him, "That was the coldest wintah evah. First snow come the 25th of Octobah and by the fifth of May we were still on runnahs."

In time Jimmy would be called James and become an important person in town like his father, but back then, being just out of the Army, everyone called him Jimmy and we called his wife Mrs. Jimmy. Jimmy was even funnier than Mr. Stowe, knew just as much, didn't object to me hanging around, and knew how to handle my father, which I didn't.

No matter how incensed my father would get, Jimmy would stay calm. When the moment was just right, he would interject a wry comment or concoct a scenario for disaster that in its absurdity turned my father's concerns into trivia. Then they would both laugh and the crisis would be over. When he couldn't think of anything to say, he would just exercise the Mainer's sacred right to say nothing and in the silence my father would wind down his anger.

Jimmy had a Model A Ford that he had converted into a sort of tractor. You had to crank it to start and Jimmy let me sit in the sideless and topless vehicle and play with the wheel and the levers.

It was Jimmy who taught me how to drive the army surplus personnel carrier with the front-end winch and A-frame. I was double-clutching and shifting into six-wheel drive and using a winch to haul things out of places long before I was able to drive legally on Maine roads beyond the farm.

My brother recalled, "You couldn't go directly from one gear to another but had to go into neutral first, let the clutch all the way out and accelerate or brake the motor before shifting again, depending on the direction of the shift. The maneuver also required one to take into account the load on the truck, its speed and the grade of the road."

The six wheel drive Army surplus truck in which the author learned to drive

There was a growing need for water, which was met in part by a full day visit by the famous dowser, Henry Gross, his friend, the novelist Kenneth Roberts and their friend, the actress Bette Davis. Some of the wells that were dug at Henry Gross' suggestion are still faithfully providing water today.

And some were dug by my hapless friends and me. As my brother Lewis tells it, "Some of our wells were dug rather than drilled and were actually a combination of a well and cistern. They consisted of a hole about five or six feet in diameter, dug by hand in wet clay down about ten or 12 feet, and then lined with stones but no mortar, so the water could seep into the well. The clay was hauled up in buckets by hand, and the water pumped out until the well was finished. . . In this matter of wells, Sam and the friends who visited him were really unlucky. They just happened to be the right size for well work during the summers that my father decided to dig. I think digging wells was the hardest job that any of us kids ever had to do on the farm."